Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Bob Dylan’s Tall Tales, 21 October 2004

... Boss is doing more than merely refusing Republicans: he’s gone so far as to offer his support to John Kerry. Other ageing rockers joining him on the Vote for Change tour of battleground states include R.E.M., James Taylor and Jackson Browne, with the Dixie Chicks – whose lead singer, Natalie Maines, got into trouble for ...

Umbah-Umbah

Jerome McGann, 22 June 1989

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century 
by Greil Marcus.
Secker, 496 pp., £14.95, June 1989, 0 436 27338 1
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... movements and events: the Catharists, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Lollards, the Ranters, John of Leyden and the French Commune. Marcus draws these and others into his secret history of the 20th century because he is interested in revolution and apocalypse: the kind of secret history which moves not in a world elsewhere, beyond the periphery of our ...

What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking

Jackson Lears: #Russiagate, 4 January 2018

... and a solid track record. Both the DNC hacking story and the one involving the emails of John Podesta, a Clinton campaign operative, involve a shadowy bunch of putatively Russian hackers called Fancy Bear – also known among the technically inclined as APT28. The name Fancy Bear was introduced by Dimitri Alperovitch, the chief technology officer of ...

Victors’ Justice

Alan Donagan, 16 February 1984

Justice at Nuremberg 
by Robert Conot.
Weidenfeld, 593 pp., £15, October 1983, 0 297 78360 2
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The Nuremberg Trial 
by Ann Tusa and John Tusa.
Macmillan, 519 pp., £12.95, October 1983, 0 333 27463 6
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... the prosecution’s documentary evidence, the unpublished papers of the US prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, and of the principal US judge, Francis Biddle, and numerous published memoirs. Both have consulted unpublished collections of papers in the US and Britain, although in some cases not the same ones; and both regale us with titbits from interviews with ...

Lethal Pastoral

Paul Keegan: Housman’s Lethal Pastoral, 17 November 2016

Housman Country: Into the Heart of England 
by Peter Parker.
Little, Brown, 446 pp., £25, June 2016, 978 1 4087 0613 8
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... turn sanctioned its less overt tonalities. In all versions, Housman’s secret hurt – for Moses Jackson, his unswervingly heterosexual Oxford contemporary – is all-determining. He had, Tom Stoppard wrote, ‘an unremitting, lopsided, lifelong, hopeless constancy to a decent chap who was in no need of it, temperamentally unfitted for it, and never for a ...

I figured what the heck

Jackson Lears: Seymour Hersh, 27 September 2018

Reporter 
by Seymour M. Hersh.
Allen Lane, 355 pp., £20, June 2018, 978 0 241 35952 5
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... new development: under Obama the federal government began prosecuting whistleblowers, including John Kiriakou, the CIA counterterrorism officer who spent two years in jail for exposing the Bush administration’s torture programme. Kiriakou is the sort of honourable public servant who could have become a source for Hersh. Many still exist, but in the ...
... 1981 expressly prohibits research into how jurors arrive at the verdicts they do. When, therefore, John Jackson complains in The Criminal Law Review that we recommend relaxation of the restriction on hearsay evidence in the absence of empirical evidence on how juries respond to hearsay evidence, my response is: yes, indeed. I only wish we did, or ...

Balls and Strikes

Charles Reeve: Clement Greenberg, 5 April 2007

Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg 
by Alice Goldfarb Marquis.
Lund Humphries, 321 pp., £25, April 2006, 0 85331 940 5
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... it, producing not only Rockwell, Guest and the Saturday Evening Post but also Georges Simenon, John Steinbeck and the New Yorker (‘high-class kitsch for the luxury trade’). With kitsch running wild, like the capitalism which propelled it, authenticity needed defending. For nearly fifty years, Greenberg shouldered the task, separating good art from bad ...

