The Last London

Iain Sinclair, 30 March 2017

... retail gallery with three beautifully folded sweaters on a plain table, daring you to search for a price tag.In the fugue of London walking, real feet on unreal ground, we have to deal with that sense of groundlessness, striding faster and faster in anticipation of a bigger fall, weaving hard to avoid the committed, heads-down texters and tweeters who seem to ...

Magic Beans, Baby

David Runciman, 7 January 2021

A Promised Land 
by Barack Obama.
Viking, 768 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 0 241 49151 5
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... be squeezed into the sausage before it finally got made.Obama accepts that ugly compromise is the price of legislative accomplishment. What he finds harder to accept is what happened, so quickly, to his promise of a new way of doing politics. From the first day of his presidency his Republican opponents were determined to give him nothing. His immediate ...

Let’s consider Kate

John Lanchester: Can we tame the banks?, 18 July 2013

... economic growth, with businesses unable to obtain the loans that they need at an acceptable price. Yes to all that. Because the banking bill is still in Parliament, the government has said that there is time for it to incorporate some of the commission’s recommendations. As things currently stand, the main components of the banking bill come from the ...

Ten Typical Days in Trump’s America

Eliot Weinberger, 25 October 2018

... businesses, all of which were major corporate donors to the Trump campaign and inauguration. The price of their stocks has soared in the last two years. The largest of them, Geo Group, which imprisons one third of the more than 300,000 immigrant detainees, held its 2017 annual conference at the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami.)To pay for the ...

With A, then B, then C

Susan Eilenberg: The Sexual Life of Iris M., 5 September 2002

Iris Murdoch: A Life 
by Peter Conradi.
HarperCollins, 706 pp., £9.99, August 2002, 9780006531753
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... and more and more: the evidence of erotic excess. Bayley alluded to this excess in his memoirs; Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001) offers a sliver. But neither gives anything like an adequate sense of the scale of it, and it is impossible to do so here. Not even Conradi himself can quite manage it: his six hundred or so pages are too few for what he has to ...

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

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

... the drink, is here supplied by mental illness (‘No less than 12 nervous breakdowns’, ‘the price he had to pay’). There is no doubt that Milligan was very funny and inspired, particularly in the Q5 TV programmes he did in the 1970s, though his verbal dexterities I found less engaging and with unfortunate effects on some of his disciples, e.g. John ...

I am only interested in women who struggle

Jeremy Harding: On Sarah Maldoror, 23 May 2024

... Diop drew a community of black intellectuals, including African Americans like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, to the offices of Présence Africaine. Andrade was working with Césaire on a new edition of his long poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and compiling an anthology of African poetry. In 1956 Diop organised the first Congress of Black Writers ...

Keepers

Andrew Scull, 29 September 1988

Mind Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency 
by Roy Porter.
Athlone, 412 pp., £25, August 1987, 0 485 11324 4
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The Past and the Present Revisited 
by Lawrence Stone.
Routledge, 440 pp., £19.95, October 1987, 0 7102 1253 4
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Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in 17th-Century England 
by Lucinda McCray Beier.
Routledge, 314 pp., £30, December 1987, 0 7102 1053 1
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Illness and Self in Society 
by Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret, translated by Elborg Forster.
Johns Hopkins, 271 pp., £20.25, January 1988, 0 8018 3228 4
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Medicine and Society in Wakefield and Huddersfield 1780-1870 
by Hilary Marland.
Cambridge, 503 pp., £40, September 1987, 0 521 32575 7
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A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane 
by Roy Porter.
Weidenfeld, 261 pp., £14.95, October 1987, 0 297 79223 7
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... whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in surprisingly sympathetic ways, joined in the chorus of condemnation of the ‘medical brutality’ which ...

Is Syria next?

Charles Glass, 24 July 2003

... at once. When Colin Powell visited Bashar Assad after the conquest of Baghdad it was to name the price of Baathism’s survival in Syria: ending support for Hizbollah in Lebanon, closing the Damascus offices of Palestinian guerrilla organisations and deporting their leaders. He told President Assad not to allow Palestinian spokesmen in Syria to speak to ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: A Shameful Year, 8 January 2004

... but the idyll is deceptive 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 ...

Come hungry, leave edgy

Sukhdev Sandhu: Brick Lane, 9 October 2003

Brick Lane 
by Monica Ali.
Doubleday, 413 pp., £12.99, June 2003, 9780385604840
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... passers-by to bid for the one item he had for sale – a single, dirty sock. ‘Go on, name your price.’) This is meant to be a gilded age for Brick Lane. Young Bangladeshis have driven away the packs of racists who even in the middle of the 1990s would head there to provoke and maraud. Now all of its four parts are safe for non-whites: the patch nearest ...

Look at Don Juan

Adam Shatz: Camus in the New World, 19 October 2023

Travels in the Americas: Notes and Impressions of a New World 
by Albert Camus, edited by Alice Kaplan, translated by Ryan Bloom.
Chicago, 152 pp., £16.99, March 2023, 978 0 226 69495 5
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... Albert Camus​ hated travelling. ‘Fear is the price of travel,’ he wrote in his journal of an unhappy trip through Central Europe in the summer of 1935, where he found himself gripped by ‘an instinctive desire to regain the shelter of old habits’. For Camus, who had tuberculosis, travel abroad raised the prospect not only of psychic unease but of illness: ‘We are feverish but porous ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... profit. For members of his Mar-a-Lago Golf Resort, for which he levies a $100,000 entry fee, the price was $525 a ticket (guests at the hotel paid extra). For that they got to mingle with celebrities like Sylvester Stallone, who turned down Trump’s offer to become chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Joe ‘Morning Joe’ Scarborough, the ...

Serious Mayhem

Simon Reynolds: The McLaren Strand, 10 March 2022

The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren: The Biography 
by Paul Gorman.
Constable, 855 pp., £14.99, November 2021, 978 1 4721 2111 0
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... were in the mid 1970s coming to represent a sort of alternative establishment. His antipathy to Richard Branson was partly a matter of distaste for what Virgin represented (a music-first ethos of drift-and-discovery and whimsical eccentricity), but also a creeping fear, once the Pistols had joined the label, that the perpetually grinning Branson, in his ...

Conspire Slowly, Act Quickly

David Runciman: Thatcher Undone, 2 January 2020

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. III: Herself Alone 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 1072 pp., £35, October 2019, 978 0 241 32474 5
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... rates, which was always one of her prime goals (she told Major that lower interest rates were the price she would extract for ERM membership). But Ridley was gesturing towards the fundamental problem as Thatcher saw it. A Europe supplied with the benefits of German economic management would necessarily be a Europe in which the Germans had too much power. If ...