Sweetie Pies

Jenny Diski, 23 May 1996

Below the Parapet: The Biography of Denis Thatcher 
by Carol Thatcher.
HarperCollins, 303 pp., £16.99, April 1996, 0 00 255605 7
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... business, now called Atlas and to become eventually ‘the largest de-greasing and de-scaling service of its kind in the world’. His father’s secretary remembers that, at 18, Denis ‘was already the man he was to become’. Common sense, says Carol, has always been his most valuable asset, along with ‘pragmatism and homespun logic’. Two of his ...

Crowing

Michael Rogin, 5 September 1996

Imagineering Atlanta 
by Charles Rutheiser.
Verso, 324 pp., £44.95, July 1996, 1 85984 800 1
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... A twice-fired former sheriff and university security officer, he worked for AT&T’s security service. Like the other guards protecting Olympic Centennial Park, he was hired at the minimum wage. The bomb fragments found at his home, however, may only have been payment in kind, souvenirs of the explosion rather than evidence pointing to its perpetrator. In ...

Punk-U-Like

Dave Haslam, 20 July 1995

The Black Album 
by Hanif Kureishi.
Faber, 230 pp., £14.99, March 1995, 0 571 15086 1
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The Faber Book of Pop 
edited by Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage.
Faber, 813 pp., £16.99, May 1995, 0 571 16992 9
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... I heard a Portishead song being played in Spud-U-Like, and every weekend since 1988 motorway service stations on the M6 and M62 have been haunted by clubbers who spend the nights journeying between venues in Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool and the Midlands. Pop music has also stormed the citadel of literary fiction, and characters in novels such as Karline ...

Diary

Ian Jack: Class 1H, 15 July 2021

... High’s Latinate period, which – though the school was an ancient foundation and claimed Robert Henryson, the ‘Scottish Chaucer’, among its early masters – occurred circa 1935. The headmaster, whom I encountered face to face only once, had MA Cantab after his name and wore a black cloak that, though every teacher had one, gave him an especially ...

Omdamniverous

Ian Sansom: D.J. Enright, 25 September 2003

Injury Time: A Memoir 
by D.J. Enright.
Pimlico, 183 pp., £12.50, May 2003, 9781844133154
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... containing my will, birth certificate, marriage certificate, national insurance and health service numbers, share certificates relating to a small bankrupt publishing house (kept as a souvenir), an Equitable Life policy, a testimonial from F.R. Leavis dated 1946, and a letter from L.C. Knights regretting that he couldn’t act as a referee since my ...

Six Wolfs, Three Weills

David Simpson: Emigration from Nazi Germany, 5 October 2006

Weimar in Exile: The Anti-Fascist Emigration in Europe and America 
by Jean-Michel Palmier, translated by David Fernbach.
Verso, 852 pp., £29.99, July 2006, 1 84467 068 6
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... those who suffered during the Cold War. There were famous and well-rewarded co-optations in the service of British and American interests, such as the gathering of conservative thinkers at the University of Chicago, but there was also a commendable hospitality – for example, to the Frankfurt School, which found its way to America by way of a sojourn in ...

No Tricks

Frank Kermode: Raymond Carver, 19 October 2000

Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Prose 
by Raymond Carver.
Harvill, 300 pp., £15, July 2000, 1 86046 759 8
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... in ‘this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction’. He has a job at a service station, or as a janitor or a delivery man, with the prospect of many more years in this unwriterly posture, so unlike the situation of the well-known writers he admires. And after these destructive years of parenting there was an alcoholic hiatus, ten ...

Farewell to the Log Cabin

Colin Kidd: America’s Royalist Revolution, 18 December 2014

The Royalist Revolution 
by Eric Nelson.
Harvard, 390 pp., £22.95, October 2014, 978 0 674 73534 7
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... the presidency, there were several attempts to restore the family to the office. JFK’s brother Robert was assassinated after his victory in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were scuppered after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 – when a young female aide ...

