Act One, Scene One

David Bromwich: Don’t Resist, Oppose, 16 February 2017

“... also came from that environment. Peter Orszag, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, William Daley, Michael Froman, Jason Furman and Jack Lew were all finance-to-government mediators of this stamp. Trump, however, gives up all pretence of a distinction between finance and government. A possible reaction is delight, as at an honest revelation. A later reaction ...”

The Angry Men

Jean McNicol: Harriet Harman, 14 December 2017

A Woman’s Work 
by Harriet Harman.
Allen Lane, 405 pp., £20, February 2017, 978 0 241 27494 1
Show More
The Women Who Shaped Politics 
by Sophy Ridge.
Coronet, 295 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 4736 3876 1
Show More
Show More
“... elected in 1982, long before that distant nirvana of ‘fifteen, ten years ago’ described by Michael Fallon, when trying to touch up young female researchers, lobby correspondents or political activists was ‘acceptable’, just harmless ‘flirtation’. Some male MPs believe they still live in that era; while one insisted that it ‘absolutely does ...”

Speak for yourself, matey

Adam Mars-Jones: The Uses of Camp, 22 November 2012

How to Be Gay 
by David Halperin.
Harvard, 549 pp., £25.95, August 2012, 978 0 674 06679 3
Show More
Show More
“... filmed with Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in 1966), referring to a line spoken by Bette Davis in King Vidor’s 1949 film Beyond the Forest, and one man’s sexual desire for another? How is it that an Australian readership in 2000 can be expected to pick up these distant references without their being explained? How are such links forged? The cartoon makes ...”

Lunch with Mussolini

Thomas Jones: Ferrari Speeds Ahead, 14 August 2025

Enzo Ferrari: The Definitive Biography of an Icon 
by Luca Dal Monte.
Cassell, 520 pp., £12.99, February 2025, 978 1 78840 475 4
Show More
Show More
“... crash.All of this​ was taking place under Fascism. Mussolini was appointed prime minister by the king of Italy on 30 October 1922. Ferrari, busy at the Alfa Romeo headquarters in Milan, wasn’t paying attention. Italy’s last multi-party elections before 1946 (though they were hardly free or fair) were held on 6 April 1924. A week later Nuvolari won the ...”

The American Virus

Eliot Weinberger, 4 June 2020

“... attempted to repeal, was passed in the Clinton years following the notorious beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers and was intended to prevent racial profiling by police officers.In the vast bureaucracy of the Department of Health and Human Services, the person in charge of overseeing the pandemic response in its many agencies was, before ...”

Taking the Bosses Hostage

Joshua Kurlantzick: China goes into reverse, 26 March 2009

Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China 
by Leslie Chang.
Picador, 432 pp., £12.99, February 2009, 978 0 330 50670 0
Show More
Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State 
by Yasheng Huang.
Cambridge, 366 pp., £15.99, November 2008, 978 0 521 89810 2
Show More
Show More
“... bargain with the US, in which China would essentially subsidise American consumption. According to Michael Pettis, an economist at Peking University, Until recently, excess US demand and excess Chinese supply were in a temporarily stable balance. As part of running a trade surplus, China necessarily accumulated dollars, which had to be exported to (invested ...”

Balloons and Counter-Balloons

Susan Eilenberg: ‘The Age of Wonder’, 7 January 2010

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science 
by Richard Holmes.
HarperPress, 380 pp., £9.99, September 2009, 978 0 00 714953 7
Show More
Show More
“... Blanchard, John Jeffries, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and James Sadler, the balloonists; in King George III, who loved telescopes and music and balloons; in Thomas Beddoes, the doctor, and his Pneumatic Institute, and his wife, Anna; in Michael Faraday, the physicist; in Charles Babbage, the mathematician and inventor ...”

Fishing for Potatoes

James Lasdun: Nissan Rogue, 27 January 2022

Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire 
by Hans Greimel and William Sposato.
Harvard, 368 pp., £22, June 2021, 978 1 64782 047 3
Show More
Show More
“... time he learned of the double trial, he had already had four clandestine meetings with the son of Michael Taylor, a former Green Beret who specialised in springing wealthy people out of tricky situations in foreign countries, and an escape plan was largely in place. A few days later it went into effect. Retracing the steps of Taylor’s team on Ghosn’s ...”

