Diary

Clancy Martin: My Life as a Drunk, 9 July 2009

... have exclaimed, ‘the dazzling discovery of a cure that could soon be within reach of all’ (David Servan-Schreiber). I think it is going to take more than a drug to cure me. While this is not as exciting a conclusion as one would like, it seems to me that what I have been calling the tragic and the possession views of addiction can be reconciled with ...

Terrorists? Us?

Owen Bennett-Jones, 7 June 2012

Terror Tagging of an Iranian Dissident Organisation 
by Raymond Tanter.
Iran Policy Committee, 217 pp., £10, December 2011, 978 0 9797051 2 0
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... Camp Ashraf after the invasion came away convinced that the group could be a useful ally. General David Phillips, a military policeman who spent time there in 2004, argues that the MEK is no more a cult than the US marines: in both organisations you have to wear a uniform, obey orders and follow rituals that seem bizarre to the uninitiated. Positive feelings ...

Why weren’t they grateful?

Pankaj Mishra: Mossadegh, 21 June 2012

Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Very British Coup 
by Christopher de Bellaigue.
Bodley Head, 310 pp., £20, February 2012, 978 1 84792 108 6
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... zealots, wondering if it had some connection with Britain’s commercial stake in Iran. In 1951, David Astor’s Observer was no less protective of British interests when it described Mossadegh as a ‘fanatic’ and a ‘tragic Frankenstein … obsessed with one xenophobic idea’. ‘There was disquiet across the white world,’ de Bellaigue writes, at ...

The Immortal Coil

Richard Barnett: Faraday’s Letters, 21 March 2013

The Correspondence of Michael Faraday Vol. VI, 1860-67 
by Frank James.
IET, 919 pp., £85, December 2011, 978 0 86341 957 7
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... that too when you put them almost in the manner of riddles for you tell me nothing relative to the green substance which you sent me or where it came from or under what circumstances found[.]’ All this from a man who was the archetype of a heroic loner according to his earliest biographers, John Tyndall, his friend and colleague, and J.H. Gladstone, a ...

The Darth Vader Option

Colin Kidd: The Tories, 24 January 2013

The Conservatives since 1945: The Drivers of Party Change 
by Tim Bale.
Oxford, 372 pp., £55, September 2012, 978 0 19 923437 0
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The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 471 pp., £14.99, January 2011, 978 0 7456 4858 3
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Reconstructing Conservatism? The Conservative Party in Opposition, 1997-2010 
by Richard Hayton.
Manchester, 166 pp., £60, September 2012, 978 0 7190 8316 7
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... the aspect of free market economics that Conservatives – even supposedly bright ones like David ‘Two Brains’ Willetts – stubbornly fail to absorb is that unintended consequences apply just as much to market-oriented panaceas as to statist policies. Cameron’s political achievement may have been to decontaminate and then quickly recontaminate ...

‘Where’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’

Michael Dobson: 17th-century literary culture, 11 September 2008

Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707 
by John Kerrigan.
Oxford, 599 pp., March 2008, 978 0 19 818384 6
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... feeling a bit seasick and discovered that all the postboxes and telephone booths had been painted green. But in those pre-euro days the shops still accepted ordinary money, and my mother used to say that what she liked best about the place, apart from the Mary O’Hara records, was that with its bumpy single-track roads and straying donkeys it reminded her of ...

Imagined Territories

Yonatan Mendel: Designing the Occupation, 2 August 2007

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation 
by Eyal Weizman.
Verso, 318 pp., £19.99, June 2007, 978 1 84467 125 0
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... tunnels in Rafah. It is a landscape of many colours: from red roofed settlements, through the green pine trees surrounding them and up to the black one-way mirrors of the Allenby border crossing into Jordan, which allow Israeli security agents to monitor Palestinians in transit without themselves being seen. There are many methods of navigation: a bridge ...

From Lying to Leering

Rebecca Solnit: Penis Power, 19 January 2017

... don’t vote with my vagina,’ the actress Susan Sarandon announced, and voted for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, who one might think was just as vagina-y a candidate as Clinton but apparently wasn‘t.‘One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome,’ Mark Lilla wrote in the New York ...

