Canned Soup and Canapés

Em Hogan: Hujar and Thek, 8 October 2026

The Wonderful World that Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek 
by Andrew Durbin.
Granta, 480 pp., £25, April, 978 1 80351 213 6
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“... in whose company he ‘could drop his guard’. Cows were early subjects – he told his friend David Wojnarowicz that he’d taken a photo of them from a great distance when he was first experimenting: ‘The cows were like a hundred feet away. I mean, three little black dots … but I knew it was cows in a field.’ As an adult, he took some striking ...”

Petulance is not a tragic flaw

Rosemary Hill: Edward and Mrs Simpson, 30 July 2015

Princes at War: The British Royal Family’s Private Battle in the Second World War 
by Deborah Cadbury.
Bloomsbury, 407 pp., £25, April 2015, 978 1 4088 4524 0
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“... of which Deborah Cadbury’s is the latest, two versions of Wallis have emerged. One, widely held at the time, argues that she was an ambitious, selfish woman who was intent on being queen and spent the rest of her life punishing the hapless duke for her disappointment. The other, a minority view though strongly ...”

Rudy Then and Rudy Now

James Wolcott, 16 February 2023

Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor 
by Andrew Kirtzman.
Simon and Schuster, 458 pp., £20, September 2022, 978 1 9821 5329 8
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“... familiarly, and not affectionately, known – has exerted true staying power. Despite not having held elective office in two decades or making any useful contribution to the commonweal as a citizen, Giuliani has managed to remain a political burlesque act, clinging to the slim consolation that tawdry fame is better than no fame at all.The contrast between ...”

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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“... Sovietology was dominated by the ‘totalitarian hypothesis’ In its strong form, this held that a monolithic party-state ruled omnipotently over a passive, frozen society: in its very different weaker form, the party-state merely sought to achieve omnipotence. Both the advocates and the critics of the totalitarian hypothesis frequently muddied the ...”

Modern Shakespeare

Graham Bradshaw, 21 April 1983

The Taming of the Shrew 
edited by H.J. Oliver.
Oxford, 248 pp., £9.50, September 1982, 0 19 812907 6
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Henry V 
edited by Gary Taylor.
Oxford, 330 pp., £9.50, September 1982, 0 19 812912 2
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Troilus and Cressida 
edited by Kenneth Muir.
Oxford, 205 pp., £9.50, September 1982, 0 19 812903 3
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Troilus and Cressida 
edited by Kenneth Palmer.
Methuen, 337 pp., £12.50, October 1982, 0 416 47680 5
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“... editor to recognise, in 1793, that at this point another break in the metre marks a dramatically held pause. ‘How?’ asks Agamemnon. ‘Ay’ is Aeneas’s unruffled, insolent reply – which he then allows to sink in, before continuing his suave provocation in a return to courtly blank verse: I ask, that I might waken reverence And bid the check be ...”

Diary

Adam Shatz: Elections in Egypt, 19 July 2012

“... parliament. It also has the right to veto any article in the new constitution that is held to violate the revolution’s goals. The presidency meanwhile has been stripped of many of its powers, including the power to declare war. This wasn’t a military coup, as some claimed: the coup had already taken place on 11 February 2011, when the SCAF ...”

Diary

Dani Garavelli: Searching for the ‘Bonhomme Richard’, 25 January 2024

“... the sensation of sandpaper, the heat of it after it was rubbed on wood and its roughness when I held it to my face.When he finished the model, my father took it to Rabbies, a restaurant he co-owned on Burns Statue Square in Ayr, which served steak with tomatoes cut into Little Red Riding Hood baskets. A copy of the Selkirk Grace hung on one wall and a glass ...”