It’s Our Turn

Rory Scothorne: Where the North Begins, 4 August 2022

The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country 
by Tom Hazeldine.
Verso, 290 pp., £11.99, September 2021, 978 1 78663 409 2
Show More
Show More
“... chance that the North could become the South. The people of Yorkshire, by spurning the advances of King David I, might have deprived us of a much more interesting island.This is not just medievalist quibbling. The imbalance between the North and Scotland has been fundamental to Britain’s evolution. In 1977, the leaders of Tyne & Wear and Merseyside county ...”

Dislocations

Stephen Fender, 19 January 1989

Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The world turned upside down 
by Robert Lawson-Peebles.
Cambridge, 384 pp., £35, March 1988, 0 521 34647 9
Show More
Mark Twain’s Letters. Vol. I: 1853-1866 
edited by Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael Frank and Kenneth Sanderson.
California, 616 pp., $35, May 1988, 0 520 03668 9
Show More
A Writer’s America: Landscape in Literature 
by Alfred Kazin.
Thames and Hudson, 240 pp., £15.95, September 1988, 0 500 01424 8
Show More
Show More
“... eaten in it. But we’re talking about writing and reading here. To an audience familiar with the King James Bible, the word ‘wilderness’ is rich with associations – among them, the idea of spiritual regeneration following a season of deprivation. It is in this wider context of initiation – the ritual of a passage through an ordeal into a higher state ...”

Oedipus was innocent

Malcolm Bull, 10 March 1994

Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith 
by Norman Cohn.
Yale, 271 pp., £20, October 1993, 0 300 05598 6
Show More
Show More
“... element of Zoroastrianism; and not only is Koresh, meaning Cyrus, the name of the Zoroastrian king of the Persians who found his way into Jewish prophecy as the man responsible for the reconstruction of the temple in Jerusalem; but the entire struggle between the Branch Davidians and the American state must have been viewed, on at least one side, as the ...”

Newspapers of the Consensus

Neal Ascherson, 21 February 1985

The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain. Vol. II: The 20th Century 
by Stephen Koss.
Hamish Hamilton, 718 pp., £25, March 1984, 0 241 11181 1
Show More
Lies, Damned Lies and Some Exclusives 
by Henry Porter.
Chatto, 211 pp., £9.95, October 1984, 0 7011 2841 0
Show More
Garvin of the ‘Observer’ 
by David Ayerst.
Croom Helm, 314 pp., £25, January 1985, 0 7099 0560 2
Show More
The Beaverbrook I Knew 
edited by Logan Gourlay.
Quartet, 272 pp., £11.95, September 1984, 0 7043 2331 1
Show More
Show More
“... But the notion that a friendly press can deliver votes has never been very convincing. Cecil King wasn’t the first person to see that newspapers could accelerate or slow up a trend, but never reverse or create one. The popular press, as Koss notes, encouraged a volatile public opinion which it could provoke and stimulate but seldom guide once the ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2019, 2 January 2020

“... am will be able to tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the Commons, he’s in a scruffy suede jacket and, according to the trolley attendant, sitting in standard class, where he is happy to have a ...”

Pseud’s Corner

John Sutherland, 17 July 1980

Duffy 
by Dan Kavanagh.
Cape, 181 pp., £4.95, July 1980, 0 224 01822 1
Show More
Moscow Gold 
by John Salisbury.
Futura, 320 pp., £1.10, March 1980, 0 7088 1702 5
Show More
The Middle Ground 
by Margaret Drabble.
Weidenfeld, 248 pp., £5.95, June 1980, 0 297 77808 0
Show More
The Boy Who Followed Ripley 
by Patricia Highsmith.
Heinemann, 292 pp., £6.50, April 1980, 0 434 33520 7
Show More
Show More
“... the literary agent, who is the dedicatee of Duffy. Harder to crack is the pseudonymous code of Michael Crichton, the omnicompetent ‘movelist’. (He is author of The Andromeda Strain, director and producer of Coma, director and scriptwriter of Westworld.) Crichton stands six feet seven inches tall. Two of his writing pseudonyms are ‘John Lange’ and ...”

Peroxide Mug-Shot

Marina Warner: Women who kill children, 1 January 1998

“... of many colours by the water’s edge, my mother has many garments of gold,’ the Erlking, or King of the Alders, calls out, luring his prey into the depths of the forest. The child riding with his father through the windy night immediately recognises the voice of the Erlking, and cries out. But his father reassures him: ‘In dürren Blättern säuselt ...”