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Diary

Suzy Hansen: In Istanbul, 7 May 2015

... beloved of today’s builders. During the Gezi protests, I noticed a teenager rubbing with his foot the meringue façade of a mall which covered what once had been a perfectly beautiful hundred-year-old building. He kicked it and some of the white stuff broke off, like dried icing sugar from a gingerbread house. What is Erdogan doing? It’s easy to hate ...

A Skeleton My Cat

Norma Clarke: ‘Poor Goldsmith’, 21 February 2019

The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith 
edited by Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy.
Cambridge, 232 pp., £64.99, July 2018, 978 1 107 09353 9
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... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly – the simple, unworldly ...

The Hell out of Dodge

Jeremy Harding: Woodstock 1969, 15 August 2019

Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music 
by Michael Lang.
Reel Art Press, 289 pp., £44.95, July 2019, 978 1 909526 62 4
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... Panther party militant and the festival along with it: ‘I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison.’ (Like Hoffman, Pete Townshend went off-message from ‘the spirit of Woodstock’ at that point. ‘Fuck off!’ he announced. ‘Fuck off my fucking stage!’) But Lang never imagined the festival as a political event and it ...

Scaling Up

Peter Wollen: At Tate Modern, 20 July 2000

... microscope, he carved and painted sculptures measurable in microns and millimetres; his Pope John Paul IIholds a cross crafted from a hair divided into sixths, making its width slightly less than the diameter of two red blood cells. His portrait of Little Red Riding Hood, whose diminutive has never been so well-deserved, features a mere speck of a girl ...

Diary

Tim Dee: Derek Walcott’s Birthday Party, 22 May 2014

... gathered and the guests stood up to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. Then came the carving of a three-foot-square cake embossed with a likeness in icing of the poet’s head, his cautious smile carried on layers of sponge in blue and yellow stripes, two of the four colours of the island’s flag, blue for the sea and yellow for sunshine. St Lucia likes to remind ...

Save it for HBO

Jenny Diski: Stanley Fish and ‘The Fugitive’, 17 March 2011

The Fugitive in Flight: Faith, Liberalism and Law in a Classic TV Show 
by Stanley Fish.
Pennsylvania, 152 pp., £16.50, November 2010, 978 0 8122 4277 5
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... and physical ties on the other. Or the Clint Eastwood of The Outlaw Josey Wales versus the John Wayne of The Searchers. Jimmy Carter and Michael Foot versus Reagan and Thatcher, say. In the end: the difference between the idealistic left and the libertarian right. Somewhere between, possibly, lies freedom that ...

Diary

Ian Thomson: Assault on the Via Salaria, 14 April 2011

... means ‘spleen’), and a group of trainee doctors in white smocks. Examining the chart at the foot of my bed, Milza would ask me: ‘And how is our Englishman today?’ Questions designed to gauge my mental alertness met with little success. In English I was asked: ‘Do you know why you’re here?’ I was in two minds about that. ‘I fell – or else I ...

In Search of Monsters

Stephen W. Smith: What are they doing in Mali?, 7 February 2013

... into the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership – more than $1 billion since 2005 – or foot the bill for Operation Enduring Freedom Trans-Sahara, if at the end of it all al-Qaida is allowed to march on Bamako? Why would Obama order more drone strikes than his predecessor against the leaders of Somalia’s al-Shabaab, a group with relatively weak ...

Degree of Famousness etc

Peter Howarth: Don Paterson, 21 March 2013

Selected Poems 
by Don Paterson.
Faber, 169 pp., £14.99, May 2012, 978 0 571 28178 7
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... to the defence of the threatened mainstream, which sounds a bit like a call to defend Elton John or MTV. Either Paterson’s mainstream poets were not as middle of the road as his name for them suggested, or the threat levels were being artificially hiked up. The Iraq invasion was taking place at the time and angry avant-gardists quickly drew the ...

Maisie’s Sisters

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Sargent’s Daughters, 5 August 2010

Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting 
by Erica Hirshler.
MFA, 262 pp., £23.95, October 2009, 978 0 87846 742 6
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... John Singer Sargent has often been accused of lacking a soul. Even Henry James, who helped introduce him to the London scene in the 1880s and continued to promote his work, worried that he suffered from a ‘sort of excess of cleverness’. The fact that Sargent catered to a transatlantic clientele of celebrities and nouveaux riches at the height of the Gilded Age only encouraged the imputations of superficiality ...

Praise for the Hands

Jeremy Harding: Rugby’s Early Years, 18 October 2007

The Original Rules of Rugby 
edited by Jed Smith.
Bodleian, 64 pp., £5.99, September 2007, 978 1 85124 371 6
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... handled the countdown with more aggression and a lot more self-importance. The selector, John Hart, on their arrival in the changing room: ‘It’s going to be a long wait, boys. Time to concentrate.’ Then the coach Brian Lochore, voice breaking with emotion: ‘You’re a good team but you’re not yet a great team. If you win today you can say ...

Act like Men, Britons!

Tom Shippey: Celticity, 31 July 2008

The History of the Kings of Britain 
by Geoffrey of Monmouth, edited by Michael Reeve, translated by Neil Wright.
Boydell, 307 pp., £50, November 2007, 978 1 84383 206 5
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The History of the Kings of Britain 
by Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Broadview, 383 pp., £8.99, January 2008, 978 1 55111 639 6
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... remained unpublished until 1534. It caused outrage among keen Arthurians, as shown for instance by John Leland’s furious Assertio inclytissimi Arturii Regis Britanniae of 1544, in which he insisted that the whole Arthurian legend was absolutely true, listed the 149 knights of the Round Table to prove it, wrote Polydore off as a damn ...

Reproaches from the Past

Peter Clarke: Gordon Brown, 1 April 2004

The Prudence of Mr Gordon Brown 
by William Keegan.
Wiley, 356 pp., £18.99, October 2003, 0 470 84697 6
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... inflicting great damage on the economy. Yet politically, the Major government was bound hand and foot to its existing policy – and Labour’s only criticism was that the policy did not go far enough. That was the position at the time of the general election in April 1992, at which Major squeaked home for another term. When Black Wednesday came in ...

XXX

Jenny Diski: Doing what we’re told, 18 November 2004

The Man who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram 
by Thomas Blass.
Basic Books, 360 pp., £19.99, June 2004, 0 7382 0399 8
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... to rationalise. Two examples of dissent are given in Thomas Blass’s book. One man puts his foot down at 135 volts: EXPERIMENTER: The experiment requires that you go on, teacher. Go on, please. SUBJECT: But if you don’t mind, I’d like to see him myself before I do go on. EXPERIMENTER: . . . It’s absolutely essential that you ...

We Do Ron Ron Ron, We Do Ron Ron

James Meek: Welcome to McDonald’s, 24 May 2001

Fast-Food Nation 
by Eric Schlosser.
Allen Lane, 356 pp., £9.99, April 2001, 0 7139 9602 1
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... instruction book, known as the ‘Bible’, 750 pages long, weighing four pounds. In 1999, John Reckert, a senior executive of Burger King, explained at a conference the relationship between technology and employees. ‘We can develop equipment that only works one way,’ he said. ‘There are many different ways today that employees can abuse our ...

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