Lace the air with LSD

Mike Jay: Brain Warfare, 4 February 2021

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control 
by Stephen Kinzer.
Henry Holt, 384 pp., £11.99, November 2020, 978 1 250 76262 7
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... a press conference and announced that they would be suing the agency. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, was alerted to the danger by his deputy, Dick Cheney. The Olsons received a settlement of $750,000 in exchange for dropping their legal action, and were invited to the White House, where Ford made them a public apology.As the Rockefeller report ...

Ha ha! Ha ha!

Lauren Oyler: Jia Tolentino, 23 January 2020

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion 
by Jia Tolentino.
Fourth Estate, 303 pp., £14.99, August 2019, 978 0 00 829492 2
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... for the New Yorker in which she somewhat mournfully observed that, following the election of Donald Trump, ‘the personal-essay boom is over’: ‘Individual perspectives do not, at the moment, seem like a trustworthy way to get to the bottom of a subject.’ She sticks her Facebook profile into the book anyway, though regular readers of her work will ...

An Elite Worth Joining

David Trotter: Preston Sturges, 13 April 2023

Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges 
by Stuart Klawans.
Columbia, 366 pp., £22, January, 978 0 231 20729 4
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... Preston Sturges​ died in August 1959, when Donald Trump was thirteen years old. So it’s not his fault that the uses to which the grandiose Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach has more recently been put include the development of a club of which Jeffrey Epstein was briefly a member, as well as an impromptu storage facility for state secrets ...

I’d smash you in the face

Thomas Meaney: MAGA’s Debt to Buckley, 22 January 2026

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America 
by Sam Tanenhaus.
Random House, 1040 pp., £33, June 2025, 978 0 375 50234 7
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... but afterwards regretted that he had only raised the profile of the ‘intellectuals’ James Bond’. What Baldwin and other contemporaries didn’t know, but Tanenhaus has discovered, is that the Buckley family clandestinely funded a segregationist newspaper, the Camden News of South Carolina, in the mid-1950s. What’s surprising here is that the ...

One Grave, Two Bodies

Tom Stevenson: Pakistan’s Political Future, 23 May 2024

... Intercept, probably leaked by Khan, revealed that in March 2022 the US State Department official Donald Lu told the Pakistani ambassador that a move against Khan would mean ‘all will be forgiven in Washington’.Khan still claims that the US was involved in the coup against him, claiming that the no-confidence vote which brought down his government in ...

Through the Trapdoor

Steven Shapin: Roger Penrose’s Puzzles, 26 June 2025

The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius 
by Patchen Barss.
Atlantic, 337 pp., £25, November 2024, 978 1 83895 932 6
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... Just before the 2024 US presidential election, Rogan put out a supine three-hour interview with Donald Trump, who delivered his usual portion of lies, idiocies and bluster. Six years earlier, one of Rogan’s guests had been Penrose. The tweedily attired scientist didn’t patronise and the sweatshirted interviewer was duly star-struck: ‘I’m a big fan ...

The Greeter

Sean Wilsey: With Cantor Fitzgerald, 19 September 2002

... 33, dark hair, brown eyes, 5 ft 5 in., weight 135, slender; Helen Steele 6 years old, brown eyes; Donald Steele 2 years old, blue eyes; Mrs H.O. Wheeler Age 55, iron grey hair, eyes grey, 5 ft 2 in., heavy set, weight 150 lbs. The fire chief was killed. People fought fires with wine. Refugees wandered through the streets with parrots on their shoulders and ...

In Our Present-Day White Christian Culture

Jacqueline Rose: Freud and Zionism, 8 July 2004

... to such behaviour because they fall outside the civilising processes of the West. Thus beneath Donald Rumsfeld’s magnificently evasive ‘Stuff happens’ – the formula allows us to think for a second that such things might happen to anyone, including presumably us, or even him – we glimpse a much harsher, discriminatory form of judgment. Between ...

Do you think he didn’t know?

