‘It was everything’

Eliot Weinberger: The Republican Convention, 11 August 2016

... immigrants with criminal records … roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens’. Inspired by Richard Nixon’s speech in 1968 – a year when there were riots in major cities – he repeated ‘law and order’ four times, dramatically elongating the phrase: ‘I have a message to every last person threatening the peace on our streets and the safety of ...

Don’t wait to be asked

Clare Bucknell: Revolutionary Portraiture, 2 March 2023

A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830 
by Paris Spies-Gans.
Paul Mellon Centre, 384 pp., £45, June 2022, 978 1 913107 29 1
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... shelf. The buttocks and thighs of a muscular plaster torso, its front primly turned to face the wall, loom over the women below.By the 1820s, ateliers specialising in female tutelage were a fixture of the Paris art world. At least thirty female artists made their debut at the Louvre’s Salon between 1822 and 1827; in 1824, 101 female exhibitors showed a ...

I’d smash you in the face

Thomas Meaney: MAGA’s Debt to Buckley, 22 January 2026

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America 
by Sam Tanenhaus.
Random House, 1040 pp., £33, June 2025, 978 0 375 50234 7
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... Goldwater’s defeat, however, the campaign became a mission to show that liberal Republicans like Richard Nixon were no longer the only option for the right. Buckley ran as the leader of the Conservative Party against his fellow Yale Republican John Lindsay. He called for the abolition of unions, tough policing, welfare restrictions, bicycle lanes and a New ...

Finding an Enemy

Conor Gearty: Sixty Years of Anti-Terrorist Legislation, 15 April 1999

Legislation against Terrorism: A Consultation Paper. CM 4178. 
by Home Office and Northern Ireland Office.
70 pp., £9.95, December 1998, 0 10 141782 9
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... on the evening before the Commons debate. In the words of the independently minded Conservative Richard Shepherd, all we ‘knew about the Bill was what I believe the country will come to detest more than anything – the manipulation, the spin, the press releases and all the covert ways of trying to secure the legislation of this country without reference ...

Oswaldworld

Andrew O’Hagan, 14 December 1995

Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery 
by Norman Mailer.
Little, Brown, 791 pp., £25, September 1995, 0 316 87620 8
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... books. I hear a voice beside me say: ‘He was a real people-person.’ There is a display on the wall of things-from-1963: a poster for Psycho, a programme for a new musical starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews called Camelot, an advertisement for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? There is a row of books from the ...

My Kind of Psychopath

Michael Wood, 20 July 1995

Pulp Fiction 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 198 pp., £7.99, October 1994, 0 571 17546 5
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Reservoir Dogs 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 113 pp., £7.99, November 1994, 0 571 17362 4
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True Romance 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 134 pp., £7.99, January 1995, 0 571 17593 7
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Natural Born Killers 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 175 pp., £7.99, July 1995, 0 571 17617 8
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... him and the best days of his childhood. He and his wife are like that throughout the film: off the wall but happy with life and with each other. They are not bland or aimless, they are skittish and dangerous, but they know fun when they see it, and the pleasure of this recognition is contagious. The roller-coaster shot focuses the mood of the whole ...

What Happened?

James Butler: Autopsy of an Election, 6 February 2020

... The tension between party members and elected representatives, however, is congenital in Labour: Richard Crossman observed in 1968 that the nominal sovereignty given to the party conference was vitiated in practice by the freedom given to MPs in matters of political judgment. Perversely, the unremitting attacks from his own MPs made it more difficult, not ...

Promises aren’t always kept

Jenny Diski: Goblin. Hobgoblin. Ugly Duckling, 8 October 2015

... I never have found out whether it was the personality that was disordered, or a crack in the wall of personality that threatened to flood my self into nowhere if I didn’t keep a hold on it. I think that BPD was really a diagnosis meaning a young woman who didn’t do as she was told and they didn’t know how to deal with it). Anyway, before all that ...

Very like St Paul

Ian Sansom: Johnny Cash, 9 March 2006

The Man Called Cash: The Life, Love and Faith of an American Legend 
by Steve Turner.
Bloomsbury, 363 pp., £8.99, February 2006, 0 7475 8079 0
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Walk the Line 
directed by James Mangold.
November 2005
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... author also of Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song and a biography of Cliff Richard – can’t be unaware of the implied contrast with the Paschal lamb of Exodus 12.46 and the fulfilment of the Scripture in the Gospel of John, chapter 19 (‘Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified ...

An UnAmerican in New York

Lewis Nkosi: The Harlem Renaissance, 24 August 2000

Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: An Eric Walrond Reader 
edited by Louis Parascandola.
Wayne State, 350 pp., $24.95, December 1998, 0 8143 2709 5
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... before us lies the open grave?Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!Many scholars date the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance from the original publication of ‘If We Must Die’ in the radical journal, the Liberator, in 1919.The new racial consciousness of the 1920s coincided, of course, with the ...

It’s Been a Lot of Fun

David Runciman: Hitchens’s Hitchens, 24 June 2010

Hitch-22: A Memoir 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Atlantic, 435 pp., £20, June 2010, 978 1 84354 921 5
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... of halting our feud. I can still picture this doomed pact in its red frame, briefly hanging on the wall. To my shame, I was the one who repudiated it, ripped it from its frame and angrily erased my signature, before recommencing hostilities. In a way, the treaty has remained broken ever since. Yet five decades on, things are starting to thaw. Peter and ...

Everybody’s Joan

Marina Warner, 6 December 2012

... de Marie occupied a vast Gothic pile, decorated throughout in polished marble with busy polychrome wall paintings recalling stirring episodes in the history of church and state in Belgium. Although I can’t remember the exact subjects now, the atmosphere of those pictures remains pungently present in my mind: nationalism and piety, conservatism and propriety ...

The Monster Plot

Thomas Powers: James Angleton, Spymaster, 10 May 2018

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton 
by Jefferson Morley.
Scribe, 336 pp., £20, December 2017, 978 1 911344 73 5
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... The chief of the Agency’s clandestine wing, Angleton’s long-time friend (but also boss) Richard Helms, worried that the Nosenko matter would blow up in the newspapers. He never lost faith in Angleton, a man he had known since OSS days and had trusted to protect the CIA from the ultimate Cold War nightmare – discovery of a high-level Soviet ...

Dynamo Current, Feet, Fists, Salt

Adam Shatz: What did you do in the war?, 18 February 2021

Papa, qu’as-tu fait en Algérie? Enquête sur un silence familial 
by Raphaëlle Branche.
La Découverte, 512 pp., £21.50, September 2020, 978 2 7071 9878 5
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... Jews under Vichy, as if remembering the Holocaust and forgetting Algeria went hand in hand.If the wall of denial has crumbled, it is in no small part thanks to the work of historians such as Raphaëlle Branche, who in 2001 published a doctoral thesis, La Torture et l’armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie, based partly on interviews with former ...

The Sound of Voices Intoning Names

Thomas Laqueur, 5 June 1997

French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial 
by Serge Klarsfeld.
New York, 1881 pp., $95, November 1996, 0 8147 2662 3
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... German victory, literally sacrificed himself to the SS so that his family, huddled behind a false wall, would escape discovery. The eight-year-old Serge survived the rest of the war in hiding in the Upper Loire, where, he says, ‘the Gestapo had no antennae.’ The greater part of French Children of the Holocaust consists of an album of pictures of the ...