Hokey Cowboy

David Runciman: Is Hayek to blame?, 22 May 2025

Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right 
by Quinn Slobodian.
Allen Lane, 279 pp., £25, April 2025, 978 0 241 77498 4
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“... since these intellectual entrepreneurs were determined to get ahead of the game – was Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, published in 1994, which made the case that differences in IQ between racial groups should be factored into policy-making. But Slobodian shows that this was just the tip of a Mont Pelerin-sized ...”

Diary

Lynne Mastnak: Kosovo, 16 July 1998

“... of Serbia clashed with a new sense of national identity among Albanians. In 1912 the Great Powers agreed to the creation of an Albanian state but allowed Serbia and Montenegro to incorporate Kosovo. For Serbs this was a liberation from Turkish rule; for the majority Albanians – who today make up 90 per cent of the province’s population – it was ...”

Even paranoids have enemies

Frank Kermode, 24 August 1995

F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism 
by Ian MacKillop.
Allen Lane, 476 pp., £25, July 1995, 0 7139 9062 7
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“... of access to a civilised society. Here, selected almost at random, is a single example of his powers, taken from Education and the University (1943). He is discussing these lines from Lady Macbeth’s welcome to Duncan:                              All our service In every point twice done, and then done double Were poor and ...”

A Traveller in Residence

Mary Hawthorne, 13 November 1997

“... wife of St Clair McKelway, who had been a talented writer and editor under Harold Ross but whose powers were then in decline. He was handsome, suave (his advice to reporters was ‘to be more debonair’), charismatic and completely unstable – an alcoholic who suffered from manic depression, which worsened as time went on. He became famous for transforming ...”

The Thing

Michael Wood: Versions of Proust, 6 January 2005

In Search of Lost Time: Vol. I: The Way by Swann’s 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Lydia Davis.
Penguin, 496 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118031 5
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol.II: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by James Grieve.
Penguin, 576 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118032 3
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol. III: The Guermantes Way 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Mark Treharne.
Penguin, 640 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118033 1
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol. IV: Sodom and Gomorrah 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by John Sturrock.
Penguin, 576 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 9780141180342
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol. V: ‘The Prisoner’ and ‘The Fugitive’ 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Carol Clark and Peter Collier.
Penguin, 720 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118035 8
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol. VI: Finding Time Again 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Ian Patterson.
Penguin, 400 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118036 6
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The Proust Project 
edited by André Aciman.
Farrar, Straus, 224 pp., $25, November 2004, 0 374 23832 4
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“... and there is no court of appeal in the French text. As Prendergast puts it, ‘no one has monopoly powers over the “correct”.’ We can prefer one version to another, but then we are choosing one understanding over another: either (mostly) the understanding we ourselves have, or (better) an understanding we hadn’t thought of before. We often think the ...”

Diary

Charles Glass: Israel’s occupation of Palestine, 21 February 2002

“... in October, during what the Israeli Army called its ‘incursion’ – a euphemism inherited from Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white banners proclaimed ‘Jerusalem is also ...”

Diary

Leo Robson: What I Saw at the Movies, 6 November 2025

“... widespread influence: on directors such as Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and David Fincher, and on the critics in whose work I was immersing myself, the so-called ‘Paulettes’ who populated the culture sections of American publications (notably David Edelstein and Stephanie Zacharek). But not only them. Kael had ...”

‘I’m coming, my Tetsie!’

Freya Johnston: Samuel Johnson’s Shoes, 9 May 2019

Samuel Johnson 
edited by David Womersley.
Oxford, 1344 pp., £95, May 2018, 978 0 19 960951 2
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“... life. He became the bosom companion (and, later, biographer) of the squalid and glamorous poet Richard Savage. At night, ‘in high spirits and brimful of patriotism’, they walked the streets together, denouncing ministerial corruption and vowing to stand by their country. Savage’s licentiousness, Boswell reported, may have led his protégé ‘into ...”

In the Sorting Office

James Meek, 28 April 2011

“... with trolleys and sorting machinery, is neat and clean, enabling Fehilly to practise his kaizen powers of vision. He stopped suddenly and pointed to a bit of floor that looked spotless to me. ‘I can see three rubber bands and a label,’ he said. ‘That’s a defect to me now. Five years ago I would just have accepted that. Now my eyes have ...”

I am only interested in women who struggle

Jeremy Harding: On Sarah Maldoror, 23 May 2024

“... exploration of mortuary grandeur resembles a set of drawings in a sketchbook. They speak to her powers of concentration rather than her political position, even though we know that she was a republican and a revolutionary, and that many of the tombs were desecrated in 1793. The camera lingers on a 13th-century bas relief of demons taunting the soul of King ...”

Freedom of the Press

Anthony Lewis, 26 November 1987

“... been balanced by the legislature? In the United States, Congress has been reluctant to grant new powers to suppress information. That is the reason why Presidents have increasingly asked courts to act in the absence of legislation. But it is the very reason why courts should take care before making new law. Those are the themes that I see in the American ...”
“... about the ‘ineptitude of the governing statute’ – to borrow a phrase from the article by Richard Buxton QC which we cited in the Report. Some of us were very attracted to the Scottish regime, in which a single broad ground gives the Court of Appeal sufficient flexibility to quash any conviction where it believes that there was or might have been a ...”

The Righteous Community

Jackson Lears: Legacies of the War on Terror, 24 July 2025

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life 
by Richard Beck.
Verso, 556 pp., £30, March, 978 1 83674 072 8
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“... the war on terror; Israelis who descend from survivors of one holocaust are now creating another.Richard Beck’s Homeland supplies abundant matter for contemplation. He deftly reconstructs the coup d’état that unfolded in the corridors of power after 9/11, but also explores the darker reaches of the American psyche: the vicarious sadism; the Manichean ...”

The Impossible Patient

Amia Srinivasan: Return of the Unconscious, 25 December 2025

“... Hungary, Italy, Germany and elsewhere – has turned many political thinkers, including Richard Seymour, Dagmar Herzog, Christina Wieland, Claudia Leeb and Joan Braune, back to the puzzle that preoccupied Reich and other left Freudians in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, that of the psychic allure of authoritarian strongmen, blood-and-soil nativism and ...”

Pint for Pint

Thomas Laqueur: The Price of Blood, 14 October 1999

Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce 
by Douglas Starr.
Little, Brown, 429 pp., £20, February 1999, 0 316 91146 1
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“... depends on a successful resolution of two sets of questions. The first seems to be formulated by Richard Titmuss in The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. Titmuss draws a distinction between Britain, where all fresh blood donation was voluntary, a gift to the community and hence an expression of concern with the general good; and the ...”