Man Is Wolf to Man

Malcolm Gaskill: C.J. Sansom, 23 January 2020

Tombland 
by C.J. Sansom.
Pan Macmillan, 866 pp., £8.99, September 2019, 978 1 4472 8451 2
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... painted books, ancient chants, plaster statues’, with too much downtime for hunting, cards and green chartreuse. They live in denial until the rising body count forces the abbot to concede: ‘It’s all over … Our life here. The monastic life in England.’ Puzzles and deaths drift up like the snow that eventually transforms Scarnsea into a locked-room ...

Diary

Dani Garavelli: Searching for the ‘Bonhomme Richard’, 25 January 2024

... Scarborough as his prizes. But while ‘John Paul Jones won the propaganda war,’ the historian David Pendleton told me, ‘much of that is down to his famous line, which he almost certainly never said, and the fact he brought the war to British shores. The convoy was carrying a cargo essential to the British war efforts. The Serapis and the Countess of ...

I going England tomorrow

Mendez: ‘The Lonely Londoners’, 7 July 2022

The Lonely Londoners 
by Sam Selvon.
Penguin, 138 pp., £16.99, June 2021, 978 0 241 50412 3
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... citizens of the Commonwealth in 1948. In his documentary The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files, David Olusoga observed that the 1948 British Nationality Act was intended to attract Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, who would be easily absorbed into the majority population, restoring Britain’s manpower after the war, while keeping it ...

Half-Wrecked

Mary Beard: What’s left of John Soane, 17 February 2000

John Soane: An Accidental Romantic 
by Gillian Darley.
Yale, 358 pp., £25, September 1999, 0 300 08165 0
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John Soane, Architect: Master of Space and Light 
by Margaret Richardson and Mary-Anne Stevens.
Royal Academy, 302 pp., £45, September 1999, 0 300 08195 2
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Sir John Soane and the Country Estate 
by Ptolemy Dean.
Ashgate, 204 pp., £37.50, October 1999, 1 84014 293 6
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... as the major channel into this country for the theories of the European Enlightenment – or so David Watkin’s generous reading of Soane’s muddled (and, at the time, scarcely audible) Royal Academy lectures would suggest. These rival claims to Soane’s legacy are neatly captured, and subverted, in a cartoon currently on show in Sir John Soane’s ...

Too Big to Shut Down

Chal Ravens: Rave On, 7 March 2024

Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain 
by Ed Gillett.
Picador, 464 pp., £20, August 2023, 978 1 5290 7064 4
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... air. Ravers joined in a raggedy coalition with the New Travellers, whose knowledge of England’s green spaces proved crucial to evading the police. Out of this emerged the ‘free party’: an outdoor gathering that broadly resembled the free festivals of the 1970s and 1980s, but with space rock and campfires swapped for cutting-edge electronic music and ...

No Pork Salad

Edmund Gordon: On the Court, 26 June 2025

The Racket: On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation – and the Other 99 per Cent 
by Conor Niland.
Penguin, 294 pp., £10.99, May, 978 0 241 99807 6
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The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay 
by Christopher Clarey.
John Murray, 356 pp., £22, May, 978 1 3998 1150 7
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The Roger Federer Effect: Rivals, Friends, Fans and How the Maestro Changed Their Lives 
by Simon Cambers and Simon Graf.
Pitch, 287 pp., £14.99, January 2024, 978 1 80150 383 9
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Searching for Novak: The Man behind the Enigma 
by Mark Hodgkinson.
Cassell, 303 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 78840 520 1
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... that it’s possible to purify polluted water by talking to it and that negative feelings turn it green; and that eating in front of the TV contaminates the food, resulting in allergies. His social circle includes Semir (‘Sam’) Osmanagić, who suggested in a 2003 book that Hitler survived the Second World War by escaping to an underground base in ...

I’m an intelligence

Joanna Biggs: Sylvia Plath at 86, 20 December 2018

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. I: 1940-56 
edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil.
Faber, 1388 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 0 571 32899 4
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The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. II: 1956-63 
edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil.
Faber, 1025 pp., £35, September 2018, 978 0 571 33920 4
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... one of her first mature poems: ‘What solace/can be struck from rock to make heart’s waste/grow green again? Who’d walk in this bleak place?’On 25 February 1956, she went to a party for the St Botolph’s Review, and ‘the worst thing happened, that big dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me … came over and was looking hard in my eyes ...