‘The Meeting of the Waters’

John Barrell, 27 July 2017

... rivers or the great collisions of rivers and oceans, that have clung to my memory with tenacious power, and still affect me as much as they ever did. I am thinking for example of the poet James Thomson’s lines on the unimaginably vast rivers of South America, not rivers so much as seas, which, bearing ‘the liquid weight of half the globe’, crash ...

I am only interested in women who struggle

Jeremy Harding: On Sarah Maldoror, 23 May 2024

... in Z (1969), his thriller about the turmoil in Greece, where a military junta had recently seized power. The FLN agreed a co-production deal. It had also put up money for Klein’s documentary and for Monangambeee, which was approved for release a few months after the festival. ‘Having screened the film,’ the official report went, ‘the Department of ...

Higher Ordinariness

Jonathan Meades: Poor Surrey, 23 May 2024

Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 
by Gavin Stamp.
Profile, 568 pp., £40, March, 978 1 80081 739 5
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The Buildings of England: Surrey 
by Charles O’Brien, Ian Nairn and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 854 pp., £60, November 2022, 978 0 300 23478 7
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... inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that the architecture he craved was being made right in front of him. He couldn’t see it for its ubiquity. Here was the distinctive architecture of its time, derived from countless precedents, with ...

Kick over the Scenery

Stephanie Burt: Philip K. Dick, 3 July 2008

Four Novels of the 1960s: ‘The Man in the High Castle’, ‘The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch’, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, ‘Ubik’ 
by Philip K. Dick.
Library of America, 830 pp., $35, May 2008, 978 1 59853 009 4
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Five Novels of the 1960s and 1970s: ‘Martian Time-Slip’, ‘Dr Bloodmoney’, ‘Now Wait for Last Year’, ‘Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said’, ‘A Scanner Darkly’ 
by Philip K. Dick.
Library of America, 1128 pp., $40, August 2008, 978 1 59853 025 4
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... at the University of California, San Diego. Dick said near the end of his life that he was ‘into power’: ‘Instead of society moulding me,’ he claimed, ‘I mould it.’ His late belief in his own visionary importance puts into new, sad light the schlubby repairmen, newspaper-puzzle obsessives and helpless Organisation Men in Dick’s earlier ...

Anglo-Egyptian Attitudes

Marina Warner, 5 January 2017

... Victoria for his exploits and awarded the Iron Crown of Austria (second class), the orders of St Anne of Russia and of the Red Eagle of Prussia, as well as being a hereditary pasha of the Turkish Empire. These honours were added to those he’d already received, the Redeemer of Greece, the cross of the Légion d’honneur – he is wearing several of them in ...

Do your homework

David Runciman: What’s Wrong with Theresa May, 16 March 2017

Theresa May: The Enigmatic Prime Minister 
by Rosa Prince.
Biteback, 402 pp., £20, February 2017, 978 1 78590 145 4
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... her from Trump, and from the politician with whom she is most often compared, Thatcher. Anne Jenkin, who helped set up Women2Win with May, says of the two: ‘Thatcher was the outsider. She was a man’s woman, and that was the secret of her success. She liked men; she liked men more than she liked women. And I don’t think that’s the case with ...

Sacred Parallelogram

Rosemary Hill: Women Paint Women, 23 April 2026

Out of the Shadows: Rediscovering Maria Cosway 
by Diane Boucher.
Unicorn, 351 pp., £27.99, June 2025, 978 1 916846 78 4
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Souvenirs 
by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun.
David Zwirner, 184 pp., £10.95, May 2025, 978 1 64423 162 3
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... its boiled-down form the memoir has a fragmentary quality but its value is further undermined by Anne Higonnet’s oddly ambivalent introduction. On the one hand, she claims for Le Brun the status of the ‘first modern woman artist … acclaimed in her own lifetime’ – an accolade which belongs to Kauffman, if to anyone. On the other, she seems ...

