... black novel, no Jewish novel and certainly no gay novel, although a black Caribbean writer such as Patrick Chamoiseau can win the Goncourt and many French writers have been Jewish or homosexual or both. In Britain the situation seems to be located somewhere between the extremes represented by the US and France. High culture in general and gay culture in ...

In the Multiverse

Jessica Olin: What Knox did next, 9 October 2025

Free: My Search for Meaning 
by Amanda Knox.
Headline, 283 pp., £22, March, 978 1 0354 2815 1
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The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox 
produced by K.J. Steinberg.
Disney+, August
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... up to Kercher’s murder; her brutal interrogation; her confession, in which she implicated Patrick Lumumba, the Black owner of the bar where she worked; the two years she spent in prison before trial; her conviction, appeal and eventual acquittal. Before the book’s publication, the press questioned the value of Knox writing about her own ...

Bloody Sunday Report

Murray Sayle: Back to Bloody Sunday, 11 July 2002

... doctor put a wound dressing on me. I was never searched. I don’t know why they shot me.’2. Patrick Campbell, 53, docker: ‘I was running away from the Saracens when I was hit in the back. I never saw who hit me – I suppose it was the soldiers because they were running after me. No one else was firing.’3. Alex Nash, 52, unemployed painter: ‘I saw ...

The Common Law and the Constitution

Stephen Sedley, 8 May 1997

... requires them to be members of either House: in recent decades at least two individuals – Patrick Gordon Walker and Frank Cousins – held ministerial office when they were neither MP nor peer. In spite of these elementary constitutional facts, much of the press has seemed to suggest that executive government is the apex of the democratic structure ...

Paisley’s Progress

Tom Paulin, 1 April 1982

... is an autochthonous bigot who once organised a mock-mass on the platform of the Ulster Hall. Patrick Marrinan, his biographer, describes the sinister shabbiness of this occasion, the nervous fascination of the audience laughing at a renegade Spanish priest reciting unfamiliar Latin words, the canny showmanship, the plastic buckets brimming with ...

American Breakdown

David Bromwich, 2 August 2018

... at the hands of Putin. As in the 1850s, the change of clothes has gone both ways. Here is Patrick Buchanan, a speechwriter for Nixon and Reagan, wondering at the double standard of the anti-Russian Democrats: ‘Many Putin actions we condemn were reactions to what we did. Russia annexed Crimea bloodlessly. But did not the US bomb Serbia for 78 days to ...

What’s next?

James Wood: Afterlives, 14 April 2011

After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory 
by John Casey.
Oxford, 468 pp., £22.50, January 2010, 978 0 19 509295 0
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... a pronounced theological emphasis, there is no mention here of Dostoevsky, Rilke, Kafka, Bataille, Patrick White, Beckett, Nabokov, Bellow, Spark, Marilynne Robinson, Saramago or Coetzee (whose novel Diary of a Bad Year has several paragraphs on the afterlife). Nabokov’s work is shot through with a persistent mysticism; in Pnin, the author imagines the dead ...

Oh God, what have we done?

Jackson Lears: The Strange Career of Robert Oppenheimer, 20 December 2012

Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer 
by Ray Monk.
Cape, 818 pp., £30, November 2012, 978 0 224 06262 6
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... inclined. Aiming high, he applied to work with Ernest Rutherford. Rejected, he turned to Patrick Blackett, a glamorous experimenter whom contemporaries described as ‘a young Oedipus’. Oppenheimer was miserable, near collapse, bedevilled by sexual frustration and academic anxieties. He lacked the practical skills needed for experimental ...

Bravo l’artiste

John Lanchester: What is Murdoch after?, 5 February 2004

The Murdoch Archipelago 
by Bruce Page.
Simon and Schuster, 580 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 7432 3936 9
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Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Media Wizard 
by Neil Chenoweth.
Crown Business, 416 pp., $27.50, December 2002, 0 609 61038 4
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Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed up Big Media 
by Michael Wolff.
Flamingo, 381 pp., £18.99, January 2004, 0 00 717881 6
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... in use.’ When the Cabinet was feuding over Westland, the Sun naturally backed her, and so when Patrick Mayhew, the Solicitor-General, told Michael Heseltine that his account of the rival bids might contain ‘material inaccuracies’, this confidential legal advice was immediately leaked to the Sun, whose sensitive and nuanced front-page account of the ...

Tied to the Mast

Adam Mars-Jones: Alan Hollinghurst, 19 October 2017

The Sparsholt Affair 
by Alan Hollinghurst.
Picador, 454 pp., £20, October 2017, 978 1 4472 0821 1
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... such as David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes, though it certainly happens in life. Patrick Gale’s recent television drama Man in an Orange Shirt, part of a season marking the anniversary of decriminalisation, was based on his family history, right down to the novelettish-seeming details of his mother discovering her husband’s love letters ...

Where’s the barbed wire?

John Lahr: August Wilson's Transformation, 9 May 2024

August Wilson: A Life 
by Patti Hartigan.
Simon and Schuster, 531 pp., £30, August 2023, 978 1 5011 8066 8
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... stay in the role until 1999, developing plays by Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, John Guare, John Patrick Shanley, Wendy Wasserstein and many others.When they joined forces, Richards was 63 and Wilson was 37. Every live wire goes dead without connections, and Richards had them. So Wilson could quit his job as a short-order cook and devote himself to ...

Canetti and Power

John Bayley, 17 December 1981

Auto da Fé 
by Elias Canetti, translated by C.V. Wedgwood.
Cape, 464 pp., £7.95, January 1982, 0 224 00568 5
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The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Continuum, 268 pp., $12.95, June 1979, 0 8164 9103 8
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The Human Province 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Continuum, 281 pp., $12.95, June 1978, 0 8164 9335 9
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Crowds and Power 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Carol Stewart.
Penguin, 575 pp., £2.95, October 1978, 0 14 003616 4
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Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Christopher Middleton.
Marion Boyars, 121 pp., £5.95, October 1976, 0 7145 1136 6
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The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit 
by Elias Canetti, translated by J.A. Underwood.
Marion Boyars, 103 pp., £5.50, January 1978, 0 7145 2579 0
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The Conscience of Words 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Continuum, 246 pp., $12.95, May 1979, 0 8164 9334 0
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... nor does it parade a ready-made metaphysic of gloom, like the novels of Graham Greene and Patrick White. It is not apocalyptic but dreadfully and intently domestic, like Dickens’s world of Todgers. It is divided into three parts: ‘A Head without a World’, ‘Headless World’ and ‘The World in the Head’. Kien, the hero, a recluse and 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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... the end of November 1993, the Prime Minister and his Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Sir Patrick Mayhew, had been utterly convincing in their determination never to deal with terrorists of any sort. Then it emerged that the Government had all along been engaged in dialogue not with the mere ‘pseudo-terrorist’ Gerry Adams but with the IRA ...

A Hard Dog to Keep on the Porch

Christopher Hitchens, 6 June 1996

... removes perhaps some millions of American children from the welfare rolls. Even Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who first opened the argument about the cultural pathology of poverty when he was working for the Nixon Administration, has professed himself appalled at the callousness and want of discrimination which characterise the new dispensation. Marion ...

Cute, My Arse

Seamus Perry: Geoffrey Hill, 12 September 2019

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 148 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 19 882952 2
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... required the shedding of blood, the subject of Yeats’s poem ‘The Rose Tree’ (1920), in which Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, leading figures in the 1916 Dublin Rising, concur that ‘nothing but our own red blood/Can make a right Rose Tree.’ (Pearse had declared that it would take ‘the blood of the sons of Ireland to redeem Ireland’.) Yeats said ...