The Propitious Rise of Israel’s little Napoleon

Avi Shlaim: Why peace with Syria and the Palestinians is getting closer, 16 September 1999

... crucially important defence portfolio in addition to the premiership, and gave foreign affairs to David Levy, who broke away from the Likud to join the One Israel alliance. A former construction worker of Moroccan origin, Levy speaks no English and it was no doubt thought that his notorious indolence would allow Barak the latitude he wanted to conduct his own ...

Determined to Spin

Susan Watkins, 22 June 2000

The Clear Stream: A Life of Winifred Holtby 
by Marion Shaw.
Virago, 335 pp., £18.99, August 1999, 1 86049 537 0
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... wave of militancy among agricultural workers erupted into a harvest-time strike at Rudston Farm. David Holtby could afford the wage increases: it was the Saturday half-day that he couldn’t stomach. Baffled and defeated, he threw in his hand and sold the farm. Winifred came back from the war to find her parents living in wealthy suburban Cottingham, on the ...

Delays that Kill

Jane Binyon: Rail safety, 16 March 2000

... that new safety controls must reduce efficiency is contestable. This view seems to be shared by David Davies, President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, in his recently published assessment of train protection systems, made in the wake of the Ladbroke Grove crash. ‘ETCS level 3,’ he writes, ‘is the best way ahead: it can offer increased line ...

I was Mary Queen of Scots

Colm Tóibín: Biographical empathy, 21 October 2004

My Heart Is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots 
by John Guy.
Harper Perennial, 574 pp., £8.99, August 2004, 1 84115 753 8
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Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens 
by Jane Dunn.
Harper Perennial, 592 pp., £8.99, March 2004, 9780006531920
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... her sunk eyes a stagnant tearStole forth, unsettled by the shock;But oft the woods renewed their green,Ere the tired head of Scotland’s QueenReposed upon the block!Even poor Swinburne had a try. His ‘Adieux à Marie Stuart’ is not as bad as Brodsky’s poem, but it definitely comes second:But surely though it die or live,    Your face was worthAll ...

Angering and Agitating

Christopher Turner: Freud’s fan club, 30 November 2006

Freud’s Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones 
by Brenda Maddox.
Murray, 354 pp., £25, September 2006, 0 7195 6792 0
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... Britain (an honour Freud, much to Jones’s chagrin, later conferred on Jones’s friend and rival David Eder). He was Freud’s chief administrator and enforcer – he served as president of the International Psychoanalytic Association from 1920 to 1924 and again from 1932 to 1949 – and his most enthusiastic missionary. He did more than anyone to ...

The Old, Bad Civilisation

Arnold Rattenbury: Second World War poetry, 4 October 2001

Selected Poems 
by Randall Swingler, edited by Andy Croft.
Trent, 113 pp., £7.99, October 2000, 1 84233 014 4
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British Writing of the Second World War 
by Mark Rawlinson.
Oxford, 256 pp., £35, June 2000, 0 19 818456 5
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... Brigaders, Trotskyites, Communists, pacifists failed by their tribunals. The playwright David Hare declared recently that working-class conscripts now met ‘the officer class’ for the first time and rebelled; but plenty had met the people issuing orders, at least since Peterloo. Moreover, an Army largely unemployed except in training or retreat ...

The Talk of Carshalton

Rosemary Hill: Pauline Boty’s Presence, 4 July 2024

Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister 
by Marc Kristal.
Frances Lincoln, 256 pp., £25, October 2023, 978 0 7112 8754 9
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Pauline Boty: A Portrait 
by Bridget Boty, Ali Smith, Lynda Nead and Sue Tate.
Gazelli Art House, 110 pp., £40, January, 978 1 8380609 2 3
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... Art Scene in London, which featured several of her paintings. Its curator, the art historian David Alan Mellor, had been fascinated by the subject in general and by Boty in particular since, as a 13-year-old, he saw Ken Russell’s television film Pop Goes the Easel. Shown as part of the arts series Monitor in 1962, it purported to follow a day in the ...

