I’m always in the club

Christian Lorentzen: Peter Matthiessen in Paris, 5 February 2026

True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen 
by Lance Richardson.
Chatto, 709 pp., £30, October 2025, 978 1 78474 301 7
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... and Luke and his younger sister, Sara, lived between Manhattan and Long Island with Goldberg and Frank O’Hara and his partner Joe LeSueur, an escape, as LeSueur put it, from ‘heterosexual circles dominated by sexist, egocentric males who thought of themselves as, to use Patsy’s most damning epithet, “entitled”’.By this point, Matthiessen had ...

Worse than a Defeat

James Meek: Shamed in Afghanistan, 18 December 2014

The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan 
by Jack Fairweather.
Cape, 488 pp., £20, December 2014, 978 0 224 09736 9
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Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War 
by Frank Ledwidge.
Yale, 287 pp., £10.99, July 2014, 978 0 300 20526 8
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British Generals in Blair’s Wars 
edited by Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan.
Ashgate, 404 pp., £19.95, August 2013, 978 1 4094 3736 9
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An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict 1978-2012 
by Mike Martin.
Hurst, 389 pp., £25, April 2014, 978 1 84904 336 6
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... and a desperate battle over Sangin in 2013 … attracted little attention’. In 2012, when Frank Ledwidge was researching his book, which tallies the personal and financial cost of Britain’s Helmand campaign, he approached all six ministers who had held the defence portfolio since the start of the operation to ask what they thought its legacy would ...

Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

... and, as Taoiseach, he decided to make public money available for this. The project was taken on by Robert Dudley Edwards from University College Dublin, who promised that a book, one thousand pages long, made up of essays by various experts, would be in print by 1946. The Government released a grant of £1500. Over the next few years Edwards worked with a ...

Seizing the Senses

Derek Jarrett, 17 February 2000

Edmund Burke. Vol. I: 1730-84 
by F.P. Lock.
Oxford, 564 pp., £75, January 1999, 0 19 820676 3
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... A Vindication of Natural Society, appeared in May 1756. It was well received and its publisher Robert Dodsley offered 20 guineas for the copyright of the Philosophical Enquiry plus a further ten if it reached a third edition. The offer was accepted and the work was published in April 1757, six weeks after Burke married Nugent’s daughter Jane. He had also ...

Culture Wars

W.J.T. Mitchell, 23 April 1992

... between public and private bodies occurs when Jim Garrison, still in shock from witnessing Robert Kennedy’s assassination on television, is finally able to make love to his at last sympathetic wife. The hyperactive perversity of the prostitutes in Jack Ruby’s night-club and the Sadean fantasies of Clay Shaw’s parlour are finally matched by the ...

Bastard Foreigners

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare v. the English, 2 July 2020

Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness 
by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton.
Cambridge, 245 pp., £75, October 2019, 978 1 108 49373 4
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... But alongside Sándor Petőfi, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Taras Shevchenko, Mihai Eminescu or Robert Burns, Shakespeare barely looks like a national poet at all, unlike Byron, as Dović and Helgason point out, whose engagement with liberal politics and eventual death in the cause of national liberation (even if it was the liberation of Greece rather than ...

Secrets are best kept by those who have no sense of humour

Alan Bennett: Why I turned down ‘Big Brother’, 2 January 2003

... constant discussion and enquiry and it was a topic on which, while not boastful, Dudley was always frank, informative and very funny. That Dudley, given the chance, could talk illuminatingly about music was brought home to me in almost the only conversation I had with him about jazz, when he explained the difference, as he saw it, between a good and an average ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2005, 5 January 2006

... into the darkness, light as a commodity squandered as I had never known it before. 22 May. Reading Frank Kermode’s review of John Haffenden’s life of Empson makes me regret a little that Empson was cut out of The History Boys. In the first version of the play Hector sings the praises of Sheffield where he had been taught by Empson, then recounts to the ...

Enemies For Ever

James Wolcott: ‘Making It’, 18 May 2017

Making It 
by Norman Podhoretz.
NYRB, 368 pp., £13.98, May 2017, 978 1 68137 080 4
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... Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol (the future godfather of neoconservatism) and the cultural observer Robert Warshow, whose essays on the movie Western and gangster films would become anthology classics and whose personal mystique resembled James Agee’s without the all-night jags. When Warshow asks Podhoretz out to lunch, ‘I felt as a girl with a secret ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: A Shameful Year, 8 January 2004

... as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the Tube ...

You are not Cruikshank

David Bromwich: Gillray’s Mischief, 21 September 2023

James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire 
by Tim Clayton.
Yale, 400 pp., £50, November 2022, 978 1 913107 32 1
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Uproar! Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London 
by Alice Loxton.
Icon, 397 pp., £25, March, 978 1 78578 954 0
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Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps and Spectres 
by Joseph Monteyne.
Toronto, 301 pp., £49.99, June 2022, 978 1 4875 2774 7
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... on 23 January looks suspiciously neat.’ Portray me, Canning may have been saying, and I who can frank your heavy-duty packages will arrange for your bail and have the charge lifted. If that was the bargain, Gillray repaid the debt with characteristic wit and economy. He made Canning wait nine months before casting him in Promis’d Horrors of the French ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... in a city that doesn’t sleep and find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap.’ The lyrics of Frank Sinatra’s standard ring out like a mocking chorus from the Yankee Stadium when the hometown wins. Poor Trump, who thought the song should be his anthem, could never shake his ‘little town blues’. His humiliation at his failure ‘to make it ...

Nothing he hasn’t done, nowhere he hasn’t been

Adam Shatz: Claude Lanzmann, 5 April 2012

The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir 
by Claude Lanzmann, translated by Frank Wynne.
Atlantic, 528 pp., £25, March 2012, 978 1 84887 360 5
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... later Sartre’s secretary, shared his anger at a student protest in support of the Fascist writer Robert Brasillach, on trial for collaboration. (That Brasillach had once been a student at Louis-le-Grand counted more with their classmates than his anti-semitism.) Lanzmann and Cau formed a groupuscule with the future novelists Michel Tournier and Michel ...

Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity

James Meek, 18 February 2016

... who feed them. In Pity the Billionaire: The Unlikely Comeback of the American Right, Thomas Frank describes a similar process in America: ‘The conservative renaissance rewrites history according to the political demands of the moment, generates thick smokescreens of deliberate bewilderment, grabs for itself the nobility of the common toiler, and ...

What else actually is there?

Jenny Turner: On Gillian Rose, 7 November 2024

Love’s Work 
by Gillian Rose.
Penguin, 112 pp., £9.99, March 2024, 978 0 241 94549 0
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Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory 
by Gillian Rose, edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson.
Verso, 176 pp., £16.99, September 2024, 978 1 80429 011 8
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... been made of Out of Africa, the memoir Dinesen wrote under her real name, Karen Blixen, starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep). And she gave us handouts of Heinrich von Kleist’s inexhaustibly spiralling ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, photocopied from the TLS. I studied with Gillian for a year, we corresponded and met up sometimes in the 1990s, but I ...