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Educating the planet

Frank Kermode, 20 March 1980

... deep sea keep you up. The second edition of Science and Poetry had not been out a year before Stephen Spender entitled his book on modern writers and belief (or unbelief) The Destructive Element, describing Richards’s note as ‘a focal point from which diverge rays towards past and future’. Certainly Conrad’s words give some insight into ...
... would damage his fledgling relations with Mugabe’s government. Rowland was embarrassed when Stephen Glover wrote a long, detailed and mainly accurate account in the Daily Telegraph of his links with Dr Jonas Savimbi, leader of the UNITA rebel movement in Angola. Journalists who interview Rowland are usually given long lectures about the justice of ...

The Russians Are Coming

John Lloyd, 11 May 1995

Comrade Criminal: The Theft of the Second Russian Revolution 
by Stephen Handelman.
Joseph, 360 pp., £16.99, September 1994, 0 7181 0015 8
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Crime Without Frontiers: The Worldwide Expansion of Organised Crime and the Pax Mafiosa 
by Clare Sterling.
Little, Brown, 274 pp., £17.50, June 1994, 0 316 91121 6
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Inside Yeltsin’s Russia 
by John Kampfner.
Cassell, 256 pp., £17.99, October 1994, 9780304344635
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A Dishonoured Society 
by John Follain.
Little, Brown, 356 pp., £16.99, February 1995, 0 316 90982 3
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... made little effort to stop the business ... the timing of the Chechen gangs’ transformation from small bands involved in petty extortion and stolen-car rackets into sophisticated crime conglomerates trading in guns and drugs coincided with the rise of Chechnya as a financial and political force.’ Sterling, also writing before the war, says that the ...

A Topic Best Avoided

Nicholas Guyatt: Abraham Lincoln, 1 December 2011

The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery 
by Eric Foner.
Norton, 426 pp., £21, February 2011, 978 0 393 06618 0
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... of his ability to steer the bargain through Congress. The legislative triumph went instead to Stephen Douglas, a politician from Illinois who, though four years younger than Lincoln, had already gained the national prominence he craved. In 1854, as the government debated the admission of Nebraska, Douglas persuaded Congress to abandon the Missouri line in ...

Little Faun Face

Jenny Turner: There was Colette, 5 January 2023

‘Chéri’ and ‘The End of Chéri’ 
by Colette, translated by Paul Eprile.
NYRB, 236 pp., £13.99, November, 978 1 68137 670 7
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‘Chéri’ and ‘The End of Chéri’ 
by Colette, translated by Rachel Careau.
Norton, 336 pp., £21.99, May, 978 1 324 05205 0
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... in the stage play in the 1920s; Michelle Pfeiffer, also fifty, was, as ever, Michelle Pfeiffer in Stephen Frears’s film version of 2009). The curtains are pink, as are the paper shades on the electric sconces and the ‘ravishing’ flesh of the nymphet in the painting on the wall. And Léa’s dressing-gown, and her underwear, and the strawberries she eats ...

To Monopolise Our Ears

Daniel Cohen: What Spotify Wants, 4 May 2023

The Spotify Play: How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance 
by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud.
Diversion, 295 pp., £15.99, January 2021, 978 1 63576 744 5
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Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation 
by Nick Seaver.
Chicago, 203 pp., £16, November 2022, 978 0 226 82297 6
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... calming’. Others are baffling: Spotify distinguishes between ‘small room’, ‘big room’, ‘deep big room’ and ‘escape room’. It’s fun to imagine what these might sound like, but there’s no need: click on any of the names and an example of the genre plays.Browsing Every Noise at Once is a reminder of how ...

Delete the workforce

Deborah Friedell: Musk’s Twitter Takeover, 3 April 2025

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter 
by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac.
Cornerstone, 468 pp., £25, September 2024, 978 1 5299 1469 6
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Elon Musk 
by Walter Isaacson.
Simon and Schuster, 688 pp., £12.99, February, 978 1 3985 2753 9
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... ticks were taken away, they wouldn’t pay to get them back. ‘Fuck that, they should pay me,’ Stephen King tweeted. LeBron James told his 52 million followers that he wouldn’t be paying either. And if the lords didn’t have blue ticks, then the peasants didn’t want them either. Almost the only people who seemed willing to pay for them were either ...

