No Rain-Soaked Boots

Toril Moi: On Cristina Campo, 24 October 2024

‘The Unforgivable’ and Other Writings 
by Cristina Campo, translated by Alex Andriesse.
NYRB, 269 pp., £16.99, February, 978 1 68137 802 2
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... She translated texts from English, German and French, by authors including Eduard Mörike, John Donne, Simone Weil and Proust, writers whose style she admired. She also championed Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams. She did some work for Italian radio and wrote a few prefaces, mostly for works by religious figures.One such ...

All Nerves

Ysenda Maxtone Graham: 10 Rillington Place, 7 November 2024

The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place 
by Kate Summerscale.
Bloomsbury, 296 pp., £22, October, 978 1 5266 6048 0
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... 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the wall of a disused factory whose chimney ...

On Hopkins Street

Chris Townsend: Radical Robert Wedderburn, 6 November 2025

Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist 
by Ryan Hanley.
Yale, 248 pp., £18.99, February, 978 0 300 27235 2
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... but probably also to distance himself from an episode of family humiliation: in Joseph Knight v. John Wedderburn, an enslaved man had successfully sued his owner, James Wedderburn’s brother, winning his freedom and forming a precedent that made life difficult for slave owners in Scotland. Andrew Colvile wrote to Bell’s claiming that his father had ...

Thought Control

Jameel Jaffer, 19 February 2026

... Sciences Research Council and a vocal critic of America’s war in Iraq. When Habib arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport in October 2006, border officials interrogated him at length, asking questions about an anti-war rally he had attended, and told him his visa had been cancelled. I was then an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union ...

The Vile and the Louche

David Todd: France’s First Fascist, 25 June 2026

The First Fascist: The Life and Legacy of the Marquis de Morès 
by Sergio Luzzatto.
Allen Lane, 488 pp., £30, February, 978 0 241 71581 9
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... Revolution, France was admired – or feared – as a source of liberal and progressive ideas. John Stuart Mill hailed the revolution as evidence that ‘democracy’ could become ‘the creed of the nation’. As late as 1914, France was Europe’s most advanced liberal democracy. Unlike in Britain, all men in France could vote, and had been able to do so ...

‘Gavin, Gavin, we love you!’

Deborah Friedell: Will Newsom run?, 4 June 2026

Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery 
by Gavin Newsom.
Bodley Head, 291 pp., £25, March, 978 1 84792 946 4
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... families in the world, and Gavin Newsom’s father was their ‘consigliere’. In 1973, when John Paul Getty III was kidnapped by the Calabrian mafia, it fell to Bill Newsom to fly to Italy to get him back. At first he suspected that his godson – ‘Little Paul’, a trust fund kid locked out of his trust – might have staged his own abduction, but ...

Buffalo Bones

J. Robert Lennon: Larry McMurtry’s American West, 4 June 2026

Larry McMurtry: A Life 
by Tracy Daugherty.
St Martin’s, 550 pp., £18.99, July 2025, 978 1 250 35458 7
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Lonesome Dove 
by Larry McMurtry.
Picador, 865 pp., £12.99, June 2025, 978 1 5290 9994 2
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Streets of Laredo 
by Larry McMurtry.
Picador, 499 pp., £12.99, June 2025, 978 1 5290 9997 3
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Dead Man’s Walk 
by Larry McMurtry.
Picador, 429 pp., £12.99, June 2025, 978 1 5290 9996 6
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Comanche Moon 
by Larry McMurtry.
Picador, 668 pp., £12.99, June 2025, 978 1 5290 9995 9
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... from his work, but had mentally classified him alongside Sidney Sheldon, Colleen McCullough and John Jakes, writers of great popular appeal in my youth, whose moment had passed and whose work was unlikely to be revisited. I came of age as a writer in the 1990s, in Montana, where I moved to attend graduate school, and cut my teeth on the literature of the ...

‘I would never release him’

Muhammad Shehada: Marwan Barghouti and Palestine’s future, 9 July 2026

... release him. A source close to the discussions told me that when the then US secretary of state John Kerry asked Netanyahu to release Barghouti in 2014, Netanyahu replied: ‘Barghouti would unify the Palestinians. I would never release him.’If elections were held, Barghouti could be elected president even if he was still in prison. He is now 67, and has ...

