The smallest details speak the loudest

John Upton: The Stephen Lawrence inquiry, 1 July 1999

The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry 
by Sir William Macpherson.
Stationery Office, 335 pp., £26, February 1999, 0 10 142622 4
Show More
The Case of Stephen Lawrence 
by Brian Cathcart.
Viking, 418 pp., £16.99, May 1999, 0 670 88604 1
Show More
Show More
... the murdered 18-year-old victim of racism. The second, a cultural balloon with Stephen Lawrence’s image on it: a balloon so large there is barely any space left in which to think objectively about Lawrence, his murder and the subsequent investigations and Inquiry. These are the undisputed facts. Stephen Lawrence was ...

Pavilion of Heaven

Ferdinand Mount: Adventures of Raffles, 2 April 2026

Raffles, Gentleman Thief 
by E.W. Hornung.
Penguin, 304 pp., £10.99, January, 978 0 241 79022 9
Show More
Writers in Whites: How a Group of Literary Cricketers Changed English Culture 
by Ollie Randall.
Fairfield, 288 pp., £22, May, 978 1 915237 74 3
Show More
Show More
... to belong, irredeemably, to the world of gaslight and hansom cabs. But no, he survives, and it’s not just the verve and breakneck pace of the stories. What captivated me once again, what I had more or less forgotten, was the angst. Raffles and his slow-witted sidekick, Bunny, shin up drainpipes, leap from roof to roof, squeeze through trapdoors and whip ...

Kurt Waldheim’s Past

Gitta Sereny, 21 April 1988

Waldheim 
by Luc Rosenzweig and Bernard Cohen.
Robson, 192 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 86051 506 0
Show More
Waldheim: The Missing Years 
by Robert Edwin Herzstein.
Grafton, 303 pp., £12.95, April 1988, 0 246 13381 3
Show More
Show More
... for praising the Germans for their tenacity in going on with them. I have written about the so-called ‘revisionists’, who obscenely wish to deny the existence of the gas-chambers – and was criticised for upholding their right to voice these irrational opinions. I have battled in print against people like ...

Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... point of crisis. The party in power, whose late 20th-century figurehead, Margaret Thatcher, did so much to create the problem, is responding by separating off the economically least powerful and squeezing them into the smallest, meanest, most insecure possible living space. In effect, if not in explicit intention, it is a let-the-poor-be-poor crusade, a ...

Strange, Angry Objects

Owen Hatherley: The Brutalist Decades, 17 November 2016

A3: Threads and Connections 
by Peter Ahrends.
Right Angle, 128 pp., £18, December 2015, 978 0 9532848 9 4
Show More
Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism 
by Barnabas Calder.
Heinemann, 416 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 0 434 02244 1
Show More
Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945-75 
by Elain Harwood.
Yale, 512 pp., £60, September 2015, 978 0 300 20446 9
Show More
Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings around the World 
by Christopher Beanland.
Frances Lincoln, 192 pp., £18, February 2016, 978 0 7112 3764 3
Show More
This Brutal World 
by Peter Chadwick.
Phaidon, 224 pp., £29.95, April 2016, 978 0 7148 7108 0
Show More
Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th-Century Architecture 
by Nicolas Grospierre.
Prestel, 224 pp., £29.99, February 2016, 978 3 7913 8229 6
Show More
Modernist Estates: The Buildings and the People Who Live in Them 
by Stefi Orazi.
Frances Lincoln, 192 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 0 7112 3675 2
Show More
Architecture an Inspiration 
by Ivor Smith.
Troubador, 224 pp., £24.95, November 2014, 978 1 78462 069 1
Show More
Show More
... opportunity of designing buildings for an entirely new form of society. Peter Ahrends’s self-published book A3: Threads and Connections is an oblique telling of this tale, through three generations of architects. Peter founded the influential firm Ahrends, Burton and Koralek (ABK) in 1960s London, and his grandfather, Bruno, was one of the ...

Poor Dear, How She Figures!

Alan Hollinghurst: Forster and His Mother, 3 January 2013

The Journals and Diaries of E.M. Forster Volumes I-III 
edited by Philip Gardner.
Pickering and Chatto, 813 pp., £275, February 2011, 978 1 84893 114 5
Show More
Show More
... washing sharing the basement, a desolate and grilling public garden, and the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil. This short passage shows a spontaneous poetic flair rarely equalled in Forster’s fiction, or elsewhere in the diaries: ‘those trudging squares and triangles’, both exact and subjective, the complex ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1996, 2 January 1997

... portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham looks like an Edwardian tinted photograph, and with the sitter so eerily present not entirely pleasing. All art is tiring and these paintings in particular as they’re crowded with detail and every dress and doublet draws you in to trace the embroidery or work out the folds and flourishes. The poster for the exhibition is ...

