The future was social

Stefan Collini: Karl Polanyi’s Predictions, 23 January 2025

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time 
by Karl Polanyi.
Penguin, 358 pp., £10.99, June 2024, 978 0 241 68555 6
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“... the celebrated generation of radical WEA tutors in the immediate postwar years emerged, including Richard Hoggart, E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.)Polanyi took these teaching duties very seriously, and when, after four years, he departed for temporary posts at colleges in the United States, he took with him the elaborate lecture notes he had prepared for ...”

Arruginated

Colm Tóibín: James Joyce’s Errors, 7 September 2023

Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ 
by Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner.
Oxford, 1424 pp., £145, February 2022, 978 0 19 886458 5
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“... in Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, and he performs the same manoeuvre: ‘Resting his feet on the dwarf wall, he climbed over the area railings, compressed his hat on his head, grasped two points at the lower union of rails and stiles, lowered his body gradually by its length of five feet nine inches and a half to within two feet ten inches of the area pavement and ...”

More Pain, Better Sentences

Adam Mars-Jones: Satire and St Aubyn, 8 May 2014

Lost for Words 
by Edward St Aubyn.
Picador, 261 pp., £12.99, May 2014, 978 0 330 45422 3
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Books 
by Charlie Hill.
Tindal Street, 192 pp., £6.99, November 2013, 978 1 78125 163 8
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“... new book, The Grass Is Greener, causes a fatal synaptic meltdown in anyone who reads it, and only Richard Anger, maverick bookseller, and Lauren Furrows, emotionally timid neurologist, can stop the epidemic. Balancing the figure of Gary, for whom subject matter is everything (he admires the Monet on his wall because the ...”

I just let him have his beer

Christopher Tayler: John Williams Made it Work, 19 December 2019

The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, ‘Stoner’ and the Writing Life 
by Charles Shields.
Texas, 305 pp., £23.99, October 2018, 978 1 4773 1736 5
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Nothing but the Night 
by John Williams.
NYRB, 144 pp., $14.95, February 2019, 978 1 68137 307 2
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“... suddenly he would break into a big smile. He was gracious, but he said what he thought.’ Like Richard Yates, a near contemporary and friend who was also famous on the writing-school circuit for not being famous, Williams served in the war and had a few unsuccessful marriages, drank too much, promoted a writerly ideal of Flaubert-like strenuousness, and ...”

Bloody Sunday Report

Murray Sayle: Back to Bloody Sunday, 11 July 2002

“... a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s ...”

Show Us the Father

James Wood, 13 August 2026

“... down the trumpet ‘just like you’re spitting paper pellets at the school bully’. One morning, Richard Lloyd, the cathedral organist, a man who like my father never got angry, auditioned me at his grand piano and offered me a place in the cathedral choir. I was ten years old. Despite the name, most of the boys at the Chorister School weren’t ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

“... the elementary school where my education began, stopping on occasion just over the playground wall.There were several variables in this stopping and the spectacle it sometimes provided. The cart had to halt at the top of Christ Church View where we could all see it and this had to happen during the morning or the dinner-time break when all the school ...”

Mann v. Mann

Colm Tóibín: The Brother Problem, 3 November 2011

House of Exile: War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles 
by Evelyn Juers.
Allen Lane, 400 pp., £25, May 2011, 978 1 84614 461 5
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“... and open-plan living quarters. Once more, as in Princeton, Mann’s study was set apart, with a wall of books, and smaller windows. The corridor outside it had a separate staircase to the upper floor. In both his American houses, there was a sense of the study as a shadowy place, away from the opulent living quarters, mirroring the distinction between Mann ...”

The Habit of War

Jeremy Harding: Eritrea, 20 July 2006

I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation 
by Michela Wrong.
Harper Perennial, 432 pp., £8.99, January 2005, 0 00 715095 4
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Unfinished Business: Ethiopia and Eritrea at War 
edited by Dominique Jacquin-Berdal and Martin Plaut.
Red Sea, 320 pp., $29.95, April 2005, 1 56902 217 8
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Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa 
edited by Robert Rotberg.
Brookings, 210 pp., £11.99, December 2005, 0 8157 7571 7
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“... in 1945, which gives a providential glimpse of Ethiopia’s ambitions and the writing on the wall for the Eritreans – or some of the writing anyhow. At the time of the Congress, the British were still running Eritrea, the world war was over and decolonisation was the next great step for Europe and its subject peoples. The portrait of Kenyatta perfectly ...”

Types and Typology

Peter Howarth: Tennyson’s Scientific Imagination, 13 August 2026

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief 
by Richard Holmes.
William Collins, 431 pp., £12.99, September, 978 0 00 869686 3
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“... tried to cheer him up with an outing to Stratford, where Tennyson scribbled his name on the wall of Shakespeare’s house and seemed to enjoy his trip on the new railway. By the spring of the following year, though, his restless misery had returned, leaving FitzGerald anxious enough to track him down in his dubious London lodgings, finding him in ...”

The Most Corrupt Idea of Modern Times

Tom Stevenson: Inspecting the Troops, 1 July 2021

The Changing of the Guard: The British Army since 9/11 
by Simon Akam.
Scribe, 704 pp., £25, March, 978 1 913348 48 9
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“... to prevent the abuse of prisoners, but Akam reports that the divisional commander, General Peter Wall, refused to give this order to the forces under his command. He was later promoted to chief of the general staff.British behaviour in Basra inspired widespread hatred. Officers deceived themselves by talking of their good works, such as repainting schools ...”

Populist Palatial

Rosemary Hill: The View from Piccadilly, 4 March 2021

London’s West End: Creating the Pleasure District, 1800-1914 
by Rohan McWilliam.
Oxford, 400 pp., £30, September 2020, 978 0 19 882341 4
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Survey of London: Volume 53, Oxford Street 
edited by Andrew Saint.
Paul Mellon Centre, 421 pp., £75, April 2020, 978 1 913107 08 6
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“... Lord Cavendish, irritated by passers-by throwing oyster shells and other rubbish over his garden wall at Burlington House, blocked it off on the west side by building the Burlington Arcade – then, as now, the longest arcade in Britain. Despite all the accidental and deliberate destruction of the last two hundred years, the history of the West End is still ...”

Blink, Bid, Buy

Donald MacKenzie, 12 May 2022

“... pandemic, when it was spotted in the masthead ad slots on the homepages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, normally prime real estate for online advertising.A plausible rough estimate is that UK news publishers lost £50 million in the early months of the pandemic because of ad-blocking of their stories about it; in April 2020 the culture ...”

Warhol’s Respectability

Nicholas Penny, 19 March 1987

The Revenge of the Philistines 
by Hilton Kramer.
Secker, 445 pp., £12.50, July 1986, 0 436 23687 7
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Gilbert and George 
by Carter Ratcliff.
Thames and Hudson, 271 pp., £14.95, November 1986, 0 500 27443 6
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British Art in the 20th Century 
edited by Susan Compton.
Prestel-Verlag (Munich), 460 pp., £16.90, January 1987, 3 7913 0798 3
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“... environment. The exhibition concludes with a mural consisting of large circular patterns which Richard Long has painted with his own fingers out of mud from the River Avon. Long belongs to the movement of the Sixties away from museums and galleries, and much of his work – footsteps and arrangements of stones or driftwood in various remote locations ...”

In real sound stupidity the English are unrivalled

Stefan Collini: ‘Cosmo’ for Capitalists, 6 February 2020

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the ‘Economist’ 
by Alexander Zevin.
Verso, 538 pp., £25, November 2019, 978 1 78168 624 9
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“... In the course of the agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law ...”