Strong Meat

John Lanchester, 11 January 1990

The Bellarosa Connection 
by Saul Bellow.
Secker, 102 pp., £11.95, January 1990, 0 436 19988 2
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The War Zone 
by Alexander Stuart.
Hamish Hamilton, 207 pp., £11.95, March 1989, 0 241 12342 9
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A Touch of Love 
by Jonathan Coe.
Duckworth, 156 pp., £9.95, April 1989, 0 7156 2277 3
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Do it again 
by Martyn Harris.
Viking, 220 pp., £11.95, October 1989, 0 670 82858 0
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... deep feeling in flimsy Billy. The God of his fathers still mattered. Billy was as spattered as a Jackson Pollock painting, and among the main trickles was his Jewishness, with other streaks flowing toward secrecy – streaks of sexual weakness, sexual humiliation. At the same time, he had to have his name in the paper. As someone said, he had a bug-like ...

Englishmen’s Castles

Gavin Stamp, 7 February 1980

The Victorian Country House 
by Mark Girouard.
Yale, 470 pp., £14.95, September 1980, 0 300 02390 1
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The Artist and the Country House 
by John Harris.
Sotheby Parke Bernet, 376 pp., £37.50, November 1980, 0 85667 053 7
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National Trust Studies 1980 
edited by Gervase Jackson-Stops.
Sotheby Parke Bernet, 175 pp., £8.95, October 1980, 0 85667 065 0
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... for, doubtless with an eye to their principal business, Messrs Sotheby Parke Bernet have carried John Harris’s research in a heavy and lavish volume with 419 plates – some a little grey, alas, but there are 26 good ones in colour. This may not be the first book on the subject, but it is a scholarly work of great scope and interest. As Mr Harris explains ...

No Crying in This House

Jackson Lears: The Kennedy Myth, 7 November 2013

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy 
by David Nasaw.
Allen Lane, 896 pp., £12.35, September 2013, 978 0 14 312407 8
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Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch 
by Barbara Perry.
Norton, 404 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 393 06895 5
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... somewhat brittle voice, occasionally grated’. She was the first-born child of the Boston mayor, John Francis ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald, a ‘paunchy welterweight’ as Nasaw calls him, who belted out ‘Sweet Adeline’ at every campaign gathering and kept his daughter on a short leash. Rose returned home from convent school in 1910 to become her ...

Inside Every Foreigner

Jackson Lears: America Intervenes, 21 February 2019

Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life 
by Robert M. Dallek..
Allen Lane, 692 pp., £30, November 2017, 978 0 241 31584 2
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... the ambiguities and resorts to conventional wisdom. His list of leaders includes Harry Truman and John Kennedy – two presidents who risked war by exacerbating tensions with the Soviet Union. Dallek views FDR from the perspective of a mid-century liberal who has apparently made his peace with the warfare state. As Dallek sees him, FDR, like his cousin ...

My Kind of Psychopath

Michael Wood, 20 July 1995

Pulp Fiction 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 198 pp., £7.99, October 1994, 0 571 17546 5
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Reservoir Dogs 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 113 pp., £7.99, November 1994, 0 571 17362 4
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True Romance 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 134 pp., £7.99, January 1995, 0 571 17593 7
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Natural Born Killers 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 175 pp., £7.99, July 1995, 0 571 17617 8
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... you prefer the Brady Bunch to the Partridge family, for instance, as Uma Thurman wants to know of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, is simultaneously a test, a cultural allusion and a send-up of the whole idea of culture. The funniest moment in Pulp Fiction concerns Harvey Keitel, come to clean up after John Travolta and ...

Writeabout

John Bayley, 9 July 1987

The Songlines 
by Bruce Chatwin.
Cape, 293 pp., £10.95, June 1987, 0 224 02452 3
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... style and equipment, perhaps by the authors of An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson, in which his picture appeared. But the faces of his naked family – father, mother, two children – have the ideal look, not so much of the Noble Savage who was a cliché in cultivated circles at the time, as of a contemporary SDP family, or the ...

A History of Disappointment

Jackson Lears: Obama’s Parents, 5 January 2012

The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama’s Father 
by Sally Jacobs.
Public Affairs, 336 pp., £20, July 2011, 978 1 58648 793 5
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A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother 
by Janny Scott.
Riverhead, 384 pp., £18.99, May 2011, 978 1 59448 797 2
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... an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008. In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the ...