Globaloney

Jackson Lears: Brzezinski’s Cold War, 5 March 2026

Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Cold War Prophet 
by Edward Luce.
Bloomsbury, 545 pp., £30, May 2025, 978 1 5266 3784 0
Show More
Show More
... Papers, revealing the systematic mendacity behind the Vietnam War, as well as Seymour Hersh’s investigations into the illegal covert operations of the CIA. The Senate had convened an inquiry into CIA misconduct, and even the fanatical cold warrior Richard Nixon had promoted détente with the Soviet Union and opened a diplomatic door to China. One could ...

No Ordinary Law

Stephen Sedley: Constitution-Makers, 5 June 2008

... If you had asked an 18th or 19th-century Englishman about his country’s constitution, you would not have got the baffled look you get today. The belief that a constitution is a document and that we do not have one is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Mr Podsnap was in no doubt whatever about the reality of a constitution that nobody could actually see: ‘And Do You Find, Sir,’ pursued Mr Podsnap, with dignity, ‘Many Evidences that Strike You, of our British Constitution in the Streets of the World’s Metropolis, London, Londres, London?’ The foreign gentleman begged to be pardoned, but did not altogether understand ...

Terms of Art

Conor Gearty: Human Rights Law, 11 March 2010

The Law of Human Rights 
by Richard Clayton and Hugh Tomlinson.
Oxford, 2443 pp., £295, March 2009, 978 0 19 926357 8
Show More
Human Rights Law and Practice 
edited by Anthony Lester, David Pannick and Javan Herberg.
Lexis Nexis, 974 pp., £237, April 2009, 978 1 4057 3686 2
Show More
Human Rights: Judicial Protection in the United Kingdom 
by Jack Beatson, Stephen Grosz, Tom Hickman, Rabinder Singh and Stephanie Palmer.
Sweet and Maxwell, 905 pp., £124, September 2008, 978 0 421 90250 3
Show More
Show More
... detailing why it had come to this conclusion. When the coroner refused to include the jury’s note in his final ruling, Middleton’s mother began a campaign to secure a formal public determination that the prison service was responsible for her son’s death. The obstacle she faced ...

Downhill from Here

Ian Jack: The 1970s, 27 August 2009

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies 
by Andy Beckett.
Faber, 576 pp., £20, May 2009, 978 0 571 22136 3
Show More
Show More
... became the way the 1920s were remembered, even though only a tiny proportion of the world’s population in 1925 drank hard liquor out of teapots in speakeasies; or danced – danced, danced, danced! – often in a cloche hat and with a long cigarette-holder pointed riskily at their partner’s crotch. It took thirty ...

But You Married Him

Rosemary Hill: Princess Margaret and Lady Anne, 4 June 2020

Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown 
by Anne Glenconner.
Hodder, 336 pp., £20, October 2019, 978 1 5293 5906 0
Show More
Show More
... in which she was played by Nancy Carroll with Helena Bonham Carter as Margaret. In the book’s prologue, she describes Bonham Carter, who ‘as it happens’ is a cousin of Glenconner’s late husband, Colin Tennant (Lord Glenconner), coming for tea and taking copious notes. It was at this moment, as she tried to ...

Skating Charm

James Wolcott: Kenneth Tynan, 13 December 2001

The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan 
edited by John Lahr.
Bloomsbury, 439 pp., £25, October 2001, 0 7475 5418 8
Show More
Show More
... Anthony Blanche outfits he wore at Oxford, and, later, the poolstick collection of headmaster’s canes he kept handy to beat women’s bottoms. The cigarettes eventually killed him, but it is only with one in his hand that he looks fully activated, in character. In London, creating a sensation as a theatre ...

Degrees of Not Knowing

Rory Stewart: Does anyone know how to govern Iraq?, 31 March 2005

What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building 
by Noah Feldman.
Princeton, 154 pp., £12.95, November 2004, 0 691 12179 6
Show More
Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam’s Iraq 
by Matthew McAllester.
Harper Perennial, 304 pp., $13.95, February 2005, 0 06 058820 9
Show More
The Fall of Baghdad 
by Jon Lee Anderson.
Little, Brown, 389 pp., £20, February 2005, 0 316 72990 6
Show More
The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq 
by Christian Parenti.
New Press, 211 pp., £12.99, December 2004, 1 56584 948 5
Show More
Show More
... of English, and giggles. His English is probably good but he prefers to use interpreters. ‘I am so sorry to hear about your accident.’ ‘Shukran’ (‘Thank you’). ‘Are you feeling recovered?’ ‘Al hamdullilah.’ ‘What happened?’ ‘I was coming out of the mosque in the souk in Amara and two gunmen were waiting. It was dark because there is ...

That Shape Am I

Patricia Lockwood: Among the Mystics, 23 January 2025

On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy 
by Simon Critchley.
Profile, 325 pp., £18.99, October 2024, 978 1 80081 693 0
Show More
Show More
... Simone Weil, picking herself like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown ...