One word says to its mate

Claire Harman: W.S. Graham, 4 October 2001

The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters of W.S. Graham 
edited by Michael Snow and Margaret Snow.
Carcanet, 401 pp., £12.95, November 1999, 1 85754 445 5
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... published until 1944) and made friends with David Archer, the publisher and bookseller whose Scott Street Arts Centre in Glasgow was a venue for the avant-garde of the interwar years. Graham met Dylan Thomas there, who was sufficiently impressed to include a Graham poem at the end of one of his own readings. Thomas was respectful, friendly and offered ...

‘It was everything’

Eliot Weinberger: The Republican Convention, 11 August 2016

... ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the host state (Governor John Kasich and Senator Rob Portman); and scores of Senate and Congress members, governors and mayors nervously up for re-election, facing the prospect of having to defend or refute whatever would be Trump’s latest wacky pronouncement and losing voters either ...
... of its offices: ‘At this location, 122 Commerce Street, was a very large warehouse owned by John Murphey, who provided support to the slave traders in the city.’ ‘I would have preferred not to have the additional markers,’ the mayor confessed, ‘but I believe they are part of history.’ He agreed to allow them, he said, because they would ...

Loafing with the Sissies

Colm Tóibín: The Trials of Andy Warhol, 10 September 2020

Warhol: A Life as Art 
by Blake Gopnik.
Allen Lane, 931 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 00338 1
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... launched in 1851, the omissions go back a long way. They include Charlotte Brontë and stretch to Scott Joplin, Alan Turing, Sylvia Plath and Diane Arbus.On 26 June this year, the paper ran a belated obituary of Valerie Solanas, who died in 1988 and is famous for having shot Andy Warhol twenty years earlier. The year before the shooting, Solanas published the ...

Chasing Steel

Ian Jack: Scotland’s Ferry Fiasco, 22 September 2022

... the outer firth.The bigger and more glamorous yards lay upriver at Dumbarton and Clydebank, where John Brown’s built the Queens for Cunard, and inside Glasgow’s city boundaries, where five or six companies on both banks (among them Harland & Wolff, Fairfield and Barclay Curle) gave Auden his ‘glade of cranes’. Downriver, the engine works and slipways ...

Am I perhaps in Italy?

James Butler: Cultures of Homosexuality, 2 April 2026

Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 
by Noel Malcolm.
Oxford, 594 pp., £14.99, June, 978 0 19 888636 5
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... number of gay men top the Trumpist pyramid (Peter Thiel, for instance, or the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent) and others lurk on its digital outskirts, but O’Neill isn’t one of them. He obviously didn’t believe his statements undermined his heterosexuality. Presumably this would be a risk only if he were the one being penetrated, and thus dominated ...

After Strachey

Adam Phillips: Translating Freud, 4 October 2007

... other translations; but, then again, reading Brill and Joan Riviere and Katherine Jones and Robson-Scott had not been illuminating. I didn’t, in other words, really think that Strachey was the problem with Freud. I was quite happy to be locked up in Strachey’s Freud and the myth of the Standard Edition and assume that it was more or less for all time. Just ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... on the US Amazon bestseller list, but the true-life Donald J. Trump story has more to do with what Scott Fitzgerald called ‘foul dust’ than with ideas or ideology. Reckoning with Trump means descending into the place that made him. What he represents, above all, is the triumph of an underworld of predators, hustlers, mobsters, clubhouse politicians and ...

Red Power

Thomas Meaney: Indigenous Political Strategies, 18 July 2024

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hämäläinen.
Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History 
by Ned Blackhawk.
Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
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Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance 
by Nick Estes.
Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
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... beyond the federal boundary, or even marking trees to signal future claims. Twenty years later, John Quincy Adams did not hesitate to send troops to burn down squatters’ homes and crops in Alabama. But these legal enforcements would be swept away in the coming demographic storm. The settler-sceptical northeastern Federalists had many political ...

A Little Pickle for the Husband

Michael Mason, 1 April 1999

Beeton's Book of Household Management 
by Isabella Beeton.
Southover, 1112 pp., £29.95, November 1998, 9781870962155
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... Household Management was probably less common only than the Bible, Shakespeare and the poems of Scott in better-off homes. Does that mean it has something to tell us about life in those homes – and if so, how are we to use it? What do books about cookery and housekeeping, of any period, tell us about contemporary realities? Certainly not the strict truth ...

What most I love I bite

Matthew Bevis: Stevie Smith, 28 July 2016

The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith 
edited by Will May.
Faber, 806 pp., £35, October 2015, 978 0 571 31130 9
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... The idea that Smith didn’t develop is a dull one regardless of whether it’s true or false (as John Bayley pointed out: ‘She never needed to do anything so banal as to “develop”, for the spectrum of tone continuously present is amazingly wide’). Despite his earlier criticism of her interest in cats Larkin’s later review singled out ‘The Singing ...

Unconditional Looking

David Trotter: Mrs Dalloway’s Demons, 23 October 2025

The Inner Life of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ 
by Edward Mendelson.
Columbia, 137 pp., £20, September, 978 0 231 22171 9
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‘Mrs Dalloway’: Biography of a Novel 
by Mark Hussey.
Manchester, 222 pp., £18.99, May, 978 1 5261 7681 3
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Mrs Dalloway 
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Edward Mendelson.
NYRB, 208 pp., £15.99, September, 978 1 68137 998 2
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Mrs Dalloway 
by Virginia Woolf, edited by Trudi Tate.
Oxford, 224 pp., £7.99, May, 978 0 19 285985 3
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... of place in an Edwardian saga. Woolf had once been quite ready to forgive ‘masterly’ Walter Scott for the ‘dull sermons’ in Old Mortality because everything in that book is ‘so much in keeping’. Boredom, after all, is woven into the ebb and flow of non-being out of which moments of being arise. One duly does, about halfway through the ...

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Adam Shatz: Mass Incarceration, 4 May 2017

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America 
by James Forman.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp., £21.98, April 2017, 978 0 374 18997 6
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... cannot think already to keep them from thinking’. Moore was echoed by the Superior Court judge John Fauntleroy, one of DC’s first black justices, and by Andrew Fowler, an influential black pastor. That Clarke was white made the policy of decriminalisation particularly susceptible to attack. Some, like Moore, suspected a plot to weaken blacks (he would ...

A Ripple of the Polonaise

Perry Anderson: Work of the Nineties, 25 November 1999

History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the Nineties 
by Timothy Garton Ash.
Allen Lane, 441 pp., £20, June 1999, 0 7139 9323 5
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... Mediterranean and the Danube basin were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire ...

The Common Law and the Constitution

Stephen Sedley, 8 May 1997

... of policy and to the courts on matters of law. When a Home Secretary, Lord Halifax, was sued by John Wilkes for punitive damages for having unlawfully issued a general warrant to search for seditious papers, Chief Justice Wilmot told the jury: ‘The law makes no difference between great and petty officers. Thank God, they are all amenable to ...