Dark Strangers, Gorgeous Slums

Philip Horne, 16 March 1989

Off the Rails: Memoirs of a Train Addict 
by Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
Bloomsbury, 193 pp., £12.95, January 1989, 0 7475 0011 8
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The Marble Mountain, and Other Stories 
by Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
Cape, 126 pp., £10.95, January 1989, 9780224025973
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The Bathroom 
by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, translated by Barbara Bray.
Boyars, 125 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 7145 2880 3
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Motherland 
by Timothy O’Grady.
Chatto, 230 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 7011 3341 4
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A Lesser Dependency 
by Peter Benson.
Macmillan, 146 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 333 49093 2
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... nothing can console us, when we think it over.’ Even in his favourite ice-cream sundae, a ‘white lady’, the hero has found an emblem of disintegration. I watched the white lady melting. Watched the vanilla melt imperceptibly under the topping of hot chocolate. Watched the scoop of ice-cream, almost perfectly round ...

Undertellers

Walter Nash, 18 February 1988

The Panda Hunt 
by Richard Burns.
Cape, 189 pp., £10.95, August 1987, 0 224 02445 0
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Davy Chadwick 
by James Buchan.
Hamish Hamilton, 145 pp., £9.95, September 1987, 0 241 12115 9
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Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris 
by Mavis Gallant.
Cape, 196 pp., £10.95, August 1987, 0 224 02426 4
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Black Idol 
by Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
Cape, 157 pp., £9.95, September 1987, 9780224024372
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... hunter who is planning an expedition to China to track down ‘a special kind of black and white bear’. Hamilton takes an immediate fancy to Edmund. ‘You remind me of Chingachgook’ he announces, not altogether plausibly. (Edmund comments, even less plausibly: ‘Chingachgook, the Last of the Mohicans, is actually pronounced Chicago by those in ...

Can Maynard Keynes do it?

Peter Clarke, 3 June 1982

The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Vol. XIX. Activities 1924-9: The Return to Gold and Industrial Policy 
edited by Sir Austin Robinson and Donald Moggridge.
Macmillan, 468 pp., £40, October 1981, 0 333 10727 6
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The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Vol. XX. Activities 1929-31: Rethinking Employment and Unemployment Policies 
edited by Sir Austin Robinson and Donald Moggridge.
Macmillan, 675 pp., £20, December 1981, 0 333 10721 7
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The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Vol. XXI. Activities 1931-9: 
edited by Sir Austin Robinson and Donald Moggridge.
Macmillan, 645 pp., £20, March 1982, 0 333 10728 4
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... the 1929 Election. In response, the Conservative Government took the unusual step of issuing a White Paper, outlining the Treasury’s objections. When Keynes in turn reviewed this publication, he took particular exception to the way it concluded with the bland contention that the root cause of unemployment lay in the high money costs of ...

Freaks of Empire

V.G. Kiernan, 16 July 1981

Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the 15th Century to the 1780s 
by Angus Calder.
Cape, 916 pp., £16.50, April 1981, 0 224 01452 8
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... the Red Indians of eastern America: no feeble moribund race, Calder insists – in resisting the white man ‘their tenacity, if tragic, was remarkable.’ A sanguinary episode was ‘King Philip’s War’, in 1675, after which those of his followers who survived were sold into slavery, whether they had taken up arms or not, in the West Indies or ...

Ikonography

Keith Kyle, 4 July 1985

Eisenhower. Vol. I: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect 1890-1952 Vol. II: The President 1952-1969 
by Stephen Ambrose.
Allen and Unwin, 637 pp., £12.50, February 1984, 0 04 923073 5
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Ike’s Letters to a Friend: 1941-1958 
edited by Robert Griffith.
Kansas, 211 pp., $19.95, October 1984, 0 7006 0257 7
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... candidate from the minute that the war ended with himself as the national hero and the White House occupied by the then little-regarded Harry Truman. But it was 1952 before he decided he was a Republican and was willing to be pushed. The drive to nominate Eisenhower for the Republican Party came from those who thought the Democrats bound to lose ...

Ruin it your own way

Susan Pedersen, 4 June 2020

Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution 
by Selina Todd.
Chatto, 304 pp., £18.99, August 2019, 978 1 78474 082 5
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A Taste of Honey 
by Shelagh Delaney.
Methuen, 112 pp., £14.44, November 2019, 978 1 350 13495 9
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... voices; Salford’s city fathers complained that she was bringing their city into disrepute; Richard Hoggart, whose landmark study of working-class culture, The Uses of Literacy, had appeared the previous year, objected that Delaney’s characters were ‘not typical’ of the working class. Very tall, striking and photogenic, Delaney found herself ...

