‘Come, my friend,’ said Smirnoff

Joanna Kavenna: The radical twenties, 1 April 1999

The Radical Twenties: Aspects of Writing, Politics and Culture 
by John Lucas.
Five Leaves, 263 pp., £11.99, January 1997, 0 907123 17 1
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... of them forgotten: Douglas Goldring, Leslie Welsh, Edward Shanks, J.D. Beresford, Ethel Carnie, Patrick Hamilton, Alick West, H.R. Barbor, Miles Malleson. To Lucas, these writers differed from the more self-regarding literati in their search for ‘a little-told story: a story not of despair, but of resistance, even vision’. The patricidal disaffection of ...

Rigging and Bending

Simon Adams: James VI & I, 9 October 2003

The Cradle King: A Life of James VI & I 
by Alan Stewart.
Chatto, 438 pp., £20, February 2003, 0 7011 6984 2
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... been published. The basic narrative of his reigns was established by two 19th-century historians: Patrick Fraser Tytler for the Scottish and Samuel Rawson Gardiner for the English. Both were sections of works of larger compass – History of Scotland from the Accession of Alexander III to the Union and History of England from the Accession of James I to the ...

How to Plan an Insurrection

Niamh Gallagher: Appropriating James Connolly, 30 November 2023

James Connolly: Socialist, Nationalist and Internationalist 
by Liam McNulty.
Merlin, 398 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 0 85036 783 6
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... Connolly wanted a socialist republic, and didn’t support the catch-all nationalism of Patrick Pearse, author of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, which he would read outside the General Post Office at the start of the rising. Connolly had criticised Pearse in the Spark for glorifying the war and repeating the tropes about blood sacrifice ...

Philistines

Barbara Everett, 2 April 1987

... has an ancestry like that of Rhiannon and Malcolm; he is surely descended from the incorrigible Patrick of the earlier book who lamentably rapes the gentle Jenny instead of marrying her the first time round: an attractive and intelligent if callow cricket-playing Classics master, as ‘English’ an archetype as one could find in the modern novel. Alun and ...

Hush-Hush Boom-Boom

Charles Glass: Spymasters, 12 August 2021

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War – A Tragedy in Three Acts 
by Scott Anderson.
Picador, 576 pp., £20, February, 978 1 5290 4247 4
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... and the Hungarians fought back. Wisner’s hope of co-ordinating a policy with SIS was dashed when Patrick Dean, head of the CIA/MI6 Joint Intelligence Committee, failed to appear at a meeting and sent no explanation. Only later did Wisner learn that Dean was in France laying plans to invade Egypt, depose President Nasser and return the Suez Canal to ...

The money’s still out there

Neal Ascherson: The Scottish Empire, 6 October 2011

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 
by T.M. Devine.
Allen Lane, 397 pp., £25, August 2011, 978 0 7139 9744 6
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The Inner Life of Empires: An 18th-Century History 
by Emma Rothschild.
Princeton, 483 pp., £24.95, June 2011, 978 0 691 14895 3
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... of six million pounds in one deal alone) and shocked Clive by denouncing him for corruption. Patrick, aged only 18, was killed in the Black Hole of Calcutta. Gideon, the youngest, knocked about the world in the Royal Navy and made a few bucks in India selling bottled Ganges water to pilgrims. In Rothschild’s words the Johnstones were ‘unusually ...

An Escalation of Reasonableness

Conor Gearty: Northern Ireland, 6 September 2001

To Raise up a New Northern Ireland: Articles and Speeches 1998-2000 
by David Trimble.
Belfast Press, 166 pp., £5.99, July 2001, 0 9539287 1 3
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... which had not fully backed the peace process. The Unionists’ chance came in March 1995, when Sir Patrick Mayhew, Peter Brooke’s successor, visited Washington. Tall and well-spoken, Mayhew looked like a man from another era, born to rule India not a few damp counties. Without warning, and despite the fact that the ceasefire had lasted for seven ...

