Mushroom Cameo

Rosemary Hill: Noël Coward’s Third Act, 29 June 2023

Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 634 pp., £30, March 2023, 978 1 4746 1280 7
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... the satire boom and the sexually liberated 1960s. He didn’t like postwar England any more than John Osborne did, and he quite liked Look Back in Anger. For his part, Osborne wanted to put on a production of Design for Living, which, like his own play, dramatises a love-hate triangle. Edward Albee got Coward’s work back into print in America and Coward ...

Always look in the well

Rachel Nolan: Guatemala’s Graves, 13 July 2023

Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics and What Remains 
by Alexa Hagerty.
Wildfire, 296 pp., £22, March, 978 1 4722 9577 4
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Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velásquez and Her Father’s Quest for Justice 
by Victoria Sanford.
California, 200 pp., £24, May, 978 0 520 39345 5
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... the remains of Josef Mengele and giving congressional testimony about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among other high-profile cases. He died nine years ago, but the colourful interviews and writings he left behind enable Hagerty to provide a substantial account. In 1984, Snow, a chain-smoker in cowboy boots, was invited to Argentina by the ...

Collective Property, Private Control

Laleh Khalili: Defence Tech, 5 June 2025

The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West 
by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska.
Bodley Head, 295 pp., £25, February, 978 2 84792 852 5
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Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War 
by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff.
Scribner, 319 pp., £20, August 2024, 978 1 6680 3138 4
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... procuring high-grade steel from Britain. But Congress wanted to facilitate local industry. Senator John Miller of California, a former general in the Union Army, argued in favour of ‘constructing American men-of-war from American material, by American workmen, to be manned by American seamen, and to be used in the service of the government of the United ...

No one is further right than me

Jan-Werner Müller: Mussolini to Meloni, 20 March 2025

Brothers of Italy and the Rise of the Italian National Conservative Right under Giorgia Meloni 
by Salvatore Vassallo and Rinaldo Vignati.
Palgrave Macmillan, 284 pp., £109.99, August 2024, 978 3 031 52188 1
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... the ideological mix was less conventional. At the party’s 2013 gathering in Rome, images of John Paul II, Thatcher, Gandhi and Mother Teresa were projected beside those of bona fide fathers of fascism such as D’Annunzio and Marinetti. The 2022 congress displayed cardboard cut-outs of Hannah Arendt, the Fellini collaborator Ennio Flaiano and ...

Heart, Head, Life, Fate

Steven Shapin: Talk to the hand, 19 March 2026

Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine and Magic 
by Alison Bashford.
Chicago, 446 pp., £25, December 2025, 978 0 226 83115 2
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... for those branches of medicine that dealt with the mental and the moral. In the 1860s, John Langdon Down, medical superintendent of the Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Surrey, noted that the faces of certain patients had the characteristics of different ethnic groups; he named one syndrome ‘Mongolism’ and the afflicted as ...

Bring me bimagrumab

Liam Shaw: Insulin Wars, 2 April 2026

The Discovery of Insulin: Enlarged Edition 
by Michael Bliss.
Chicago, 304 pp., £25, October 2025, 978 0 226 83913 4
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... had an epiphany about the way to isolate the sought-after pancreatic extract. He approached John Macleod, a biochemist at the university, who agreed to give him laboratory space to investigate his wild surmise. Banting was assisted by a student, Charles Best, and within a year they were keeping diabetic dogs alive with their extract. In 1922 Banting and ...

World-Beating Buster-Upper

Colin Burrow: Muriel Spark’s Wickedness, 9 October 2025

The Letters of Muriel Spark, Vol. 1: 1944-63 
edited by Dan Gunn.
Virago, 679 pp., £35, August, 978 0 349 01434 0
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Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark 
by Frances Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 408 pp., £25, June, 978 1 5266 6303 0
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... books. She also wrote poems (much less good than the novels) and studies of Mary Shelley and John Masefield, whose narrative verse she admired. She then had a protracted bust-up with Stanford, which had its origins in what was to prove the foundational crisis in her life. In late 1953 she was taking too much Dexedrine, which she used as an appetite ...

