‘Derek, please, not so fast’

Ferdinand Mount: Derek Jackson, 7 February 2008

As I Was Going to St Ives: A Life of Derek Jackson 
by Simon Courtauld.
Michael Russell, 192 pp., £17.50, October 2007, 978 0 85955 311 7
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... by the sense of power that money gives, and even in his development as a physicist he was largely self-taught: he had never done any research under or with anyone and probably had hardly ever been contradicted by anyone of his age.’ Yet Kuhn found him courteous and considerate and never discovered any inclination to Fascism in him. In As I Was Going to St ...

Global Moods

Peter Campbell: Art, Past and Present, 29 November 2007

Mirror of the World: A New History of Art 
by Julian Bell.
Thames and Hudson, 496 pp., £24.95, October 2007, 978 0 500 23837 0
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... are obscure or surprising. Watteau’s Gilles of 1716–18 is reproduced on the same spread as a self-portrait of c.1710 by the Korean Yun Du-so. Yun Du-so looks hard at you from the last page of one section, Gilles less emphatically from the first page of the next. Gilles seems to ‘inhabit his own face with a certain unease. In his disquiet we can maybe ...

Martinique in Burbank

David Thomson: Bogart and Bacall, 19 October 2023

Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair 
by William J. Mann.
HarperCollins, 634 pp., £35, August, 978 0 06 302639 1
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... screenwriter who has a violent, if not murderous, edge. No other film used Bogart’s hostility or self-loathing so well. The loneliness must have been spurred by the great embarrassment in Bogart’s public life. In 1947, he had been part of the Committee for the First Amendment, an attempt to challenge Washington over its paranoid pursuit of communists in ...

Blood All Over the Grass

Ewan Gibbs: On the Miners’ Strike, 2 November 2023

Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 
by Robert Gildea.
Yale, 469 pp., £25, August, 978 0 300 26658 0
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... the pit, and before the violent interruption of the strike, mining settlements were to an extent self-policed.The word​ ‘backbone’ is also used in Gildea’s book by Heather Wood, from Easington in County Durham, to describe the role of women in mining communities. She reflects on her family’s experience: her grandfather was killed in a fatal pit ...

Coins in the Cash Drawer

Philippe Marlière: Jean Jaurès’s Socialism, 2 November 2023

A Socialist History of the French Revolution 
by Jean Jaurès, translated by Mitchell Abidor.
Pluto, 259 pp., £19.99, July, 978 0 7453 4219 1
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Selected Writings of Jean Jaurès: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism 
edited by Jean-Numa Ducange and Elisa Marcobelli, translated by David Broder.
Palgrave, 158 pp., £89.99, June 2022, 978 3 030 71961 6
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... among the bourgeoisie had begun to undermine. Energetic new forces, struggling for the right to self-development, were on a collision course with the feudal system. For Marx and Jaurès, the bourgeoisie led the revolution and brought about the destruction of the Ancien Régime’s institutions. Furet regarded this as a ‘Marxist ...

Invention of the Trickster

Celia Donert: Roma in Europe, 2 November 2023

Europe and the Roma: A History of Fascination and Fear 
by Klaus-Michael Bogdal, translated by Jefferson Chase.
Allen Lane, 588 pp., £40, July, 978 0 241 51902 8
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... whom speak dialects of the Romani language, while Sinti (and in France, Manouche) is the preferred self-designation in Germany and neighbouring countries. Official census figures are unreliable: Roma often don’t want to identify themselves for fear of discrimination. Some of the largest Romani minorities live in Central and Eastern Europe, among them ...

Why didn’t you tell me?

Andrew Cockburn: Meddling in Iraq, 4 July 2024

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the Middle East, 1979-2003 
by Steve Coll.
Allen Lane, 556 pp., £30, February 2024, 978 0 241 68665 2
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... something. Yet Coll also shows that Saddam was more than just a tyrannical thug. He could be self-deprecatingly humorous, and was deeply read in Arab and foreign literature (Hemingway was a favourite). Once, catching a TV presenter in a grammatical error, he phoned the minister of culture to complain, decreeing a six-month suspension for the ...

Love Me or I Shoot You

Christienna Fryar: Three Imperial Wars, 1 August 2024

Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire 
by Erik Linstrum.
Oxford, 313 pp., £26.99, April 2023, 978 0 19 757203 0
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... emotions of the British, though, is that it risks treating the psychic toll of collapsing national self-image as more important than the experiences of colonial subjects. Aside from a brief overview of the origins of the three colonial wars, this isn’t really a book about those conflicts or the people who lived through them. And while it is an important ...

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 the half-deserted Mamallapuram. From first to last, Britain’s trade policy was ruthlessly self-seeking. As Lord William Bentinck said of the consequences of allowing textiles from British mills into India: ‘The misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India.’But Dalrymple ...

Bread and Butter

Catherine Hall: Attempts at Reparation, 15 August 2024

Colonial Countryside 
edited by Corinne Fowler and Jeremy Poynting.
Peepal Tree, 278 pp., £25, July, 978 1 84523 566 6
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Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations Now! 
by Michael Banner.
Oxford, 172 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 19 888944 1
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... and extraction that characterised Britain’s colonial ventures, challenging the chauvinism and self-congratulation that was for so long the dominant mode.How should today’s multicultural British public respond to events that took place centuries ago but continue to reverberate? The cultural critic Michael Rothberg proposes the term ‘implicated ...

Who’s the adult here?

Joanna Biggs: Lena Dunham after ‘Girls’, 25 June 2026

Famesick: A Memoir 
by Lena Dunham.
Fourth Estate, 416 pp., £18.99, April, 978 0 00 838421 0
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... Dunham’s life was integrated into Girls, but not always the parts we guessed. Hannah’s comic self-absorption was regularly assigned to Dunham by lazy critics; no one guessed that the taciturn, violent side of Hannah’s love interest, Adam, played by Adam Driver, was also drawn from life. As the show went on into six seasons and Dunham/Horvath became an ...

Up from the Cellar

Nicholas Spice: The Interment of Elisabeth Fritzl, 5 June 2008

Greed 
by Elfriede Jelinek, translated by Martin Chalmers.
Serpent’s Tail, 340 pp., £7.99, July 2008, 978 1 84668 666 5
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... expression she gives to her deeply inhibited and perverse sexual nature: gruesome episodes of self-harming, ritual exploits in seedy voyeurism, infantile excursions into low-grade pornography. At home she dances a grim pas de deux of mutual exploitation with her old mother. At work, as a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatoire, she assumes the role of ...

The Framing of al-Megrahi

Gareth Peirce: The Death of Justice, 24 September 2009

... that the attack was an appalling error, the US compounded its mistake: President Reagan claimed self-defence and the ship’s commander and crew were awarded high military honours. Two days after the downing of the Iranian airbus, Tehran Radio condemned the attack as an act of naked aggression and announced it would be avenged ‘in blood-splattered ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Swimming on the 52nd Floor, 24 September 2015

... a cluster of pubs could safely navigate. Ships on weathervanes and pub signs confirmed London’s self-confidence as a world port. But the tarnished galleon on Whiston Road was empty, its immigrants dispersed. Alfred Cross, who argued in his 1906 treatise for the employment of specialist architects rather than borough engineers, had earlier won the commission ...

Who Lives and Who Dies

Paul Farmer: Who survives?, 5 February 2015

... afternoon in October 1988, I was leaving a friend’s house in Cambridge, Massachusetts in a self-important rush: a medical student also getting a degree in anthropology, I was headed back to Haiti, then experiencing a great political upheaval. My friend was one of the founders of Partners In Health, which we believed, even then, might make a difference ...