Making a Costume Drama out of a Crisis

Jenny Diski: ‘Downton Abbey’, 21 June 2012

Downton Abbey: Series One and Two 
Universal DVD, £39.99, November 2011Show More
Upstairs Downstairs: Complete Series One and Two 
BBC DVD, £17.99, April 2012Show More
Park Lane 
by Frances Osborne.
Virago, 336 pp., £14.99, June 2012, 978 1 84408 479 1
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Habits of the House 
by Fay Weldon.
Head of Zeus, 320 pp., £14.99, July 2012, 978 1 908800 04 6
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... but as classy and educational, shown in the Masterpiece Theatre strand of the Public Broadcasting Service (as were those other great English classics Morse, Prime Suspect and Midsomer Murders). Upstairs, Downstairs, Cooke explains at the beginning, ‘follows the life of a London family through the reign of Edward VII. He was the big bearded monarch who had a ...

Quill, Wax, Knife

Adam Smyth: Collier’s Letter Racks, 18 July 2013

Mr Collier’s Letter Racks: A Tale of Art & Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age 
by Dror Wahrman.
Oxford, 275 pp., £22.95, November 2012, 978 0 19 973886 1
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... and lying-stories and two-penny poets’ in his privy, and many texts were ‘pressed into general service’, as Margaret Spufford put it in Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), as toilet paper. Books were pulled apart to serve in the binding and endpapers of later books, the pages of an unwanted Bible perhaps padding the spine of an unholy prose ...

So Very Silent

John Pemble: Victorian Corpse Trade, 25 October 2012

Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and Its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834-1929 
by Elizabeth Hurren.
Palgrave, 380 pp., £65, December 2011, 978 0 230 21966 3
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Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor 
by Ruth Richardson.
Oxford, 370 pp., £16.99, February 2012, 978 0 19 964588 6
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... looked like laundry baskets but weren’t. The railway companies operated a discreet distribution service. Passengers travelling from Liverpool Street to Cambridge were unaware that a consignment of corpses was regularly hitched to their train. There were limits: in 1858 the master of a London workhouse was convicted of selling human remains for personal ...

Loose Woven

Peter Howarth: Edward Thomas’s contingencies, 4 August 2005

Collected Poems 
by Edward Thomas, edited by R. George Thomas.
Faber, 264 pp., £12.99, October 2004, 0 571 22260 9
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... write any poems until the autumn of 1914. Thinking over their genesis afterwards, his friend Robert Frost commented that ‘the decision he made in going into the army helped him make the other decision in form.’ This is both a simple material explanation and perhaps also a piece of soul-searching. Frost knew that the more Thomas believed he could ...

A Fue Respectable Friends

John Lloyd: British brass bands, 5 April 2001

The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History 
by Trevor Herbert.
Oxford, 381 pp., £48, June 2000, 0 19 816698 2
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... bands. One of the earliest was the Cyfarthfa band, in the iron-smelting centre of Merthyr Tydfil. Robert Crawshay, the owner of the Cyfarthfa works, in effect created a private orchestra. He employed a family of musicians from Bradford, members of London theatre orchestras and strolling players; and, like some Renaissance prince or 17th-century cardinal, gave ...

The Rendition of Abu Omar

John Foot: The trial of the kidnappers, 2 August 2007

... that the area had been staked out). This complicated phone trail eventually led to a man called Robert Lady. Lady was the CIA’s man in Milan, formally a US vice-consul, but well known to the police as a spy. He was so in love with Italy that he had decided to spend his imminent retirement in a luxurious villa near Turin. When this house was raided by the ...

Diary

Christian Lorentzen: Homo Trumpiens, 3 November 2016

... estate mogul and reality television executioner. Trump has never shown fealty and at best paid lip service to the conservative movement’s three-prong catechism of which Ryan is the most prominent and doctrinaire national exemplar. In shorthand these are a ‘strong defence’ (Trump claims falsely to have opposed the Iraq War and would allow or encourage ...