At the RA

John-Paul Stonard: Anselm Kiefer , 6 November 2014

... of the frontal and the recessive’ in these works, which he compares to the paintings of Jackson Pollock. He refers to the sense of being caught between diving into the image, drawn into the perspectival vortex, or remaining on the surface of the canvas, seeing it as a physical object rather than an imaginary space. For perspectival recession read ...

You must do something

Randall Kennedy: John Lewis fights for freedom, 23 October 2025

John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community 
by Raymond Arsenault.
Yale, 558 pp., £25, February 2024, 978 0 300 28181 1
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John Lewis: A Life 
by David Greenberg.
Simon and Schuster, 704 pp., $23, October 2024, 978 1 9821 4300 8
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... John Lewis​ was at the heart of the protests in the early 1960s which transformed race relations in the United States. He participated in the sit-ins of 1960 in which black students (and a few white allies) occupied seats in shops, restaurants and entertainment venues from which African Americans were barred. In 1961 he joined the freedom rides, in which black and white activists travelled together on buses in the South to test whether local officials would follow new national rules prohibiting states from separating passengers on the basis of race ...

Find the birch sticks

R.W. Johnson: A spy’s diary, 1 September 2005

The Guy Liddell Diaries. Vol. I: 1939-42 
edited by Nigel West.
Frank Cass, 329 pp., £25, February 2005, 0 415 35213 4
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... When Lord Halifax was sent off as ambassador to the US, bogus baggage was placed on the Port Jackson at Liverpool to fool the Germans, and when it turned out that the Port Jackson wasn’t going to America, the baggage was transferred to the Warwick Castle. Meanwhile, Churchill plus a whole crowd of journalists and ...

Guerrilla into Criminal

Richard White: Jesse James, 5 June 2003

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War 
by T.J. Stiles.
Cape, 510 pp., £20, January 2003, 9780224069250
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... Jesse James has stressed his Confederate roots and his support among ex-Confederates in Clay and Jackson Counties in Missouri. Stiles, however, distils James and the James Gang down until nothing is left of them but their secessionist convictions. Other reasons for their actions are ignored, marginalised or explained away. In Stiles’s hands, James is a ...

Green Pastel Redness

Colin Kidd: The Supreme Court Coup, 24 March 2022

Dissent: The Radicalisation of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Supreme Court 
by Jackie Calmes.
Twelve, 478 pp., £25, July 2021, 978 1 5387 0079 2
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Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months that Transformed the Supreme Court 
by Linda Greenhouse.
Random House, 300 pp., £22.50, November 2021, 978 0 593 44793 2
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... never be construed as substantive: it was, by definition, procedural. The distinguished jurist John Hart Ely considered substantive due process an oxymoron, just like ‘green pastel redness’. Some conservatives asked whether abortion rights were conjured out of judicial subjectivity and caprice.Strangely, in retrospect, at the time of Roe v. Wade ...

Oh God, what have we done?

Jackson Lears: The Strange Career of Robert Oppenheimer, 20 December 2012

Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer 
by Ray Monk.
Cape, 818 pp., £30, November 2012, 978 0 224 06262 6
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... the only reason he was feeling better, however. On holiday in Corsica with his Harvard friend John Edsall in spring 1926, he took to reading Proust, and fastened on a passage from A la recherche that released him from his feelings of self-contempt by acknowledging the pervasiveness of human moral frailty – especially the ‘indifference to the ...

The Nominee

Andrew O’Hagan: With the Democrats, 19 August 2004

... sidewalk before slowing to a halt outside the green house at 83 Beals Street, the house where John Kennedy was born. The windows on the ground floor had curtains of Irish lace. ‘That dog has no right to be walking over there,’ said the lady. The young man smiled and snapped his fingers. ‘Dog got no sense of history,’ he said, then he ...

Deliverology

David Runciman: Blair Hawks His Wares, 31 March 2016

Broken Vows: Tony Blair – The Tragedy of Power 
by Tom Bower.
Faber, 688 pp., £20, March 2016, 978 0 571 31420 1
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... doctored dossiers to cavalier disregard for the rule of international law. He quotes General Mike Jackson, who toured Basra in May 2003 after the victory over Saddam. ‘It is startlingly apparent,’ Jackson reported to London, ‘that we are not delivering that which was deemed to be promised and is expected.’ ...