His Very Variousness

Ferdinand Mount: Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments, 4 December 2025

Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin 
by Kevin J. Hayes.
Oxford, 480 pp., £30.99, September 2025, 978 0 19 755426 5
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Ingenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist 
by Richard Munson.
Norton, 288 pp., £23.99, December 2024, 978 0 393 88223 0
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... the gang and persuaded them to disperse. He followed up this act of personal bravery with what John Updike called ‘Franklin’s fiercest and most eloquent pamphlet’, A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County. During the Revolutionary Wars, the anti-slavery cause was put on hold. At the Constitutional Convention, Franklin decided against ...

Waiting for the Poetry

Ange Mlinko: Was Adrienne Rich a poet?, 15 July 2021

The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography 
by Hilary Holladay.
Doubleday, 416 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 0 385 54150 3
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Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution 
by Adrienne Rich.
Norton, 345 pp., £13.99, May 2021, 978 0 393 54142 7
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... who had died five years earlier. Submissions in 1955 were so dismal that he privately asked John Ashbery and O’Hara for manuscripts (Ashbery’s Some Trees was the winner).Rich and her fans have bristled at some of the condescending praise her early books received. Auden’s introduction to A Change of World (1951) characterised her poems as ‘neatly ...

Art and Mimesis in Plato’s ‘Republic’

M.F. Burnyeat: Plato, 21 May 1998

... Proms. Think Morning Service at the village church, carols from King’s College Cambridge, Elton John singing to the nation from Westminster Abbey. Think popular music in general and, when Plato brings in a parallel from the visual arts, forget the Tate Gallery and recall the advertisements that surround us everywhere. Above all, think about the way all this ...

Literary Friction

Jenny Turner: Kathy Acker’s Ashes, 19 October 2017

After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography 
by Chris Kraus.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 1 63590 006 4
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... Nature by tracing the writings and life of the 19th-century British agrarian working-class poet John Clare,’ but letters to the writer and theorist Peter Wollen, her main married-man lover of the period, show her flailing: ‘I must get there, out of this endless selfishness a problem with always watching oneself … the autocratic autistic world that I ...

The Question of U

Ian Penman: Prince, 20 June 2019

Prince: Life and Times 
by Jason Draper.
Chartwell, 216 pp., £15.99, February 2017, 978 0 7858 3497 7
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The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince 
by Mayte Garcia.
Trapeze, 304 pp., £9.99, April 2018, 978 1 4091 7121 8
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... their profit-eyed, zoned-out heroes.Prince​ was born on 7 June 1958 in Minneapolis. His father, John L. Nelson, was 42 at the time; his mother, Mattie Shaw, was 25. His first name was the one his father performed under in a local jazz combo: Prince Rogers. During Prince’s teenage years it was a volatile household. Listening to ‘When Doves Cry’ is like ...

The Darwin Show

Steven Shapin, 7 January 2010

... and 3000 of the rapidly produced 1860 second edition – books offered for sale by the publisher John Murray at the same time included 7600 copies of an account of the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and 3200 copies of Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. From 1860 to 1865, the monthly sales of ‘the book that made the modern ...

The Road to Reading Gaol

Colm Tóibín, 30 November 2017

... had another connection to Jane Elgee before her marriage. In a letter to his son William in 1921, John Butler Yeats wrote of Jane Wilde: ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when the circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it.’ Butt enjoyed various romances, and was, on occasion, heckled at public meetings by the ...

Wouldn’t you like to be normal?

Lucie Elven: Janet Frame’s Place, 8 May 2025

The Edge of the Alphabet 
by Janet Frame.
Fitzcarraldo, 296 pp., £12.99, August 2024, 978 1 80427 118 6
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... university ‘in my spare time’ and had a ‘pash’ on her psychology teacher, the 24-year-old John Money. In Frame’s probationary year teaching at Arthur Street School, she stiffened, avoiding the staff teas. This is where her autobiography and King’s retelling, based on interviews, diverge, but in both she swallows a packet of aspirin, and wakes the ...