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 ...

He, She, One, They, Ho, Hus, Hum, Ita

Amia Srinivasan: How Should I Refer to You?, 2 July 2020

What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She 
by Dennis Baron.
Liveright, 304 pp., £16.99, February 2020, 978 1 63149 604 2
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... the same rule of agreement; as Baron says, ‘violating a little grammatical rule was no great price to pay in order to keep the masculine pronoun at the top of the gender hierarchy.’) Second, the generic ‘he’ is a tool of patriarchy. While an indefinite like ‘everyone’ includes people of any gender, even when accompanied by the undeniably ...

The Ostrich Defence

Azadeh Moaveni: Trafficking Antiquities, 5 October 2023

... In May 2016, Diana Craig Patch, the Met’s curator for Egyptian art, received an email from Richard Semper, a Paris-based dealer, pitching a ‘hard piece I have for sale’. It was Nedjemankh’s coffin: Semper and his partner, Christophe Kunicki, wanted €4.5 million. Kunicki is a fixture in the European art world, fêted by museum curators. He ...

In the Egosphere

Adam Mars-Jones: The Plot against Roth, 23 January 2014

Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books 
by Claudia Roth Pierpont.
Cape, 353 pp., £25, January 2014, 978 0 224 09903 5
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... I hate to say it, but it can be very helpful to us. I mean you hear a singer even as brilliant as Richard Tucker and he’s a Jew. HALDEMAN: Is he? NIXON: He’s pushy … HALDEMAN: There are a lot more anti-Semites than there are Jews, and the anti-Semites are with us generally and the Jews sure aren’t. The Breast was a grotesque fable out of Kafka ...

What if he’d made it earlier?

David Runciman: LBJ, 5 July 2012

The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. IV: The Passage of Power 
by Robert Caro.
Bodley Head, 712 pp., £30, June 2012, 978 1 84792 217 5
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... back anti-lynching legislation, claiming it was a matter for the individual states. This was the price he paid for getting them to do his bidding when he needed them. But it made him repugnant to the liberal wing of the party. To them, he reeked of ‘magnolia’. Nonetheless, Johnson believed a brokered convention that could not coalesce around a liberal ...

The Things We Throw Away

Andrew O’Hagan: The Garbage of England, 24 May 2007

... to spring a trap in our minds. ‘Rural England is where urban England now dumps its rubbish,’ Richard Girling writes. ‘Here it tips everything from garbage in landfills to fridges in ponds, broken cars and surplus people.’1 The Daily Mail says there is a plague of rats in Britain as a result of the lack of care taken in refuse collection. The ...

The Reptile Oculist

John Barrell, 1 April 2004

... offered to buy Benjafield’s shares in the newspaper; Benjafield named an absurdly inflated price; the prince paid up. Overnight the Morning Post became an opposition newspaper, and Taylor was promoted from drama critic to editor, though with the politician and dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan managing the ...

A Man of Parts and Learning

Fara Dabhoiwala: Francis Williams Gets His Due, 21 November 2024

... by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar plantations worked by enslaved ...

Why the bastards wouldn’t stand and fight

Murray Sayle: Mao in Vietnam, 21 February 2002

China and the Vietnam Wars 1950-75 
by Qiang Zhai.
North Carolina, 304 pp., $49.95, April 2000, 0 8078 4842 5
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None so Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam 
by George Allen.
Ivan Dee, 296 pp., $27.50, October 2001, 1 56663 387 7
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No Peace, No Honour: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam 
by Larry Berman.
Free Press, 334 pp., $27.50, November 2001, 0 684 84968 2
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... see, if only we had looked. Two who drew the inevitable conclusions were the incoming President, Richard Nixon, elected on a promise of ‘peace with honour’ reminiscent of Mendès-France, and his devious National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger. Both had impeccable anti-Communist credentials, both had travelled widely (Nixon as Pepsi-Cola’s ...

Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester, 5 July 2001

... and wanted to be with her because he hoped that some of it might rub off on him.He paid a heavy price for marrying her: it entailed going into her father’s business. And so he became a fishmonger, getting up at five in the morning to go to Billingsgate Market and working till about four handling smelly, slithery goods and customers who haggled over prices ...
Rationalism in Politics, and Other Essays 
by Michael Oakeshott, edited by Timothy Fuller.
Liberty, 556 pp., $24, October 1991, 0 86597 094 7
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... was another name for ‘excellence’. In the campus emergency of 1968 he even publicly endorsed Richard Nixon. In general, however, Strauss eschewed official bromide or partisan pronouncement; that was the role not of the teacher but of the taught. The veiled pole star of Strauss’s journey through the past was Nietzsche, the one modern thinker who – he ...

The Health Transformation Army

James Meek: What can the WHO do?, 2 July 2020

... world of foreign disease. The real-life archetype, who appears in two bestselling books from 1994, Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone and Laurie Garrett’s The Coming Plague, is the medical researcher Joe McCormick. Here he is, in Garrett’s version, being asked by the WHO in 1979 to fly from the Atlanta headquarters of the US Centres for Disease Control and ...

‘J’accuse’: Dreyfus in Our Times

Jacqueline Rose: A Lecture, 10 June 2010

... affair. Nor, given the army’s final and total climbdown, does anything show quite so clearly the price it had to pay for its own machinations, cover-up and self-deception. The army lied. And once its prestige and standing had been compromised by the first lie – the wrongful accusation of Dreyfus – it became even more important for it to lie over and over ...

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ages by Wendy Richard of EastEnders. Back in the 1820s Gas Company funds were misappropriated, illegal payments made to council officials and stock accounts falsified. Now, in more enlightened times, when bureaucratic malpractice is exposed and celebrated every ...