Owning Mayfair

David Cannadine, 2 April 1981

Survey of London. Vol. 40: The Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part 2. The Buildings 
edited by F.H.W. Sheppard.
Athlone, 428 pp., £55, August 1980, 0 485 48240 1
Show More
Show More
... pioneer works as S.E. Rasmussen’s astonishingly innovative London: The Unique City (1934) and John Summerson’s now-classic Georgian London (1945). So influential have these books become that, in retrospect, their novelty and audacity are hard to appreciate. But at the time of publication, they were milestones in the history of architecture, showing how ...

Everlasting Stone

Patrick Wormald, 21 May 1981

The Enigma of Stonehenge 
by John Fowles and Barry Brukoff.
Cape, 126 pp., £6.95, September 1980, 0 224 01618 0
Show More
British Cathedrals 
by Paul Johnson.
Weidenfeld, 275 pp., £12.50, September 1980, 0 297 77828 5
Show More
Show More
... A Mr Jay, of Nettlecombe, near Watchet, Somerset, wrote c. 1670 an essay modestly entitled ‘A Fool’s Bolt soon shott at Stonage’ (i.e. Stonehenge). It begins: A Wander Wilt of Wiltshire, rambling to Rome to gaze at Antiquities, and there skrewing himself into the company of Antiquaries, they entreated him to illustrate unto them, that famous monument in his Country called Stonage ...

Short Cuts

Matt Foot: Corrupt Cops, 8 February 2024

... the ‘gravity’ of the offences. In August, the Labour Party’s spokesman on home affairs, John Fraser, wrote to the home secretary, Robert Carr, about the cases. The Sunday Times report on Fraser’s letter said that he had asked Carr ‘to pay special regard to the method of proof used by transport police’ and the lack of ‘independent ...

It’s a shitshow

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Thatcher’s Failed Experiment, 8 May 2025

Inside Thatcher’s Monetarism Experiment: The Promise, the Failure, the Legacy 
by Tim Lankester.
Policy, 227 pp., £19.99, May 2024, 978 1 4473 7135 9
Show More
Show More
... 1982 should have been 15 percentage points higher than it was. Thatcher’s government, and later John Major’s, experimented with various other methods for containing inflation. In 1988, Thatcher’s second chancellor, Nigel Lawson, proposed making the Bank of England independent and tasking it with keeping down inflation, the path New Labour took when it ...

World in Spectacular Light

Hal Foster: Bauhaus in Exile, 5 December 2024

Objects in Exile: Modern Art and Design across Borders 1930-60 
by Robin Schuldenfrei.
Princeton, 345 pp., £55, January 2024, 978 0 691 23266 9
Show More
Show More
... to experience: learning came by way of doing and making. Aligned with the American pragmatism of John Dewey (who was read at the Bauhaus), this idea was advanced by Albers, who took it with him in 1933 when he went to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later at Yale, where his impact was immense. For other Bauhauslers experiment was a ...

Euripides Unbound

Robert Cioffi, 26 September 2024

... mounted under glass, Gehad turned to his colleague Yvona Trnka-Amrhein and the Euripides expert John Gibert, both professors of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder, to decipher the text (it has just been published in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik). The papyrus was probably produced in the third century ce at the height of the ...

The Revolution No One Wanted

Alex de Waal: War in Khartoum, 18 May 2023

... corner of Sudan hoped to liberate the country from its imperial history. The most prominent was John Garang, dissident soldier, and the founder and leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. After Garang’s death in 2005, there was no one of his stature to press the case that a new Sudan, transformed to benefit the historically oppressed, was ...

That Damn Smooth Stuff

Jefferson Cowie: Louisiana Demagogue, 19 March 2026

American Populist: Huey Long of Louisiana 
by Thomas E. Patterson.
Louisiana State, 704 pp., £43, February 2025, 978 0 8071 8299 4
Show More
Show More
... Can’t Happen Here); the directors Robert Rossen, Ken Burns and Stephen Zaillian; and the actors John Goodman and Sean Penn have all grappled with the Kingfish – Long’s nickname, after a black character on the radio show Amos ’n’ Andy who manipulated and cajoled his associates into various exploits. Randy Newman recorded two songs about him in ...

