Let’s consider Kate

John Lanchester: Can we tame the banks?, 18 July 2013

... it is easy. We need two things from our banks. One of them is to keep lending money, especially to small businesses, which are essential as the engine of economic activity – the route out of the state we’re in. The government has poured unprecedented amounts of money into the economy in an attempt to get it moving. It’s done so through quantitative ...
... the dynamite bomb seemed tiny in proportion to its capacity to do harm; it could fit easily into a small bag or even a pocket. Using the pages of the Irish World, Ford and O’Donovan Rossa collected more than $20,000 within a year. Even those among the nationalist Irish-American groups who supported the idea of a bombing campaign in Britain viewed with ...

Ten Bullets to One, Twenty to Another

Thomas Meaney: Sri Lanka, 2 February 2017

Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World 
by Steven Kemper.
Chicago, 480 pp., £31.50, January 2015, 978 0 226 19907 8
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Tamil: A Biography 
by David Shulman.
Harvard, 416 pp., £25, September 2016, 978 0 674 05992 4
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The Seasons of Trouble: Life amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War 
by Rohini Mohan.
Verso, 368 pp., £16.99, October 2015, 978 1 78168 883 0
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... Ernest Goonetilleke, the first native governor-general, said. This was a point of pride. Don Stephen Senanayake, the country’s first prime minister, remarked: ‘There has been no rebellion in Ceylon, no non-cooperation movement and no fifth column. We were among the peoples who gave full collaboration while Britain was hard-pressed.’ After ...

Places Never Explained

Colm Tóibín: Anthony Hecht, 8 August 2013

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht 
edited by Jonathan Post.
Johns Hopkins, 365 pp., £18, November 2012, 978 1 4214 0730 2
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... boy who never finished the third grade, just below me; if I stretch out my left hand I can touch a small dark pleasant Italian, about five feet high; with my right hand I can touch somebody who came from I don’t know where, but he’s just been here two weeks while his wife had a baby boy. ‘In the evenings,’ Jarrell added, ‘I mostly write poetry or ...

Fed up with Ibiza

Jenny Turner: Sybille Bedford, 1 April 2021

Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life 
by Selina Hastings.
Chatto, 432 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 1 78474 113 6
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... total lack of formal education. So she started writing about the law instead, in pieces about the Stephen Ward and Lady Chatterley trials for Esquire, Jack Ruby for Life, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial for the Saturday Evening Post. ‘The law, the workings of the law, the daily application of the law to people and situations, is an essential element in a ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: The Plutocrat Tour, 7 July 2022

... shirt, was alone at the bar. A couple of non-performative locals, supporting players, drank at a small table beside a wall of boxing memorabilia and photographs of scenes from the lost London. The subversive lock-in was migratory, coming down the Lea Valley and heading for the river. The key point of difference with the ethical profit-spreaders in Great ...

Frozenology

Tony Wood: Siberia is Melting, 9 September 2010

... the localised warming effect that any building has on the upper layers of the permafrost; only a small minority ascribe the problems to planetary climate shifts. Even the 2009 Greenpeace Russia report, from which I have taken my figures, strikes a cautious note, saying only that global climate change must ‘surely have played a role’. The hesitation ...

Oh those Lotharios

Alison Light: Jean Lucey Pratt, 17 March 2016

A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt 
edited by Simon Garfield.
Canongate, 736 pp., £12.99, April 2016, 978 1 78211 572 4
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... Club, precursor of International Pen, but finds its literary milieu ‘alarmingly refined’ (Stephen Spender lectures on Poetic Drama, ‘loathing the suburbs’). She gives up the Daily Mail and starts reading the New Statesman. In 1936 her father dies unexpectedly. At 26 Jean has £300 a year, rent from the family home, and a portfolio of stocks and ...

