Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... into a ship. All the walls were painted grey, battleship grey. Everything was grey except the wall where my books are and the bathroom, which was red, a dusty red.’ The Kendalls avoided the alienation from the familiar rhythms of the city experienced by other East Enders who moved out to suburban council estates. ‘You knew everybody anyway because ...

Russia’s Managed Democracy

Perry Anderson: Why Putin?, 25 January 2007

... Kremlin Rising, that puts the palliators of the Financial Times to shame.2 Among historians, Richard Pipes, at one with Malia in hostility to Communism, but in temperament and outlook the all but complete opposite, has struck a characteristically dissonant note. Whereas Malia believed it was essentially the First World War that blew Russia off course ...

Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester, 5 July 2001

... there by Laurence Olivier in Macbeth and, at the Golders Green Hippodrome, by John Gielgud in Richard II. I was also taken to things picked out by myself: the Crazy Gang in OK for Sound at the London Palladium and Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, after I had heard part of a broadcast of it. I found it long, apart from the murderers’ apologias, but was ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... in the flats above and below don’t even know there’s been a fire. This was something else.’ Richard Welsh is a senior officer with the London Fire Brigade. His pager went off at 1.18 a.m. ‘Initially they had six machines there,’ he said. ‘Then they asked for eight, and then ten, and then 15, 20, and then 25. I’m hearing that on the way there, so ...

Chasing Steel

Ian Jack: Scotland’s Ferry Fiasco, 22 September 2022

... best in terms of subsidy; few if any routes made a profit – while others went to the wall or made do with inferior vessels. So the government proposed instead to invite tenders for the Clyde and Hebridean ferry services as a single operational unit. To reassure Brussels that this wasn’t merely a trick to perpetuate the old order, it came up ...