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‘Double y’im dees’

Christopher Tayler: Ben Fountain, 2 August 2012

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk 
by Ben Fountain.
Canongate, 307 pp., £16.99, July 2012, 978 0 85786 438 3
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... of Fountain’s long apprenticeship is that his 1970s-vintage literary models – among them Robert Stone, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer in Vietnam-era reportage mode – turned out to be pretty useful for a writer hitting his stride at the start of the 21st century. His main adjustments concern mood. For the pill-popping nerviness of Didion and ...

Exhibitionists

Hal Foster: Curation, 4 June 2015

Ways of Curating 
by Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Penguin, 192 pp., £9.99, March 2015, 978 0 241 95096 8
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Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World – And Everything Else 
by David Balzer.
Pluto, 140 pp., £8.99, April 2015, 978 0 7453 3597 1
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... to scholarship, let alone to criticism (both are decidedly uncool), and little of the sense of service to patrimony or public that still motivates some curators in Europe. At the beginning of the practice known as ‘institutional critique’, Robert Smithson insisted that the artist must understand the apparatus he or ...

Boiling Electrons

David Kaiser, 27 September 2012

Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe 
by George Dyson.
Allen Lane, 401 pp., £25, March 2012, 978 0 7139 9750 7
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... He served as the director of the Theoretical Division at wartime Los Alamos, reporting directly to Robert Oppenheimer. After the war, he returned to Cornell, but he remained active as a consultant to the nuclear weapons programme, as well as to the budding nuclear power industry. In 1947, Bethe was asked to tackle the problem of shielding for nuclear ...

Enfield was nothing

P.N. Furbank: Norman Lewis, 18 December 2003

The Tomb in Seville 
by Norman Lewis.
Cape, 150 pp., £14.99, November 2003, 0 224 07120 3
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... days in pure loss and reduce the dangerous life in the virgin forest to an imitation of military service . . . That it calls for such efforts and vain expense to attain the object of our studies confers no value on what one should rather regard as the negative aspect of our métier. The truths which we travel so far to seek need to be stripped from such ...

Elzābet of Anletār

John Gallagher, 22 September 2016

This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World 
by Jerry Brotton.
Allen Lane, 358 pp., £20, March 2016, 978 0 241 00402 9
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... Iskenderun. Edward Webbe was a former slave who spent five years in the Ottoman naval and military service, journeying to Persia, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus and Goa, which he called ‘the head and chief city in all the East Indies’. On his return to England he wrote a remarkable and picaresque account of his travels and travails. Captivity and slavery were ...

Leave, and Leave Again

William Davies: The Brexit Mentality, 7 February 2019

... modernisation programme, rested on the assumption that improvements could come about only once service users had powers of exit similar to the ones they had in the private sector. The turnout in the 1992 general election was 78 per cent; nine years later, it was 59 per cent. Developing alongside these trends was a new political common sense about ...

Magnificent Progress

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Tudor Marriage Markets, 5 December 2024

The Thistle and the Rose: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Tudor 
by Linda Porter.
Head of Zeus, 379 pp., £27.99, June 2024, 978 1 80110 578 1
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... English political nation a great deal, but in 1603 the skilful diplomacy of her chief minister, Robert Cecil, escorted James VI, King of Scots, to the thrones of England and Ireland, with far less fuss than everyone had feared. The entire archipelago was for the first time in its history united under a single monarch, and moreover under the ruler of the ...

Highbrow Mother Goose

Colin Kidd: Constitutional Dramas, 22 February 2024

The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom 
edited by Peter Cane and Harshan Kumarasingham.
Cambridge, 1178 pp., £160, August 2023, 978 1 108 47421 4
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... in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), and then, after the Brexit referendum in 2016, by what Robert Crowcroft describes as a ‘contest’, ostensibly between proponents of popular and parliamentary sovereignty, ‘to make up the rules under which the country was governed’, though in truth the constitution provided ‘little more than a fig leaf’ for ...

