Sightbites

Jonathan Meades: Archigram’s Ghost, 21 May 2020

Archigram: The Book 
edited by Dennis Crompton.
Circa, 300 pp., £95, November 2018, 978 1 911422 04 4
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... Archigram was an out-of-hours architectural band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly original, sometimes on the money, sometimes woeful, often funny, reliably coarse ...

At the Ashmolean

Neal Ascherson: ‘The Lost World of Old Europe’, 5 August 2010

... Reaching into her own background in Lithuania, the last pagan country in Europe, she identified a White Goddess of Death and all the deities of a maternal fertility cult. According to Gimbutas, this ancient matriarchy was finally overthrown by an invasion of primitives from the Black Sea steppes, horse-riding tribes dominated by male ...

At the Ikon Gallery

Brian Dillon: Jean Painlevé , 1 June 2017

... on coasts from Norway to the Mediterranean. It grows up to six centimetres long, has a brown or white shell and a speckled body that may range in colour from grey to orange. In sheltered bays, these molluscs settle into fine, soft mud or muddy sand, where they mate in undulant chains, half a dozen at once. When disturbed from their orgies, the snails swim ...

Principal Ornament

Jose Harris, 3 December 1992

G.M. Trevelyan: A life in History 
by David Cannadine.
HarperCollins, 288 pp., £18, September 1992, 0 00 215872 8
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... historian in a psychologically-conscious age like our own could get away with the black-and-white judgments of individuals, groups, races and nations that were the hallmark of Trevelyan’s historical method. Trevelyan’s whole oeuvre was deeply committed to a composite vision of Englishness, Protestantism, Puritanism, high-minded ...

Hare’s Blood

Peter Wollen: John Berger, 4 April 2002

The Selected Essays of John Berger 
edited by Geoff Dyer.
Bloomsbury, 599 pp., £25, November 2001, 0 7475 5419 6
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... of a bear dejectedly pulling a pram. Or the amateur artists of Hiroshima. Or the carvings of white wooden birds, with wings and fan tails, about six inches long, made from well-soaked pine-wood and hung in the kitchen of a peasant home, in Czechoslovakia, in the Baltic lands, or in Berger’s own Haute-Savoie. This is the Berger I admire most, a man who ...

First Puppet, Now Scapegoat

Inigo Thomas: Ass-Chewing in Washington, 30 November 2006

State of Denial: Bush at War 
by Bob Woodward.
Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., £18.99, October 2006, 0 7432 9566 8
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... been so. Woodward’s first Watergate article wasn’t about the scandal named after the huge, white, swirling 1960s complex beside the Potomac. It was about one of the building’s better-known residents, Martha Mitchell, wife of then US attorney general John Mitchell, soon to leave that post to become head of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the ...

Infisal! Infisal! Infisal!

Jonathan Littell: A Journey in South Sudan, 30 June 2011

... little improvised camps of displaced persons, with huts made from branches, sometimes covered with white or blue international aid tarpaulins.The elite here are the Nilotic people, Dinka, Nuer and Shilluk, most of whom arrived in 2005 when the Southern rebels of the SPLA, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, took power; as for the local population, the great ...

Christian v. Cannibal

Michael Rogin: Norman Mailer and American history, 1 April 1999

The American Century 
by Harold Evans.
Cape, 710 pp., £40, November 1998, 0 224 05217 9
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The Time of Our Time 
by Norman Mailer.
Little, Brown, 1286 pp., £25, September 1998, 0 316 64571 0
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... feature of the ‘American exceptionalism’ celebrated in the introduction. He identifies white supremacy as another constitutive feature of the United States, one that became ever more pervasive after the Emancipation Proclamation, and one which, according to Evans, white Americans have had more difficulty coming ...

Diary

Wendy Doniger: Crazy about Horses, 23 September 1993

... have to do with horse-ripping? Not much. Rituals involving horses, particularly the killing of a white stallion, existed throughout the Indo-European world. In some, a queen or king pantomimes copulation with a stallion (or, as the case may be, a mare). The worship of a white horse in pre-Roman England is dramatically ...

In Defence of ILEA

Martin Lightfoot, 22 December 1983

... least because the chances of right-wing control of the Authority are remote. The Government’s White Paper on the future of the Greater London Council and the Metropolitan Counties, called with a mind-numbing disrespect for the appropriate phrase Streamlining the Cities, appears to let ILEA off lightly. It is proposed that a joint board of the inner London ...

Corbyn in the Media

Paul Myerscough, 22 October 2015

... the job as leader of the Labour Party and already he wasn’t doing it right. What colour poppy, white or red, would he wear to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day? Would he kneel to the queen when he was admitted to the Privy Council (see Martin Loughlin’s piece on p. 29)? On the day after he was elected, he spoke at a mental health trust fun day in his ...

Eye Candy

Julian Bell: Colour, 19 July 2007

Colour in Art 
by John Gage.
Thames and Hudson, 224 pp., £9.95, February 2007, 978 0 500 20394 1
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... packages of the organic. The long, grey slatted façade that rises above them is punctuated by a white lattice over the entrance, a schematic town plan composed of 64 variously chopped-up chequers. And then, overhead, the building’s length is crowned by a further grid, a canopy of large panes looking through to the sky. Acrylic film sealed between the ...

Don’t wear yum-yum yellow

Theo Tait: Shark Attack!, 2 August 2012

Demon Fish: Travels through the Hidden World of Sharks 
by Juliet Eilperin.
Duckworth, 295 pp., £18.99, January 2012, 978 0 7156 4291 7
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... But we’re gradually becoming more enlightened. The third best-protected species is the great white, described approvingly here by E.O. Wilson as ‘one of the four or five last great predators of humanity’. Eilperin, an environmental reporter for the Washington Post, has travelled the world trying to understand sharks and human interactions with ...

I’m not a happy poet

John Butt: Lorca, 1 April 1999

Lorca: A Dream of Life 
by Leslie Stainton.
Bloomsbury, 568 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 7475 4128 0
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... In Argentina in 1933, so Leslie Stainton tells us, Lorca ‘began wearing a white linen suit, and frequently a white cotton sailor’s shirt with a V-shaped neck and a dark sash. He took childlike delight in donning the shirt and going to the beach to “awaken” the seashells by calling out to them ...