What Universities Owe

Vincent Brown, 24 July 2025

Yale and Slavery: A History 
by David W. Blight.
Yale, 432 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 300 28184 2
Show More
Show More
... out that Yale had named many of its colleges after slaveholders and pro-slavery leaders, including John C. Calhoun College in 1933 and Samuel F.B. Morse College in 1961, and noted that in 1831 Yale officials had helped to block the establishment of a college for Black Americans in New Haven. They called for Yale ‘to acknowledge how it has benefited from the ...

New York Review

Herschel Post, 17 December 1981

The Cost of Good Intentions: New York City and the Liberal Experiment 
by Charles Morris.
Norton, 256 pp., £8.95, March 1981, 0 393 01339 1
Show More
Show More
... the City Government and the New York Police were doing something right. It is easy to forget that John Lindsay, still burdened with one of the most harshly negative public reputations among American political figures, was hailed in 1968 as the politician of the future, the man who had kept the city cool and who offered hope that the liberal experiment for the ...

Millom

Alan Hollinghurst, 18 February 1982

Sea to the West 
by Norman Nicholson.
Faber, 64 pp., £3, June 1981, 0 571 11729 5
Show More
Out for the Elements 
by Andrew Waterman.
Carcanet, 151 pp., £3.95, October 1981, 0 85635 377 9
Show More
Between Here and Now 
by R.S. Thomas.
Macmillan, 110 pp., £5.95, November 1981, 0 333 32186 3
Show More
Poetry Introduction Five 
Faber, 121 pp., £5.25, January 1982, 0 571 11793 7Show More
Show More
... poets such as Jeffrey Wainwright and Paul Muldoon; there has also recently been the odd case of John Fuller’s The Illusionists, a novel in the stanza of Eugene Onegin which expertly takes on much of the wit, melancholy and technical fluency of Pushkin’s poem. ‘Out for the Elements’ is also in the Pushkin stanza, but differs from Fuller’s poem in ...

Angel Gabriel

Salman Rushdie, 16 September 1982

Chronicle of a Death Foretold 
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa.
Cape, 122 pp., £5.95, September 1982, 0 224 01990 2
Show More
Show More
... Spanish American literature, finally to reach the enormous audiences they deserve. Already, John Fowles in a Guardian essay has used the Chronicle to great effect as a prism through which to see the battle for the Malvinas. No doubt the Sun will shortly advise its readers to do the same. No doubt Sandy Woodward is a fan of the tale of Colonel Aureliano ...

Seventy Years in a Filthy Trade

Andrew O’Hagan: E.S. Turner, 15 October 1998

... years, who is spattered with ordure in The Dunciad; ‘stage-struck priests’ like the Rev. John Home, whose Douglas gave rise to a Scottish roar from the pit: ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ There is word of parsonical whorings and slayings, of deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds ...

Venom

Robin Briggs: Saint-Simon and Louis XIV, 26 November 1998

Saint-Simon, ou le système de la cour 
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Jean-François Fitou.
Fayard, 636 pp., frs 160, November 1997, 2 213 59994 7
Show More
Show More
... sensibly preferred to strike a deal with the Parlement, while calling in the Scottish expert John Law to operate a less painful rearrangement of the huge debts left by the war. In foreign policy Saint-Simon remained a traditionalist, unable to understand why Orléans sought alliances with the maritime and Northern powers. He would always insist on the ...

Magician behind Bars

Michael Rogin: David Mamet in a Cul de Sac, 2 July 1998

The Old Religion 
by David Mamet.
Faber, 194 pp., £9.99, May 1998, 0 571 19260 2
Show More
Show More
... whip up rural Georgia into an anti-semitic frenzy. In the midst of all this, the outgoing Governor John Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment. The Governor’s own investigation had uncovered a conclusive flaw in Conley’s story: if the sweeper had used the elevator merely to transport the dead body to the basement, as he claimed, then ...