Pipe down back there!

Terry Castle: The Willa Cather Wars, 14 December 2000

Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism 
by Joan Acocella.
Nebraska, 127 pp., £13.50, August 2000, 0 8032 1046 9
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... the linear and upright form of the male phallus.’) She wickedly lampoons Ammons and Patrick Shaw for finding lurking sexual symbols, such as giant wombs and fallopian tubes, in Cather’s frequent descriptions of Midwestern scenery. (‘No tree can grow, no river flow, in Cather’s landscapes,’ Acocella notes, ‘without this being a penis or ...

Heir to Blair

Christopher Tayler: Among the New Tories, 26 April 2007

... or ethnic minority candidates is ‘political correctness’ at its most extreme. The demotion of Patrick Mercer – the Conservative ‘homeland security’ spokesman who said that as an army officer he had come across ‘a lot of ethnic minority soldiers who were idle and useless, but who used racism as a cover for their misdemeanours’ – was, to many of ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: My 2006, 4 January 2007

... the sense to list) read: ‘Monkeys. Talking Parrots. Regent Pet Stores. Naturalists.’ In 1966 Patrick Garland and I filmed some poems to include in a comedy series we were doing, On the Margin. The standard form of comedy sketch shows then demanded a musical interlude between items, Kathy Kirby, say, or Millicent Martin. Boldly (as we thought) we opted ...

Upriver

Iain Sinclair: The Thames, 25 June 2009

Thames: Sacred River 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Vintage, 608 pp., £14.99, August 2008, 978 0 09 942255 6
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... fires, scrambler bikes and wavering golden beds of reeds. My instinct was to follow the example of Patrick Wright, whose television journey, The River: The Thames in Our Time (1999), starts on the open sea, with the offshore forts, before making landfall on the Isle of Grain. Ackroyd believes that ‘the source is the place of enchantment, where the boundary ...

Into the Underworld

Iain Sinclair: The Hackney Underworld, 22 January 2015

... scientist, Professor Challenger, who would now be seen a natural performer for the television age, Patrick Moore channelled by Brian Blessed, sinks a shaft in Sussex, going deeper than anyone has gone before, to prove that ‘the world upon which we live is itself a living organism, endowed … with a circulation, a respiration, and a nervous system of its ...

The Strange Death of Municipal England

Tom Crewe: Assault on Local Government, 15 December 2016

... to impose monetarist discipline and liberate the economy from its social democratic baggage. Patrick Jenkin, then the minister responsible for local government, prefigured Eric Pickles: ‘We have a duty to protect ratepayers from blatant exploitation. We have a duty to ensure that all parts of the public sector work within national economic ...

Why Literary Criticism is like Virtue

Stanley Fish, 10 June 1993

... Teaching the cultural text is the role of cultural studies, whose promise is well presented in Patrick Brantlinger’s Crusoe Footprints. Cultural studies, he explains, ‘aims to overcome the disabling fragmentation of knowledge within the disciplinary structure of the university, and ... also to overcome the fragmentation and alienation in the larger ...

Irangate

Edward Said, 7 May 1987

The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey 
by Salman Rushdie.
Picador, 171 pp., £2.95, January 1987, 0 330 29990 5
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Turning the Tide: US Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace 
by Noam Chomsky.
Pluto, 298 pp., £5.95, September 1986, 0 7453 0184 3
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... Luttwak, Michael Ledeen, Jeane Kirkpatrick, media legitimisers from George Will, William Safire, Patrick Buchanan and William Buckley to reporters like Shirley Christian and James Le Moyne, the editorial staff of the New Republic and Commentary, and many more) has moved American policy into a ruthless and uncomprehending adversarialism towards terrorism and ...

The Atmosphere of the Clyde

Jean McNicol: Red Clydeside, 2 January 2020

When the Clyde Ran Red: A Social History of Red Clydeside 
by Maggie Craig.
Birlinn, 313 pp., £9.99, March 2018, 978 1 78027 506 2
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Glasgow 1919: The Rise of Red Clydeside 
by Kenny MacAskill.
Biteback, 310 pp., £20, January 2019, 978 1 78590 454 7
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John Maclean: Hero of Red Clydeside 
by Henry Bell.
Pluto, 242 pp., £14.99, October 2018, 978 0 7453 3838 5
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... ILP’s success in 1922 came in part from capturing the large Irish vote, thanks to Wheatley and Patrick Dollan, the first Catholic lord provost of Glasgow and the ILP’s supreme organiser, and the party’s decision to back Catholic schools, drop its support for prohibition (many of the ILPers were teetotal; so were Gallacher and Maclean) and back Home ...

Who does that for anyone?

Adam Shatz: Jean-Pierre Melville, 20 June 2019

Jean-Pierre Melville: Le Solitaire 
by Bertrand Teissier.
Fayard, 272 pp., €22, October 2017, 978 2 213 70573 6
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Jean-Pierre Melville, une vie 
by Antoine de Baecque.
Seuil, 244 pp., €32, October 2017, 978 2 02 137107 9
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... in his films is ‘in reality an effect of memory’. The same observation might be made of Patrick Modiano, whose noirish investigations of wartime Paris, spun from newspaper clippings and phone listings, often recall Melville’s cinema. Their work converges, too, in a shared feeling for Nazi-occupied Paris, their fascination with the underworlds of ...

When Ireland Became Divided

Garret FitzGerald: The Free State’s Fight for Recognition, 21 January 1999

Documents on Irish Foreign Policy. Vol. I: 1919-22 
edited by Ronan Fanning.
Royal Irish Academy and Department of Foreign Affairs, 548 pp., £30, October 1998, 1 874045 63 1
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... by the Russian representative in New York in June 1920. But according to the Sinn Féin envoy Patrick McCartan – writing to a Soviet official from neighbouring Estonia on his way back to Ireland from Russia in June 1921 – this had not been seriously considered by de Valera because of McCartan’s doubts about when ‘your representatives speak for ...

Do Anything, Say Anything

James Meek: On the New TV, 4 January 2024

Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television 
by Peter Biskind.
Allen Lane, 383 pp., £25, November, 978 0 241 44390 3
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... Sex and the City’s creator and its second lead writer were gay men, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, prompting one of the Girls cast, Jemima Kirke, to say of Dunham’s series: ‘It’s not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended Dunham ...

Red Power

Thomas Meaney: Indigenous Political Strategies, 18 July 2024

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hämäläinen.
Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History 
by Ned Blackhawk.
Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
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Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance 
by Nick Estes.
Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
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... were developed by Maxime Rodinson for Israel and, in their current academic configuration, by Patrick Wolfe for Anglo-settler states, Karl Kautsky refined the distinction between ‘work’ colonies, where Europeans settled and conducted extermination, and ‘exploitation’ colonies, where the aims were more purely extractive and relied on local ...

A Man of Parts and Learning

Fara Dabhoiwala: Francis Williams Gets His Due, 21 November 2024

... his diary, without much detail. Near Black River Bay on the south coast, the doctor and naturalist Patrick Browne more carefully recorded the comet’s position in the sky over several days and sent his data to a newspaper in London, though without seeming to understand why its location was changing and what that signified. In fact, as both entities hurtled ...

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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... he didn’t find gifted or amusing enough. Among the first of the non-plumbers to arrive was Patrick O’Donovan, a red-faced, hard-living Irishman (Ampleforth, Christ Church and war service with the Irish Guards) who came on the recommendation of the diplomat Nico Henderson. He had never published a word in his life, but within a few years had acquired ...