Getting it right

Tam Dalyell, 18 July 1985

The Ponting Affair 
by Richard Norton-Taylor.
Cecil Woolf, 144 pp., £5.95, June 1985, 0 900821 74 4
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Who Killed Hilda Murrell? 
by Judith Cook.
New English Library, 182 pp., £1.95, June 1985, 0 450 05885 9
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... writes as pungently as anyone in modern journalism, but he has a weekly column to sustain, and Robert Maxwell is by no means as anxious about the fate of the Belgrano as he is about the costs of the Falklands, or the welfare of the Polish Government. Like Mr Foot, John Rentoul of the New Statesman has contributed some crucial articles – turning-points in ...

Tricked Out as a Virgin

Bee Wilson: Respectable Enough, 4 November 2021

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A True Story of Sex, Crime and the Meaning of Justice 
by Julia Laite.
Profile, 410 pp., £16.99, April, 978 1 78816 442 9
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... expressed pity for the poor women on the street, but many viewed them with misogynist contempt. Robert Fabian, a former London superintendent, wrote in his memoirs that ‘the whore is a bad apple … there is a big brown bruise on her soul, of self-indulgence and selfishness.’ But traffickers and pimps were also vile: ‘the lowest form of animal life on ...

What is rude?

Thomas Nagel: Midgley, Murdoch, Anscombe, Foot, 10 February 2022

The Women Are up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch Revolutionised Ethics 
by Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb.
Oxford, 326 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 0 19 754107 4
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Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life 
by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman.
Chatto, 398 pp., £25, February, 978 1 78474 328 4
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... philosophy and history. Foot, Midgley and Murdoch then joined the war effort by entering the civil service. Murdoch had become a communist at Oxford and was sure the civil service wouldn’t want her, not ‘with a record like mine’. But she was taken on at the Treasury, and duly copied documents which she hid in a tree in ...

Had he not run

David Reynolds: America’s longest-serving president, 2 June 2005

Franklin Delano Roosevelt 
by Roy Jenkins.
Pan, 208 pp., £7.99, May 2005, 0 330 43206 0
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Franklin D. Roosevelt 
by Patrick Renshaw.
Longman, 223 pp., $16.95, December 2003, 0 582 43803 9
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom 
by Conrad Black.
Weidenfeld, 1280 pp., £17.99, October 2004, 0 7538 1848 5
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... to assistant secretary of the navy and then governor of New York. But he was also affected by service in Woodrow Wilson’s administration during the First World War. As he wrote in 1935, Wilson could appeal, as TR could not, to the ‘truly profound moral and social convictions’. On the big issues of what would make a better world, FDR remained, in ...

I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place

David Runciman: In the White House, 11 October 2018

Fear: Trump in the White House 
by Bob Woodward.
Simon & Schuster, 448 pp., £20, September 2018, 978 1 4711 8129 0
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... asshole,” Cohn said, half-joking and smacking Trump gently on his arm. Cohn turned to a Secret Service agent. “I just hit the president. If you want to shoot me, go ahead.”’ It’s the ‘half-joking’ that’s the giveaway: it’s precisely what Cohn would tell himself after the event. But it’s not just Cohn. At other points the source is clearly ...

Diary

Patrick McGuinness: Back to Bouillon, 6 June 2024

... landowners. Their side of the family were all employed in domestic labour, or in a version of the service industry. Lucie’s ability to take it to the next level, but also to the next class up, was both part of the trajectory and a break from it. The Lejeunes, my grandfather’s side, were all industrial workers and they socialised together at the many ...

I adore your moustache

James Wolcott: Styron’s Letters, 24 January 2013

Selected Letters of William Styron 
edited by Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin.
Random House, 643 pp., £24.99, December 2012, 978 1 4000 6806 7
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... poets in these pages – the stellar cast includes Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola ...

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