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Diary

Mat Pires: La Princesse de Clèves at the Barricades, 9 April 2009

... and Ray-Bans, celebrated his election on a yacht provided by a media magnate, and is married to a former supermodel. The term bling-bling seems to have entered the French language just to describe the country’s head of state. As far as the business of government is concerned, the Fifth Republic’s unwritten motto, ‘Le président préside, le premier ...

Britain is Your Friend

Rosemary Hill: British WW2 Propaganda, 15 December 2016

Persuading the People: British Propaganda in World War Two 
by David Welch.
British Library, 224 pp., £25, September 2016, 978 0 7123 5654 1
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... amalgamated Underground Electric Railways Company briefed the calligrapher Edward Johnston and his pupil Eric Gill to create a symbol and a typeface that would give visual identity to the unified network. The Johnston Sans lettering and red, white and blue roundel of the London Underground marked the beginning of a golden age. As well as the precisely detailed ...

The Candidates

Chris Lehmann: Scott, Rick, Ted, Marco and Jeb, 18 June 2015

... of Republican presidential hopefuls, it’s a well-trodden career path. Take Marco Rubio, a former protégé of Bush, who is often hailed as the great other-than-white hope for a party that fares badly among younger and Latino voters. On paper, Rubio presents as an American success story in the log-cabin mould: the son of struggling Cuban immigrants, he ...

The Enabling Boundary

Tom Nairn: We’re All Petit Bourgeois Now, 18 October 2007

What Should the Left Propose? 
by Roberto Mangabeira Unger.
Verso, 179 pp., £15, January 2006, 1 84467 048 1
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The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound 
by Roberto Mangabeira Unger.
Harvard, 277 pp., £19.95, February 2007, 978 0 674 02354 3
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Une brève histoire de l’avenir 
by Jacques Attali.
Fayard, 432 pp., €20, October 2006, 2 213 63130 1
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... there is not yet an answer.’ Here he is repeating an argument made in 1977 by Wittgenstein’s pupil and editor, Georg Henrik Von Wright, who pointed out in ‘What Is Humanism?’ that the real advances of humanism had always been marked by challenge and defiance. Only in forced retirement had humanism become associated with platitudes and ...

Lucian Freud

Nicholas Penny, 31 March 1988

... Double Portrait and Triple Portrait, in fact show only one girl, with a single whippet in the former and a brace of whippets in the latter. As for the plants, it is notable how they compete with the people beside them – most obviously, the potted palm (one of Freud’s earliest and most prized possessions) with the man in a raincoat in Interior in ...

Relentlessly Rational

Stephen Sedley: The Treason Trial, 22 September 2022

The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid 
by Thomas Grant.
John Murray, 335 pp., £25, July, 978 1 5293 7286 1
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... in Kentridge’s case a barrister friend of his father who was willing to have him as a pupil – and could scrape through the not very demanding professional exams, you could be called to the local bar and become an advocate.In many of these respects South Africa mirrored England. It did so too in its formal adherence to due process and ...

The Rack, the Rapier, the Ruff and the Fainting Nun

Nicholas Penny: Manet/Velázquez, 10 July 2003

Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting 
by Gary Tinterow and Geneviève Lacambre et al.
Yale, 592 pp., £50, March 2003, 0 300 09880 4
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... of two great themes in art: the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, and picturesque poverty, the former filled with smiling cherubs, the latter featuring grinning urchins. Spagnoletto was the artist we now know by the name of Ribera, who was active in Naples, then under Spanish rule; he was associated with paintings that depicted the sufferings of emaciated ...

Why Twice?

Rosemary Hill: Fire at the Mack, 24 October 2024

The Mack: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art 
by Robyne Calvert.
Yale, 208 pp., £35, April, 978 0 300 23985 0
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... seeds of the Mack’s destruction were sown long before both fires,’ as Eileen Reid, a former head of widening participation at the school, put it in the Scottish Review – had been muted while the restoration was progressing. Now they were voiced. Listing the misjudgments and lost opportunities of more than a decade, Reid concluded: ‘The real ...

Bouvard and Pécuchet

C.H. Sisson, 6 December 1984

The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters: Correspondence of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis. 
edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Murray, 193 pp., £13.50, April 1984, 0 7195 4108 5
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... and others’. He dines with princesses and is indeed everywhere that is anywhere. His dazzled former schoolmaster, evidently with little knowledge of bureaucratic procedures, foresees in 1960 that his name must appear somewhere in the next one or two Honours Lists, after the success of the London Library appeal. This ‘delightful fantasy’, as ...

The Silences of General de Gaulle

Douglas Johnson, 20 November 1980

Mon Général 
by Olivier Guichard.
Grasset
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Lettres, Notes et Carnets: Vol.1 1905-1918, Vol.2 1919-1940; 
by Charles de Gaulle.
Plon
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Le Colonel de Gaulle et les Blindés 
by Paul Huard.
Plon
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... certain observers have insisted on what was petulant and poor in the General’s character. The former director of Le Monde, Hubert Beuve-Méry, always emphasised these defects and permitted himself to sigh at the nature of human frailty. Echoing Talleyrand’s comment on Napoleon, ‘quel dommage qu’un si grand homme soit si mal élévé,’ he ...

Diary

Ian Jack: Class 1H, 15 July 2021

... in other words, not solely on the basis of their examination results. Sir Cyril Norwood, a former headmaster of Harrow who was commissioned to design the postwar curriculum for England’s state schools, gave similar advice in 1943. Parents’ wishes should be given ‘due consideration’ when their children were allocated secondary schools, while ...

A Bottle of Ink, a Pen and a Blotter

Amit Chaudhuri: R.K. Narayan, 9 August 2001

... from the high philosophical India of Professor Radhakrishnan, the first President of India and a former Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at All Souls, but quickly metamorphoses into the languors and evasions of a small-town bureaucratic conversation between superior and subordinate. ‘“Conquer taste, and you will have conquered the ...

The Mess They’re In

Ross McKibbin: Labour’s Limited Options, 20 October 2011

... attend schools that aren’t falling down. And they could demonstrate the pointlessness of the pupil premium, the Lib Dem nostrum dear to Clegg’s heart, in the context of other education cuts and a failing economy. The second is to act from strength, and promise to restore the NHS’s funding. During the election Cameron insisted that the NHS budget ...

Diary

Christopher Turner: Summerhill School and the real Orgasmatron, 3 June 2004

... how patients weep so easily when lying on their backs. Some do so in the first hour. Why?’ One former student remembers being instructed to lie down and ‘breathe deeply, as though you’re having sexual intercourse’, while Neill prodded her stomach (she was too young to know what sex was, so she just panted). ‘The repressed ones have stomachs like ...

Across the Tellyverse

Jenny Turner: Daleks v. Cybermen, 22 June 2006

Doctor Who 
BBC1Show More
Doctor Who: A Critical Reading of the Series 
by Kim Newman.
BFI, 138 pp., £12, December 2005, 1 84457 090 8
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... box.’ Meanwhile, two teachers at the local secondary modern are disturbed by the behaviour of a pupil called Susan, and investigate. Susan turns out to be the granddaughter and travelling companion of a strange old man, known only as the Doctor – she was made a relative, it is said, because the writer was uncomfortable with the implications otherwise. The ...

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