Oozy

Diana Rose, 20 September 1984

A Nice Girl like Me: A Story of the Seventies 
by Rosie Boycott.
Chatto, 250 pp., £8.95, April 1984, 0 7011 2665 5
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... We would like some examples of ‘the witty and highbrow artistic references’ which her friends, David and Jeremy, bandied about. But all we hear of Jeremy’s thoughts, when he and Rosie ‘tumble’ into bed, is that he thinks ‘fate had brought them together and they’d met in another lifetime.’ Jeremy is respectfully described as a ‘Cambridge ...

A Potent Joy

E.S. Turner, 4 July 1985

Hitler’s Rockets: The Story of the V-2s 
by Norman Longmate.
Hutchinson, 423 pp., £13.95, May 1985, 0 09 158820 0
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... who all along decried the rumours of a rocket attack as ‘a mare’s nest’ (thus giving David Irving the title for a book) and said of Sir Stafford Cripps, who took the threat seriously: ‘What can you expect from a lawyer who eats nothing but nuts?’ Even when it was indubitably clear what was on the way, Cherwell fell back to arguing that the ...

Diary

Inigo Thomas: Michael Wolff’s Book Party, 8 February 2018

... Fire and Fury: ‘better books’, she said, would be published soon. Better books? She mentioned David Frum’s Trumpocracy as an example, with its less than thrilling subtitle ‘The Corruption of the American Republic’. The errors of Wolff’s book, and its stylistic shortcomings, were said to be indicative of deeper flaws in Michael Wolff the man: was ...

Roman Fever

Sarah Perry, 26 September 2019

Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire 
by Jessica Howell.
Cambridge, 238 pp., £75, October 2018, 978 1 108 48468 8
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... David Soren​ of the University of Arizona was excavating the remains of a villa just outside Lugnano in Umbria in 1992 when he uncovered a fifth-century mass grave: 47 small skeletons had been interred in layers, some pressed into large amphorae. A number of them were newborn babies. The deepest layer held only a corpse or two, but the higher levels were increasingly populated ...

Covid-19 in the Time of Netanyahu

Yonatan Mendel: Bibi has done it again, 7 May 2020

... government.’ The media rallied to his call, and so did less likely allies. The novelist David Grossman went on TV to urge a ‘unity government’ of Likud and Blue and White. ‘Hatred will wait for better days … we need an emergency unity government now,’ Aviv Geffen, a rock star and once a leading peace activist, said in an op-ed. Even the ...

Clever, or even Clever-Clever

Adam Kuper: Edmund Leach, 23 May 2002

Edmund Leach: An Anthropological Life 
by Stanley Tambiah.
Cambridge, 517 pp., £60, February 2002, 0 521 52102 5
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The Essential Edmund Leach: Vol. I: Anthropology and Society 
by Stephen Hugh-Jones and James Laidlaw.
Yale, 406 pp., £30, February 2001, 0 300 08124 3
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The Essential Edmund Leach: Vol. II: Culture and Human Nature 
by Stephen Hugh-Jones and James Laidlaw.
Yale, 420 pp., £30, February 2001, 0 300 08508 7
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... But in his own eyes he remained the gangling, untidy public school rebel, still recognisable in David Hockney’s official portrait of him as Provost. ‘Quirky, unpredictable, a believer that truth emerges from contradiction, a roughneck in argument’, according to Noel Annan, his predecessor as Provost of King’s. His friend Audrey Richards said that he ...

The Disappointing Trajectory of Amir Peretz

Ilan Pappe: Will Peretz make a difference?, 15 December 2005

... for the Ashkenazi-dominated Labour Party: to have within its highest ranks a ‘Moroccan’ who held such views was in those days almost unthinkable. Since then, Peretz, like the other members of the Eight, has become more ‘pragmatic’ – as we say in Israel – in an attempt to shift Israel’s Zionist politics towards the centre. In the 1990s, he ...

Sir Jim

Reyner Banham, 22 May 1980

Memoirs of an Unjust Fella: An Autobiography 
by J.M. Richards.
Weidenfeld, 279 pp., £10, March 1980, 9780297777670
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... have been brooding on the hollowness of its victory already). In general, I think he has always held practically everybody at arm’s length. The narrative of the book is marked by a superficiality which goes beyond being merely unobservant or indifferent. And it becomes baffling and ultimately infuriating as one reads on. As I said earlier, he knew (and ...

Death of a Poet

Karl Miller, 22 January 1981

... star. But Chapman was a fan like lots of others, in that the Lennon identification appears to have held the promise of an escape from his troubles, while also arousing or attracting feelings of hostility.It seems fairly clear that the two of them were in one important respect alike. If Chapman was wretched, so was, so had to be, his hero. In the world in which ...

What is what

A.J. Ayer, 22 January 1981

Sameness and Substance 
by David Wiggins.
Blackwell, 238 pp., £12.50, May 1980, 0 631 19090 2
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... discovered, the term is then taken to apply to anything which has that constitution. It is further held that since the possession of such a constitution is a necessary condition for anything to fall under the term, the necessity can be insinuated into the bestowal of the property that marks out the object as being of its natural kind. So supposing that G is a ...

The Debate

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2024

... embody ‘MAGA: The Next Generation’. JD Vance, formerly known as James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel and J.D. Vance, now strangely rebranded without the stops, is a self-styled ‘hillbilly’ whose backwoods was Middletown, Ohio, an industrial suburb of Cincinnati (pop. 50,987), where he went from poverty to Yale Law School. He wrote a bestselling ...

Paintings about Painting

Nicholas Penny, 4 August 1983

The Art of Describing 
by Svetlana Alpers.
Murray, 273 pp., £25, May 1983, 0 7195 4063 1
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... air, light – ‘dewy vapour and sunshine’ in the case of Cuyp – which cannot be owned or held. Dutch genre paintings, on the other hand, do record with love and care a good deal of immaculate opulence and in many still-lives we are presented with piles of luxury goods. The treasures painted by Kalf nestling against rumpled Turkey carpets on marble ...

Prince and Pimp

Paul Foot, 1 January 1998

The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken 
by Luke Harding and David Leigh.
Penguin, 205 pp., £6.99, December 1997, 0 14 027290 9
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... to more dramatic revelations in the Guardian and on Granada’s World in Actionprogramme, Aitken held a press conference in Tory Central Office. It fell to him, he intoned, to take up what he called ‘the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play’ against the ‘cancer of bitter and twisted journalism’. He sued for libel. This was ...

The Life of Henri Grippes

Jonathan Coe, 18 September 1997

Selected Stories 
by Mavis Gallant.
Bloomsbury, 887 pp., £25, April 1997, 0 7475 3251 6
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... Gallant has been offered a regular platform under the benign aegis of William Maxwell and, later, David Menaker. Although they span almost half a century – the earliest was published in 1953, the latest in 1995, Gallant’s 73rd year – they are nonetheless eerily consistent in voice and preoccupation. Gallant writes about exiled people: characters in ...

Diary

Christopher Hadley: The Lake Taupo Stamp, 18 September 1997

... post. Its manufacturing process, which was an inconvenience to the New Zealand printers, held the key to the accident which created the ‘Lake Taupo’. On one occasion between the years 1902 and 1904 a printer was careless and passed the paper through the press for the second time the wrong way round. There was therefore a sheet of 80 4d Pictorials ...