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Pissing on Pedestrians

Owen Bennett-Jones: A Great Unravelling, 1 April 2021

Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell 
by John Preston.
Viking, 322 pp., £18.99, February, 978 0 241 38867 9
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... contemptuous of once trusted friends and colleagues. Other great egos of our time – Philip Green and Conrad Black, for example – have had the same problem. Maxwell’s grandiosity reached such a pitch that he told the Mirror’s editor Roy Greenslade that a headline about Russian troops invading Lithuania must be wrong because ‘Gorbachev wouldn’t ...

Degrees of Not Knowing

Rory Stewart: Does anyone know how to govern Iraq?, 31 March 2005

What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building 
by Noah Feldman.
Princeton, 154 pp., £12.95, November 2004, 0 691 12179 6
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Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam’s Iraq 
by Matthew McAllester.
Harper Perennial, 304 pp., $13.95, February 2005, 0 06 058820 9
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The Fall of Baghdad 
by Jon Lee Anderson.
Little, Brown, 389 pp., £20, February 2005, 0 316 72990 6
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The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq 
by Christian Parenti.
New Press, 211 pp., £12.99, December 2004, 1 56584 948 5
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... In January, I sat in the military airport in Kuwait staring at razor wire, tents, humvees and a green plastic portaloo and wondered what it would feel like to land back in Baghdad. I boarded a noisy military transport plane and flew to a gravel wasteland surrounded by razor wire, humvees and brown portaloos. Only the sand in the wind indicated I was in ...

The poet steamed

Iain Sinclair: Tom Raworth, 19 August 2004

Collected Poems 
by Tom Raworth.
Carcanet, 576 pp., £16.95, February 2003, 1 85754 624 5
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Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 
edited by Nate Dorward.
The Gig, 288 pp., £15, March 2003, 0 9685294 3 7
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... Wendy Mulford, John James, with decent selections of Bill Griffiths, Allen Fisher, Douglas Oliver. And glimpses of many others, the reforgotten: John Temple, Anna Mendelssohn. It is a truth, unilaterally acknowledged (Cambridge and environs), that Raworth is the man, the only English poet the Americans read. They like, or liked in the days when lines ...

Reasons to Comply

Philippe Sands: International law, 20 July 2006

The Limits of International Law 
by Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner.
Oxford, 262 pp., £17.99, February 2005, 0 19 516839 9
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War Law: International Law and Armed Conflict 
by Michael Byers.
Atlantic, 214 pp., £16.99, April 2005, 1 84354 338 9
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... such courts in other states. That is a major omission. The ‘life of law has not been logic’, Oliver Wendell Holmes said. ‘It has been experience.’ As a member of Bush’s administration, Goldsmith would have seen first-hand how it took decisions on the US’s international obligations. Unfortunately he does not draw directly on those experiences. It ...

Not a Damn Thing

Nick Laird: In Yeats’s wake, 18 August 2005

Collected Poems 
by Patrick Kavanagh, edited by Antoinette Quinn.
Allen Lane, 299 pp., £25, September 2004, 0 7139 9599 8
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... in 1936 and in May 1937 moved to London, where he was commissioned to write an autobiography, The Green Fool. The book was well received, though a disparaging remark in it caused Oliver St John Gogarty to sue for libel. (Kavanagh had written: ‘I mistook Gogarty’s white-robed maid for his wife – or his mistress. I ...

Hoist that dollymop’s sail

John Sutherland: New Victorian Novels, 31 October 2002

Fingersmith 
by Sarah Waters.
Virago, 549 pp., £12.99, February 2002, 1 86049 882 5
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The Crimson Petal and the White 
by Michel Faber.
Canongate, 838 pp., £17.99, October 2002, 1 84195 323 7
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... of the Minor Club come a couple of swells. ‘Why,’ says Caroline, loud enough to be heard in Green Park, ‘if it ain’t Captain Flashie, VD – I mean VC.’ The swell, a military man with magnificent moustaches, turns to his pal and says, just as loudly: ‘Hoist that dollymop’s sail, Speedicut, and you’ll be pissing fish-hooks for three ...

Wall Furniture

Nicholas Penny: Dickens and Anti-Art, 24 May 2012

... noisy advertising. In front of them some violent encounters of the sort familiar to Mr Jingle and Oliver Twist are being enacted. The print implies that cultural institutions, especially the new National Gallery, are detached from the sordid realities of urban life. The Royal Academy moved into the east wing of Wilkins’s building in 1837 while the National ...

