The Parliamentary Peloton

Peter Mair: Money and Politics, 25 February 2010

A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal and How to Save Our Democracy 
by Martin Bell.
Icon, 246 pp., £11.99, October 2009, 978 1 84831 096 4
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... Two days after becoming taoiseach in 1979, for example, Haughey approached the property developer Patrick Gallagher to ask for help in clearing his huge debt with Allied Irish Bank. Gallagher gave him £300,000 out of what he later testified was ‘a sense of duty’. Fianna Fáil politicians were not the only ones involved. In his testimony to the Mahon ...

Loaded Dice

Thomas Chatterton Williams: Ta-Nehisi Coates, 3 December 2015

Between the World and Me 
by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Text, 152 pp., £10.99, September 2015, 978 1 925240 70 2
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... within the discipline of sociology on the subject of black culture in the wake of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action and Oscar Lewis’s ‘culture of poverty’ theories, the vast majority of blacks, and especially black youth and those working on the front lines of poverty mitigation, have been ...

Hiatus at 4 a.m.

David Trotter: What scared Hitchcock?, 4 June 2015

Alfred Hitchcock 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Chatto, 279 pp., £12.99, April 2015, 978 0 7011 6993 0
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Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much 
by Michael Wood.
New Harvest, 129 pp., £15, March 2015, 978 1 4778 0134 5
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Hitchcock à la carte 
by Jan Olsson.
Duke, 261 pp., £16.99, March 2015, 978 0 8223 5804 6
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Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, Vol. II 
edited by Sidney Gottlieb.
California, 274 pp., £24.95, February 2015, 978 0 520 27960 5
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... his personality has a direct bearing on his success.’ The most substantial biography to date, by Patrick McGilligan, includes plenty of anecdotes about fear, but supplies little by way of evidence of its ultimate cause, and draws no conclusions. Peter Ackroyd, however, is firmly of the Truffaut school. His Hitchcock trembles from the outset: ‘Fear fell ...

Heathrow to Canary Wharf

Nick Richardson: Crossrail, 11 October 2012

... the city to connect stations on its outskirts via the centre has its origins in the town planner Patrick Abercrombie’s utopian plans for postwar London. For Abercrombie, the Blitz had created an opportunity: we could pack displaced Londoners off to ‘new towns’, plant vegetables where their houses had been, and sink the railways. Blackfriars ...

Diary

Christopher Prendergast: Piss where you like, 17 March 2005

... nationalist cause. The Prendergasts came from Cork, at some point migrating to Dublin slumland. Patrick, my grandfather, married Mary Leonard. Her mother, Granny Leonard, I saw once, at a very great age, wizened and swaddled in a large armchair, surrounded by clan members. She was very small and a republican firebrand. During the uprising, she would ...

Brief Encounters

Andrew O’Hagan: Gielgud and Redgrave, 5 August 2004

Gielgud's Letters 
edited by Richard Mangan.
Weidenfeld, 564 pp., £20, March 2004, 0 297 82989 0
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Secret Dreams: A Biography of Michael Redgrave 
by Alan Strachan.
Weidenfeld, 484 pp., £25, April 2004, 0 297 60764 2
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... beach made me witness to a quite interesting gangbang in which the principal performers were Patrick (and equipage, rather to my surprise) and a German of remarkable handsomeness and Royal physique. I merely held the gloves, as it were, but it was quite interesting en plein air.’ Then it’s on to Spoleto: ‘This place is mad – Festival of Fifty ...

Herberts & Herbertinas

Rosemary Hill: Steven Runciman, 20 October 2016

Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman 
by Minoo Dinshaw.
Penguin, 767 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 0 241 00493 7
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... civil war, but society was lively. Among his compatriots were Osbert Lancaster, Rex Warner and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Maurice Cardiff, the army officer who ran the council temporarily before Runciman arrived, recalls him vividly dealing with his improbable staff as they all gamely muddled through. ‘He had two kinds of yesses, one short, even clipped, was ...

