Diary

Jeremy Harding: My ’68, 19 July 2018

“... archive, now online, is a gory mish-mash of psychedelia, drugs, the occult, squatting, flower power, music, libertarian sexual politics – softly pornographic while staunchly pro-gay, with a smattering of second-wave feminism – and a contempt for the establishment that occasionally strays into serious politics. IT had been quicker to respond to ‘les ...”

Paths to Restitution

Jeremy Harding: Leopold’s Legacy, 5 June 2025

“... province of Katanga. The prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was deposed after only three months in power. Four months later he was assassinated by a scratch firing squad overseen by former Belgian colonial police officers. In 2001, a Belgian parliamentary committee concluded that the government of the day ‘bore a moral responsibility’ for Lumumba’s ...”

A sewer runs through it

Alastair Logan, 4 November 1993

“... judges, saw fit to ponder for one moment what effect that had on their chances of a fair trial. Anne Maguire and her family, including 13-year-old Patrick, entered the dock in the Old Bailey on trial for possession of explosives after the massive publicity that attended the Guildford bombings trial, which had finished not long before. The media had made ...”

Ashes

Nicholas Spice, 19 December 1985

The Assault 
by Harry Mulisch, translated by Claire Nicolas White.
Collins Harvill, 204 pp., £8.95, November 1985, 0 00 271011 0Show More
All Our Yesterdays 
by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Angus Davidson.
Carcanet, 300 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 85635 593 3Show More
Family Sayings 
by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by D.M. Low.
Carcanet, 181 pp., £7.95, May 1984, 0 85635 504 6Show More
The Little Virtues 
by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Dick Davis.
110 pp., £6.95, June 1985, 0 85635 553 4Show More
Strange Loop 
by Amanda Prantera.
Cape, 175 pp., £8.50, June 1984, 0 224 02210 5Show More
The Cabalist 
by Amanda Prantera.
Cape, 184 pp., £8.95, September 1985, 0 224 02326 8Show More
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“... left him. For many people, the story which has come to represent all such stories is the story of Anne Frank, whose ordeal in hiding in Amsterdam was mocked by a fate that decreed she should be discovered and transported within a few months of liberation. Harry Mulisch treats the plight of the Dutch Jews, and of Jews everywhere at that time, with his own kind ...”

I, Lowborn Cur

Colin Burrow: Literary Names, 22 November 2012

Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature 
by Alastair Fowler.
Oxford, 283 pp., £19.99, September 2012, 978 0 19 959222 7Show More
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“... of the New Comedy of Menander. But comic dramatists also often seem to have been attracted to what Anne Barton has called Cratylic names – those which appear to endorse the view of Plato’s Cratylus that there is an intrinsic relationship between name and nature. Aristophanes has Dicaeopolis (‘just city’) and Lysistrata (‘disbander of ...”

Yuk’s Last Laugh

Tim Parks: Flaubert, 15 December 2016

Flaubert 
by Michel Winock, translated by Nicholas Elliott.
Harvard, 528 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 674 73795 2Show More
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“... there was nothing false or laughable in him. At 27, Achille-Cléophas had married the 18-year-old Anne-Justine-Caroline and immediately produced a son, Achille, who, as his name foretold, was to follow in his father’s footsteps. After Achille, however, there were three children who all died shortly after birth, so that Gustave was born eight years after his ...”

The Readyest Way to Hell

Clare Bucknell: The Exhausting Earl of Rochester, 26 December 2024

Rochester and the Pursuit of Pleasure 
by Larry D. Carver.
Manchester, 260 pp., £85, June 2024, 978 1 5261 7367 6Show More
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“... kinder things about his worst enemy. ‘To write a lampoon on oneself is not exactly unique,’ Anne Barton has pointed out; ‘it is, however, fundamentally paradoxical.’ Love suggests that ‘To the Post Boy’ may have been a pre-emptive strike on Rochester’s part, an attempt to silence his enemies ‘by flaunting a brilliance in invective they had ...”

