Prince Charming: A Memoir 
by Christopher Logue.
Faber, 340 pp., £20, September 1999, 9780571197682
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... fact that he has never had a job, never wanted to ‘settle’ until late in life, never felt at home in his own perfectly respectable middle-class family and home. These are the themes of this autobiography. I didn’t really know Logue when I asked him to that lunch, didn’t realise how strongly he must have felt, as he ...

Infidels

Malise Ruthven, 2 June 1983

The Helen Smith Story 
by Paul Foot and Ron Smith.
Fontana, 418 pp., £1.95, February 1983, 0 00 636536 1
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... on forbidden infidel activities, providing no Saudis are ‘corrupted’. Europeans may brew their home-made hooch, and discreetly indulge in extra-marital sex, so long as they remain in their hotel rooms or compounds, though technically these are crimes punishable by imprisonment, flogging or worse. When Abdul Aziz became king after conquering the Hejaz in ...

Diary

Frank Field: Reading Kilroy-Silk’s Diary, 6 November 1986

... book just how often he is talking to his supporters on the phone – presumably from his Berkshire home or from the Commons. Although even now he doesn’t appear to notice the fact, the diary records one of Kilroy’s major tactical errors. Late in his account he boasts of agreeing to have a TV film made about his reselection battle. The film left it unclear ...

Matully

Sidharth Bhatia, 13 February 1992

No Full Stops in India 
by Mark Tully.
Viking, 352 pp., £16.99, November 1991, 0 670 81919 0
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... to their ghetto, made up mainly of diplomats, which gave them access to the essentials from back home – breakfast cereals and Coca Cola among them. I remember the wife of the correspondent of a well-known news magazine who had brought with her a three-month supply of toilet paper because she had been told it was not available in India. The ignorance does ...

The Lie-World

James Wood: D.B.C. Pierre, 20 November 2003

Vernon God Little 
by D.B.C. Pierre.
Faber, 279 pp., £10.99, January 2003, 0 571 21642 0
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... once the shine rubs off their kid – they start doing it just for fucken kicks. Vernon’s home-town, Martirio, is a biliously ignorant place, populated by obese women, coarse cowboys, leather-lunged pastors with strapping voices, slow-witted deputies, and the like. Its chief attraction seems to be the local restaurant, the Bar-B-Chew Barn, a name ...

Iniquity in Romford

Bernard Porter: Black Market Britain, 23 May 2013

Black Market Britain 1939-55 
by Mark Roodhouse.
Oxford, 276 pp., £65, March 2013, 978 0 19 958845 9
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... Britons on the home front in the Second World War bore the sacrifices the war imposed on them without too much complaint. In particular they accepted the need for market controls and rationing, which were intended to constrain the demand for precious consumables, ensure their quality and allow them to be shared out equally ...

The Magic Trousers

Matt Foot: Police Racism, 7 February 2019

Behind the Blue Line: My Fight against Racism and Discrimination in the Police 
by Gurpal Virdi.
Biteback, 299 pp., £20, March 2018, 978 1 78590 321 2
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... called by far-right groups to take place and told the local Asian community to stay at home. In August 2015 Mushin Ahmed, an 81-year-old imam, was viciously attacked by racists; one kick left the imprint of the sole of a trainer on his face. A few weeks after his death yet another racist demonstration was called. The police allowed the march to ...

At Pallant House

Rosemary Hill: On Dora Carrington, 3 April 2025

... they are well discussed in the catalogue by Ariane Banks in her chapter on ‘Carrington at Home’ and the design of the show recreates some of the trompe l’oeil effects at which Carrington excelled. There is an illusionary bookcase made for Lytton, its titles cut and pasted from other volumes to create such suggestive chimeras as ‘...