Bad Magic

Iain Sinclair: Brion Gysin’s Cut-Ups, 23 July 2026

Brion Gysin: Le Dernier Musée 
edited by Olivier Weil.
Éditions Paris Musées, 120 pp., €39, April, 978 2 7596 0639 9
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... was killed eight months after Gysin’s arrival. The future artist finessed his birth certificate: John Clifford Brian of the Thames Valley became Brion of everywhere. The Interzone of Tangier was the ideal clinic for skin-shedding transformation. Gysin emerged as an Orwellian on psilocybin; he sampled and promoted every available system of control. The ...

Who to Be

Colm Tóibín: Beckett’s Letters, 6 August 2009

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-40 
edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck.
Cambridge, 782 pp., £30, February 2009, 978 0 521 86793 1
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... complex figures, such as Beckett’s aunt Cissie and Beckett himself and indeed his first cousin John Beckett, whose serious, intelligent and eccentrically minimalist style of conducting Bach cantatas in Dublin, and wonderfully laconic and informative introductions, were, for me, one of the very great pleasures of the city in the 1970s. Cissie Sinclair was ...

Putting Religion in Its Place

Colm Tóibín: Marilynne Robinson, 23 October 2014

Lila 
by Marilynne Robinson.
Virago, 261 pp., £16.99, October 2014, 978 1 84408 880 5
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... books concentrate fiercely, and indeed lovingly, on just two households, that of the Reverend John Ames, and his lifelong friend the Reverend Robert Boughton, with flashbacks in Lila into the eponymous heroine’s life before she came to Gilead and married Ames and had a son with him. Gilead takes a strand from Middlemarch and turns it around. Ames, like ...

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Adam Shatz: Mass Incarceration, 4 May 2017

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America 
by James Forman.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp., £21.98, April 2017, 978 0 374 18997 6
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... cannot think already to keep them from thinking’. Moore was echoed by the Superior Court judge John Fauntleroy, one of DC’s first black justices, and by Andrew Fowler, an influential black pastor. That Clarke was white made the policy of decriminalisation particularly susceptible to attack. Some, like Moore, suspected a plot to weaken blacks (he would ...

A Difficult Space to Live

Jenny Turner: Stuart Hall’s Legacies, 3 November 2022

Selected Writings on Marxism 
by Stuart Hall, edited by Gregor McLennan.
Duke, 380 pp., £25.99, April 2021, 978 1 4780 0034 1
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Selected Writings on Race and Difference 
by Stuart Hall, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Duke, 472 pp., £27.99, April 2021, 978 1 4780 1166 8
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... the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the ...

Do I like it?

Terry Castle: Outsider Art, 28 July 2011

... be considered a discovery of the 1990s. The first big show of his work I saw was in 1996; in 1999, John Ashbery published a book-length poem entitled Girls on the Run, the cover of which bore an arresting Darger watercolour showing some of the Vivian Girls in panic-stricken flight. The ‘literariness’ and epic ‘virtual world’ quality of Darger’s work ...

Why name a ship after a defeated race?

Thomas Laqueur: New Lives of the ‘Titanic’, 24 January 2013

The Wreck of the ‘Titan’ 
by Morgan Robertson.
Hesperus, 85 pp., £8, March 2012, 978 1 84391 359 7
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Shadow of the ‘Titanic’ 
by Andrew Wilson.
Simon and Schuster, 392 pp., £8.99, March 2012, 978 1 84739 882 6
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‘Titanic’ 100th Anniversary Edition: A Night Remembered 
by Stephanie Barczewski.
Continuum, 350 pp., £15.99, December 2011, 978 1 4411 6169 7
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The Story of the Unsinkable ‘Titanic’: Day by Day Facsimile Reports 
by Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton.
Transatlantic, 127 pp., £16.99, November 2011, 978 1 907176 83 8
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‘Titanic’ Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew 
by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Harper, 404 pp., £9.99, September 2012, 978 0 00 732166 7
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Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage 
by Hugh Brewster.
Robson, 338 pp., £20, March 2012, 978 1 84954 179 4
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‘Titanic’ Calling 
edited by Michael Hughes and Katherine Bosworth.
Bodleian, 163 pp., £14.99, April 2012, 978 1 85124 377 8
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... eggs and hothouse grapes and peaches. There were pink roses and white daisies on the table. John Jacob Astor, the richest man in America, and his young new wife, Madeleine, were on their honeymoon. The 46-year-old mining magnate Ben Guggenheim was having dinner in the rococo dining room with his latest mistress, Ninette, a 24-year-old cabaret singer he ...