Hey man, we’re out of runway

Christian Lorentzen: Bad Times for Biden, 18 July 2024

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future 
by Franklin Foer.
Penguin, 432 pp., £24, September 2023, 978 1 101 98114 6
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The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House 
by Chris Whipple.
Scribner, 409 pp., £12.99, December 2023, 978 1 9821 0644 7
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The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump 
by Alexander Ward.
Portfolio, 354 pp., £28.99, February, 978 0 593 53907 1
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... to Klain, ‘that there was no way to build a nationwide pluralistic democracy based in Kabul’. David Petraeus and other generals instead convinced Obama to send in tens of thousands of additional troops. On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden promised to pull out US troops and told an interviewer that he would feel ‘zero responsibility’ for what happened ...

All Kinds of Not Much

Chal Ravens: Slacker Daydreams, 10 September 2026

Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984-94 
by Simon Reynolds.
White Rabbit, 456 pp., £23, June, 978 1 3996 1837 3
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... was inspired by the rape and murder of a woman from their native Minnesota, while Seattle grungers Green River adopted the nickname of a femicidal mass murderer.In 1988, Melody Maker’s David Stubbs declared that it had been ‘the best ever year for rock music’, listing 49 bands in evidence. Hardly any of them had ...

The Last London

Iain Sinclair, 30 March 2017

... off-grid?Drifting in a lazy, autopilot trajectory, my own cloud of unknowing, down Bethnal Green Road towards the pop-up shopping hub by the London Overground station at Shoreditch, I register a notice in a window that says: ‘No coffee stored overnight.’ Once upon a time, white vans (for white men) were nervous about their tools and ladders, but ...

Diary

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

... debatable. It’s a shocking story, with one of the victims having been battered almost to death. David Cameron is quick to move in and claim the crime is evidence of ‘a broken society’, conveniently ignoring the fact that Edlington, the village in question, is smack in the middle of what was a mining community, a society systematically broken by Mrs ...

Chop, Chop, Chop

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Grief Is the Thing with Feathers’, 21 January 2016

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers 
by Max Porter.
Faber, 114 pp., £10, September 2015, 978 0 571 32376 0
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... American culture, began to favour the notion of identity being constructed on the basis of wounds. David Kessler, who was Kübler-Ross’s co-author on her last two books, proposes that the same stages are present in every experience of loss, not just death but divorce, moving house and changing jobs. From here it’s not much of a stretch to the Onion story ...

Speak for yourself, matey

Adam Mars-Jones: The Uses of Camp, 22 November 2012

How to Be Gay 
by David Halperin.
Harvard, 549 pp., £25.95, August 2012, 978 0 674 06679 3
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... height,’ he said, ‘and the weight of your chin, I’d recommend a hat with a broader brim.’ David Halperin’s new book, How to Be Gay, addresses the mysterious persistence of discredited elements from pre-Stonewall gay male culture. In theory camp should have been rendered obsolete by the arrival of models of gay behaviour not driven by the old toxic ...

Was Ma Hump to blame?

John Sutherland: Aldous Huxley, 11 July 2002

Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual 
by Nicholas Murray.
Little, Brown, 496 pp., £20, April 2002, 0 316 85492 1
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The Cat's Meow 
directed by Peter Bogdanovich.
April 2002
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... between Sybille Bedford’s thirty-year-old life of Aldous and the awaited definitive biography by David Bradshaw. With the passing of time, Murray can tell us things prohibited to his predecessor by discretion and the libel laws. At the same time, like Murray’s other biographies, this one holds the central ground of its subject very ably and maintains a ...

Pavilion of Heaven

Ferdinand Mount: Adventures of Raffles, 2 April 2026

Raffles, Gentleman Thief 
by E.W. Hornung.
Penguin, 304 pp., £10.99, January, 978 0 241 79022 9
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Writers in Whites: How a Group of Literary Cricketers Changed English Culture 
by Ollie Randall.
Fairfield, 288 pp., £22, May, 978 1 915237 74 3
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... all the dashers over the years, from Gerald du Maurier through John Barrymore and Ronald Colman to David Niven. I particularly enjoyed the Yorkshire TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and genuine nervous tension never ...