Taste, Tact and Racism

Ian Hamilton: The death of Princess Diana, 22 January 1998

Assassination of a Princess 
by Ahmad Ata.
Dar Al-Huda, 75 pp., £5, September 1997, 977 5340 23 3
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Diana: A Princess Killed by Love 
by Ilham Sharshar.
Privately published, 125 pp., £10, September 1998, 977 5190 95 9
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Who Killed Diana? 
by Muhammad Ragab.
Privately published, 127 pp., £5, September 1998, 977 08 0675 7
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Harrods: A Place in Knightsbridge 
by Tim Dale.
Harrods, 224 pp., £35, November 1995, 1 900055 01 5
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... skills were world-renowned. Diana, after all, was no longer an authentic royal. Nor was the Duke of Windsor. Nor is Mohamed al-Fayed. After the humiliating DTI Report, and the refusal of his applications for citizenship, al-Fayed apparently shifted the focus of his regal aspirations. Spumed by the real-life British royals, he turned to an ...

Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester, 5 July 2001

... sister of two leading Yiddish actors, Maurice and Fanny Waxman, whose roles on the London and New York stages included Hamlet and Medea. My father was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, grew up in Darlington, and always had a slight Northern accent. He was one of a large family: Abe; then Bec, the one girl; then my father, Philip, called Phil but Phishel at ...

The Hard Zone

Andrew O’Hagan: At the Republican National Convention, 1 August 2024

... Shakespeare, who’s a bit of a poet. People who defined a new movement in their time.’The New York Times ended a few days of self-suppression with a summation of the Trump lobby’s atmospherics. ‘For Donald J. Trump’s most ardent supporters,’ it said,the assassination attempt on Saturday was the climax and confirmation of a story that Mr Trump has ...

The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
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... Astor fortune had its origins in the fur trade monopoly that John Jacob Astor established in New York after migrating there from Walldorf in the Rhineland in the late 18th century. The profits went into buying up large tracts of Manhattan when it was still mainly farmland and scrub; later, when the fields grew into streets and buildings, many of them held on ...

The Price

Dan Jacobson: The concluding part of Dan Jacobson’s interview with Ian Hamilton, 21 February 2002

... sense that it would counter what remained of Encounter. There were endless meetings about which duke or millionaire would provide the money.I went to one of them.Did you? Anyway, by that stage, I had been dragged in as a possible editor of this thing.I know they wanted to get Karl Miller at one point.But Karl had recommended me and for Karl’s sake I ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... had sold all six of her Victorian-style daguerreotypes and had been offered an internship in New York.‘Her soul was of a kind,’ said Betty Jackson, speaking of her sister Mary Mendy, Khadija’s mother. Their relative Demel Carayol, also an artist and a former member of the group Soul II Soul, was full of memories the day I tracked him down in Palmers ...