Does one flare or cling?

Alice Spawls, 5 May 2016

‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
by Robin Muir.
National Portrait Gallery, 304 pp., £40, February 2016, 978 1 85514 561 0Show More
‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
National Portrait GalleryShow More
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“... during the war). Colour printing had always been emblematic of Vogue’s modernity and spending power – Nast insisted on full colour covers from the very beginning – and ‘Vogue’ 100’s small darkroom of slides show the luminosity and saturation that were now possible; the hues are as rich as any Boucher. More portable cameras made travel possible ...”

A Monk’s-Eye View

Diarmaid MacCulloch, 10 March 2022

The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History 
by James G. Clark.
Yale, 649 pp., £25, October 2021, 978 0 300 11572 7Show More
Going to Church in Medieval England 
by Nicholas Orme.
Yale, 483 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 300 25650 5Show More
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“... winnowing of monastic life with the same rationale as Wolsey’s. It concentrated its destructive power on the Anglo-Norman element, since many of the surviving houses from the 11th and 12th centuries were now unfeasibly small by Tudor standards. This meant that the dissolutions up to and including the 1536 act spared at one chronological extreme the ...”

Where could I emote?

Bee Wilson: Looking for Al Pacino, 26 June 2025

Sonny Boy: A Memoir 
by Al Pacino.
Century, 369 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 1 5299 1262 3Show More
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“... furious dignity in the face of prejudice. ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ takes on an added power when the eyes are Pacino’s giant brown hooded eyes, so intensely expressive at times and so terrifyingly deadened at others. When the film came out, Frank Kermode wrote in the LRB (6 January 2005) that ‘to give Pacino his due, he plays [Shylock] as a ...”

Ten-Foot Chopsticks

James Meek: The North-East Transition, 4 December 2025

“... China had already taken the wheel). The company, Britishvolt, collapsed just after Labour won power in 2024, but the Starmer government has pursued the link between green jobs, economic growth and votes in the same gung-ho spirit as Johnson, Democrats in the US and mainstream parties in the EU. The transition from fossil fuels to zero-carbon energy needs ...”

Even Immortality

Thomas Laqueur: Medicomania, 29 July 1999

The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present 
by Roy Porter.
HarperCollins, 833 pp., £24.99, February 1999, 0 00 637454 9Show More
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“... To be sure, major killers disappeared periodically but not through the agency of doctors or the power of science. Thus in medicine – unlike physics, chemistry or engineering – an immense accumulation of learning from the scientific revolution to our own century had almost no positive effect. One irony, among many, is that medicine became ...”

The Coburg Connection

Richard Shannon, 5 April 1984

Albert, Prince Consort 
by Robert Rhodes James.
Hamish Hamilton, 311 pp., £15, November 1983, 0 241 11000 9Show More
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“... Empire. Her half-sister, Elizabeth I, avoided the problem by avoiding matrimony altogether. Anne’s consort, the dim Prince George of Denmark, confined himself largely to trying (and failing) to provide a successor to the Stuart crown. It is the most cogent testimony to Prince Albert’s consortship from his marriage to Queen Victoria in 1840 to his ...”

Sister-Sister

Terry Castle, 3 August 1995

Jane Austen’s Letters 
edited by Deirde Le Faye.
Oxford, 621 pp., £30, March 1995, 0 19 811764 7Show More
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“... early 19th-century Britain (the recently rediscovered diaries of Austen’s lesbian contemporary, Anne Lister, are an example) – one is struck not so much by the letters’ hastiness or triviality as by the passionate nature of the sibling bond they commemorate. Sororal or pseudo-sororal attachments are arguably the most immediately gratifying human ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... it might seem attractive to set up a new country where they’re unlikely ever (ever?) to be in power. Who would be then? If a Scottish Labour government were as little socialist and as slavishly Thatcherite as New Labour led by the unspeakable Blair or the harmless Miliband, little would be gained. (Down here in Cumbria, I’ve recently been voting Lib ...”
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