Salt Spray

Ferdinand Mount: When Britannia Ruled the Waves, 5 December 2024

The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1815-1945 
by N.A.M. Rodger.
Allen Lane, 934 pp., £40, October 2024, 978 0 7139 9412 4
Show More
Show More
... that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy (2013), but these shorter works concentrate on high power politics rather than the inner workings of the Royal ...

Kippers and Champagne

Daniel Cohen: Barclay and Barclay, 3 April 2025

You May Never See Us Again: The Barclay Dynasty – A Story of Survival, Secrecy and Succession 
by Jane Martinson.
Penguin, 336 pp., £10.99, October 2024, 978 1 4059 5890 5
Show More
Show More
... houses into hotels. In 1964 they bought a terraced house in Paddington, which became the Hyde Park North Hotel; by the end of the 1970s they had opened fifteen hotels.Their ascent wasn’t without setbacks. In 1960 Frederick and a younger brother, Douglas, who ran a sweet shop together in Shepherd’s Bush, were declared bankrupt after failing to pay their ...

Where are we now?

LRB Contributors: Responses to the Referendum, 14 July 2016

... for people like them, and how much the discipline of the euro is responsible for driving them north. No lessons in the mechanics of wage suppression or Deutsche Bundesbank’s anti-Keynesianism are needed.It is one thing, however, to have an optimistic (or pessimistic) view of capitalism’s ability to weather the storm blowing from working-class ...

Good New Idea

John Lanchester: Universal Basic Income, 18 July 2019

... including Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a moment.Guy Standing is a long-standing member of BIEN, the Basic Income Earth Network, which, since its ...

The Habit of War

Jeremy Harding: Eritrea, 20 July 2006

I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation 
by Michela Wrong.
Harper Perennial, 432 pp., £8.99, January 2005, 0 00 715095 4
Show More
Unfinished Business: Ethiopia and Eritrea at War 
edited by Dominique Jacquin-Berdal and Martin Plaut.
Red Sea, 320 pp., $29.95, April 2005, 1 56902 217 8
Show More
Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa 
edited by Robert Rotberg.
Brookings, 210 pp., £11.99, December 2005, 0 8157 7571 7
Show More
Show More
... from the cities and the land as cannon fodder for the Eritreans, who had been driven back into the north of the territory to a wilderness of mountain and mostly unserviceable plain, which they held against one full-dress Soviet-style military campaign and then another. By the mid to late 1980s, it was possible to stand in an Eritrean frontline trench and watch ...

The Killing of Blair Peach

David Renton, 22 May 2014

... Tomlinson’s death encouraged Peach’s family to ask again for the Cass Report to be released. Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, agreed to do so. The inquest into Tomlinson’s death resulted in a verdict of unlawful killing, which made possible the criminal prosecution for manslaughter of PC Simon Harwood. (He was acquitted.) The ...

Jottings, Scraps and Doodles

Adam Shatz: Lévi-Strauss, 3 November 2011

Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory 
by Patrick Wilcken.
Bloomsbury, 375 pp., £30, November 2011, 978 0 7475 8362 2
Show More
Show More
... teach at the New School for Social Research in New York. In March 1941, he boarded the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle along with 350 other ‘undesirables’, among them Victor Serge, who described the ship as ‘a kind of floating concentration camp’. Lévi-Strauss found the ascetic Serge unapproachable, but while docked in Casablanca he struck up a lasting ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... appreciative of language. The colours were too bright perhaps.7 March. Read and enjoy Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts about the lure of in-between places and the edges of cities and other communities. I feel I was on to this years ago in my play The Old Country, when Hilary, a spy in the Foreign Office, describes the venues where he met ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2010, 16 December 2010

... proud when they have a Piper window, the latest (and no more pleasing than the rest) glimpsed at Paul Scofield’s memorial service in St Margaret’s, Westminster. For all that, though, the book is immensely readable, drawing together so many strands of the artistic life in the 1930s and 1940s – K. Clark, Ben Nicholson, Betjeman and all the stuff to do ...

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
Show More
Show More
... chemistry and then physics, and also took a seminar (only one other student enrolled) with Alfred North Whitehead on the Principia Mathematica, which Whitehead had written with Bertrand Russell twenty years earlier. However, once Oppenheimer had decided on physics he was champing at the bit to be ‘near the centre’ of the discipline. In the Anglophone ...

Sex on the Roof

Patricia Lockwood, 6 December 2018

Evening in Paradise: More Stories 
by Lucia Berlin.
Picador, 256 pp., £14.99, November 2018, 978 1 5098 8229 8
Show More
Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs 
by Lucia Berlin.
Picador, 160 pp., £12.99, November 2018, 978 1 5098 8234 2
Show More
Show More
... in men in question???’ I wrote shriekingly in the margin. A few months​ later she married Paul Suttman, a sculptor so devoted to aesthetics that he told Lucia she was asymmetrical the first time she undressed for him. (She was diagnosed with scoliosis at the age of ten.) He chose forks with only two tines, ‘so it was difficult to eat ...

Somerdale to Skarbimierz

James Meek, 20 April 2017

... neck. He was a small man with a folksy didacticism and a strong resemblance to the late magician Paul Daniels. He sat at the head of a long table. In front of him was a copy of the daily Rzeczpospolita with a picture of Theresa May on the front page. It was mid-January and May had just made her speech declaring that Britain, as part of leaving the ...

Stuck on the Flypaper

Frances Stonor Saunders: The Hobsbawm File, 9 April 2015

... were permanently monitored. Product received from these listening devices was codenamed Source North. The transcription centre was known as the Gristery, after its formidable supervisor Evelyn Grist, remembered by Cornwell as a kind of Madame Blavatsky who, together with a stuffed owl, guarded the arcane mysteries of her sanctum. The actual recording was ...

Central Bankism

Edward Luttwak, 14 November 1996

... candidacy for any position of special trust eagerly accepted, their very names talismanic, as with Paul Volcker in Wall Street and far beyond it, or Guido Carli in Italy, where the name of most past prime ministers evokes only opprobrium. Because their own power derives largely from their supreme command of the crusade against the devil of inflation, central ...

Pint for Pint

Thomas Laqueur: The Price of Blood, 14 October 1999

Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce 
by Douglas Starr.
Little, Brown, 429 pp., £20, February 1999, 0 316 91146 1
Show More
Show More
... to become the unwitting subjects of medical observation in the notorious Tuskegee experiment; Paul Goodman’s Of One Blood (the phrase is from Acts 17.26), about the abolitionist response to St Paul’s pronouncement that the whole human race has a common origin; Barbara Ehrenreich’s Blood Rites, about the origins of ...