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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... stirred up a public outcry against continued government secrecy. The then director of the CIA, Robert Gates, promptly ordered the release of a large number of files to the National Archives. Later, Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act requiring the CIA and FBI to release virtually all records even tangentially related to the ...

I need money

Christian Lorentzen: Biden Tries Again, 10 September 2020

Yesterday’s Man: The Case against Joe Biden 
by Branko Marcetic.
Verso, 288 pp., £12.99, March 2020, 978 1 83976 028 0
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... history books … but he is doing a good job.’ When Carter, along with many Democratic senators (Frank Church, George McGovern, Birch Bayh), lost out in that year’s elections, Biden found himself with increased seniority and free to tack further right.‘In a strange way,’ he said, ‘the election of Ronald Reagan is more consistent with the budgetary ...

Wire him up to a toaster

Seamus Perry: Ordinary Carey, 7 January 2021

A Little History of Poetry 
by John Carey.
Yale, 303 pp., £14.99, March 2020, 978 0 300 23222 6
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... genius seems to have been first sparked by reading a good though now mostly forgotten book, Robert Currie’s Genius (1974), which analysed with panache the Romantic invention of the phenomenon and its diverse aftermath in 20th-century avatars such as Samuel Beckett and Adolf Hitler. The lonely artist inhabits a superior aesthetic realm, Currie ...

Heathcliff Redounding

David Trotter: Emily Brontë’s Scenes, 9 May 2024

Emily Brontë: Selected Writings 
edited by Francis O’Gorman.
Oxford, 496 pp., £95, December 2023, 978 0 19 886816 3
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... Walter Scott’s Waverley novels: honourable if rather dozy young Englishmen such as Rob Roy’s Frank Osbaldistone who undertake perilous expeditions into the wild regions north of the border. These young men turn out to possess a combative streak perfectly calibrated to rub the locals up the wrong way. So we shouldn’t be surprised that what most appeals ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... of the Guildford Four are a politically heterogeneous bunch: at one end, Cardinal Basil Hume, Robert Kee, Merlyn Rees, Lord Scarman and the late Lord Devlin; at the other, rhetoric-ridden, far-left Trotskyist groupings. And in between the world and its dog. The only thing on which all are agreed – some with more knowledge of the facts than others – is ...

When Ireland Became Divided

Garret FitzGerald: The Free State’s Fight for Recognition, 21 January 1999

Documents on Irish Foreign Policy. Vol. I: 1919-22 
edited by Ronan Fanning.
Royal Irish Academy and Department of Foreign Affairs, 548 pp., £30, October 1998, 1 874045 63 1
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... 1921 until January 1922 the administration of the Department of Foreign Affairs was undertaken by Robert Brennan, who had been in charge of publicity for Sinn Féin and had latterly been working under my father in the Dáil Publicity Department. De Valera made it clear to Brennan on his appointment that, despite Plunkett’s nominal role, he was to report ...

Far-Right Wellness Product

James Meek: Romania’s Far Right, 19 February 2026

... therapies and conspiracy theories about medicine and vaccination. Like his populist counterpart Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, and many MAGA influencers, Georgescu benefited from the pandemic, using people’s fear, uncertainty and ignorance to braid together an anti-establishment and anti-vax message, thus strengthening each strand: the ...

Ivory Trade

Steven Shapin: The Entrepreneurial University, 11 September 2003

MIT and the Rise of Entrepreneurial Science 
by Henry Etzkowitz.
Routledge, 173 pp., £70, June 2002, 9780415285162
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Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialisation of Higher Education 
by Derek Bok.
Princeton, 233 pp., £14.95, April 2003, 0 691 11412 9
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... differences. Etzkowitz’s slim but unnecessarily repetitive book mixes historical accounting with frank celebration of entrepreneurialism at MIT, and at American research universities generally: ‘Charges of conflict of obligation,’ Etzkowitz assures us, ‘have abated’; the creation of companies by academics ‘has now come to be positively defined as a ...

Shapeshifter

Ian Penman: Elvis looks for meaning, 25 September 2014

Elvis Has Left the Building: The Day the King Died 
by Dylan Jones.
Duckworth, 307 pp., £16.99, July 2014, 978 0 7156 4856 8
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Elvis Presley: A Southern Life 
by Joel Williamson.
Oxford, 384 pp., £25, November 2014, 978 0 19 986317 4
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... and tomorrow would be as different as land and sky. That evening, safe in his Bel Air rental (a Frank Lloyd Wright designed house previously owned by the shah of Iran), he said to Geller: ‘I don’t want to perform any more. I want to leave the world. Find me a monastery. I want to become a monk.’ But his ascetic mood soon passed (as every Elvis mood ...

Distraction v. Attraction

Barbara Everett: Ashbery, Larkin and Eliot, 27 June 2002

... in echoes under Bellow’s powerful prose. The rhetoric of multiplicity is other than American (Robert Burton probably invented it for English prose) but both Bellow and McBain are probably hearing some rhythm from Whitman’s sometimes tedious but more often breathtaking echt American anaphoras, constructed to coast us as in a spaceship across an otherwise ...

Lethal Pastoral

Paul Keegan: Housman’s Lethal Pastoral, 17 November 2016

Housman Country: Into the Heart of England 
by Peter Parker.
Little, Brown, 446 pp., £25, June 2016, 978 1 4087 0613 8
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... how to read the poems. One anecdote that Parker does not pass on to us concerns a meeting with Frank Harris, in which Housman took offence at Harris’s suggestion that the final stanza of ‘1887’, the introductory poem of A Shropshire Lad, was darkly intended. The poem remembers the Silver Jubilee celebrations, and Housman tests an ossified ...

Seeing Stars

Alan Bennett: Film actors, 3 January 2002

... manners.Except that now, telling the story, I can’t be sure that it was Ronald Colman and not Robert Donat, who was certainly more likely to be in Leeds and indeed in England and who was known to be shy (and, as Mam said, ‘a martyr to asthma’) and therefore more likely to bolt from the shop.Cherished and admired as a local boy was Eric Portman, who ...

Real Busters

Tom Crewe: Sickert Grows Up, 18 August 2022

Walter Sickert 
Tate Britain, until 18 September 2022Show More
Walter Sickert: The Theatre of Life 
edited by Matthew Travers.
Piano Nobile, 184 pp., £60, October 2021, 978 1 901192 59 9
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Sickert: A Life in Art 
by Charlotte Keenan McDonald.
National Museums Liverpool, 104 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 1 902700 63 2
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... decided he didn’t like standing out in the cold? His first biographer (and former student), Robert Emmons, insisted that ‘SICKERT IS ONE OF THE IMPRESSIONISTS’ on the grounds that, though not an original member, he was ‘so closely allied to them both in method and sentiment, as to take his place, naturally and inevitably, within the innermost ...

The Writer and the Valet

Frances Stonor Saunders, 25 September 2014

... evidence procured by Finn and Couvée, went largely unreported in the West. Long forgotten is Robert Conquest’s The Courage of Genius: The Pasternak Affair, published in 1961, as impartial an account as you could expect from someone who had been employed in the Foreign Office’s propaganda shop for more than a decade. Add to these Evgeny Pasternak’s ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2010, 16 December 2010

... a Christian after all) but that of the rest of the cast. 7 April. The open mouth of Chelsea’s Frank Lampard, having scored a goal, is also the howl on the face of the damned man in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. 16 April. The row over Lord Ashcroft’s non-dom status seems to have died down. Nobody, I think, noted that it was the reverse of the row that ...