Always the Same Dream

Ferdinand Mount: Princess Margaret, 4 January 2018

Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 423 pp., £16.99, September 2017, 978 0 00 820361 0
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... his behaviour in the later stages of their marriage to that of Jack Manningham, the villain in Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight, who sets out by a series of fiendish tricks to convince his wife that she is mad. Snowdon did actually persuade the princess to visit a psychiatrist.She was in fact perfectly capable of looking after her own interests. She ...

The Right to Murder

Gaby Wood: ‘In a Lonely Place’, 22 March 2018

In a Lonely Place 
by Dorothy B. Hughes.
NYRB, 224 pp., $14.95, August 2017, 978 1 68137 147 4
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In a Lonely Place 
directed by Nicholas Ray.
Criterion Collection, £14.99
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... with her, but I didn’t like her very much.’ As if in homage to Ray’s dislike, his biographer Patrick McGilligan refers to Grahame several times as a ‘sexy blonde actress’, and writes that ‘many of those who knew Grahame considered her a nymphomaniac.’ It wasn’t just those who knew her. In Peter Turner’s succinct, sad memoir, Film Stars ...

Clothes were everything to me

Lisa Cohen: Bill Cunningham, 25 October 2018

Fashion Climbing: A New York Life 
by Bill Cunningham.
Chatto, 256 pp., £16.99, October 2018, 978 1 78474 281 2
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... Rose Cumming, of the purple hair and magnificent display windows; ‘the fascinating Mr [Herman Patrick] Tappé’, another ‘truly original designer’; and Nona Park and Sophie Shonnard of Chez Ninon, the discreet seller of approved reproductions (and modifications) of Paris couture to US society women, who took Cunningham under their wing, brought him ...

Mother Country

Catherine Hall: The Hostile Environment, 23 January 2020

The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment 
by Amelia Gentleman.
Guardian Faber, 336 pp., £18.99, September 2019, 978 1 78335 184 8
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Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation 
by Colin Grant.
Cape, 320 pp., £18.99, October 2019, 978 1 78733 105 1
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Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Become Scapegoats 
by Maya Goodfellow.
Verso, 272 pp., £12.99, November 2019, 978 1 78873 336 6
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... as well as a number of supportive MPs, refugee and migrant centre workers, black activists such as Patrick Vernon, and the Guardian, which gave space to Gentleman’s stories over a long period. Yet despite the scandal, the widespread public shame, the apology and resignation of the home secretary Amber Rudd, and the promise from her replacement Sajid Javid of ...

11 September 1973

Christopher Hitchens: Crimes against Allende, 11 July 2002

Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History 
by Andy Beckett.
Faber, 280 pp., £15.99, May 2002, 0 571 20241 1
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... Spain. (Some distant booms and cannon shots from this episode may be found in the later novels of Patrick O’Brian.) Is it too fanciful to see a common and self-consciously phlegmatic character as well? Chile is divided almost as surely from its continental neighbours, by the spine of the Andes, as is Britain by the Channel. The outlook is maritime: the ...

Caesar wept

Jan-Werner Müller: Trolling the Libs, 4 December 2025

... of post-liberals’ uncertainty about which direction to take was a book called Regime Change by Patrick Deneen, one of Orbán’s great fans and fellow-travellers, which was published in 2023. Deneen, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, had risen to prominence five years earlier after the appearance of his short book, Why Liberalism ...

Fatal Realism

Andrew O’Hagan: Walter Lippmann’s Warning, 25 December 2025

Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography 
by Tom Arnold-Forster.
Princeton, 353 pp., £30, July 2025, 978 0 691 21521 1
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... the problem of representation was ultimately not so much political as epistemological,’ John Patrick Diggins wrote in 1991 in an essay in Political Theory:In Public Opinion, he suggested that the political misinformation plaguing the American people might be corrected by a bureau of experts capable of screening and organising the news to make it more ...

My Darlings

Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007

... and television and on the stage, playing Harry Hope, the irascible bar-owner in The Iceman Cometh. Patrick Magee, who played Slade the anarchist in the same production, said: ‘In a kind of funny way, as we went through rehearsal, Jackie became more and more like Harry Hope – you could actually see it. When he finally did it, it was absolutely ...