Japan goes Dutch

Murray Sayle: Japan’s economic troubles, 5 April 2001

“... thus instantly plunging Japan and probably the world into depression. The London-based consultant Andrew Smithers calls his gloomy analysis ‘Japan as a Laboratory for Economic Theory’ because no major economy has ever run up such an extraordinary peacetime debt, or had so few ideas about how to ease its burden.Last year, the 171-year-old Sogo Department ...”

The Laying on of Hands

Alan Bennett, 7 June 2001

“... in watching television, would have known why. Seated behind him was a thick-set shaven-headed young man in dark glasses, black suit and black T-shirt who, minus the shades and occasionally (and far too rarely some viewers felt) minus the T-shirt, appeared nightly on the nation’s screens in a television soap. The previous week he had stunned his audience ...”

Kipling’s Lightning-Flash

Barbara Everett, 10 January 1991

“... led to break and run from the service by some element in his relationship with one Mrs Bathurst, a young New Zealand hotel-keeper. Vickery’s fate becomes preternaturally vivid to us, but we never directly see either of the two persons concerned, or understand fully the motivations involved. The gentle and amiable Pritchard, a ‘woman’s man, struggles to ...”

Adulation or Eggs

Susan Eilenberg: At home with the Carlyles, 7 October 2004

Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Pimlico, 560 pp., £15, February 2003, 0 7126 6634 6
Show More
Show More
“... on the heights, Carlyle’s writing has something essentially unserious about it, as of a man (so Andrew Lang remarked) ‘talking angrily and vehemently to himself’. When he was still young, Carlyle confessed in his notebooks that the world had lost its solidity for him. ‘I attend to few things as I was wont: few ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: A Shameful Year, 8 January 2004

“... bus pass which he scrutinises as grimly as an Albanian border guard, even checking the likeness. Andrew Wilson sails through unchallenged.I walk back through the streets of Oxford and as always I have a sense of being shut out and that there is something going on here that I’m not a part of; not that I was a part of it even when I was a part of it.16 ...”

Open in a Scream

Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021

Francis Bacon: Revelations 
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January, 978 0 00 729841 9
Show More
Show More
“... and moved to a cottage in Hampshire, in a village called Steep, where he lived for two years. Andrew Sinclair, in Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (1993), includes a few sentences on his stay. Daniel Farson, in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (also 1993), gives it a passing reference. Michael Peppiatt, in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an ...”

In Whose Interest?

Thomas Meaney: Truman’s Plan, 6 December 2018

The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months that Changed the World 
by A.J. Baime.
Doubleday, 431 pp., £20, February 2018, 978 0 85752 366 2
Show More
The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War 
by Benn Steil.
Oxford, 606 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 0 19 875791 7
Show More
Show More
“... that the US federal government could on occasion align with Providence, as it had in the days of Andrew Jackson, the great champion of the white settlers on the frontier. Young Harry read Mark Twain, played the piano and listened to Mozart. He disapproved of boxing, guns and Wagner. Endowed with porch-front charm, he was ...”

Where do we touch down?

Jeremy Harding: Bruno Latour’s Habitat, 15 December 2022

On the Emergence of an Ecological Class: A Memo 
by Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz, translated by Julie Rose.
Polity, 80 pp., £9.99, November 2022, 978 1 5095 5506 2
Show More
After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis 
by Bruno Latour, translated by Julie Rose.
Polity, 180 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 1 5095 5002 9
Show More
Show More
“... an endocrinologist, had been at work on a project that later earned him a Nobel with his rival Andrew Schally for ‘discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain’. Latour embedded himself in Guillemin’s lab, describing his research ‘as analogous with that of an intrepid explorer in Ivory Coast … living with ...”

A Surfeit of Rank

Simon Akam, 10 March 2022

The Habit of Excellence: Why British Army Leadership Works 
by Langley Sharp.
Penguin, 320 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 0 241 50750 6
Show More
Show More
“... into combat alongside Third World armies means you need casualty evacuation and fire support,’ Andrew Fox, a former Parachute Regiment officer, pointed out. ‘These things are expensive and logistically intensive. The Ranger Regiment does not have either of those things in sufficient numbers to “accompany” safely.’ Fox agreed that all this was an ...”

Russell and Ramsey

Ray Monk, 29 August 1991

Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship 
by Nicholas Griffin.
Oxford, 409 pp., £45, January 1991, 0 19 824453 3
Show More
Philosophical Papers 
by F.P. Ramsey, edited by D.H. Mellor.
Cambridge, 257 pp., £30, August 1990, 0 521 37480 4
Show More
The Philosophy of F.P. Ramsey 
by Nils-Eric Sahlin.
Cambridge, 256 pp., £27.50, November 1990, 0 521 38543 1
Show More
Show More
“... of its editorial team. Two years ago we had Bertrand Russell: The Psychobiography of a Moralist by Andrew Brink, a lecturer in English at McMaster who helped to edit Volumes I and XII of the Collected Papers. This presented a Freudian analysis of the personal papers published in those volumes. Nicholas Griffin’s Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship has a ...”

Interview with a Dead Man

Jeremy Harding: Witches of Impalahoek, 20 June 2013

Witchcraft and a Life in the New South Africa 
by Isak Niehaus.
Cambridge, 239 pp., £60, December 2012, 978 1 107 01628 6
Show More
Show More
“... In the 1980s, the ANC stepped in as the next major institutional force. The comrades, by and large young, all male and according to Jimmy incredibly brave, lit out from their schools to begin a campaign of confrontation in 1986, the tenth anniversary of the Soweto massacre. P.W. Botha responded with a state of emergency. The war was now in the open. As a kind ...”

Dunbar’s Disappearance

Sally Mapstone: William Dunbar, 24 May 2001

The Poems of William Dunbar 
edited by Priscilla Bawcutt.
Association for Scottish Literary Studies, £70, May 1999, 0 948877 38 3
Show More
Show More
“... entirely fitting for a piece written within the context of marital negotiations, especially by a young and attention-seeking poet. Dunbar is the first writer in Scots who can legitimately be called a ‘Court poet’. The Scottish kings had no great tradition of encouraging literary patronage, and indeed for much of Dunbar’s career at James IV’s Court ...”

The History Boy

Alan Bennett: Exam-taking, 3 June 2004

“... of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I wasn’t reassured but ...”

Diary

Tom Paulin: Trimble’s virtues, 7 October 2004

“... head west for about 40 kilometres into the Gaeltacht: we’re to have lunch with an old friend, Andrew, in the Beehive Bar near the coast. He’s there in the car-park having a smoke. I manage to refuse his offer of a Sweet Afton, and as I do so he notices my copy of Dean Godson’s biography of David Trimble, Himself Alone, lying in the back seat with ...”

Will I, Won’t I?

Daniel Soar: Dostoevsky’s Kiss, 6 March 2025

The Brothers Karamazov 
by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Michael Katz.
Liveright, 900 pp., £15.99, July 2024, 978 1 324 09510 1
Show More
Show More
“... five separate revisions of it), there have been translations by David Magarshack (1958), Andrew MacAndrew (1970), Julius Katzer (1980), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990), David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and, most recently, Michael Katz. Apparently there are at least eleven translations into German, nine into French, five into ...”