Diary

Sean Wilsey: Going Slow, 17 July 2008

... beginning his writing career with an account of a hanging in Cotulla for the San Antonio Express. Stephen Crane wandered around with the Chili Queens in the same plaza where the Comanches would ride into town and receive tribute – pay or the town would be burned and looted. This lobby is the setting for a scene from All the Pretty Horses. John Grady Cole ...

Through the Trapdoor

Jeremy Harding: Walter Benjamin’s Last Day, 19 July 2007

The Narrow Foothold 
by Carina Birman.
Hearing Eye, 29 pp., £7, August 2006, 9781905082100
Show More
Show More
... were in contact with the Emergency Rescue Committee set up by Varian Fry, an enigmatic, daring young American who saved the lives of many illustrious figures, including Chagall, Ernst and Arendt. Fittko and Birman don’t appear to have met in 1940. Fittko remained in Marseille long enough to realise that escape via the port was nearly impossible, but she ...

The Concept of ‘Cat Face’

Paul Taylor: Machine Learning, 11 August 2016

... of great subtlety were allegedly revealed to Honinbo Jowa by ghosts, enabling him to defeat his young protégé Intetsu Akaboshi, who after four days of continuous play collapsed and coughed up blood, dying of TB shortly afterwards. Another, the Ear Reddening game, turned on a move of such strength that it caused a discernible flow of blood to the ears of ...
... phase of Confederate commemorations – is more direct: ‘Erected to the memory of the heroes … Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris, who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy, April 13, 1873.’ When EJI arrived in Montgomery there were more than fifty memorials of one sort or another to the glories of the ...

Hare’s Blood

Peter Wollen: John Berger, 4 April 2002

The Selected Essays of John Berger 
edited by Geoff Dyer.
Bloomsbury, 599 pp., £25, November 2001, 0 7475 5419 6
Show More
Show More
... In 1948, Gear, then based in Paris, had exhibited with Réalités Nouvelles and, along with Stephen Gilbert, had also become one of only two British founding members of the CoBrA group, whose significance has been aptly characterised by Chris van der Heijden: ‘in the midst of the darkness of the Cold War the colours of CoBrA take on a special ...

That Wooden Leg

Michael Wood: Conversations with Don Luis, 7 September 2000

An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel 
translated by Garrett White.
California, 266 pp., £17.50, April 2000, 0 520 20840 4
Show More
Show More
... he said. Buñuel attended a school in Zaragoza that sounds at all points identical with the school Stephen Dedalus attends in Dublin in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There is something disingenuous, even mischievous, about this claim, since Buñuel’s religious preoccupations are clearly more firmly anchored than ...

Serious Mayhem

Simon Reynolds: The McLaren Strand, 10 March 2022

The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren: The Biography 
by Paul Gorman.
Constable, 855 pp., £14.99, November 2021, 978 1 4721 2111 0
Show More
Show More
... of the Teddy Boy contingent. He and Westwood relaunched the shop as Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, then as SEX, and then Seditionaries, each incarnation associated with an increasingly confrontational look inspired respectively by motorbike gangs, the bondage and fetish underworld, and the military.McLaren had somehow gone from demanding the ...

The Excursions

Andrew O’Hagan, 16 June 2011

... I asked her.‘Packed,’ she said. ‘The workers and the schoolkids, just by.’‘Where do the young people go for nights out?’ Karl said.She looked at him as if human nature were always biting at her heels. ‘You could go to Glasgow,’ she said, ‘but it would cost you a fortune to get back in a taxi. Even to get to Hamilton costs £22. But there’s ...

