The Last Witness

Colm Tóibín: The career of James Baldwin, 20 September 2001

... They wouldn’t publish the book, they said, as a favour to me.’ In London, however, Michael Joseph agreed to publish Giovanni’s Room and, later, in New York, a small publisher, the Dial Press, offered to bring the book out. It first appeared in 1956. Both Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room were declarations of independence for ...

How bad can it get?

LRB Contributors: On Johnson’s Britain, 15 August 2019

... some hay was made of the fact that May and her top adviser, Nick Timothy, shared a political hero: Joseph Chamberlain. Chamberlain started out on the left of the Liberal Party in the 1870s and was in league with the Tories by the mid-1880s, never having had a middle phase. He was the first to try to weld together a concern for the working classes and a belief ...

The Playboy of West 29th Street

Colm Tóibín: Yeats’s Father in Exile, 25 January 2018

... appeared in 1920, and Pound published John Butler Yeats’s Early Memories in 1923. In 1944, Joseph Hone selected a larger edition of the letters, published as J.B. Yeats: Letters to His Son W.B. Yeats and Others. This was reissued in an abridged edition with an introduction by John McGahern in 1999. But, after its initial publication in 1944, it was ...

The Darwin Show

Steven Shapin, 7 January 2010

... the importance of the day and the greatness of the scientist’. In Charlotte, North Carolina, there were performances of a one-man musical, Charles Darwin: Live & in Concert (‘Twas adaptive radiation that produced the mighty whale;/His hands have grown to flippers/And he has a fishy tail’). At Harvard, the celebrations included ‘free ...

Architectures of Containment

Clair Wills: Ireland’s Lost Children, 20 May 2021

Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes 
Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Government of Ireland, 2865 pp., October 2020Show More
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... twelve adult women who were resident at Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in Cork were buried in St Joseph’s Cemetery, Cork, between 1927 and 1985:The women buried here remained in Bessborough for extended periods working as domestic servants; their deaths were not childbirth related. One woman entered Bessborough in 1922, aged 20 years, and remained there ...

Germs: A Memoir

Richard Wollheim, 15 April 2004

... I, and perhaps both of us, had suffered through my father’s reticence. We were on holiday in North Wales, where we had taken for the summer the upper part of a rambling 19th-century castle, and, one late afternoon, various members of a large and famous Bloomsbury family, children and grandchildren of the old lady to whom the house belonged, had settled ...

The Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, 23 March 2006

... for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous ...

Ever Closer Union?

Perry Anderson, 7 January 2021

... literal embodiment.‘This technical and cognitive equipment’, Vauchez writes, going on to quote Joseph Weiler,is not only the instrument that officially defines and authenticates that ‘Europe’ to which candidates are applying in phases of enlargement; it equally inserts itself into the most routine operations of the EU, turning into Europe’s ...

The Italian Disaster

Perry Anderson, 22 May 2014

... bags. One last service he performed, as he did so. On April 5, he pardoned the American colonel Joseph Romano, sentenced in absentia to seven years for his part in the kidnapping in Milan of an Egyptian cleric, who was then delivered in a US military aircraft to Cairo for months of torture at the hands of Mubarak’s police. Constitutionally, a presidential ...