Supersensual Ear

Patricia Lockwood: Willa Cather’s Substance, 2 April 2026

The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop 
by Garrett Peck.
New Mexico, 309 pp., £22.99, March, 978 0 8263 6925 3
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Death Comes for the Archbishop 
by Willa Cather.
Everyman, 344 pp., £16.99, October 2025, 978 1 85715 089 6
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“... Professor’s House prepares the ground for the later novel, sweeping the path as John the Baptist did for the one to come. In both books, male relationships are the pure and primary ones. The Professor’s House centres on the memories of an ageing historian, Napoleon Godfrey St Peter, and much of the book – the entire middle section, in ...”

A Different Life

Thomas Laqueur: Can cellos remember?, 9 October 2025

Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound 
by Kate Kennedy.
Apollo, 468 pp., £10.99, August, 978 1 80328 704 1
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“... on the previous century’s instruments. ‘The violins of Cremona,’ the historian of music John Hawkins wrote in 1776, ‘are exceeded only by those of Stainer, a German, whose instruments are remarkable for a full and piercing tone.’ A French encyclopedia entry on the making of stringed instruments similarly argued that the violins of Jacob Stainer ...”

Climbing the Ziggurat

Tom Stevenson: Xi Jinping’s Inheritance, 22 January 2026

The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping 
by Joseph Torigian.
Stanford, 704 pp., £40, June 2025, 978 1 5036 3475 6
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The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China 
by Michael Sheridan.
Headline, 345 pp., £12.99, July 2025, 978 1 0354 1351 5
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On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World 
by Kevin Rudd.
Oxford, 604 pp., £26.99, January 2025, 978 0 19 776603 3
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“... in its favourite predilection by describing him as a ‘reformer’ (the BBC correspondent John Simpson predicted that he would mark a break with the ‘stern’ Hu, and speculated about the possibility of an elected parliament). Instead, all prospect of a more open political environment has receded. Dissidence is rare and often treated as treason. Liu ...”

More than ever, and for ever

Michael Rogin: Beauvoir and Nelson Algren, 17 September 1998

Beloved Chicago Man: Letters to Nelson Algren 1947-64 
by Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.
Gollancz, 624 pp., £25, August 1998, 0 575 06590 7
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America Day by Day 
by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Carol Cosman.
California, 355 pp., $27.50, January 1999, 0 520 20979 6
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“... her years of greatest success, The Man with the Golden Arm initiated Algren’s Cold War downfall. John Garfield, fresh from his triumphs in the left-wing films noirs Body and Soul and Force of Evil, wanted to play Frankie Machine, but he was about to die from a heart attack, a victim of the Blacklist. When Otto Preminger acquired the film rights to the novel ...”

Freedom of the Press

Anthony Lewis, 26 November 1987

“... view the prevailing one in the Supreme Court. In 1971, a justice who cherished traditional values, John Harlan, wrote for the Court: ‘The constitution’s right of free expression is powerful medicine ... It is designed to remove governmental restraints from the arena of public discussion ... in the hope that use of such freedom will ultimately produce a ...”

Boomerang

Sylvia Lawson, 18 February 1988

Australians: A Historical Library 
Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, AUS $695Show More
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“... a part of political life – segmented, as sport always was, by the divisions of class and race. John Rickard’s survey of entertainment takes in dancing, music, magazines and newspapers; he also notes the formation of a Fellowship of Australian Writers, and its moves for grants and subsidies. He does not consider what the novelists, travel writers and ...”

North and South

Raphael Samuel, 22 June 1995

Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village 
by Mark Hudson.
Cape, 320 pp., £16.99, October 1994, 0 224 04170 3
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“... and felt herself ‘completely at home’ with them. In the person of the ‘gentle and amiable John Aked’ she entered, too, into the first of her intense relationships with working men. The journey to Bacup, though she calls it ‘sentimental’, was also, by her own account, the launching-pad for her lifelong work as a social investigator; as her diary ...”
“... 1981 expressly prohibits research into how jurors arrive at the verdicts they do. When, therefore, John Jackson complains in The Criminal Law Review that we recommend relaxation of the restriction on hearsay evidence in the absence of empirical evidence on how juries respond to hearsay evidence, my response is: yes, indeed. I only wish we did, or could, have ...”

