Diary

Thomas Jones: The Last Days of eBay, 19 June 2008

... eponymous donation. Whitman stepped down as CEO of eBay in March this year, to be replaced by John Donahoe, formerly the president of eBay Marketplaces. In January, when her departure was announced, the Los Angeles Times reported that Whitman might be considering a run for the governorship of California, on a Republican ticket, in 2010. Skoll withdrew ...

Communiste et Rastignac

Christopher Caldwell: Bernard Kouchner, 9 July 2009

Le Monde selon K. 
by Pierre Péan.
Fayard, 331 pp., €19, February 2009, 978 2 213 64372 4
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... in the context of post-Cold War ‘operations of Anglo-Saxon reconquest’. He faults Kouchner and John Garang, the leader of the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, for undermining a joint Franco-Sudanese strategy to counter ‘Anglo-Saxon expansionism in the region’ in the early 1990s. He sees a ‘total convergence of Kouchner’s actions in ...

Vermicular Dither

Michael Hofmann, 28 January 2010

The World of Yesterday 
by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell.
Pushkin Press, 474 pp., £20, 1 906548 12 9
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... formats and with new translations by the excellent Anthea Bell,* it seems to be succeeding – John Fowles (a representatively Anglo-Saxon e and u crossbreed) wrote: ‘Stefan Zweig has suffered, since his death in 1942, a darker eclipse than any other famous writer of this century. Even “famous writer” understates the prodigious reputation he enjoyed ...

Other People’s Mail

Bernard Porter: MI5, 19 November 2009

The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 
by Christopher Andrew.
Allen Lane, 1032 pp., £30, October 2009, 978 0 7139 9885 6
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... in many of the events it became involved with over the last 50 years – the Profumo affair; the John Stonehouse mystery; Peter Wright; a score of famous spy cases; the Northern Ireland conflict; the miners’ strikes; the Gibraltar shootings; the Lockerbie bombing; ‘Room 101’; the thrilling escape of the defector Oleg Gordievsky; the killing of WPC ...

I whine for her like a babe

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: The Other Alice James, 25 June 2009

Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James 
by Susan Gunter.
Nebraska, 422 pp., £38, March 2009, 978 0 8032 1569 6
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... however, suggests that Alice must have been quite aware of William’s feeling for Minny. In 1913, John Gray, then dean of Harvard Law School and another of the men who had once been in love with Minny, gave his share of her correspondence to Alice for safekeeping; and it was Alice who in turn sent the letters on to Henry for the second volume of his ...

Terms of Art

Conor Gearty: Human Rights Law, 11 March 2010

The Law of Human Rights 
by Richard Clayton and Hugh Tomlinson.
Oxford, 2443 pp., £295, March 2009, 978 0 19 926357 8
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Human Rights Law and Practice 
edited by Anthony Lester, David Pannick and Javan Herberg.
Lexis Nexis, 974 pp., £237, April 2009, 978 1 4057 3686 2
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Human Rights: Judicial Protection in the United Kingdom 
by Jack Beatson, Stephen Grosz, Tom Hickman, Rabinder Singh and Stephanie Palmer.
Sweet and Maxwell, 905 pp., £124, September 2008, 978 0 421 90250 3
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... how can repeal make any difference to that right’s continued application within Britain? The John Terry case notwithstanding, the right to privacy, for example, is now pretty well established in the British courts, as are the changes to the restrictions on the powers of the police, which may originally have been inspired by the convention but which take ...

Downhill from Here

Ian Jack: The 1970s, 27 August 2009

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies 
by Andy Beckett.
Faber, 576 pp., £20, May 2009, 978 0 571 22136 3
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... commentary on Britain . . . And it shifted in tone; from the anxious to the apocalyptic. In John Fowles’s novel Daniel Martin, published in 1977, the expatriate narrator says of his homeland: ‘England is already a thing in a museum, a dying animal in a zoo.’ Beckett pulls many other examples (Lessing, Drabble, Spark) from what he calls the ...

