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Diary

David Thomson: Alcatraz, 26 March 2009

... Escape from Alcatraz (1979), in which Clint Eastwood played Morris and the warden was the late Patrick McGoohan, so famous himself as ‘The Prisoner’. There was a rich irony in the casting of McGoohan, for wardens and the society they are paid to defend are as much prisoners of the idea of incarceration as the inmates. Are we remotely within reach of a ...

Companions in Toil

Michael Kulikowski: The Praetorian Guard, 4 May 2017

Praetorian: The Rise and Fall of Rome’s Imperial Bodyguard 
by Guy de la Bédoyère.
Yale, 336 pp., £25, March 2017, 978 0 300 21895 4
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... of his downfall, but it is immortalised in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius in which Sejanus (a young Patrick Stewart in the BBC adaption) is presented by his successor, Macro, with the letter ordering his summary execution and the butchery of all his family. After seven years at the apex of power, Macro was driven to suicide by Tiberius’ young ...

Sleep through it

Anne Diebel: Ottessa Moshfegh, 13 September 2018

My Year of Rest and Relaxation 
by Ottessa Moshfegh.
Cape, 288 pp., £12.99, July 2018, 978 1 78733 041 2
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Homesick for Another World 
by Ottessa Moshfegh.
Cape, 277 pp., £9.99, January 2018, 978 1 78470 150 5
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... a parody of itself, gauche and ridiculous.’ (This celebrity-as-talisman gag is a mild version of Patrick Bateman’s exegesis of the work of Whitney Houston, Huey Lewis and the News and Phil Collins-era Genesis in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.) The book is set roughly twenty years ago, which just qualifies it as historical fiction, but it isn’t ...

I suppose I must have

Sophie Lewis: On Gaslighting, 1 August 2024

On Gaslighting 
by Kate Abramson.
Princeton, 217 pp., £20, May, 978 0 691 24938 4
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... further undermines the victim. George Cukor’s 1944 film noir Gaslight, based on the 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton, inspired the term, though it took some time to gain ground. Psychoanalytical scholarship first mentioned ‘the gaslight phenomenon’ in the late 1960s. In 1981, two doctors, Victor Calef and Edward Weinshel, gave an account of gaslighting in ...

Cloak and Suit and Slipper

Rye Dag Holmboe: Reviving Hirshfield, 13 July 2023

Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered 
by Richard Meyer.
MIT, 267 pp., £55, September 2022, 978 0 262 04728 9
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... claim for unschooled painting (Janis wrote a catalogue essay for Masters of Popular Painting on Patrick J. Sullivan, an American house painter turned artist he described as ‘gentle’ and ‘unspoiled’). Masters of Popular Painting was the third exhibition to survey the major movements of modern art at MoMA; the first, Cubism and Abstract Art, was held ...

Under-the-Table-Talk

Christopher Tayler: Beckett’s Letters, 19 March 2015

Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1957-65 
by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck.
Cambridge, 771 pp., £30, September 2014, 978 0 521 86795 5
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... in more old-fashioned terms. ‘He talks of his books as if they were written by someone else,’ Patrick Bowles, the first translator of Molloy, noted while Beckett retouched his handiwork in 1953. ‘He said that it was the voice to which he listened, the voice one should listen to. “There are many things I don’t understand in my books.”’ Bowles ...

He shoots! He scores!

David Runciman: José Mourinho, 5 January 2006

Mourinho: Anatomy of a Winner 
by Patrick Barclay.
Orion, 210 pp., £14.99, September 2005, 0 7528 7333 4
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... at the mercy of the Hot Hand, mere surfers on the inexorable waves of chance like everyone else? Patrick Barclay’s portrait of José Mourinho, with its subtitle ‘Anatomy of a Winner’, promises an answer to these questions. But in fact it simply confirms how little thought even the best football writers are willing to give to the workings of chance in ...