Ten Bullets to One, Twenty to Another

Thomas Meaney: Sri Lanka, 2 February 2017

Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World 
by Steven Kemper.
Chicago, 480 pp., £31.50, January 2015, 978 0 226 19907 8
Show More
Tamil: A Biography 
by David Shulman.
Harvard, 416 pp., £25, September 2016, 978 0 674 05992 4
Show More
The Seasons of Trouble: Life amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War 
by Rohini Mohan.
Verso, 368 pp., £16.99, October 2015, 978 1 78168 883 0
Show More
Show More
... Ernest Goonetilleke, the first native governor-general, said. This was a point of pride. Don Stephen Senanayake, the country’s first prime minister, remarked: ‘There has been no rebellion in Ceylon, no non-cooperation movement and no fifth column. We were among the peoples who gave full collaboration while Britain was hard-pressed.’ After ...

Strenuous Unbelief

Jonathan Rée: Richard Rorty, 15 October 1998

Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in 20th-Century America 
by Richard Rorty.
Harvard, 107 pp., £12.50, May 1998, 9780674003118
Show More
Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. III 
by Richard Rorty.
Cambridge, 355 pp., £40, June 1998, 0 521 55347 4
Show More
Show More
... the bad boy of American philosophy, Richard Rorty struck his colleagues as a safe and promising young man. His first book, published in 1967, was an anthology of Essays in Philosophical Method designed to document the reorientations in analytic philosophy that followed Rudolf Carnap’s move from Germany to the US in 1935. Carnap had promoted the cause of ...

The Last London

Iain Sinclair, 30 March 2017

... more than a week old. In his book Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers, the geographer Stephen Graham quotes Hito Steyerl, a German video artist: ‘Many contemporary philosophers have pointed out that the present moment is distinguished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness.’* Call it ground-zero vertigo. Non-specific ...

Strait is the gate

Christopher Hitchens, 21 July 1994

Watergate: The Corruption and Fall of Richard Nixon 
by Fred Emery.
Cape, 448 pp., £20, May 1994, 0 224 03694 7
Show More
The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House 
by H.R. Haldeman.
Putnam, 698 pp., $27.50, May 1994, 0 399 13962 1
Show More
Show More
... in the groves of California): Today, we can look back at this little house and still imagine the young boy sitting by the window of the attic he shared with his three brothers, looking out to a world he could then himself only imagine ... When he became President, he took on challenges here at home on matters from cancer research to environmental ...
... new team have forced the departure of one of its political columnists, the deputy-editor, Hugo Young – a writer any newspaper might be glad to employ. As to what is happening at the Times – well, reading tastes differ: but who could ever have imagined that the Thunderer would seek to entice readers by conducting an up-market bingo game which is ...

The Russians Are Coming

John Lloyd, 11 May 1995

Comrade Criminal: The Theft of the Second Russian Revolution 
by Stephen Handelman.
Joseph, 360 pp., £16.99, September 1994, 0 7181 0015 8
Show More
Crime Without Frontiers: The Worldwide Expansion of Organised Crime and the Pax Mafiosa 
by Clare Sterling.
Little, Brown, 274 pp., £17.50, June 1994, 0 316 91121 6
Show More
Inside Yeltsin’s Russia 
by John Kampfner.
Cassell, 256 pp., £17.99, October 1994, 9780304344635
Show More
A Dishonoured Society 
by John Follain.
Little, Brown, 356 pp., £16.99, February 1995, 0 316 90982 3
Show More
Show More
... year of two Russian colleagues at different ends of the journalistic ladder – Dmitry Kholodov, a young reporter on Moskovsky Komsomolets, killed by a briefcase bomb while investigating corruption in the military; and Vladislav Listyev, killed after he announced that notoriously corrupt advertising practices would be suspended at the main state TV channel ...

Ten Million a Year

David Wallace-Wells: Dying to Breathe, 2 December 2021

... consumption and fossil-fuel burning in the world’s richest countries.The environmental historian Stephen Pyne calls our era the ‘pyrocene’, a global regime of burning: coal and oil, agricultural land and forest, bush and wetland, most of it planned. The Anthropocene, Pyne says, implies dominion over nature. He prefers to emphasise the fact that, wherever ...