Somerdale to Skarbimierz

James Meek, 20 April 2017

... neck. He was a small man with a folksy didacticism and a strong resemblance to the late magician Paul Daniels. He sat at the head of a long table. In front of him was a copy of the daily Rzeczpospolita with a picture of Theresa May on the front page. It was mid-January and May had just made her speech declaring that Britain, as part of leaving the ...

Stuck on the Flypaper

Frances Stonor Saunders: The Hobsbawm File, 9 April 2015

... such cases was allegedly stood down. Simply by virtue of living as long as he did, Hobsbawm must lay claim to one of the biggest PFs in MI5’s vast back catalogue. Then there’s the smell of the file, the physical residue of ink and carbon and onion paper and the many hands that passed over it, fingertips licked to separate the pages; and the distinct ...

A Pound Here, a Pound There

David Runciman, 21 August 2014

... successor. Brown let it be known that he didn’t approve (in this he was egged on by his friend Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail) and that was that. In other respects gambling reform in Britain followed the path Budd laid down for it. The Gambling Act of 2005 essentially treated the activity as part of the leisure industry, something that needed its own rules ...

The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
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... Britain and France as gangsters. What I remember were the things that made us laugh: the column by Paul Jennings that had a tongue-twister about ‘tuskless rustics eating crustless Ruskets’; the strip cartoon by Jules Feiffer; the witty reviews by Kenneth Tynan of plays that we had next to no chance of seeing; the house adverts by the subversive estate ...

The Force of the Anomaly

Perry Anderson: Carlo Ginzburg, 26 April 2012

Threads and Traces: True False Fictive 
by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi.
California, 328 pp., £20.95, January 2012, 978 0 520 25961 4
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... the reasons for the enemy’s victory, ‘it was not only in the field that intellectual causes lay at the root of our defeat.’ (‘Ce n’est pas seulement sur le terrain militaire que notre défaite a eu ses causes intellectuelles’). Viewed morally and aesthetically, Strange Defeat is an impressive document, an indictment written at white heat by a ...

Who had the most fun?

David Bromwich: The Marx Brothers, 10 May 2001

Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx 
by Stefan Kanfer.
Penguin, 480 pp., £7.99, April 2001, 0 14 029426 0
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The Essential Groucho 
by Groucho Marx, edited by Stefan Kanfer.
Penguin, 254 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 14 029425 2
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... the right hand, oompah for the left: a demi-style that would stand him in good stead when the act lay fallow, and assist an inborn facility for seducing whole lines of chorus girls. The result placed a built-in ceiling on his competence, but it worked nicely as a sight gag for the eye and ear. Harpo would emulate him in this as in other respects, but he was a ...

I Could Sleep with All of Them

Colm Tóibín: The Mann Family, 6 November 2008

In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story 
by Andrea Weiss.
Chicago, 302 pp., £14.50, May 2008, 978 0 226 88672 5
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... in Brooklyn with Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, among others, he wrote in his diary: ‘What an epic one could write about this!’ Soon Golo too moved in, having escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his uncle Heinrich, Alma Mahler and Franz ...

I am a knife

Jacqueline Rose: A Woman’s Agency, 22 February 2018

Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus 
by Vanessa Grigoriadis.
Houghton Mifflin, 332 pp., £20, September 2017, 978 0 544 70255 4
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Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus 
by Laura Kipnis.
HarperCollins, 245 pp., £20, April 2017, 978 0 06 265786 2
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Living a Feminist Life 
by Sara Ahmed.
Duke, 312 pp., £20.99, February 2017, 978 0 8223 6319 4
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Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body 
by Roxane Gay.
Corsair, 288 pp., £13.99, July 2017, 978 1 4721 5111 7
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Difficult Women 
by Roxane Gay.
Corsair, 272 pp., £13.99, January 2017, 978 1 4721 5277 0
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... account of what happened, despite its having been challenged down to the last detail by Paul Nungesser, the student she accused, who went on to file his own complaint against the university for violating his Title IX rights by allowing Sulkowicz to continue with her protest piece, for which she received academic credit. (Columbia settled with him ...

The Arrestables

Jeremy Harding: Extinction Rebellion, 16 April 2020

... Alinksy, the Chicago-based community activist and author of Rules for Radicals (1971), Mark and Paul Engler (This Is an Uprising, 2016) and Srdja Popovic, the Serbian advocate of ‘laughtivism’ (Blueprint for Revolution, 2015): XR insists that its interventions should both be fun and poke fun. Gene Sharp, the author of The Politics of Non-Violent Action ...

Towards the Precipice

Robert Brenner: The Continuing Collapse of the US Economy, 6 February 2003

... under. When corporate scandals first hit the headlines early in 2002, the US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill attributed them to the immorality of a ‘small number’ of miscreants. Apparently he’d been misinformed. The rapacious practices of these executives and firms – whether or not technically illegal – are typical of, and endemic to, corporate ...

Bites from the Bearded Crocodile

G. Cabrera Infante, 4 June 1981

... Published in 1605, Espejo de Paciencia (‘The Looking-Glass of Patience’) is a long poem that lay forgotten for more than two centuries, until it was rediscovered in 1834. It was about that time that Jose Maria de Heredia (cousin to the French Heredia, famous for his Trophée) wrote what is considered the first Romantic poem ever written in ...

Bournemouth

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bournemouth Set, 21 May 2020

... judged a failure of the times. She was written off as a hysteric but argued that the main problem lay ‘in my ability to assume the receptive attitude, that cardinal virtue in women’. ‘Her illness was a form of self-assertion,’ Strouse adds, and it was soon decided that she should go to Bournemouth, where they knew how to take such things ...

‘I wouldn’t pay it either’

Simon Skinner: World Cup Wallcharts, 25 June 2026

The Power and the Glory: A New History of the World Cup 
by Jonathan Wilson.
Little Brown, 608 pp., £12.99, May, 978 0 349 14573 0
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... shoulder and heel injuries dropping a bed on his foot while trying to evict from it a drunk Paul Gascoigne, England’s most important player. At Spain 1982 the Argentine manager César Menotti spent most of his time with a German model and missed morning training sessions, so the team exhausted itself in the heat of the afternoons; the full-back ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
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... no idea what their procedures were. That is perhaps the only excuse for Henry James, who wrote to Paul Bourget that Wilde’s sentence to hard labour was too severe, that isolation would have been more just.’ Close to Wilde’s release date, the governor of Reading Gaol said to Ross: ‘He looks well. But like all men unused to manual labour who receive a ...