Mr Straight and Mr Good

Paul Foot: Gordon Brown, 19 February 1998

Gordon Brown: The Biography 
by Paul Routledge.
Simon and Schuster, 358 pp., £17.99, February 1998, 0 684 81954 6
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... and Tony Blair. In The Candidate, the great American film about political compromise starring Robert Redford, a young welfare lawyer is persuaded against his instinct to go into politics to change the world. He starts by answering questions with independent judgment and in direct language. Yes, he is in favour of abortion on demand. Yes, he is in favour ...

Learning to Say ‘Cat’

Edmund Gordon: ‘Lean Fall Stand’, 17 June 2021

Lean Fall Stand 
by Jon McGregor.
Fourth Estate, 288 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 00 820490 7
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... take care to establish the way its main character speaks before his stroke. We’re introduced to Robert ‘Doc’ Wright in Antarctica, where he works for several months each year as a technical assistant and guide to geographical researchers. The first thing we hear from him is a phatic murmur delivered into a faulty radio: ‘Thomas? Luke? Come in? This is ...

Plato Made It Up

James Davidson: Atlantis at Last!, 19 June 2008

The Atlantis Story: A Short History of Plato’s Myth 
by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, translated by Janet Lloyd.
Exeter, 192 pp., £35, November 2007, 978 0 85989 805 8
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... answer for half a century: Plato made Atlantis up. That was his response to a lecture by Fernand Robert in 1956, when the speaker tentatively referred to the theory that Atlantis was inspired by the lost Minoan civilisation, and he had not changed his mind by the time of his death in 2006, shortly after correcting the manuscript of The Atlantis Story, a ...

A Few Pitiful Traitors

David Drake: The French Resistance, 5 May 2016

Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance 
by Robert Gildea.
Faber, 593 pp., £20, September 2015, 978 0 571 28034 6
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Occupation Trilogy: ‘La Place de l’etoile’, ‘The Night Watch’, ‘Ring Roads’ 
by Patrick Modiano, translated by Caroline Hillier, Patricia Wolf and Frank Wynne.
Bloomsbury, 336 pp., £18.99, August 2015, 978 1 4088 6790 7
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... French Communist Party (PCF), at that point the biggest and most popular party in the country. As Robert Gildea explains in his perceptive new book, each constructed a myth about France’s behaviour during the war that served its own political interests; each claimed it had led the Resistance. According to the Gaullist narrative, France went to war in 1939 ...

Mobsters get homesick too

Misha Glenny: ‘Mafias on the Move’, 30 June 2011

Mafias on the Move: How Organised Crime Conquers New Territories 
by Federico Varese.
Princeton, 278 pp., £24.95, March 2011, 978 0 691 12855 9
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... Robert Friedman’s Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America came out in 2000. Two years before that, in June 1998, he received a phone call from Mike McCall, an FBI agent. McCall warned him that his investigation into Russian organised crime was proving dangerous. ‘I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings,’ McCall said, ‘but a major Russian organised crime figure has taken out a contract on your life ...

Dear So-and-So

Ange Mlinko: Caroline Blackwood’s Doubles, 6 February 2025

The Stepdaughter 
by Caroline Blackwood.
McNally Editions, 112 pp., $18, August 2024, 978 1 961341 12 8
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The Fate of Mary Rose 
by Caroline Blackwood.
Virago, 240 pp., £9.99, November 2024, 978 0 349 01904 8
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... Caroline Blackwood’s first novel, was published when she was 44 and married to Robert Lowell. The seven years they spent together transformed her from an occasional magazine writer to a committed littérateur, a vindication of many years in the role of aristocratic playgirl, trophy wife and muse. She hailed from ‘the insular world of the ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... of the Guildford Four are a politically heterogeneous bunch: at one end, Cardinal Basil Hume, Robert Kee, Merlyn Rees, Lord Scarman and the late Lord Devlin; at the other, rhetoric-ridden, far-left Trotskyist groupings. And in between the world and its dog. The only thing on which all are agreed – some with more knowledge of the facts than others – is ...