He blinks and night is day

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Light Perpetual’, 17 June 2021

Light Perpetual 
by Francis Spufford.
Faber, 336 pp., £16.99, February, 978 0 571 33648 7
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... dressing? Val, the friend of British nationalists, of course.There aren’t enough members of the white race’s vanguard for the uniforms to come from a factory. They have to be home-made. The blue BM crossed-circle came as a machine-embroidered patch, but she was the one who had to get it to work on a khaki shirt, who had to make the jacket and the ...

On Trying to Be Portugal

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Zionist Terrorism, 6 August 2009

‘A Senseless, Squalid War’: Voices from Palestine 1945-48 
by Norman Rose.
Bodley Head, 278 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 0 224 07938 9
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Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War against Jewish Terrorism 1945-48 
by David Cesarani.
Heinemann, 290 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 0 434 01844 4
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... semitic peoples’, as Magnes called it, though he too expected large-scale Jewish immigration. Richard Crossman, who was a member of the commission, concluded that Magnes ‘represented nothing real in Palestine’. This was sadly confirmed by Hourani’s saying that a binational state could work only ‘if a certain spirit of co-operation and trust exists ...

Rain, Blow, Rustle

Nick Richardson: John Cage, 19 August 2010

No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage’s 4'33" 
by Kyle Gann.
Yale, 255 pp., £16.99, April 2010, 978 0 300 13699 9
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... Depression, convinced his future lay in music. In 1933 he sent a clarinet sonata to the pianist Richard Buhlig who, impressed by its maturity, sent it on to the composer Henry Cowell, then a major figure in the American avant-garde and an outspoken advocate of non-Western musical traditions. He liked the piece enough to include it in a concert programme and ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Thatcher in Gravesend, 9 May 2013

... front, a smokescreen for whatever villainy went on in the back room. There were yards of heaped white goods, damaged and dripping acid, being made ready, so I was told, for export to Nigeria. Fleets of cars with dubious paperwork were being sliced and reattached by the crusher’s equivalent of Dr Frankenstein’s scalpel. Otherwise, the only action came ...

Diary

Jeremy Harding: The Late Jonas Savimbi, 21 March 2002

... when the tide was turning against the values of the ‘free world’, which in those days meant white minority rule. The MPLA was strictly a Marxist-Leninist movement with a non-starter economic policy and, as time went on, a penchant for self-enrichment. Like Islam and Christianity in many parts of Africa, Marxism-Leninism was a malleable ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: Reform’s Disaster Capitalism, 25 September 2025

... October 2021. The party was polling in the low single digits. Only a few hundred people turned up. Richard Tice, who had replaced Nigel Farage as leader seven months earlier, had chosen to hold the event on the same day – and in the same city, Manchester – as the Conservative Party Conference. He hired a battle bus with a sound system to drive past the ...

Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings

Jerry Fodor: The Case against Natural Selection, 18 October 2007

... it can’t. Hence the current perplexity. History might reasonably credit Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin as the first to notice that something may be seriously wrong in this part of the wood. Their 1979 paper, ‘The Spandrels of S. Marco and The Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’, ignited an argument about the ...

Our Man

Perry Anderson: The Inglorious Career of Kofi Annan, 10 May 2007

The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power 
by James Traub.
Bloomsbury, 442 pp., £20, November 2006, 0 7475 8087 1
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Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in a World of War 
by Stanley Meisler.
Wiley, 384 pp., £19.99, January 2007, 978 0 471 78744 0
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... single abstention. Unanimity was secured, but a hitch arose at the next stage. The French told the White House that while they could not accept a second Security Council resolution explicitly authorising an attack on Iraq, which would implicate them, they had no objection to a US invasion based on an American interpretation of 1441 – the course that Cheney ...

She shall be nameless

Nicholas Spice: Marlen Haushofer, 18 December 2014

The Wall 
by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Shaun Whiteside.
Quartet, 211 pp., £12, June 2013, 978 0 7043 7311 2
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Nowhere Ending Sky 
by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Amanda Prantera.
Quartet, 178 pp., £12, June 2013, 978 0 7043 7207 8
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The Loft 
by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Amanda Prantera.
Quartet, 173 pp., £12, May 2011, 978 0 7043 7313 6
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... by a housewife. As a way of clearing her mind, a woman makes use of a weekend when her husband, Richard, is away, to set down on paper what has been happening over the previous months. Stella, a teenager, just out of high school, comes to stay as a guest of the family. Under the eyes of his wife, Richard seduces ...