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The Ballad of Andy and Rebekah

Martin Hickman: The Phone Hackers, 17 July 2014

... for a small employer could be excused from a case scheduled to last as long as this one. One barrister remarked – out of earshot – that few of the selected jurors had jobs. Only 15 reporters could squeeze into the lawyer-packed court; the rest watched CCTV pictures of proceedings in a grubby-carpeted basement. Over four days, Edis set out the ...

Fed up with Ibiza

Jenny Turner: Sybille Bedford, 1 April 2021

Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life 
by Selina Hastings.
Chatto, 432 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 1 78474 113 6
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... Bailey that year. The book begins with the judge’s entrance, ‘trailing a wake of subtlety, of secret powers, age’ and ends three and a half weeks later with the not guilty verdict. In between, the book is structured like a calendar: four weeks divided by weekends, each week divided into days.Adams was a doctor, based in Eastbourne, who specialised in ...

The Playboy of West 29th Street

Colm Tóibín: Yeats’s Father in Exile, 25 January 2018

... myself under prison rule and learn all the virtues.’ After Trinity, Yeats studied to become a barrister but spent most of his time with literary friends, including the critic Edward Dowden and the poet John Todhunter. John and Susan named their first child William Butler Yeats. Soon afterwards they had a daughter, Lily. As a law student, John Butler Yeats ...

Merely a Warning that a Noun is Coming

Bee Wilson: The ‘Littlehampton Libels’, 8 February 2018

The Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery about Words in 1920s England 
by Christopher Hilliard.
Oxford, 256 pp., £30, June 2017, 978 0 19 879965 8
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... not convict,’ Bailhache announced. The jury followed his guidance. For Travers Humphreys, the barrister who acted for the prosecution in the 1921 trial, Swan’s case exposed a flaw in the English justice system, as he explained in his memoir 25 years later. Humphreys thought that juries were very rarely wrong, but that a miscarriage of justice was ...

Marching Orders

Ronan Bennett: The new future of Northern Ireland, 30 July 1998

... went in for electoral politics we got the PUP and the UDP. They have been joined by the barrister-turned-politician, Robert McCartney who, along with Conor Cruise O’Brien, founded the UKUP (that rogue ‘K’ is for ‘Kingdom’), to oppose further UUP sell-outs and the mayhem of a united Ireland. In last month’s Assembly elections there were ...

Saving Masud Khan

Wynne Godley, 22 February 2001

... see, identify or shrewdly evaluate people or situations. Although passive and sickly, I enjoyed secret fantasies of violence. When asked what I was going to be when I grew up, I replied that I was going to be ‘a boy actress’.When I was six, an abscess developed in my inner ear which eventually, in a climax of torture, burst through my eardrum. For years ...

In the Potato Patch

Jenny Turner: Penelope Fitzgerald, 19 December 2013

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life 
by Hermione Lee.
Chatto, 508 pp., £25, November 2013, 978 0 7011 8495 7
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... and smallness work well with limited resources, or because its irony makes sense to writers in secret protest over the limitations within which they work. As a conventional literary career, Fitzgerald’s life’s work was, as one reviewer put it, ‘an awful hash’. But really and truly, in what universe does the phrase ‘literary career’ make the ...

Wordsworth’s Crisis

E.P. Thompson, 8 December 1988

Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years 
by Nicholas Roe.
Oxford, 306 pp., £27.50, March 1988, 0 19 812868 1
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... Felix Vaughan appears more often in the Society’s Minutes, but in his capacity as a (generous) barrister, defending political victims. Frend, whom Roe several times claims as a ‘leader’ of the LCS, was probably never a member of the Society, but he did share the LCS platform in the final climactic public protest against the Two Acts in December ...

A Minimum of Charity

Katharine Fletcher: The obstacles to seeking asylum, 17 March 2005

... funds if necessary, but proving this is itself costly and time-consuming. Declan O’Dempsey, a barrister with extensive experience of presenting asylum cases at all levels, estimates that a solicitor will usually need to spend three hours or so with a client to complete a Statement of Evidence Form, which most asylum seekers have to fill in before they are ...

Grim Eminence

Norman Stone, 10 January 1983

The Twilight of the Comintern 1930-1935 
by E.H. Carr.
Macmillan, 436 pp., £25, December 1982, 0 333 33062 5
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... of International Affairs refuse support to Leonard Schapiro, then a struggling and reluctant barrister, engaged on the book that was to become The Origins of the Bolshevik Autocracy (1952). As a publisher’s reader, he tried to prevent acceptance of John Erickson’s Soviet High Command. In the days of Times Literary Supplement anonymity Carr saw to it ...

Cute, My Arse

Seamus Perry: Geoffrey Hill, 12 September 2019

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 148 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 19 882952 2
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... Eliot also suggested that ‘the reader of a poem should take at least as much trouble as a barrister reading an important decision on a complicated case,’ a sentiment with which, despite his multiple reservations about Eliot, Hill would no doubt concur. ‘Do you have to be so aggressively recondite?’ he demands of himself halfway through this ...

Call me Ahab

Jeremy Harding: Moby-Dick, 31 October 2002

Moby-Dick, or, The Whale 
by Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker.
Northwestern, 573 pp., £14.95, September 2001, 0 8101 1911 0
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Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in 
by C.L.R. James.
New England, 245 pp., £17.95, July 2001, 9781584650942
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Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival 
by Clare Spark.
Kent State, 744 pp., £46.50, May 2001, 0 87338 674 4
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Lucchesi and the Whale 
by Frank Lentricchia.
Duke, 104 pp., £14.50, February 2001, 9780822326540
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... Ahab asks. ‘Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in the grave, and we must there to learn it.’ So we can still distinguish the purist Ahab from the compromised Ishmael and, if we wish, prefer the one over the other. For many reasons, we find ourselves (I find myself) at home with ...

Last Exit

Murray Sayle, 27 November 1997

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong 
by Jonathan Dimbleby.
Little, Brown, 461 pp., £22.50, July 1997, 0 316 64018 2
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In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major 
by Percy Cradock.
Murray, 228 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 7195 5464 0
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Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule: The Economic and Political Implications of Reversion 
edited by Warren Cohen and Li Zhao.
Cambridge, 255 pp., £45, August 1997, 0 521 62158 5
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The Hong Kong Advantage 
by Michael Enright, Edith Scott and David Dodwell.
Oxford, 369 pp., £20, July 1997, 0 19 590322 6
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... and (in a 1993 New Yorker profile) ‘massive and brute irrationality’. Even Patten’s barrister wife, Lavender, calls the Chairman of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank a ‘bloody traitor’ when no one but Dimbleby, equipped with his tape-recorder, is listening. This is not the approach of a history book, but of a morality play, a melodrama or ...

My Darlings

Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007

... Such an idea would have amused Beckett, but it would have been kept a carefully guarded secret from O’Casey. After Magee had played in Krapp’s Last Tape and MacGowran had played in Endgame, Beckett continued to engage with his new-found Irish voices. Embers, starring both of them, if starring is the word, was first broadcast by the Third ...

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat

David Runciman: Thatcher’s Rise, 6 June 2013

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. Vol. I: Not for Turning 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 859 pp., £30, April 2013, 978 0 7139 9282 3
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... minister with a science degree than she was to be the first woman prime minister – and then as a barrister. But it was also a matter of temperament. She liked to badger people, picking away at the same few threads until something started to give. Moore writes of her governing style: ‘She used every remark, every memo, every meeting as an opportunity to ...

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