Down to the Last Cream Puff

Steven Shapin: The End of Haute Cuisine, 5 August 2010

Au Revoir to All That: The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine 
by Michael Steinberger.
Bloomsbury, 248 pp., £8.99, July 2010, 978 1 4088 0136 9
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... was in crisis. Fergus Henderson serves good English food (roasted bone marrow, potted beef) at St John beside Smithfield Market and April Bloomfield does well with rollmops and devils on horseback at the Spotted Pig in Greenwich Village. And above all there’s the rising global influence of a cuisine scarcely mentioned in Steinberger’s book. When food ...

Regret is a shabby thing

Bernard Porter: Knut Hamsun, 27 May 2010

Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter 
by Ingar Sletten Kolloen, translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik.
Yale, 378 pp., £25, September 2009, 978 0 300 12356 2
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Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance 
by Monika Zagar.
Washington, 343 pp., £19.99, May 2009, 978 0 295 98946 4
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... in troops, seeing in him the ‘great terrorist’ he had been waiting for, or at least the John the Baptist who would come before. Whether or not he was technically a member of Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling, which became an important issue at the time of his postwar trial (he was not a great joiner: the likelihood is that his wife Marie paid his ...

The Fastidious President

David Bromwich: The Matter with Obama, 18 November 2010

... to think when they placed those two statements side by side? I recently listened to some of John Kennedy’s press conferences, and was struck, not by his charm and easy control of the press, the usual traits that people bring up, but rather by his quickness and conversational rhythm. Kennedy’s answers are detailed and matter of fact, and though he ...

A City of Sand and Puddles

Julian Barnes: Paris, 22 April 2010

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris 
by Graham Robb.
Picador, 476 pp., £18.99, April 2010, 978 0 330 45244 1
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The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps 
by Eric Hazan, translated by David Fernbach.
Verso, 384 pp., £20, February 2010, 978 1 84467 411 4
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... over several years. For instance, I was almost sure I would tackle the distinguished art critic John Russell’s Paris (1960), ‘with photographs by Brassaï’, but never got past the pictures. I had slightly less confidence about Maxime Du Camp’s six-volume Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle ...

Diary

Adam Mars-Jones: Not the Marrying Kind, 20 March 2014

... though, was that the references to journals were not in Dad’s handwriting, but his clerk John Cant’s. There had been delegation. Dad couldn’t be bothered to do his own skimpy, bigoted research. I felt very let down. We’d had our difficulties in the past, but I had always been able to rely on his stamina. I found I missed the personal ...

Scoop after Scoop

Ian Jack: Chapman Pincher’s Scoops, 5 June 2014

Dangerous to Know: A Life 
by Chapman Pincher.
Biteback, 386 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 1 84954 651 5
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... has lasted ever since. But in his warm evocation of this boyhood, the kind you might imagine a John Buchan hero to have had, there is also (and not for the last time) a utilitarian chill. Aged 13, he allows himself to be seduced by the household’s part-time maid, aged 16, whom he finds in his bedroom in an inviting posture. Never one to waste an ...

The Ballad of Andy and Rebekah

Martin Hickman: The Phone Hackers, 17 July 2014

... individual cases, including those involving three cabinet ministers, Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Prescott. Edis told the court that while their papers were busy hacking to find evidence of other people’s affairs – in January 2003 the Sun ran a story calling Andy Gilchrist, then leading the Fire Brigade Union in a series of strikes against the Blair ...

Unlike a Scotch Egg

Glen Newey: Hate Speech, 5 December 2013

The Harm in Hate Speech 
by Jeremy Waldron.
Harvard, 292 pp., £19.95, June 2012, 978 0 674 06589 5
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... thinks, or at least not saying what one doesn’t think – is central, just as it is in John Rawls’s theory of justice of 1971. The claim that access to speech matters doesn’t flatly contradict the ‘only words’ doctrine (both are endorsed in Mill’s On Liberty). But a supporting narrative needs to be added if they are to cohabit ...