Arrayed in Shining Scales

Patricia Lockwood: Solving Sylvia Plath, 10 July 2025

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath 
by Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg.
Faber, 812 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 571 37764 0
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... a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is ...

Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam

Seamus Heaney, 20 August 1981

... was the real cause of Mandelstam’s first arrest a day or two after the face-slapping incident: David had faced Goliath with eight stony couplets in his sling. The Moscow apartment was searched by the secret police, Mandelstam was taken to their headquarters in the Lubianka Prison, interrogated, and sentenced to three years of exile in Cherdyn, where, in a ...

Our Flexible Friends

Conor Gearty, 18 April 1996

Scott Inquiry Report 
by Richard Scott.
HMSO, 2386 pp., £45, February 1996, 0 10 262796 7
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... weight was crushing even for the very finest of its mandarins. The senior Foreign Office official, David Gore-Booth, agreed that answers ‘should be accurate’ but thought that ‘half a picture can be accurate.’ Similarly, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler, thought that it was ‘acceptable in some circumstances for a statement to disclose only part ...

A Nation of Collaborators

Adéwálé Májà-Pearce, 19 June 1997

... their deliberations in September so that Abacha can incorporate their recommendations into a grand blueprint for ‘true independence and sovereignty’, to be announced in his Independence Day address the following month. The list of these visionaries is interesting. Here they all are, the government minister who called Mandela a racist when he objected ...

How the sanity of poets can be edited away

Arnold Rattenbury: The Sanity of Ivor Gurney, 14 October 1999

‘Severn and Somme’ and ‘War’s Embers’ 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £7.95, September 1997, 1 85754 348 3
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80 Poems or So 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by George Walter and R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 148 pp., £9.95, January 1997, 1 85754 344 0
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... And of songs: ‘David of the White Rock’, the ‘Summer Song’ so soft, and that Beautiful tune to which roguish words by Welsh pit boys Are sung – but never more beautiful than here under the ...

The Art of Stealth

Bruce Ackerman: The Supreme Court under Threat, 17 February 2005

... deceiving. Over the past two centuries, the Supreme Court has given very different meanings to the grand abstractions and cryptic formulae of the Constitution, and in doing so has ratified a series of great transformations in American government. From age to age, the court’s decisions have revolutionised the relationships between the presidency and ...

Isn’t that . . . female?

Patricia Lockwood: My Dame Antonia, 20 June 2024

Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories 
by A.S. Byatt.
Vintage, 444 pp., £9.99, November 2023, 978 1 5291 1299 3
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... said. To have in your life a problem play, to have it be a problem play because of your life.As David Mitchell notes in his introduction to this reissue of Medusa’s Ankles, the selected stories are as deep and broad as the three decades they cover, though the ones from Sugar and Other Stories (1987) are the most indispensable. Each is different from the ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... Guardian. He said it would come from journalists he’d worked with there. He was obsessed with David Leigh and Nick Davies, two of the main reporters. ‘Davies is extremely hostile to me,’ Assange said. ‘The Guardian basically double-crossed the organisation in the worst way.’ (The Guardian denies this.) ‘We left them with a cache of cables – to ...

In the Sorting Office

James Meek, 28 April 2011

... who quit Sandd in January, told me that he used to sort mail on his bed. In a café among the grand villas of Bussum, near Hilversum, he handed me the flyer that Sandd put through his door after he resigned, advertising his job: a picture of four smiling white people in Sandd blue, striding down the road with light sheaves of paper, grinning. ‘Keep busy ...

Barely under Control

Jenny Turner: Who’s in charge?, 7 May 2015

... Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then education secretary, David Blunkett, who explained that if sponsors put up £2 million, or 20 per cent of the capital costs, such ‘businesses, individuals, churches or voluntary bodies’ would get ‘considerable freedom over management structures and processes’, and of course a ...

Strange, Angry Objects

Owen Hatherley: The Brutalist Decades, 17 November 2016

A3: Threads and Connections 
by Peter Ahrends.
Right Angle, 128 pp., £18, December 2015, 978 0 9532848 9 4
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Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism 
by Barnabas Calder.
Heinemann, 416 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 0 434 02244 1
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Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945-75 
by Elain Harwood.
Yale, 512 pp., £60, September 2015, 978 0 300 20446 9
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Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings around the World 
by Christopher Beanland.
Frances Lincoln, 192 pp., £18, February 2016, 978 0 7112 3764 3
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This Brutal World 
by Peter Chadwick.
Phaidon, 224 pp., £29.95, April 2016, 978 0 7148 7108 0
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Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th-Century Architecture 
by Nicolas Grospierre.
Prestel, 224 pp., £29.99, February 2016, 978 3 7913 8229 6
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Modernist Estates: The Buildings and the People Who Live in Them 
by Stefi Orazi.
Frances Lincoln, 192 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 0 7112 3675 2
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Architecture an Inspiration 
by Ivor Smith.
Troubador, 224 pp., £24.95, November 2014, 978 1 78462 069 1
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... forces’ such as office space to fund the galleries, ABK nevertheless submitted a design for a grand circus, culminating in a spiky, asymmetrical tower; it had no references to the style of the original gallery (a rather wan classicism), but tried to continue its use of civic, ceremonial approaches. The Prince of Wales, when Ahrends presented the project ...

Poor Dear, How She Figures!

Alan Hollinghurst: Forster and His Mother, 3 January 2013

The Journals and Diaries of E.M. Forster Volumes I-III 
edited by Philip Gardner.
Pickering and Chatto, 813 pp., £275, February 2011, 978 1 84893 114 5
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... a young man were to be heightened by the ‘drive against male vice’ initiated in 1954 under David Maxwell Fyfe as home secretary, whose most notable victim was Lord Montagu, imprisoned for 12 months for homosexual offences. On the Tube, Forster closely observes an ‘enormous young foreigner’. Was he perhaps ‘a Cossack dancer? I would have asked ...

Crocodile’s Breath

James Meek: The Tale of the Tube, 5 May 2005

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City For Ever 
by Christian Wolmar.
Atlantic, 351 pp., £17.99, November 2004, 1 84354 022 3
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... subsidy. The company trying to raise money for the Metropolitan was on the verge of collapse. David Wire, the lord mayor, allowed himself to be persuaded by Pearson – then the Corporation of the City of London’s solicitor – of the case for public transport in the capital, the one that’s still being made today. Wire accepted that something needed ...

Upper and Lower Cases

Tom Nairn, 24 August 1995

A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707 
edited by John Robertson.
Cambridge, 368 pp., £40, April 1995, 0 521 43113 1
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The Autonomy of Modern Scotland 
by Lindsay Paterson.
Edinburgh, 218 pp., £30, September 1994, 0 7486 0525 8
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... of Scottish post-Union society, Jacques Leruez’s L’ Ecosse: une nation sans état (1983) and David McCrone’s Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (1992). He gives a more political twist to these important analyses, attempting what amounts to a general ideological reassessment of post-1707 history: ‘In effect, if not in ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2004, 6 January 2005

... of lost villages and frostbitten fields it gets more and more foggy and like a journey out of Le Grand Meaulnes. It’s all of an hour before we reach the church and everyone has gone in, the undertakers with a policeman looking on just shouldering out the coffin. Since the bill is £40 I feel I need a receipt but while the driver ransacks his cab for pad ...