Sprigs of Wire

Ange Mlinko: On Jo Ann Beard, 21 March 2024

Collected Works 
by Jo Ann Beard.
Serpent’s Tail, 439 pp., £17.99, August 2023, 978 1 80081 788 3
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Cheri 
by Jo Ann Beard.
Serpent’s Tail, 79 pp., £10, August 2023, 978 1 80081 785 2
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“... so much creative licence as a deep identification between the author and her subject. Cheri may remind her of the women she grew up with: working-class women, perhaps without the protection of husbands; women who generally rely on other women. Beard’s essay feels like a bravura attempt to rescue Cheri from the loneliness of her death. The pieces in ...”

I adjure you, egg

Tom Johnson: Medieval Magic, 21 March 2024

Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England 
by Katherine Storm Hindley.
Chicago, 299 pp., £36, August 2023, 978 0 226 82533 5
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“... manuscript held in the Bodleian, one recipe gives a charm to secure favours, promising that ‘you may have whatever you want.’ It consists of a short prayer and a sequence of letters with no recognisable meaning, separated by crosses. At some later date, a reader went through the text with a needle, pricking pinholes through the letter shapes of the magical ...”

One-Way Traffic

Ferdinand Mount: Ancient India, 12 September 2024

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World 
by William Dalrymple.
Bloomsbury, 482 pp., £30, September, 978 1 4088 6441 8
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“... of papyrus from the rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus suggest that customs taxes on trade with India may have generated one-third of the total income of the Roman exchequer. Roman commentators were in despair about the drain of gold to India. Pliny the Elder called India ‘the sink of the world’s most precious metals’ – the converse of the complaint under ...”

Bringing Down Chunks of the Ceiling

Andy Beckett: Dave Haslam’s Manchester, 17 February 2000

Manchester, England: The Story of the Pop Cult City 
by Dave Haslam.
Fourth Estate, 319 pp., £12.99, September 1999, 1 84115 145 9
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“... before the delicatessens took over, he has a few sentences about the kind of life Manchester may be leaving behind: ‘This street culture is not about civic pride and marketing initiatives … It can, and will, thrive in crappy coffee bars, under leaking roofs or down unlit roads. It’s uncontrollable, uncomfortable and never far removed from the ...”

In Disguise of a Merchant

Linda Colley: Company-States, 30 July 2020

Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World 
by Andrew Phillips and J.C. Sharman.
Princeton, 253 pp., £25, June 2020, 978 0 691 20351 5
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“... to servers in China. Whatever the truth of these accusations, they raise the question of what may be involved when organisations attached to a particular state intervene in an extensive and sustained way in another country and continent, even if their interest appears – and is proclaimed to be – commercially driven. They also raise questions about the ...”

I just wanted to touch it

Liam Shaw: To Catch a Panda, 10 September 2026

The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythic Giant Panda 
by Nathalia Holt.
Atria, 288 pp., £10.99, July, 978 1 66802 775 2
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“... capacity to ‘intuit the intangibles of the psychology of his opposite number’. He may have learned about Pat Nixon’s love of pandas on the first evening of the presidential visit in 1972, as they chatted over shark’s fin soup and the People’s Liberation Army Band played ‘Home on the Range’. But he probably already knew how desperate ...”

Get a Real Degree

Elif Batuman, 23 September 2010

The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing 
by Mark McGurl.
Harvard, 480 pp., £25.95, April 2009, 978 0 674 03319 1
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“... the past 20, 50 or a hundred years. It rarely refers to other books at all. Literary scholarship may not be an undiluted joy to its readers, but at least it’s usually founded on an ideal of the collaborative accretion of human knowledge. It’s frustrating that McGurl, a literary historian, occasionally seems to ignore the whole history of literature ...”

In Farageland

James Meek, 9 October 2014

“... closer to getting a sale.’ Heale was one of 17 Ukip members elected to Kent County Council last May, making them the second biggest party. (Of the eight seats in Thanet, Ukip won seven.) Before that, in 2003, Heale stood as an independent against a Tory councillor but lost. Before that, he was a Conservative for twenty years. Before that, living in ...”

Fear in Those Blue Eyes

David Runciman: Thatcher in Her Bubble, 3 December 2015

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. II: Everything She Wants 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 821 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 7139 9288 5
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“... Thatcher if he chose. Lawson attached a personal memo to the one supplied by the Cabinet Office in May 1985, in which he said that ‘the proposal for a poll tax would be completely unworkable and politically catastrophic.’ But he did nothing to follow up on this warning and the plan was allowed to continue on its merry way. Lawson had decided that Thatcher ...”

Irangate

Edward Said, 7 May 1987

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey 
by Salman Rushdie.
Picador, 171 pp., £2.95, January 1987, 0 330 29990 5
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Turning the Tide: US Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace 
by Noam Chomsky.
Pluto, 298 pp., £5.95, September 1986, 0 7453 0184 3
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“... secret agent. Al-Shiraa, the Lebanese magazine that leaked word of the arms supply on 1 November, may well have been enlisted by his political enemies in order to cripple his chances of greater prominence. There are at least two precedents for such American expeditions to Iran, both of them interventionary in the most literal sense. One was the notorious ...”

What are we telling the nation?

David Edgar: Thoughts about the BBC, 7 July 2005

Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC 
by Georgina Born.
Vintage, 352 pp., £10.99, August 2005, 0 09 942893 8
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Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a Digital World 
BBC, 135 pp.Show More
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“... non-linear, experimental single plays inherited one to two million listeners from The Archers may have been that, unlike TV drama, radio drama doesn’t face direct commercial competition. But the success of radio in resisting homogenisation also applied to sectors which faced determined competition, and which nonetheless succeeded in rejuvenating and ...”

Spaces between the Stars

David Bromwich: Kubrick Does It Himself, 26 September 2024

Kubrick: An Odyssey 
by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams.
Faber, 649 pp., £25, January, 978 0 571 37036 8
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“... excerpts from published memoirs and reviews, and photographs taken on and off the set. It may be a close call for non-initiates, but I think the trip is worth the expense. Aficionados tend to divide between two touchstones, Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I belong to the first group but can see the point of the second: which way you go ...”

Butter wouldn’t melt

Nicholas Spice: Schubert’s​ Imagination, 19 March 2026

Lyrical Diary: Lieder from Franz Schubert to Wolfgang Rihm 
by Christian Gerhaher, translated by Shaun Whiteside.
Faber, 397 pp., £25, September 2025, 978 0 571 35770 3
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“... to utter words and to do so with unquestioned commitment to meaning. What the voice is singing may be swallowed up by the music, but that it is singing with an urgent intention to speak to us is how we know that the song is alive.It is easy to forget that when Schubert wrote his songs, the public lieder recital did not exist. The nearest thing to it was ...”

During Her Majesty’s Pleasure

Ronan Bennett, 20 February 1997

“... It is barely worth speaking of anything as tangible as motive in Robert Ford’s murder. Robbery may have been involved, though McCluskie has always denied that it was. Any part it did play was tangential. ‘We had a go at him to get some money,’ Reynolds told the police, ‘he gave me 10p and when I asked for more he said he didn’t have any and ...”

Corncob Caesar

Murray Sayle, 6 February 1997

Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of Douglas MacArthur 
by Geoffrey Perret.
Deutsch, 663 pp., £20, October 1996, 9780233990026
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“... Know your enemy, and know yourself, and you may fight a hundred battles and not lose one. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c.450 BC The historian William Manchester, who served with him in the Pacific, said he was the greatest soldier in American history. Never much regarded in Britain, he is still recalled with loathing in Australia ...”