West End Vice

Alan Hollinghurst: Queer London, 8 May 2025

Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945-59 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 445 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 241 37060 5
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Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-67 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 416 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 241 68370 5
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... up to a topic while naming it only by a metonym is telling – perhaps intended, too, as a small frowning courtesy to the three lady members of the fifteen-strong committee.Court cases are inevitably a key part of the record: often pitiful in themselves, and with potentially terrible consequences of exposure and professional ruin. Sir George Mowbray ...

You Muddy Fools

Dan Jacobson: In the months before his death Ian Hamilton talked about himself to Dan Jacobson, 14 January 2002

... So, impressing this teacher became most important to me.He was trying to make you feel small but he ended up making you feel big.Absolutely. When I got fewer red marks than these other guys, the footballers, I began to think I was getting somewhere. This teacher – call him ‘P.J.’ – rarely praised anybody. Or if he did, he praised them at ...

After Gibraltar

Conor Gearty, 16 November 1995

... almost as though it were a simple matter of logic. Writing in this paper some months ago, Stephen Sedley considered the off-the-shelf solution of incorporation of the European Convention’ to head the list of possible reforms in this area ‘if only on the practical ground that adherence to a set of standards enforceable on the state by an ...
Stalin’s Spy: Richard Sorge and the Tokyo Espionage Ring 
by Robert Whymant.
Tauris, 368 pp., £25, October 1996, 1 86064 044 3
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... pivotal events of the century, a setting-up of sides for the Second World War. Philby, along with Stephen Spender, Hugh Gaitskell, Naomi Mitch-ison, the American journalist John Gunther and many others, was horrified to see the Austrian regular army shelling the workers’ flats in Karl-Marx-Stadt, and readily agreed with his new Communist girlfriend, Litzi ...

How to Get Screwed

David Runciman, 6 June 2019

The Mueller Report: Presented With Related Materials by the ‘Washington Post’ 
Simon and Schuster, 736 pp., £12.99, May 2019, 978 1 4711 8617 2Show More
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... thought a good idea to get someone from the Trump campaign, given that in July 2016 there was a small but not insignificant chance he might end up as president. The person who turned up was Carter Page. None of the people I spoke to seemed entirely sure who he was or what he was doing there. He sat through two days of discussions about lobbying and ...

Little England

Patrick Wright: The view through a bus window, 7 September 2006

Great British Bus Journeys: Travels through Unfamous Places 
by David McKie.
Atlantic, 359 pp., £16.99, March 2006, 1 84354 132 7
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... the bus-traveller’s equivalent of the zigzag walk (first left, first right ad infinitum) that Stephen Graham had earlier recommended, in The Gentle Art of Tramping (1926), as a way of manoeuvring the modern city into new patterns of disclosure. Starting at Victoria Coach Station, Goldring boards a bus that is about to depart for Essex, a county he has ...

All the girls said so

August Kleinzahler: John Berryman, 2 July 2015

The Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 427 pp., £11.99, October 2014, 978 0 374 53455 4
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77 Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 84 pp., £10, October 2014, 978 0 374 53452 3
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Berryman’s Sonnets 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 127 pp., £10, October 2014, 978 0 374 53454 7
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The Heart Is Strange 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 179 pp., £17.50, October 2014, 978 0 374 22108 9
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Poets in their Youth 
by Eileen Simpson.
Farrar, Straus, 274 pp., £11.50, October 2014, 978 0 374 23559 8
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... by the week, his marriage in tatters. He finished a highly psychologised critical biography of Stephen Crane. He replaced Roethke for a term at the University of Washington in Seattle; lectured briefly at the University of Vermont; met Jarrell, without any fur flying. In 1952 he spent the spring term at the University of Cincinnati, a generally successful ...

Posthumous Gentleman

Michael Dobson: Kit Marlowe’s Schooldays, 19 August 2004

The World of Christopher Marlowe 
by David Riggs.
Faber, 411 pp., £25, May 2004, 0 571 22159 9
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Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: Journeys through the Elizabethan Underground 
by Roy Kendall.
Fairleigh Dickinson, 453 pp., $75, January 2004, 0 8386 3974 7
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Tamburlaine Must Die 
by Louise Welsh.
Canongate, 149 pp., £9.99, July 2004, 1 84195 532 9
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History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe 
by Rodney Bolt.
HarperCollins, 388 pp., £17.99, July 2004, 0 00 712123 7
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... seven years earlier. They were an unsavoury bunch, who all had experience of committing fraud in small teams; Frizer, as if going down to posterity as the killer of a great Elizabethan playwright weren’t ignominy enough, had also been a property-speculator in Basingstoke. Of Marlowe’s recent biographers, only Constance Kuriyama is prepared to accept the ...

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