Oops

Ian Stewart, 4 November 1993

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier 
by Bruce Sterling.
Viking, 328 pp., £16.99, January 1993, 0 670 84900 6
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The New Hacker’s Dictionary 
edited by Eric Raymond.
MIT, 516 pp., £11.75, October 1992, 0 262 68079 3
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Approaching Zero: Data Crime and the Computer Underworld 
by Bryan Clough and Paul Mungo.
Faber, 256 pp., £4.99, March 1993, 0 571 16813 2
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... buy The Hacker Crackdown. To continue its Story: on 1 March 1990, the Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games, a computer game publisher that employed 15 people and had an annual turnover of $500,000. It was looking for a ‘handbook of computer crime’, allegedly being published by the company. It took away every item of computing ...

Late Picasso

Nicholas Penny, 20 November 1986

Je suis le Cahier: The Sketchbooks of Picasso 
edited by Arnold Glimcher and Marc Glimcher.
Thames and Hudson, 349 pp., £36, September 1986, 0 500 23461 2
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The Musèe Picasso, Paris: Catalogue of the Collections. Paintings, Papiers Collés, Picture Reliefs, Sculptures, Ceramics 
by Marie-Laure Besnard-Bernadac, Michéle Richet and Hélène Seckel.
Thames and Hudson, 315 pp., £25, October 1986, 0 500 23461 2
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Degas: The Complete Etchings, Lithographs and Monotypes 
by Jean Adhémar and Françoise Cachin.
Thames and Hudson, 290 pp., £25, October 1986, 0 500 09114 5
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... that Picasso, towards the end of his life, became addicted to all-in wrestling on the telly – as John Richardson informs us in the sympathetic account of those years (and brave attempt to defend Picasso’s late work) which appeared in the New York Review of Books on 19 July 1984. However private these sketchbooks were, they reveal, more and more as we ...

His Spittin’ Image

Colm Tóibín: John Stanislaus Joyce, 22 February 2018

... how Stephen Dedalus, disowning his own parent, searches for another father. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy (1923) Just as Oscar Wilde began to become himself the year after his father’s death, when he was 21, and John Butler Yeats managed, figuratively, to kill his son by going into exile in ...

Waving

Anthony Thwaite, 27 October 1988

Stevie Smith: A Critical Biography 
by Frances Spalding.
Faber, 331 pp., £15, October 1988, 0 571 15207 4
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... poems and her nature cropped so that she might be plausibly rendered on stage and screen by Glenda Jackson’. I can see Ricks’s objections to Hugh Whitemore’s film Stevie without entirely sharing them. When Whitemore wrote to me, telling me of his project and asking whether I had anything to contribute, I found the whole notion so unlikely that I ...

At Hyde Park Corner

Jonathan Meades: The Bomber Command Memorial , 25 October 2012

... distended immodesty. His fellow donors include the late Bee Gee Robin Gibb, the mobile phone baron John Caudwell and the pornographer Richard Desmond: their name liveth for evermore all right, prominently, in a niche on the western side of the structure. The memorial to the 55,573 nameless dead airmen of Bomber Command and its few thousand survivors has ...

Reversing the Freight Train

Geoff Mann: The Case for Degrowth, 18 August 2022

Tomorrow’s Economy: A Guide to Creating Healthy Green Growth 
by Per Espen Stoknes.
MIT, 360 pp., £15.99, April, 978 0 262 54385 9
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Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World 
by Jason Hickel.
Windmill, 318 pp., £10.99, February 2021, 978 1 78609 121 5
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Post Growth: Life after Capitalism 
by Tim Jackson.
Polity, 228 pp., £14.99, March 2021, 978 1 5095 4252 9
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The Case for Degrowth 
by Giorgos Kallis, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa and Federico Demaria.
Polity, 140 pp., £9.99, September 2020, 978 1 5095 3563 7
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... bankruptcy of believing that ‘more’ is the same as ‘better’ have an even longer history. John Stuart Mill (among others) argued that humans are best served by a society in which ‘no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.’ More recently, the ...

In Cardiff

Julian Bell: Gillian Ayres, 13 July 2017

... both by Continental tachisme, with its blots and smears, and by Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock at work on his drip paintings. Ayres responded by laying great boards on the floor and splattering them with hardware shop enamel paints in black, sienna, flame red and prussian blue. The high spirits of this experimentation still bubble up ...