Handbooks

Valerie Pearl, 4 February 1982

The Shell Guide to the History of London 
by W.R. Dalzell.
Joseph, 496 pp., £12.50, July 1981, 0 7181 2015 9
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... in 1764. Woodcut illustrations, scanty before the 19th century, can be found as early as 1681 in Richard Burton’s Historical Remarques. The great age of the London guidebook began, however, in the middle of the 19th century, as David Webb has shown in the London Journal (1980, No 2). One important development illustrates nicely that odd relationship ...

Diary

Rose George: In the New Beirut, 23 January 2003

... with fresh tree stumps. ‘We cut them down,’ a guard says. ‘There was a delegation wearing white suits. They didn’t want to get them dirty.’ When you have a country to rebuild maybe heritage is indulgence. Or maybe it’s something else. Beirut’s architects talk about ‘collective amnesia’: building over unpleasant history is the best way of ...

Hindsight Tickling

Christopher Tayler: Disappointing sequels, 21 October 2004

The Closed Circle 
by Jonathan Coe.
Viking, 433 pp., £17.99, September 2004, 0 670 89254 8
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... object of Michael’s affections complains that he’s ‘too dogmatic’, too ‘black and white’), while the tragi-farcical ending collapses the different levels of reality in a surprising and effective way. In The House of Sleep, on the other hand, a kinky, right-wing mad scientist rubs shoulders with more plausible cast members for no particular ...

Short Cuts

Tom Hickman: Outside Appointments, 15 August 2024

... served in a number of ministerial roles before losing his seat in 2019; and the attorney general, Richard Hermer KC, a barrister appointed from full-time practice at Matrix Chambers.The published list of ministerial appointments included an asterisk against the outsiders’ names with a footnote recording that the king intended to confer on each a peerage for ...

Not No Longer but Not Yet

Jenny Turner: Mark Fisher’s Ghosts, 9 May 2019

k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 
edited by Darren Ambrose.
Repeater, 817 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 1 912248 28 5
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... anachronistic, antiqued model of “good literature”’; he quoted the naturalist Richard Mabey, who, like Fisher, had known and loved that coast for years. To read Sebald, according to Mabey, was to watch the belittlement of ‘a very close friend’.Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was published towards the ...

A Hit of Rus in Urbe

Iain Sinclair: In Lea Valley, 27 June 2002

... major blight, a steady stream of ‘I-Spy’ water fowl. Fish corpses (nothing more exciting than white-bellied carp). I think we can assume that we have penetrated the Lea Valley’s recreational zone. Boats. Wet suits. Easy access to the North Circular Road, the broken link of an earlier orbital fantasy. This border is marked by a permanent pall of thick ...

Higher Ordinariness

Jonathan Meades: Poor Surrey, 23 May 2024

Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 
by Gavin Stamp.
Profile, 568 pp., £40, March, 978 1 80081 739 5
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The Buildings of England: Surrey 
by Charles O’Brien, Ian Nairn and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 854 pp., £60, November 2022, 978 0 300 23478 7
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... again, and Betjeman and Pevsner, whose antipathies were more convergent than is claimed). Dazzling white walls, streamlining, vitrolite, green window frames, green pantiles (often blue in Bournemouth). Among its most satisfying examples – i.e. the gaudiest – were apartment blocks at Pinner, Muswell Hill, Smithfield, Highgate. They are the décor of film ...

No Beast More Refined

James Davidson: How Good Was Nureyev?, 29 November 2007

Rudolf Nureyev: The Life 
by Julie Kavanagh.
Fig Tree, 787 pp., £25, September 2007, 978 1 905490 15 8
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... man’. Clara Saint, however, spoke to the French border police, one of whom happened to be a White Russian. Plain-clothed officers took up position close to where Nureyev was sitting with his minders. All he had to do was go up to them and ask for freedom, which he duly did. There was a brief tug-of-war, with Nureyev in the middle, until the French ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...