It’s already happened

James Meek: The NHS Goes Private, 22 September 2011

... jumped forwards in time. Lansley has not yet, supposedly, shaken up the NHS. He’d barely been in power a year when I talked to Porter. But here was a leading surgeon in an NHS hospital, about to perform a challenging operation on an NHS patient, telling me exactly how much money the hospital was going to lose by operating on her, and chatting easily about ...

Dark Emotions

Jenny Turner: The Women’s Liberation Movement, 24 September 2020

Misbehaviour 
directed by Philippa Lowthorpe.
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Nightcleaners 
directed by the Berwick Street Film Collective.
Lux/Koenig/Raven Row, £24, July 2019
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Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women's Liberation Movement, 1968-present 
by Margaretta Jolly.
Oxford, 334 pp., £22.99, November 2019, 978 0 19 065884 7
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... wrote, ‘by how many mentioned in almost the same breath’ the Ford machinists’ strike and Anne Koedt’s ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’, which was doing the rounds ‘on ill-typed roneoed sheets’ in the early 1970s. ‘The startling disparity between the two catalysts … is more apparent than real. Women clearly sensed that the two were part ...

Superchild

John Bayley, 6 September 1984

The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. V: 1936-1941 
edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie.
Chatto, 402 pp., £17.50, June 1984, 0 7012 0566 0
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Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood 
by Angelica Garnett.
Chatto, 181 pp., £9.95, August 1984, 0 7011 2821 6
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... pleasure that there is in life itself’. Even her hesitations reassure them. (‘Have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays about myself?’) The immediacy in every phrase still shoots at us – the ding dong of the Rodmell church bells outside the window, coming between her and the words as she writes, and so clambering into ...

Open in a Scream

Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021

Francis Bacon: Revelations 
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January, 978 0 00 729841 9
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... Bacon gave his own party at his studio, to celebrate Michael Wishart’s marriage to his friend Anne Dunn. The party went on for two days and was, John Richardson reports,slightly presided over by the nanny, the blind nanny, who would be in the rocking-chair at the back of the studio … My mother had a house around the corner so I used to come and go at ...

Are we doomed?

David Runciman: The End of the Species, 20 November 2025

After the Spike: The Risks of Global Depopulation and the Case for People 
by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso.
Bodley Head, 307 pp., £22, July 2025, 978 1 84792 835 1
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No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children 
by Paul Morland.
Swift, 264 pp., £12.99, March 2025, 978 1 80075 412 6
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The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction 
by Henry Gee.
Picador, 278 pp., £18.99, March 2025, 978 1 0350 3083 5
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... Spears and Geruso suggest that ‘it’s time to shake any residual belief in the magic, magnetic power of two.’But the point they want to make above all is that we have got the relationship between population and climate change all wrong. In the 1960s and 1970s, the world seemed to be confronted by the twin threats of overpopulation and ‘global ...

Who do you think you are?

Jacqueline Rose: Trans Narratives, 5 May 2016

... on other people. After all, if I can’t exist without you, then you have, among other things, the power to kill me. The rate of physical assault and murder of trans people is a great deal higher than it is for the general population. A 1992 London survey reported 52 per cent MTF and 43 per cent FTM transsexuals physically assaulted that year. A 1997 survey by ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... never seen.3 May. A distressing call today from Dr C., the oncologist who looked after my friend Anne during her last illness. He talks about hospital services being deliberately run down and the difficulties of ward care due to shortage of staff but it’s only gradually I realise that what he wants is for me to try and write a play about it. I explain what ...

A Minimum of Charity

Katharine Fletcher: The obstacles to seeking asylum, 17 March 2005

... 1993, there were 250.) The 1971 Immigration Act provides the Immigration Service with the power to detain immigrants in order to check their identity, if there is reason to think they will abscond, or if they are shortly to be removed from the country and are waiting for travel documents. In practice, the use of detention is more or less ...