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Diary

Will Self: Walking out of London, 20 October 2011

... realm of the airport showed up as an orange nimbus against the purple night sky. In the morning, David Cameron was holding an emergency press conference on the television stuck in the top left-hand corner of the breakfast room: ‘Work is at the heart of a responsible society,’ he politely hectored the assembled hacks, while we sloped off on our walking ...

Orchestrated Panic

Yitzhak Laor: The Never-Ending War, 1 November 2007

1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East 
by Tom Segev, translated by Jessica Cohen.
Little, Brown, 673 pp., £25, May 2007, 978 0 316 72478 4
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... conveniently assuming that the Americans would endorse what it was doing, even when there was no green light from Washington. In other words, Israel used the same policy of ‘eliciting authorisation’ when it came to dealings with its superpower patron. In my view this is a crucial aspect of Israeli military history and the close connection between the two ...

Shock Cities

Susan Pedersen: The Fate of Social Democracy, 2 January 2020

Thatcher’s Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town 
by Guy Ortolano.
Cambridge, 301 pp., £29.99, June 2019, 978 1 108 48266 0
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Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Postwar England 
by Jon Lawrence.
Oxford, 327 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 0 19 877953 7
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... the new towns – Ortolano calls it ‘welfare state modernism’ (clean modernist lines, but in green, airy and usually low-rise estates) – ran into trouble: first, because the need to build fast and cheaply, at a time of serious shortages of materials, led to substitutions and the cutting of corners; second, because the style itself, as the privatisation ...

Post-Useful Misfits

Thomas Jones: Mick Herron’s Spies, 19 October 2023

The Secret Hours 
by Mick Herron.
Baskerville, 393 pp., £22, September, 978 1 3998 0053 2
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... told him: ‘They’re made up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true.’ The grandfather, David Cartwright, aka the Old Bastard or OB for short, knows what he’s talking about, as he was the power behind the throne at the Park for decades. The grandson, River Cartwright, once a promising recruit at the Park, has just been relegated to a dead-end job ...

Every Mother’s Son

Jonathan Parry: Britain in Sudan, 24 July 2025

Chain of Fire: Campaigning in Egypt and the Sudan, 1882-98 
by Peter Hart.
Profile, 444 pp., £30, February, 978 1 80081 073 0
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... was characteristically scathing about the morals of the British officers, ‘whose ideal is the green room of the Gaiety [Theatre]’, and who, in pursuit of promotion at home, thought nothing of butchering men who were fighting to defend a ‘thousand years of freedom’. If the soldiers seemed lacking in imagination, the journalists who accompanied the ...

Diary

Hilary Mantel: Meeting the Devil, 4 November 2010

... way we shield each other from an experience of darkness. One day soon after the surgery I vomit green gunk. ‘Don’t worry!’ I exclaim as I retch. ‘It will be fine! It’s just like The Exorcist,’ I say, before anyone else can. And so I spin away, back into the 1970s; I am easily parted from the present day. I remember the cinema queues and the ...

The Devil upon Two Sticks

Charles Nicholl: Samuel Foote, 23 May 2013

Mr Foote’s Other Leg: Comedy, Tragedy and Murder in Georgian London 
by Ian Kelly.
Picador, 462 pp., £18.99, October 2012, 978 0 330 51783 6
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... clubs and coffee-houses of London’s blossoming West End, and the perfect clownish counterfoil to David Garrick’s smouldering tragic hero. In his heyday in the 1760s, a summer season at the Haymarket theatre earned his company up to £5000, which may be multiplied a hundredfold for its value today. He had a townhouse on Suffolk Street, round the corner from ...

Entrepreneurship

Tom Paulin: Ted Hughes and the Hare, 29 November 2007

Letters of Ted Hughes 
edited by Christopher Reid.
Faber, 756 pp., £30, November 2007, 978 0 571 22138 7
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... exciting half hour of my life, under those great vertical 15 second rivers of orange or blue or green lightning, & great skyfulls of blazing thorns, & continuous overhead thunder, with great long swells coming along the gunwales, pouring in on both sides, one man bailing like mad, the rest paddling & yelling, & our sail like a map of the world in giant rips ...
... year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David Marquand, who was at Magdalen and who told me how he had been scared out of his wits one dark night in the cloisters when Bruce had swept past him in his Spanish cloak. I must have written to him and been told to come down to Magdalen, though I remember ...

On Not Being Sylvia Plath

Colm Tóibín: Thom Gunn on the Move, 13 September 2018

Selected Poems 
by Thom Gunn.
Faber, 336 pp., £16.99, July 2017, 978 0 571 32769 0
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... strange being alone with these two books; even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2004, 6 January 2005

... with many surviving stretches of medieval tiled floor, but much the most numinous object is a green earthenware inkwell found in the chapterhouse during excavations and now in the abbey museum; it was presumably used, possibly for the last time, to sign the deed of surrender handing the abbey over to Henry VIII’s commissioners. Over at Rievaulx we film ...

Weird Things in the Sky

Edmund Gordon: Are we alone?, 26 December 2024

After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon 
by Greg Eghigian.
Oxford, 388 pp., £22.99, September 2024, 978 0 19 086987 8
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... and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) – played a role in connecting the happenings to little green men. There were also influential works of non-fiction, such as a widely read article in Life, ‘Have We Visitors from Space?’, which appeared in April 1952. That summer, the number of reported sightings ‘skyrocketed’. It wasn’t long before people ...

Bitchy Little Spinster

Joanne O’Leary: Queens of Amherst, 3 June 2021

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet 
by Julie Dobrow.
Norton, 448 pp., £13.99, January 2020, 978 0 393 35749 3
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... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...

Progress Past

Paul Langford, 8 November 1990

The Idea of Progress in 18th-Century Britain 
by David Spadafora.
Yale, 464 pp., £22.50, July 1990, 0 300 04671 5
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George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron 
by Vincent Carretta.
Georgia, 389 pp., £38.50, June 1990, 0 8203 1146 4
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... it surely requires more sophistication than is offered here. Ross of Exeter was ‘moderate’, Green of Lincoln ‘a liberal’, Watson of Llandaff ‘extremely liberal’; Butler of Oxford was ‘a conservative’, Newton of Bristol ‘fairly conservative’. What liberalism and conservatism mean in this context is not explained: aside from the ...

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