Stefan Collini: Kingsley Amis, 14 December 2006

The Life of Kingsley Amis 
by Zachary Leader.
Cape, 996 pp., £25, November 2006, 0 224 06227 1
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... when ‘the Movement’ was first identified, a group of writers that included Amis, Larkin, Wain, Donald Davie, Robert Conquest and others. As J.D. Scott put it in the baptismal piece in the Spectator, ‘The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible.’ Amis in particular had, as ...

I’m always in the club

Christian Lorentzen: Peter Matthiessen in Paris, 5 February 2026

True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen 
by Lance Richardson.
Chatto, 709 pp., £30, October 2025, 978 1 78474 301 7
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... of the army to be his right-hand man. They reported to MI6, and Angleton befriended Kim Philby, a bond that would keep him sniffing for moles in the ranks for the rest of his career. After the war Angleton ran X-2 in Italy, and following the CIA’s establishment in 1947 he became head of staff in its Office of Special Operations, which dealt with foreign ...

What you can get away with

James Wolcott: Updike Reconsidered, 19 February 2026

John Updike: A Life in Letters 
by John Updike, edited by James Schiff.
Hamish Hamilton, 874 pp., £40, November 2025, 978 0 241 70758 6
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... shunted aside at the New Yorker as postmodernists, minimalists and collagists (specifically Donald Barthelme) became the vogue. Updike was spared the indignity of finding himself on the outs, though the perpetual honeymoon had its bumpy patches. Tina Brown’s Batmobile arrival from Vanity Fair to assume the editorship in 1992 initially proved ...

Four Moptop Yobbos

Ian Penman, 17 June 2021

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 642 pp., £9.99, March, 978 0 00 834003 2
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The Beatles and Sixties Britain 
by Marcus Collins.
Cambridge, 382 pp., £90, March 2020, 978 1 108 47724 6
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The Beatles in Context 
edited by Kenneth Womack.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £74.99, January 2020, 978 1 108 41911 6
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... stagnant canals was left far behind for Help!, which transplanted the Beatles into a witless James Bond parody that had little to do with anything in their lives. David Melbye, in his contribution to The Beatles in Context, argues persuasively that we too often have a ‘tendency to see before we listen’, and that ‘what impelled (and impels) the world to ...

No Grand Strategy and No Ultimate Aim

Stephen Holmes: US policy in Iraq, 6 May 2004

Incoherent Empire 
by Michael Mann.
Verso, 278 pp., £15, October 2003, 1 85984 582 7
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... of Iraq as an opportunity to streamline America’s military structure and doctrine. Indeed, Donald Rumsfeld seems to have been so single-mindedly focused on his reform agenda, meant to improve the war-fighting capacity of US troops, that he apparently shrugged off the question of what to do after victory. Scandalously, US soldiers were given no ...

Emily of Fire & Violence

Paul Keegan: Eliot’s Letters, 22 October 2020

... and wives exert this pressure on each other.’ With even less reason could individuals whose bond was epistolary – whose bond is their words – lay claim to each other’s meanings, however much they might aspire to ‘unity of mind’.The letter epitomised the limits to knowing. On the other hand there are kinds of ...

Alphabeted

Barbara Everett: Coleridge the Modernist, 7 August 2003

Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection 
edited by Seamus Perry.
Oxford, 264 pp., £17.99, June 2002, 0 19 871201 4
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The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. XVI: Poetical Works I: Poems (Reading Text) 
edited by J.C.C. Mays.
Princeton, 1608 pp., £135, November 2001, 0 691 00483 8
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The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. XVI: Poetical Works II: Poems (Variorum Text) 
edited by J.C.C. Mays.
Princeton, 1528 pp., £135, November 2001, 0 691 00484 6
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The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. XVI: Poetical Works III: Plays 
edited by J.C.C. Mays.
Princeton, 1620 pp., £135, November 2001, 0 691 09883 2
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... a work that has considerable respect for Puritan movements both Established and Dissenting, Donald Davie admitted in Evangelicalism an ‘openly repressive Toryism’, and added, ‘of the philistinism of the Evangelicals there can be no doubt’. It was seemingly this illib-eral philistinism that made Wordsworth, Southey, Scott, de Quincey, Byron and ...