Gobblebook

Rosemary Hill: Unhappy Ever After, 21 June 2018

In Byron’s Wake: The Turbulent Lives of Lord Byron’s Wife and Daughter 
by Miranda Seymour.
Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 1 4711 3857 7
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Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist 
by Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin and Adrian Rice.
Bodleian, 128 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 1 85124 488 1
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... that would most help to make her legal case for separation’. Whatever she told her lawyer, Stephen Lushington, it had a galvanising effect. From that point, he recalled, ‘I considered a reconciliation impossible.’ Whether it was the incest, the sodomy, adultery, drugs or Byron’s episodes of apparent near psychosis, it shook Lushington to the ...

‘I’m coming, my Tetsie!’

Freya Johnston: Samuel Johnson’s Shoes, 9 May 2019

Samuel Johnson 
edited by David Womersley.
Oxford, 1344 pp., £95, May 2018, 978 0 19 960951 2
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... man. Most readers assume she was praising Johnson’s sober, rational side; Leslie Stephen, writing in 1878, went so far as to commend Tetty’s penetrative ‘good sense’ for discerning the same quality in Johnson, despite his ‘grotesque appearance’. But if we take Tetty’s ‘sensible’ to mean – as in this period it certainly could ...

Even When It’s a Big Fat Lie

Alex Abramovich: ‘Country Music’, 8 October 2020

Country Music 
directed by Ken Burns.
PBS, eight episodes
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... Frank was being held. The mob handcuffed the warden, took Frank, and drove him through several small towns on the way to Phagan’s hometown, Marietta. Carson’s song ‘Dear Old Oak in Georgia’ celebrates the tree from which Frank was hanged: ‘Two years we have waited and tales we have listened to,’ he sang. ‘But the boys of old Georgia had to ...

How do you spell Shakespeare?

Frank Kermode, 21 May 1987

William Shakespeare. The Complete Works: Original-Spelling Edition 
edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.
Oxford, 1456 pp., £75, February 1987, 9780198129196
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William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 
edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor.
Oxford, 1432 pp., £25, October 1986, 0 19 812926 2
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... which Oxford-modern resolves by printing ‘busil’est’ – an emendation duly defended in Stephen Orgel’s excellent single-play Oxford version2 (‘my thoughts of Miranda are most active when I am busiest at my work’). The Oxford-original gives ‘busielest’ as what the compositor or possibly the scribe misread or wrongly divided in an attempt ...

Which Face?

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Emigrés on the Make, 6 February 2020

Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia 
by Benjamin Tromly.
Oxford, 329 pp., £75, September 2019, 978 0 19 884040 4
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The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-90 
by Peter Reddaway.
Brookings, 337 pp., £25.50, February, 978 0 8157 3773 5
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... if given the chance. In a society apparently so alienated from its government, it seemed that a small well-placed shove from the outside might bring the whole regime tumbling down.There were a couple of flaws in this argument. The one Benjamin Tromly focuses on is the fact that the Russians eager to stay in the West were not democracy-lovers who had ...

Not Enough Delilahs

Andrew O’Hagan: Lillian Ross, 4 July 2019

Picture 
by Lillian Ross.
NYRB, 219 pp., £14.99, June 2019, 978 1 68137 315 7
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... John Huston to come out to Hollywood in the summer of 1950 to write about his adaptation of Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage. She just stuck with the project from beginning to end. If you know how to report in a certain way, by seeing people and circumstances as you might see them if you were writing a novel, then access becomes a daily ...

Touching and Being Touched

John Kerrigan: Valentine Cunningham, 19 September 2002

Reading after Theory 
by Valentine Cunningham.
Blackwell, 194 pp., £45, December 2001, 0 631 22167 0
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... A. Cohen ‘by and large appalling tosh’; the critical practice of Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt is, he says, ‘piss-poor’, while the former is so inaccurate (not that Cunningham is without his blunders) that she gives us ‘history as shitty-slop’. Yet he wants readers to be tactful as well as tactile, which means having what Bunyan ...