Does one flare or cling?

Alice Spawls, 5 May 2016

‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
by Robin Muir.
National Portrait Gallery, 304 pp., £40, February 2016, 978 1 85514 561 0
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‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
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... likes photography, but not fashion photography.’ Robin Muir, the curator, and the set designer, Patrick Kinmonth, have no doubt done their best but the Portrait Gallery is an awkward space. From the main corridor and the rooms that usually host the modern part of the NPG’s collection, they’ve created 15 chamberlets, sprouting from two ...

On the Darwinian View of Progress

Amartya Sen, 5 November 1992

... no particular guarantee that they make lives pleasanter or richer or nicer. Consider, for example, Patrick Bateson’s pointer to the fact that ‘male polygynous primates that fight with other males for females have much larger canines than male primates that are characteristically monogamous’.* While the reproductive and survival advantages for those with ...

Hinsley’s History

Noël Annan, 1 August 1985

Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War: Essays in Honour of F.H. Hinsley 
edited by Richard Langhorne.
Cambridge, 329 pp., £27.50, May 1985, 0 521 26840 0
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British Intelligence and the Second World War. Vol. I: 1939-Summer 1941, Vol. II: Mid-1941-Mid-1943, Vol. III, Part I: June 1943-June 1944 
by F.H. Hinsley, E.E. Thomas, C.F.G. Ransom and R.C. Knight.
HMSO, 616 pp., £12.95, September 1979, 0 11 630933 4
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... that the Italian historians who did not go into exile were all good anti-Fascists at heart. Patrick Salmon rescues the Nuremberg judges and dents the tu quoque Nazi apologists by showing that although the British were intending to invade Norway and had already violated its neutrality at the time when the German invasion got under way, the German ...

Rwanda in Six Scenes

Stephen W. Smith: Fables of Rwanda, 17 March 2011

... of the Rwandan Supreme Court; the erstwhile chief of external security services Colonel Patrick Karegeya; and General Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, the ex-chief of staff of the Rwandan army. Nyamwasa survived an attempt on his life last June, when a commando opened fire on him in Johannesburg, where he now lives in exile. The South African authorities ...

Falling in love with Lucian

Colm Tóibín: Lucian Freud’s Outer Being, 10 October 2019

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922-68 
by William Feaver.
Bloomsbury, 680 pp., £35, September 2019, 978 1 4088 5093 0
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... coal and I never understood what was happening, quite why I was being locked in there.’ When Patrick Heron saw the painting at the Hanover Gallery in 1950, he wrote: ‘One is not sure. Terrific finish, no longer being idiosyncratic, cannot hide an uncertainty, not of drawing but of volume. And then there is a new element here: this work is atmospheric ...

A Hit of Rus in Urbe

Iain Sinclair: In Lea Valley, 27 June 2002

... who learn to put up with the barriers, the awkward setts beneath bridges. We pay our tithe. Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s 1944 Greater London Plan was a visionary document: ‘every piece of land welded into a great regional reservation’. The Lee Valley Recreational Park. A perimeter fence around a Sioux reservation. Compulsory leisure. The Lea would lose ...

What are judges for?

Conor Gearty, 25 January 2001

... insight part of their project, writers such as John Griffith (The Politics of the Judiciary) and Patrick McAuslan (The Ideologies of Planning Law), have found themselves exposed on this account alone to partisan attack. Murray Hunt has perhaps explained it best, observing in a recent essay that ‘it is a defining characteristic of legal cultures that ...

In His Pink Negligée

Colm Tóibín: The Ruthless Truman Capote, 21 April 2005

The Complete Stories 
by Truman Capote.
Random House, 400 pp., $24.95, September 2004, 0 679 64310 9
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Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote 
edited by Gerald Clarke.
Random House, 487 pp., $27.95, September 2004, 0 375 50133 9
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... in fact, had lunch with the queen.) The following year – after Jackie Kennedy’s newborn son, Patrick, had died – Capote wrote to her and received a very personal and sweet reply which he sent to the Deweys ‘in confidence’. He entertained them, and made his friends do the same. When they came to Hollywood, Capote made sure that David Selznick was on ...

Posthumous Gentleman

Michael Dobson: Kit Marlowe’s Schooldays, 19 August 2004

The World of Christopher Marlowe 
by David Riggs.
Faber, 411 pp., £25, May 2004, 0 571 22159 9
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Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: Journeys through the Elizabethan Underground 
by Roy Kendall.
Fairleigh Dickinson, 453 pp., $75, January 2004, 0 8386 3974 7
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Tamburlaine Must Die 
by Louise Welsh.
Canongate, 149 pp., £9.99, July 2004, 1 84195 532 9
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History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe 
by Rodney Bolt.
HarperCollins, 388 pp., £17.99, July 2004, 0 00 712123 7
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... in 2003; the first Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe appeared last month (edited by Patrick Cheney).* Even without the bloodshed and intrigue that the fatal stab wound in Deptford supplies, the biographers’ Marlowe is always liable to be defined by his death, if only because a sizeable proportion of the detailed evidence we have about him ...

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 ...

A Revision of Expectations

Richard Horton: Notes on the NHS, 2 July 1998

The National Health Service: A Political History 
by Charles Webster.
Oxford, 233 pp., £9.99, April 1998, 0 19 289296 7
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... loathing between doctors and government during the Thatcher years. It began straight away, when Patrick Jenkin, her first Health Minister, rejected the report of Douglas Black, Chief Scientist at the DHSS, on inequalities in health. Black provided a radical analysis of what the NHS had to do to restore the notion of a universal and comprehensive service ...

Marching Orders

Ronan Bennett: The new future of Northern Ireland, 30 July 1998

... Adams were to see off his opponents, he would have to produce results. In the early Nineties, Sir Patrick Mayhew was able to taunt Sinn Fein as being ‘a mere ten per cent party’ and not worth talking to; most commentators agreed, and the consensus was that while the Party had a solid core of loyal supporters it was unlikely to expand. Sinn Fein was ...
... 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 ...

Belonging

John Kerrigan, 18 July 1996

The ‘O’o’a’a’ Bird 
by Justin Quinn.
Carcanet, 69 pp., £7.95, March 1995, 1 85754 125 1
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Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time 
by Eavan Boland.
Carcanet, 254 pp., £18.95, April 1995, 1 85754 074 3
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Collected Poems 
by Eavan Boland.
Carcanet, 217 pp., £9.95, November 1995, 1 85754 220 7
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Captain Lavender 
by Medbh McGuckian.
Gallery Press, 83 pp., £11.95, November 1994, 9781852351427
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... early creativity to specific anxieties about locale. When she saw the bench in Dublin where Patrick Kavanagh used to sit, and read his sonnet about the spot, she was thrilled by ‘the idea of place as something language could claim even if ownership had been denied’. ‘Because I was starting to locate myself in language,’ she recalls, ‘I was ...

On the Secret Joke at the Centre of American Identity

Michael Rogin: Ralph Ellison, 2 March 2000

Juneteenth 
by Ralph Ellison, edited by John Callaghan.
Hamish Hamilton, 368 pp., £16.99, December 1999, 0 241 14084 6
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... masters as an accurate indicator of black inferiority; it was the source of his anger at Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Report on the Negro Family (1965), still an influential guide to public policy, which claimed that a black ‘matriarchy’ deprived young black men of paternal role models and drove them to crime. Social scientists, literary intellectuals ...