Crocodile’s Breath

James Meek: The Tale of the Tube, 5 May 2005

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City For Ever 
by Christian Wolmar.
Atlantic, 351 pp., £17.99, November 2004, 1 84354 022 3
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... company trying to raise money for the Metropolitan was on the verge of collapse. David Wire, the lord mayor, allowed himself to be persuaded by Pearson – then the Corporation of the City of London’s solicitor – of the case for public transport in the capital, the one that’s still being made today. Wire accepted that something needed to be done to ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... the system of justice in England? Some years earlier, in a judgment in the Birmingham Six case, Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, had summed up the broader significance of such a reversal. If the six men win, it will mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they were guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were involuntary and ...

William Rodgers reads the papers

William Rodgers, 19 February 1987

The Market for Glory: Fleet Street Ownership in the 20th Century 
by Simon Jenkins.
Faber, 247 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 571 14627 9
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The End of the Street 
by Linda Melvern.
Methuen, 276 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 413 14640 5
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... The brothers Harmsworth launched the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror while Scott was wrestling with Home Rule for Ireland and the Boer War. Later, as Lords Northcliffe and Rothermere, their proprietorial arrogance and political manoeuvring became a legend. As Scott approached retirement, Lord Beaverbrook was making the Daily ...

Say what you will about Harold

Christopher Hitchens, 2 December 1993

Wilson: The Authorised Life 
by Philip Ziegler.
Weidenfeld, 593 pp., £20, September 1993, 0 297 81276 9
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... care to mention one – even one – attainment of the Wilson period that could bear comparison?Lord Melbourne’s over-used but pungent observation about the Order of the Garter, that he liked it because there was ‘no damned merit in it’, is very necessary for any consideration or reconsideration of the Wilson phenomenon. If he represented anything at ...

One of the Pyramids of Egypt

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 27 May 1999

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment 
by Isobel Grundy.
Oxford, 680 pp., £30, April 1999, 0 19 811289 0
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... human personality, Orlando catches far more of Lady Mary than her travels east or her quarrels at home. As with Orlando, the difficulty of knowing her is compounded by gaps and contradictions in the record. Though it was not true, as Lady Mary once claimed, that she ‘never printed a single line in my Life’, both her class and her sex fed her profound ...

Fighting Men

D.A.N. Jones, 2 February 1984

Ring of Truth 
by Vernon Scannell.
Robson, 342 pp., £8.95, November 1983, 0 86051 244 4
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The Tiger and the Rose: An Autobiography 
by Vernon Scannell.
Robson, 197 pp., £8.95, November 1983, 0 86051 221 5
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Man of War 
by John Masters.
Joseph, 314 pp., £8.95, November 1983, 0 7181 2360 3
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The Notebook of Gismondo Cavalletti 
by R.M. Lamming.
Cape, 248 pp., £7.95, November 1983, 0 224 02141 9
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The Rape of Shavi 
by Buchi Emecheta.
Ogwugwu Afor, 178 pp., £7.95, November 1983, 0 9508177 1 6
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Thomas Lyster: A Cambridge Novel 
by David Wurtzel.
Brilliance, 215 pp., £7.95, November 1983, 0 946189 30 7
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Don’t Swing a Cat 
by Eva Bolgar.
Bachman and Turner, 143 pp., £7.50, November 1983, 0 85974 098 6
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... first British poet to have been keen on boxing and, apparently, quite good at it: we may think of Lord Byron and Robert Graves. But few others, surely, have written and worried so concernedly about the ethics of this sport, its moral justification. Ring of Truth, his first novel since The Big Time in 1965, returns hungrily to Scannell’s old problem. Can ...

Victors’ Justice

Alan Donagan, 16 February 1984

Justice at Nuremberg 
by Robert Conot.
Weidenfeld, 593 pp., £15, October 1983, 0 297 78360 2
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The Nuremberg Trial 
by Ann Tusa and John Tusa.
Macmillan, 519 pp., £12.95, October 1983, 0 333 27463 6
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... how. From 1942, according to the Tusas, the British Government and bureaucracy had concluded (the Lord Chancellor, Simon, scrupling half-heartedly) that the major war criminals should not be tried, but put to death by executive action. Much was made of the precedent of the relegation of Napoleon to St Helena by a decision of the Congress of Vienna. The Tusas ...