Great American Disaster

Christopher Reid, 8 December 1988

To Urania: Selected Poems 1965-1985 
by Joseph Brodsky.
Penguin, 174 pp., £4.99, September 1988, 9780140585803
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... obligation to make allowances at moments like this. But how generous should such allowances be? ‘May 24, 1980’ is a translation from the Russian into rhyming, or assonantally chiming, quatrains. It is conceivable that the word ‘nitty-gritty’ was chosen here, not just as a companion-in-rhyme for ‘city’, but because it is the ideal counterpart to ...

My body is my own

David Miller, 31 October 1996

Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality 
by G.A. Cohen.
Cambridge, 277 pp., £40, October 1995, 0 521 47174 5
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... Equality can be seen as an indirect attempt to reaffirm its relevance. On the surface its concerns may seem to be different: to establish which parts of Marxism are still defensible and which are not, and to scrutinise the idea of self-ownership that has played a central role in recent libertarian thought, especially in North America. To these tasks Cohen ...

On Douglas Crase

Matthew Bevis, 5 December 2019

... other collection of verse – a slim chapbook, The Astropastorals, first published in 2017. One may well wonder what Crase was doing in those intervening decades.Among other things, he was writing essays and books of non-fiction. Lines from London Terrace, published last year, brings together a range of his pieces on literature, painting and culture ...

At the Sainsbury Centre

Mike Jay: Ayahuasca Art, 5 December 2024

... Huichol economy. But they bear little resemblance to the traditional works from which they derive. Robert Zingg, the anthropologist who introduced Huichol art to the West in the 1930s, collected not yarn paintings but gourd and clay bowls, decorated with patterns in subdued earth tones and designed to be left as votive objects in sacred spots. Creating such ...

How frightened should we be?

John Lloyd, 10 February 1994

Russia 2010 
by Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson.
Random House, 302 pp., $32, October 1993, 0 679 42995 6
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What About the workers: Workers and the Transition to Capitalism in Russia 
by Simon Clarke.
Verso, 248 pp., £34.95, September 1993, 0 86091 650 2
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After the Soviet Union: From Empire to Nation 
edited by Timothy Colton and Robert Levgold.
Norton, 208 pp., $24.95, November 1992, 0 393 03420 8
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... planning’ on the part of Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson, from whose book it comes. Though it may not, at first sight, appear any less plausible than a capitalist China ruled by the Chinese Communist Party would have seemed in the Sixties or Seventies, or a Japan producing high-quality, high-cost consumer goods for the world would have done in the ...

Rancorous Luminaries

R.W. Davies, 28 April 1994

Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives 
edited by J. Arch Getty and Roberta Manning.
Cambridge, 294 pp., £35, September 1993, 0 521 44125 0
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Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant 
by Amy Knight.
Princeton, 312 pp., £19.95, January 1994, 0 691 03257 2
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This I Cannot Forget: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin’s Widow 
by Anna Larina.
Hutchinson, 385 pp., £25, March 1994, 0 09 178141 8
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Stalin i Ordzhonikidze: Konflikty v Politbyuro v 30-e gody 
by O.V. Khlevnyuk.
Rossiya Molodaya, 144 pp., December 1993, 5 86646 047 5
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... as Politburo minutes of that time, to both of which I had been refused access the previous April. May promises made that autumn have not been kept. The KGB, military and foreign affairs archives remain administratively separate from the other state archives, and access is extremely difficult. And we still await the Presidential of Kremlin archives, promised ...

The Problem of Reality

Michael Wood: Primo Levi, 1 October 1998

Primo Levi: The Tragedy of an Optimist 
by Myriam Anissimov, translated by Steve Cox.
Aurum, 452 pp., £25, September 1998, 1 85410 503 5
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... man’ – the learning of the lesson was itself a form of defiance and an aid to survival. I may be an ‘intellectual’ today, even though the word fills me with vague discomfort; I certainly was not one then, because of moral immaturity, ignorance and alienation; and if I became one later on, paradoxically, I owe that precisely to the Lager ...

One of the Pyramids of Egypt

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 27 May 1999

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment 
by Isobel Grundy.
Oxford, 680 pp., £30, April 1999, 0 19 811289 0
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... her ‘the rough draught of a certain famous line in the “Characters of Women” ’. Woolf may have intended her mock-biography as an affectionate portrait of Vita Sackville-West, but Isobel Grundy is surely right in thinking that these episodes in Orlando’s career were primarily inspired by the life and letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Of ...