Candy-Assed Name

John Mullan: ‘Demon Copperhead’, 16 November 2023

Demon Copperhead 
by Barbara Kingsolver.
Faber, 548 pp., £9.99, May, 978 0 571 37648 3
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... of the adult. But it’s not very much about poverty; it’s more like the vindicating tale of a self-made man. Fleeing the Murdstones, the young David is briefly a penniless child, wandering the roads of Kent, but he is soon rescued by his benevolent aunt. David’s progress up the rungs of the economic ladder corresponds to Dickens’s own: like ...

Short Cuts

James Butler: Radiant Ambiguity, 27 July 2023

... mortgages to collapsing schools and a real-wage death spiral. Its fiscal rules may prove a self-imposed prison. None of this is likely to prevent Labour winning, but there are few certainties about what it will do once it takes office.Starmer’s political statements rarely add up to much or endure for long: the ten moderately left-wing pledges made in ...

A Whiff of Grapeshot

John Foot: Giovanni and Giorgio, 27 July 2023

Politics, Murder and Love in an Italian Family: The Amendolas in the Age of Totalitarianisms 
by Richard Bosworth.
Cambridge, 262 pp., £29.99, February, 978 1 009 28017 4
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... are secondary: memoirs and published letters, as well as scholarly studies and biographies. The self-censorship that characterised the remarks of a leading communist such as Giorgio Amendola is never really examined, though there are hints that his ‘memory’ may have been ‘gilded’. Bosworth tends to take his memoirs, Una scelta di vita (1976) and ...

Diary

Mendez: Bingeing on ‘Drag Race’, 27 July 2023

... grows little crystals in your eyes’ – tells RuPaul that she’ll combine a lip-sync with a ‘self-care tutorial’. Her drag, she explains, pits comedy against the difficulty of living with a chronic illness. The walk-through is often an emotional segment – before the lighter mood of the maxi challenge and runway show – and allows the queens to ...

Coke v. Bacon

Stephen Sedley, 27 July 2023

The Winding Stair 
by Jesse Norman.
Biteback, 464 pp., £20, June, 978 1 78590 792 0
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... to seek power and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self. The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base, and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy ...

Diary

Darcie Fontaine: Florida under DeSantis, 19 October 2023

... a one-off.The adoption of SB 266 and similar bills has resulted, unsurprisingly, in increased self-censorship among professors. A 2021 law (HB 233) allows students to record lectures without the consent of the professor or other students, not only for learning purposes but also to be used as evidence in complaints against the university or for a criminal ...

After the Old Order

Adéwálé Májà-Pearce, 19 October 2023

... speech to the French diplomatic corps in August, Macron sneered at the ‘baroque alliance between self-proclaimed pan-Africans’ on the one hand, and Russian and Chinese ‘neo-imperialists’ on the other, both of whom, he claimed, were stirring up old arguments over sovereignty and colonial exploitation for their own ends. According to Macron, France is ...

Election in Iran

Azadeh Moaveni, 4 July 2024

... food expo at a sprawling complex built by the shah in the 1970s. Sanctions mean that Iran must be self-sufficient in food production and the sector is flourishing, despite 40 per cent inflation. Now the Russians are coming in search of gum, soap, tomato paste, laundry detergent. Dozens of halls were filled with stands for more than seven hundred Iranian ...

Bears in Awe

Jordan Kisner: Lauren Groff’s ‘The Vaster Wilds’, 4 July 2024

The Vaster Wilds 
by Lauren Groff.
Hutchinson Heinemann, 256 pp., £20, September 2023, 978 1 5291 5290 6
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... see something now moving beneath the everyday, the daily, the grey and oppressive stuff of the self, something more like an intricate geometry that lived beneath the surface of the material world. And this swift and gorgeous and too-rare strike to the heart was just like when one of the goldsmith’s apprentices beat and beat at a tiny lump of gold until ...

Short Cuts

Tom White: A Bridge across the Humber, 4 December 2025

... viable electoral vehicle for the left and criticised Gott’s candidacy as ill-thought out and self-indulgent.As election day approached, Labour dispatched MPs and ministers to Hull, including Tony Benn, Tony Crosland, George Brown and James Callaghan. The newly appointed minister for transport, Barbara Castle, spoke at a meeting on 18 January. The story ...

Carrion and Earth

Niamh Gallagher: Ireland’s Great Famine, 20 November 2025

Rot: A History of the Irish Famine 
by Padraic X. Scanlan.
Little, Brown, 340 pp., £25, March 2025, 978 1 4721 4687 8
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... of Irish labourers. The policy reflected a moral belief that aid should promote self-reliance and distinguish the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ poor. As Trevelyan explained, ‘Our plan is not to give the meal away, but to sell it.’By March 1847 public works schemes employed more than 700,000 people, whose wages supported ...

Where the Power Is

James Vincent: Planet Phosphorus, 14 August 2025

White Light: The Elemental Role of Phosphorus – in Our Cells, in Our Food and in Our World 
by Jack Lohmann.
Oneworld, 288 pp., £18.99, April, 978 1 83643 087 2
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... by a worker on the island. They contained 2116 reports of harassment, sexual abuse, assault, self-harm and suicide attempts, with more than half of the incidents involving children. A worker for Human Rights Watch who interviewed detainees reported: ‘A woman who misses her husband in Australia carves his name into her chest with a knife. A girl writes ...

An Anchor and a Cross

Em Hogan: Tattoo Me, 6 November 2025

Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art 
by Matt Lodder.
Yale, 224 pp., £25, November 2024, 978 0 300 26939 0
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... the course of his life, he extensively documented his thousands of sexual encounters in a self-declared Stud File … He even tattooed a handy series of measurement marks on his forearm in order to accurately record the particular prowess of each of his partners for posterity … ‘I wanted freedom,’ he described later. ‘[Tattooing] was a grand ...

You must do something

Randall Kennedy: John Lewis fights for freedom, 23 October 2025

John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community 
by Raymond Arsenault.
Yale, 558 pp., £25, February 2024, 978 0 300 28181 1
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John Lewis: A Life 
by David Greenberg.
Simon and Schuster, 704 pp., $23, October 2024, 978 1 9821 4300 8
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... had characterised the organisation’s activism, winning it grudging admiration, degenerated into self-indulgence and sloganeering. Weeks after Lewis lost the vote, Carmichael electrified racial politics with a call and response routine in Greenwood, Mississippi in which he and his African American audience took turns in shouting ‘Black Power’. He thereby ...

Diary

Armando Ledezma: In Venezuela, 9 July 2026

... than any government body, in part because it is still motivated largely by ideology rather than self-interest.The day before I left La Guajira, as a delayed celebration for my birthday, José organised a trip to Playa Castilletes, the peninsula’s most beautiful beach. We picked up groceries, gasoline and passengers and drove north, crossing a long row of ...