A Minimum of Charity

Katharine Fletcher: The obstacles to seeking asylum, 17 March 2005

“... take a case to appeal, there are other new difficulties. Barbara (not her real name) worked on a white farm in Zimbabwe and was smuggled to the UK by an associate of her employer in 2001 after she was assaulted and her life threatened by Zanu PF supporters. Telling the Home Office interviewers what had been done to her was difficult: ‘I didn’t want to ...”

Swoonatra

Ian Penman, 2 July 2015

Sinatra: London 
Universal, 3 CDs and 1 DVD, £40, November 2014Show More
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“... craft. That may ultimately be what differentiates him from more than capable contemporaries like Tony Bennett and Mel Tormé: with Sinatra there’s less obvious technique on show and more personality. Except, what is most characteristic about that personality is how unshowy it is: how it often feels deeply submerged, and hard to touch. He can sound on the ...”

The dogs in the street know that

Nick Laird: A Week in Mid-Ulster, 5 May 2005

“... take that? And now the process is dead. I can’t see it getting back up again – no one believes Tony Blair anymore in the Unionist community – and I can’t see that anyone in the two Unionist parties could go back into government with Sinn Féin, after the bank robbery and now this McCartney murder. Both Blair and Ahern have been left with severe egg on ...”

The Shoah after Gaza

Pankaj Mishra, 21 March 2024

“... claimed that the Jewish state, which sold arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa, embodied white supremacy not democracy. Muhammad Ali saw Palestine as an instance of gross racial injustice. So, today, do the leaders of the United States’s oldest and most prominent Black Christian denominations, who have accused Israel of genocide and asked Biden to ...”

I’m just a sound

Ian Penman: Back to the Beach Boys, 23 April 2026

Surf’s Up: Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys 
by Peter Doggett.
New Modern, 420 pp., £25, November 2025, 978 1 917923 34 7
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“... words to express it, Wilson often needed collaborators to articulate his feelings in song, notably Tony Asher and Van Dyke Parks. The alchemy is mysterious: while these may not have been precisely his ‘own’ words, they somehow feel as if they are written in Wilson’s voice. Talking to himself, talking to his wife, talking to God. The more unvarnished the ...”

The Person in the Phone Booth

David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010

“... of privacy in public which includes rather than excludes the acknowledgment of strangers. Tony Harrison’s ‘Changing at York’ takes place in a phone booth in York railway station, where he has gone to inform his son that his train has been delayed. The booth is replete with phobic objects and sensations: a vandalised directory, the smell of ...”

Who will get legal aid now?

Joanna Biggs: Legal Aid, 20 October 2011

“... so many of whose front bench were lawyers, consistently attacked solicitors and barristers. Tony Blair (called to the Bar 1976) wanted to ‘derail the gravy train of legal aid’ and Jack Straw (called to the Bar 1972) complained of ‘BMW-driving civil liberties lawyers’. But New Labour’s attack wasn’t on the gravy train: it was on the ...”

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan, 6 March 2025

“... and a congregation that includes Geri Halliwell, Bear Grylls, the former John Lewis chair Sharon White and the multi-millionaire Conservative donor Ken Costa.HTB’s approach is rooted less in exegesis than in religious conviction. ‘Enthusiasm is a big part of it,’ according to the writer Andrew Graystone. ‘You believe that your brand of Christianity ...”
“... Keep your hair on! in which Jocelyn Stevens, my boss, had invested some money. The sets were by Tony Armstrong-Jones, who was also on the magazine and became a great friend of mine. And I was vaguely given to understand that a good review would be welcome: but I needn’t have worried, because Gallery Nell booed it off the stage. Then I became literary ...”

I’m a Surfer

Steven Shapin: What’s the Genome Worth?, 20 March 2008

A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life 
by Craig Venter.
Allen Lane, 390 pp., £25, October 2007, 978 0 7139 9724 8
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“... celebrated Venter as one of America’s ‘Great Innovators’, they elected to pose him wearing a white lab coat on one side and a businessman’s jacket on the other, an admired chimera of scientific knowledge and capitalist entrepreneurship. Venter grew rich through these manoeuvres. In November 1993, he had over 700,000 shares in HGS, worth $9.2 million ...”

Hizbullah’s War

Zain Samir, 30 November 2023

“... saw fighters in military jeeps or off-road motorbikes. As I approached Aalma El Chaeb, columns of white smoke rose from another Israeli strike, and later, in Dhayra, I could hear the woosh-woosh of an outgoing salvo of rockets. At night, my small hotel in Naqoura shook when an Israeli airstrike targeted a nearby position.The inhabitants of Aalma El Chaeb and ...”

Quickening, or How to Plot an Abortion

Clair Wills: The Abortion Plot, 16 March 2023

“... campaign. But it was also personal. Behind the statistic of 35 deaths a year was the mother of Tony Garnett, Up the Junction’s story editor. She had died of septicaemia following a backstreet abortion in the early 1940s, when Tony was five years old. Nineteen days later his father committed suicide.One of the ...”

The Framing of al-Megrahi

Gareth Peirce: The Death of Justice, 24 September 2009

“... bear no trace of explosives. A second suitcase, opened by a Scottish farmer, contained packets of white powder which a local police officer told him was undoubtedly heroin; no heroin was ever recorded as having been discovered. All but two of the labels that Dr Fieldhouse attached to the bodies he found were removed and have never been found. Although the ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2005, 5 January 2006

“... in the back garden of a council house a small pavilion has been set up and two figures in the white suits of forensic experts are lumbering in and out of the house. It’s a crime scene, though Jamie, the cheeky grips, suggests it could be quite a small wedding. When we reach the school they tell us it’s a 30-year-old man, an old boy of the school, who ...”

Dazed and Confused

Paul Laity: Are the English human?, 28 November 2002

Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 
by Richard Weight.
Macmillan, 866 pp., £25, May 2002, 0 333 73462 9
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Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom 
by Tom Nairn.
Verso, 176 pp., £13, September 2002, 1 85984 657 2
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Identity of England 
by Robert Colls.
Oxford, 422 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 19 924519 3
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Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, October 2002, 1 85619 716 6
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“... British state now doomed? No wars against Continental enemies are in prospect; even geography – white cliffs, island fortress – means a lot less than it did. In the absence of any unitary racial or religious self-definition, old loyalties and alignments – Scottishness, Welshness – have emerged from under the ragged counterpane of British ...”