If I Turn and Run

Iain Sinclair: In Hoxton, 1 June 2000

45 
by Bill Drummond.
Little, Brown, 361 pp., £12.99, March 2000, 0 316 85385 2
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Crucify Me Again 
by Mark Manning.
Codex, 190 pp., £8.95, May 2000, 0 18 995814 6
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... of the USA, credit-rich geeks, surfers with trembling fingers. The ones who are currently sampling Stephen King. When the investment pays off, the nouveau plutocrats buy into old-fashioned bricks and mortar. Property prices soar. Clerkenwell booms from the Euro-rinsed Smithfield meat market, through Cloth Fair, back to Hoxton and Shoreditch. The psychic ...

How far shall I take this character?

Richard Poirier: The Corruption of Literary Biography, 2 November 2000

Bellow: A Biography 
by James Atlas.
Faber, 686 pp., £25, November 2000, 0 571 14356 3
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... Bellow has read and taught all his life, allows Buck Mulligan in Ulysses to give a comic twist to Stephen Dedalus’s similar pretensions that he is of divine origins and divinely inspired: I’m the queerest young fellow that you ever heard. My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird. With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree. So here’s to disciples and ...

How to Measure Famine

Alex de Waal, 6 February 2025

... others, and aid donors with limited budgets wanted to know which to prioritise. The nutritionist Nicholas Haan and his colleagues at the UN’s food security and nutrition analysis unit in Somalia developed a five-phase scale with colour-coded maps to represent a composite of three kinds of data: on households’ access to food, child malnutrition levels and ...

Our Flexible Friends

Conor Gearty, 18 April 1996

Scott Inquiry Report 
by Richard Scott.
HMSO, 2386 pp., £45, February 1996, 0 10 262796 7
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... anybody over BSE? Public disillusion has reached such depths that no one now cares whether or not Stephen Dorrell or Douglas Hogg and their junior colleagues are telling the truth. They probably are at the moment, or at least the truth as they presently believe it to be. The reason the beef industry has collapsed is not that people think they are being lied ...

England’s Isaiah

Perry Anderson, 20 December 1990

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas 
by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy.
Murray, 276 pp., £18.95, October 1990, 9780719547898
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... field which, he maintains, has traditionally been neglected in England. Between the time of Leslie Stephen and, say, Quentin Skinner, that was certainly true. Even today, this branch of studies has far less elbow-room in English than in American universities. Since the Seventies, however, the situation has been changing, and the rise of a new kind of ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Notes on 1997, 1 January 1998

... action’ to a foreground scene of some talk at another table between John Standing, playing Nicholas Jenkins, and Jeremy Clyde, playing Roddie Cutts. Christopher Morahan wants our table to be having an animated and amusing conversation, with Sillery the life and soul of the party. There is one problem with this and that is that the MPs are played by ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... Quite simply it caused nearly all of the 72 deaths. ‘There’s a moment,’ the fire expert Stephen Mackenzie told me, ‘when the tactics have to move from “remain in place” to “assisted evacuation”.’ It had been obvious from very early on, even to spectators on the ground, that the fire at Grenfell Tower was not going to be put out, that it ...