Somerdale to Skarbimierz

James Meek, 20 April 2017

... the early years his cocoa got a warrant from Queen Victoria but by 1861, when his sons George and Richard took over the factory, now in different premises, the business was on the brink. A new product the Cadburys had been counting on to turn things around, a drink called Iceland Moss, made of cocoa mixed with lichen, failed to find favour with the public.The ...

Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester, 5 July 2001

... birth. I can remember almost nothing of the house we’d lived in previously, which was at 39 King Edward’s Road, Hackney. I know from a photograph that it was a large, dark, Victorian house, but when I went to take a look at it around 1950 I discovered that it had been destroyed in the Blitz. The other thing I know about it from photographs is that it ...

Different Speeds, Same Furies

Perry Anderson: Powell v. Proust, 19 July 2018

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hamish Hamilton, 509 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 241 14383 4
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... under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a ...

Chasing Steel

Ian Jack: Scotland’s Ferry Fiasco, 22 September 2022

... that a community whose ‘sons and brothers have had to face the hunnish foe in a foreign land for King and Country, should be so exploited by rapacious Steamer Companies’.Some of the complaints were reasonable, others less so. The island of Colonsay had nine sailings to and from the mainland every month, when the steamer called on its journey between ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... that day so they went there and met up with their friend Muna Ali. They all went to Falafel King afterwards to have lemonade. They just sat at the window watching the world go by, and they discussed Ramadan. Naseem promised to come to Grenfell Tower so they could break their fast together and make her famous cheese pie. ‘It had been such a big iftar ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... more than 16 hours to be admitted. An A&E consultant at the Royal Stoke University Hospital, Dr Richard Fawcett, broadcast his frustration on Twitter. ‘It breaks my heart,’ he wrote, ‘to see so many frail and elderly patients in the corridor for hours and hours … I personally apologise to the people of Stoke for the Third World conditions of the ...