The Tongue Is a Fire

Ferdinand Mount: The Trouble with Free Speech, 22 May 2025

What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea 
by Fara Dabhoiwala.
Allen Lane, 472 pp., £30, March, 978 0 241 34747 8
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... book, and to the actions of Roof and especially Breivik. Later that same year, on 3 August, Patrick Crusius murdered 23 people, most of them Latinos, in a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The manifesto he posted, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, deplores the ‘Hispanic Invasion’ and praises Tarrant. On 14 May 2022, Payton S. Gendron killed ten African ...

Diary

David Thomson: Alcatraz, 26 March 2009

... Escape from Alcatraz (1979), in which Clint Eastwood played Morris and the warden was the late Patrick McGoohan, so famous himself as ‘The Prisoner’. There was a rich irony in the casting of McGoohan, for wardens and the society they are paid to defend are as much prisoners of the idea of incarceration as the inmates. Are we remotely within reach of a ...

Piperism

William Feaver: John and Myfanwy Piper, 17 December 2009

John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art 
by Frances Spalding.
Oxford, 598 pp., £25, September 2009, 978 0 19 956761 4
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... Paintings became roughcast with spurts of white on hessian. Stained glass, designed for Patrick Reyntiens to execute, became standard in reasonably go-ahead churches. The late 1960s Roman Catholic cathedral in Liverpool outperformed Coventry in having Piper glass all round, filling the central lantern and casting a lurid cineramic light on the ...

I ain’t afeared

Marina Warner: In Her Classroom, 9 September 2021

Black Teacher 
by Beryl Gilroy.
Faber, 268 pp., £12.99, July, 978 0 571 36773 3
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... claims, however, were seen as vanity.Gilroy took a break from teaching after her marriage to Patrick Gilroy, an English scientist who was active in anticolonial circles. She describes the isolation she felt as part of an early ‘mixed couple’ in the suburbs, where she brought up their two children: Paul, the historian and author of There Ain’t No ...

Companions in Toil

Michael Kulikowski: The Praetorian Guard, 4 May 2017

Praetorian: The Rise and Fall of Rome’s Imperial Bodyguard 
by Guy de la Bédoyère.
Yale, 336 pp., £25, March 2017, 978 0 300 21895 4
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... of his downfall, but it is immortalised in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius in which Sejanus (a young Patrick Stewart in the BBC adaption) is presented by his successor, Macro, with the letter ordering his summary execution and the butchery of all his family. After seven years at the apex of power, Macro was driven to suicide by Tiberius’ young ...

To the Benefit of No One

Niamh Gallagher: Henry Wilson’s Assassination, 4 August 2022

Great Hatred: The Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP 
by Ronan McGreevy.
Faber, 442 pp., £20, May, 978 0 571 37280 5
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... were members of the IRA, which had emerged in 1919 to consolidate the Irish Republic declared by Patrick Pearse and others in the Easter Rising of 1916. The republican cause was strengthened by the victory of Sinn Féin in the December 1918 UK general election: they ran on an abstentionist platform and won 73 of the 105 seats in Ireland promising to use ...

Scrapbook

Edward Pearce, 26 July 1990

A Sparrow’s Flight: Memoirs 
by Lord Hailsham.
Collins, 463 pp., £17.50, July 1990, 0 00 215545 1
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... owed much, he reckons, to the shrewd instinct of Pakenham to be rid of a professional candidate, Patrick Gordon-Walker, who would inherit favourable boundary changes to come, and stick in a single-issue, one-off candidate to keep that improving seat warm for himself. Such Renaissance thinking among the godly is fun. The tactic, he hints, was followed again ...

Power-Seeker

Frank Kermode, 12 October 1989

Bernard Shaw. Vol. II: The Pursuit of Power 
by Michael Holroyd.
Chatto, 422 pp., £18, September 1989, 0 7011 3350 3
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... revenge, striking him down, with Murdochian violence, when he contemplated the attractions of Mrs Patrick Campbell. He had flirted with other actresses, but did not carry the pursuit to its end; with Stella, his first Liza, he committed himself, but this pursuit also failed and she slipped from his grasp. Despite his theoretical contempt for ...