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Keep the baby safe

Stephen Sedley: Corrupt and Deprave, 10 March 2022

A Matter of Obscenity: The Politics of Censorship in Modern England 
by Christopher Hilliard.
Princeton, 320 pp., £28, September 2021, 978 0 691 19798 2
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... But nothing availed against the combined hostility of the prosecutor, Brian Leary, and the judge, Michael Argyle QC. The jury convicted, and the accused were jailed. They were bailed pending appeal, and in November 1971 their appeals were allowed on the ground that Argyle had failed to give the jury an adequate direction on the meaning of obscenity, in ...

Bardism

Tom Shippey: The Druids, 9 July 2009

Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain 
by Ronald Hutton.
Yale, 491 pp., £30, May 2009, 978 0 300 14485 7
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... in sacred groves, their totem plants being oak and mistletoe, the latter harvested by druids in white robes wielding golden sickles. Lucan combines the horrific and naturist elements with a much admired account of a grisly sacrificial wood, allegedly destroyed by Caesar in person, thereby overcoming his soldiers’ superstitious fears. Tacitus provides ...

Drones, baby, drones

Andrew Cockburn, 8 March 2012

... followed their example,’ he said in the State of the Union speech. One supportive commentator, Michael Lind of Salon, called the new strategy, with its stress on agility and flexibility, ‘the greatest revolution in American foreign policy in a generation’. Yet the president’s words have a familiar ring. In September 1999 George W. Bush, then a ...

Colonels in Horsehair

Stephen Sedley: Human Rights and the Courts, 19 September 2002

Sceptical Essays on Human Rights 
edited by Tom Campbell and K.D. Ewing.
Oxford, 423 pp., £60, December 2001, 0 19 924668 8
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... the courts managed to decide little more than that a First-Nation Canadian had as much right as a white man to be drunk in the Old Stope Hotel, Yellowknife. By the 1980s something new had stirred in Canada’s judicial ethos; possibly the same thing as in Australia where, in the early 1990s, the Federal High Court discovered in the country’s 1901 ...

Your hat sucks

Gill Partington: UbuWeb, 1 April 2021

Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics and Poetics of UbuWeb 
by Kenneth Goldsmith.
Columbia, 328 pp., £20, July 2020, 978 0 231 18695 7
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... something of a literary celebrity, appearing on late-night talkshows and reading his work at the White House during Obama’s time in office. Sporting his signature straw hat, he often appears in person as a thrift-store dandy whose flamboyant dress (Obama reportedly asked why he was wearing golf shoes) and mannered vocal delivery are part of a carefully ...

How to Hate Oil

Edmund Gordon: On Upton Sinclair, 4 January 2024

Oil! 
by Upton Sinclair.
Penguin, 572 pp., £15.99, January, 978 0 14 313744 3
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... sent the young author a three-page analysis of The Jungle and an invitation to visit him at the White House for further discussion. These events led directly to the passing of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act (although not, to Sinclair’s chagrin, to the drafting of new legislation promoting workers’ rights. ‘I aimed for ...

Après Brexit

Ferdinand Mount, 20 February 2020

... our tried institutions with an openness to change when practical considerations prompted – what Michael Oakeshott later called ‘intimations’. The trouble is that Burke himself, like many other conservatives, tended in practice not to recognise such intimations. Nothing could have been more obvious than that rotten boroughs ought to be abolished and the ...

Outside in the Bar

Patrick McGuinness: Ten Years in Sheerness, 21 October 2021

The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness 
by Patrick Wright.
Repeater, 751 pp., £20, June, 978 1 913462 58 1
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... Online vaunted its association with two local celebrities: ‘Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em star Michael Crawford revealed he visited the pub during filming forty years ago. And German literary star Uwe Johnson also had his own stool at the pub where he used to write about the people he met.’ Photos of Crawford and Johnson accompanied a picture of the ...

Every Penny a Vote

Alexander Zevin: Neoliberalism, 15 August 2019

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism 
by Quinn Slobodian.
Harvard, 381 pp., £25.95, March 2018, 978 0 674 97952 9
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... vote. They did this in part by adapting the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Michael Heilperin, a founding member of Mont Pelerin, wrote the ICC’s International Code to Protect Foreign Investments, which enshrined the ‘preferential’ standing of foreign investors over the host state. Neoliberals, in other words, deftly promoted the ...

That Shape Am I

Patricia Lockwood: Among the Mystics, 23 January 2025

On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy 
by Simon Critchley.
Profile, 325 pp., £18.99, October 2024, 978 1 80081 693 0
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... sermons. There, ‘sitting across from me and addressing me angrily in a loud voice, Father Michael Butler, chaplain of the university – and a lovely man – slowly read the words of the Bull in Latin … This is the kind of experience that stays with you, especially when you’re not even a proper Catholic.’ After such an experience you must turn ...

The Suitcase: Part Three

Frances Stonor Saunders, 10 September 2020

... officials from the British Consulate were waiting on the quay. The passengers (Helen, sheet-white) were bussed straight to the consulate, where they were offered sandwiches, tea, cigarettes and more forms to fill in. My uncle Peter thinks they were then put up for a couple of weeks in the Pera Palace Hotel, established in 1895 by the Wagons-Lits Company ...

Like a Dog

Elizabeth Lowry: J.M. Coetzee, 14 October 1999

Disgrace 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Secker, 220 pp., £14.99, July 1999, 0 436 20489 4
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The Lives of Animals 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Princeton, 127 pp., £12.50, May 1999, 0 691 00443 9
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... of In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) and Life and Times of Michael K (1983), to the confessional monologue of Age of Iron (1990) and the literary-historical pastiches of Foe (1986) and The Master of Petersburg (1994), Coetzee’s approach has been varied, his idiom pliable. He has written in the voice of a repressed ...

Fire or Earthquake

Thomas Powers: Joan Didion’s Gaze, 3 November 2022

Let Me Tell You What I Mean: A New Collection of Essays 
by Joan Didion.
Fourth Estate, 149 pp., £8.99, January 2022, 978 0 00 845178 3
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... myself,’ she wrote in one of the essays in Slouching towards Bethlehem. Her subject was Comrade Michael Laski, who ran a splinter group of Stalinists in Los Angeles, where Didion interviewed him in 1967. He was threatened from every direction. Dealing with dread, Didion believed, invited risky measures of self-protection like alcohol, heroin, sex and ...

Let them cut grass

Linda Colley, 16 December 1993

The Downing Street Years 
by Margaret Thatcher.
HarperCollins, 914 pp., £25, October 1993, 0 00 255049 0
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... males. These could be the men of her own party, as when she notes how hopeless Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine were when they accompanied her on a visit to Reagan in 1985. ‘I did not bring them again,’ she remarks, for all the world as though they were a couple of incontinent pet dogs. But foreign statesmen could fare little better. That same ...

No more pretty face

Philip Horne, 8 March 1990

Emotion Pictures: Reflections on the Cinema 
by Wim Wenders, translated by Sean Whiteside and Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 148 pp., £12.99, November 1989, 0 571 15271 6
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Scorsese on Scorsese 
by Martin Scorsese, edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie.
Faber, 178 pp., £12.99, November 1989, 9780571141036
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... one would expect from his 1970 admiration of Truffaut’s L’Enfant Sauvage, with its black and white photography and its old-fashioned use of the shrinking iris to close a scene by picking out a detail: ‘The serious way in which circle-outs centre one’s vision on a detail of the image is also a kind of affection towards its objects, in stark contrast ...

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