Central Bankism

Edward Luttwak, 14 November 1996

“... would have come out just fine. But only a few adventurous souls, and only one reputable economist, John Maynard Keynes, dared to contradict what seemed to be common sense, and even they were hesitant. The central bankers, by contrast, were utterly certain that they were right, just as they are now; and they gave exactly the same advice they are giving now; the ...”

Tacky Dress

Dale Peck, 22 February 1996

Like People in History: A Gay American Epic 
by Felice Picano.
Viking, 512 pp., $23.95, July 1995, 0 670 86047 6
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How Long Has This Been Going On? 
by Ethan Mordden.
Villard, 590 pp., $25, April 1995, 0 679 41529 7
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The Facts of Life 
by Patrick Gale.
Flamingo, 511 pp., £15.99, June 1995, 0 602 24522 2
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Flesh and Blood 
by Michael Cunningham.
Hamish Hamilton, 480 pp., £14.99, June 1995, 9780241135150
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“... cool luminous reportage that reminds one of the work of our more storied essayists, Joan Didion or John McPhee. In the past few years the incidence of these big books has increased rapidly: three years ago, Christopher Bram published his Washington tale, Almost History; in 1994, Laura Argiri’s 19th-century melodrama The God in Flight came out, along with ...”

Notes on a Notebook

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 September 1999

“... Robert Megaw was shot when his patrol was ambushed in Edward Street in Lurgan. And Constable John Forsyth was blown up in Market Street on 18 June 1974. There have been many others. The RUC is currently 93 per cent Protestant. The action of Loyalist informers and double agents in Northern Ireland has often involved them in liaising between the Loyalist ...”

The Cow Bells of Kitale

Patrick Collinson: The Selwyn Affair, 5 June 2003

“... East Africa? It gathers up the experience of all the conflicting parties in what Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, in their important 1992 study, called the ‘Unhappy Valley’. Was there a hidden political motive, unstated in any of the official documents? There was a widespread impression among the settlers that the prosecution of the Selwyns was intended to ...”

Is Syria next?

Charles Glass, 24 July 2003

“... of sponsoring terrorism may not be sufficient to win public support for action. On 6 May 2002, John Bolton, the Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, filled the gap by accusing Syria of developing chemical and biological weapons and acquiring hundreds of Scud missiles. He warned that Damascus was a step away from ...”

In the Tart Shop

Murray Sayle: How Sydney got its Opera House, 5 October 2000

The Masterpiece: Jørn Utzon, a Secret Life 
by Philip Drew.
Hardie Grant, 574 pp., AUS $39.95, October 1999, 1 86498 047 8
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Jørn Utzon: The Sydney Opera House 
by Françoise Fromonot, translated by Christopher Thompson.
Electa/Gingko, 236 pp., £37.45, January 1998, 3 927258 72 5
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“... but once committed to the idea, he was a loyal and stubborn ally. Ashworth introduced Goossens to John Joseph Cahill, who was soon to become Labour Premier of New South Wales. A backroom politician of Irish immigrant stock who dreamed of bringing art to the people, Cahill gave an Australian down-to-earthness to the high-toned support for the scheme, and many ...”

‘What a man this is, with his crowd of women around him!’

Hilary Mantel: Springtime for Robespierre, 30 March 2000

Robespierre 
edited by Colin Haydon and William Doyle.
Cambridge, 292 pp., £35, July 1999, 0 521 59116 3
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“... phenomenon. So there is plenty to look at; it is our fault if we can’t see. An Englishman called John Carr, travelling in Paris in 1802, was surprised by a bust ‘taken of him, a short period before he fell’. He noted:History, enraged at the review of the insatiable crimes of Robespierre, has already bestowed on him a fanciful physiognomy, which she has ...”