Fat Man

Steven Shapin: Churchill’s Bomb, 26 September 2013

Churchill’s Bomb: A Hidden History of Science, War and Politics 
by Graham Farmelo.
Faber, 554 pp., £25, October 2013, 978 0 571 24978 7
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... wasn’t in the intellectual league of Cambridge’s Ernest Rutherford or Manchester’s Patrick Blackett or London’s J.D. Bernal, but he had certain virtues that made him ideal for the position of Churchill’s personal scientist. He was posh, rich, well mannered, well connected and Tory – and that wasn’t typical of the British scientific ...

Antigone in Galway

Anne Enright, 17 December 2015

... known as Máméan (the Pass of the Birds) that pilgrims still use on the way to the well of St Patrick. Individual graves are built up with large stones, for the length of the body beneath, and there are no crosses to be seen. The bodies of infants were buried by a father or an uncle, often at night. The scant ritual and the isolation of the setting is ...

Gissing may damage your health

Jane Miller, 7 March 1991

The Collected Letters of George Gissing. Vol. I: 1863-1880 
edited by Paul Mattheisen, Arthur Young and Pierre Coustillas.
Ohio, 334 pp., £47.50, September 1990, 0 8214 0955 7
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... by more than a few readers with a special interest in him or his times? Raymond Williams advised Patrick Parrinder against reading the novels in the winter, as ‘a tactful and tolerant supervisor solicitous about my emotional health’, as Parrinder puts it. Scandal and an absolutely efflorescent unhappiness are to be found beneath the evasiveness, the ...

Diary

David Rieff: Cuban Miami, 5 February 1987

... Miami hero is North himself. It is no accident that when White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan wanted to defend him he went to Miami to do so. Appearing before a Cuban audience, he excoriated critics of the covert aid to the Contras as traitors. There is today no other city in America in which Buchanan could have made such a speech and ...

Welfare in America

William Plowden, 11 July 1991

American Social Welfare Policy: A Structural Approach 
by Howard Karger and David Stoesz.
Longman, 371 pp., £18.95, November 1990, 0 8013 0193 9
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America’s Misunderstood Welfare State 
by Theodore Marmor, Jerry Mashaw and Philip Harvey.
Basic Books, 268 pp., $22.95, October 1990, 9780465001224
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The American Prospect 
edited by Paul Starr and Robert Kuttner.
New Prospect, 168 pp., $31
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... because working families too were receiving welfare.’ Though some liberals, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, derided such sweeping assertions, Murray’s thesis appealed both to common sense and to prejudice. It justified cuts in welfare spending and reductions in taxes and in state intervention. It also presented a pragmatic, morally neutral case for ...

Aids in South Africa

R.W. Johnson, 12 September 1991

... conference in Durban on the economic impact of Aids, Jonathan Broomberg, Malcolm Steinberg and Patrick Masobe constructed a complex actuarial model to take into account the fact that the epidemic’s doubling time is likely to slow down as it progresses. In the very early stages the number of adults aged 15-34 who are HIV+ doubles every six months – a ...

Kitchen Devil

John Bayley, 20 December 1990

Emily Brontë: A Chainless Soul 
by Katherine Frank.
Hamish Hamilton, 303 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 9780241121993
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... his own would probably have been a flimsy and meagre affair. The Pruntys had come a long way since Patrick left the bogside cottage in county Down, and – astonishingly – reached Cambridge as a sizar to take his degree for the Church. ‘No one from Ballynaskeagh had ever gone to Oxford or Cambridge,’ observes Frank, ‘and to the present day no one has ...

Diary

Christopher Harvie: Cars and Cuckoo Clocks, 26 January 1995

... obscura. Gray probably stole this contraption from the Edinburgh Outlook Tower of his hero Sir Patrick Geddes, the pioneer sociologist and town-planner. He uses it to create an image not of engagement but of alienation; the Institute’s élite is literally predatory on losers deemed to have lost all human qualities. Yet if ‘all history is intellectual ...

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