Speaking British

Thomas Jones, 30 March 2000

The Third Woman 
by William Cash.
Little, Brown, 318 pp., £14.99, February 2000, 0 316 85405 0
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Greene on Capri: A Memoir 
by Shirley Hazzard.
Virago, 149 pp., £12.99, January 2000, 1 86049 799 3
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... letter. Cash failed to get permission to quote from Catherine’s letters, partly because her son, Oliver Walston, was at the same time making a documentary about her relationship with Greene, broadcast a month before The Third Woman was published. To make up for that shortcoming, we have plenty of Greene’s leaden poetry: In a plane your hair was blown And ...

Wharton the Wise

D.A.N. Jones, 4 April 1985

The Missing Will 
by Michael Wharton.
Hogarth, 216 pp., £10.95, November 1984, 0 7011 2666 3
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... is a Byronic Luddite, with a sneaking sympathy for Arthur Scargill’s pugnacity; now he is a ‘Green’, a true conservative determined to conserve the land of Britain against the assaults of oil magnates and Mr Buchanan-Smith, the Minister for Energy. (This January he has also twice denounced Macmillan for being soft on Russia: the only politician he has ...

Lamb’s Tails

Christopher Driver, 19 June 1986

All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present 
by Stephen Mennell.
Blackwell, 380 pp., £14.95, October 1985, 0 631 13244 9
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Curye on Inglysch: English Culinary Manuscripts of the 14th Century including ‘The Forme of Cury’ 
edited by Constance Hieatt and Sharon Butler.
Oxford, for the Early English Text Society, 224 pp., £6.50, April 1985, 0 19 722409 1
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The English Cookbook 
by Victor Gordon.
Cape, 304 pp., £12.50, November 1985, 0 224 02300 4
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... media. At this period, one of the 17th century’s better cookery books – apparently the work of Oliver Cromwell’s widow – was published only to be lampooned, and another Civil War widow, Lucy Hutchinson, was constrained to complain of the ‘court caterpillars’ who could present her husband as a life-denier in spite of his affection for music and ...

My Guru

Edward Said: Elegy for Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, 13 December 2001

... One especially hot, slow afternoon in September a young man with a brisk manner, piercing blue-green eyes and a heavy accent came in, asked for tickets, showed me his identity card quickly (I had no chance to see his name, only to register that he was a graduate student), and then, as he was leaving, turned and asked me what I had said my name was. When I ...

Full Tilt

Thomas Jones: Peter Carey, 8 February 2001

True History of the Kelly Gang 
by Peter Carey.
Faber, 352 pp., £16.99, January 2001, 0 571 20987 4
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... whose new project is a study of the criminal mind – Dickens, meanwhile, would have been writing Oliver Twist. While Oates has a very nasty time, largely self-inflicted, Maggs is rescued by a serving girl who brings him to his senses: Maggs should give up on the worthless Phipps and go straight back to his real children in Australia; and he does, taking her ...

Nora Barnacle: Pictor Ignotus

Sean O’Faolain, 2 August 1984

... left Lennox whispered: ‘I did one, she did the other.’) ‘Sir William Orpen’s portrait of Oliver St John Gogarty dressed in his hunting pink. Pure Bronzino. Lennox! Shall we ever forget Firenze in 1913? And the Louuuuvur!’ (At his elbow the serpent’s ‘Pure fake.’) ‘A masterly portrait of poor Paddy Tuohy by Leo Whelan. What a sad end! An ...

Mother One, Mother Two

Jeremy Harding: A memoir, 31 March 2005

... and repressed appetites. And I have no doubt that when I was marched off with Maureen to see Oliver! on the stage, I recognised a little of my absent mother in the character of Nancy. Margaret had suddenly grown up – and she’d become robust. Nancy faded from my imagination, but Maureen never quite gave her up: the strong girl with the heart of gold ...

Yawning and Screaming

John Bayley, 5 February 1987

Jane Austen 
by Tony Tanner.
Macmillan, 291 pp., £20, November 1986, 0 333 32317 3
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... of Mansfield itself. But Jane Austen, who understood so well Mrs Norris and her appetite for green baize, is surely quite happy to present the Crawfords as persons with whom her acquaintance can only be rather distant. She doesn’t know them well, and she doesn’t mind. ‘Let other pens than mine dwell on guilt and misery ... Edmund did cease to care ...

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