Burrinchini’s Spectre

Peter Clarke, 19 January 1984

That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in 19th-Century Intellectual History 
by Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow.
Cambridge, 385 pp., £25, November 1983, 9780521257626
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“... they are playing, it is not clear what they are doing here, along with such as Dugald Stewart, David Ricardo, the Mills, E.A. Freeman, Alfred Marshall and Graham Wallas. Are these the First Eleven, or just the first eleven names that cropped up? When the Whigs were in charge, at least we used to have an identifiable team of All Stars, whom the fans either ...”

Politics and the Prophet

Malise Ruthven, 1 August 1996

Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society 
by Michael Gilsenan.
Tauris, 377 pp., £14.95, February 1996, 1 85043 099 3
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The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World 
edited by John L. Esposito.
Oxford, 480 pp., £295, June 1995, 0 19 506613 8
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Unfolding Islam 
by P.J. Stewart.
Garnet, 268 pp., £25, February 1995, 9780863721946
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Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East 
by Fred Halliday.
Tauris, 256 pp., £35, January 1996, 1 86064 004 4
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“... Mediterranean societies, as well as others further afield, and this calls into question the widely held view that Islamic texts or values can of themselves be held responsible for types of behaviour that underpin male supremacism. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World includes articles on feminism and Muslim ...”

Vigah

Elizabeth Drew: JFK, 20 November 2003

John F. Kennedy: An Unfinished Life 1917-63 
by Robert Dallek.
Allen Lane, 838 pp., £25, September 2003, 0 7139 9737 0
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“... caretakers of the flame to open sealed papers concerning Kennedy’s health problems, which were held at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Earlier books had revealed that Kennedy took a number of different medications, and we were vaguely aware at the time that he had a bad back, but Dallek’s new information about the extent of Kennedy’s health ...”

Who rules in Baghdad?

Patrick Cockburn: Power Struggles in Iraq, 14 August 2008

“... explanation of the gunfire and cancelled the visit. The departing American commander, General David Petraeus, keeps saying that the fall in violence and the extension of government control in Iraq is ‘fragile and reversible’. His caution is based on experience. In 2004 Petraeus, then commander of the 101st Airborne Division, appeared to have pacified ...”

Syzygy

Galen Strawson: Brain Chic, 25 March 2010

36 Arguments for the Existence of God 
by Rebecca Goldstein.
Atlantic, 402 pp., £12.99, March 2010, 978 1 84887 153 3
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“... a woman’s body (unmindful, perhaps, of the evolutionary energy behind this emotion), is widely held to have acquired descriptive details from two Princeton philosophers. Mallach, the physicist in Properties of Light, shares many ideas with David Bohm. Klapper, who thinks ‘Goethe … settled for being a genius’ and ...”

Too Glorious for Words

Bernard Porter: Lawrence in Arabia, 3 April 2014

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East 
by Scott Anderson.
Atlantic, 592 pp., £25, March 2014, 978 1 78239 199 9
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“... that surrounded his reputation both in his own day and afterwards, as reflected in the 1962 David Lean biopic, presenting him as the romantic hero – tall, blue-eyed, in flowing robes – he always wanted to be. His failures are familiar to anyone who has taken any serious interest in him, and were only too painfully known to himself. He either led or ...”

Ovid goes to Stratford

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare Myths, 5 December 2013

Thirty Great Myths about Shakespeare 
by Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith.
Wiley-Blackwell, 216 pp., £14.99, December 2012, 978 0 470 65851 2
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“... premises in Stratford during or soon after the town’s first great Shakespearean festival, David Garrick’s Jubilee of 1769; it may even have adorned the Birthplace itself, part of which was still in business as the Swan and Maidenhead Inn. Garrick himself preferred to think of the infant Shakespeare being taught by Nature rather than Fancy: but the ...”

In Cardiff

John Barrell: Richard Wilson, 25 September 2014

“... greeted the last major Wilson exhibition, Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction, curated by David Solkin, now of the Courtauld Institute, certainly the best, and probably the most respected, historian of 18th-century British art now practising. In the introduction to his excellent and, as it turned out, controversial catalogue, Solkin had suggested that ...”