Sex on the Roof

Patricia Lockwood, 6 December 2018

Evening in Paradise: More Stories 
by Lucia Berlin.
Picador, 256 pp., £14.99, November 2018, 978 1 5098 8229 8
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Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs 
by Lucia Berlin.
Picador, 160 pp., £12.99, November 2018, 978 1 5098 8234 2
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... own voice, her innocence, her habit of ironing her husband’s Jockey shorts. This is not so much self-absorbed as honest: she was charming, she was lovable, she was the magnet to which most metal flies. As well as a list of houses, she could have written a list of the names she used for herself: Dolores, Maggie, Carlotta, Claudia, Maria, Maya. (How do ...

Ten Thousand Mile Mistake

Thomas Powers: Robert Stone in Saigon, 18 February 2021

Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone 
by Madison Smartt Bell.
Doubleday, 588 pp., £27, March 2020, 978 0 385 54160 2
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The Eye You See With: Selected Non-Fiction 
by Robert Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pp., £20.99, April 2020, 978 0 618 38624 6
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‘Dog Soldiers’, A Flag for Sunrise’, Outerbridge Reach’ 
by Robert Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell.
Library of America, 1216 pp., £35, March 2020, 978 1 59853 654 6
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... not something she needs to think about. One taste of high-grade heroin clouds her mind with self-delight. ‘I’m all primary process,’ she says. ‘I live the examined life. Not one funny little thing gets by me.’Marge is fine with Converse’s plan. He knows a Marine called Ray Hicks, a Zen martial arts enthusiast who will soon be heading home on ...

Fed up with Ibiza

Jenny Turner: Sybille Bedford, 1 April 2021

Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life 
by Selina Hastings.
Chatto, 432 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 1 78474 113 6
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... to do it in. ‘My attachment to England was instinctive, a bid for, if not roots, a kind of self-preservation … I held onto the English language as the rope to save me from drifting awash in the fluidities of multilingualism that surrounded me.’ German seems never to have been an option, partly because of ‘the vast and monstrous thing’, as she ...

Worm Interlude

Patricia Lockwood: What is a guy for?, 17 November 2022

Liberation Day 
by George Saunders.
Bloomsbury, 238 pp., £18.99, October 2022, 978 1 5266 2495 6
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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain 
by George Saunders.
Bloomsbury, 432 pp., £10.99, April 2022, 978 1 5266 2424 6
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... attempts to answer himself, do you do with your love of American history? Where to put the self that visits graveyards in other cities, on vacation, even putting off the pleasurable sightseeing of wife and children to kneel down and do a grave-rubbing in crayon? He works best in small biodomes, and what better than a cemetery? We can visualise it as a ...

Not in the Mood

Adam Shatz: Derrida’s Secrets, 22 November 2012

Derrida: A Biography 
by Benoît Peeters, translated by Andrew Brown.
Polity, 629 pp., £25, November 2012, 978 0 7456 5615 1
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... in and through language, you have to bid farewell to the idea of a stable, unified self. That notion is another of those reassuring fictions – like god, Spinoza’s ‘substance’, Hegel’s Geist, Heidegger’s ‘being’, Lévi-Strauss’s structures – we have devised in order to escape différance and find some anchor, some ‘meaning ...

Incapable of Sustaining Weeds

Tom Stevenson: What happened in Tigray, 25 January 2024

Understanding Ethiopia’s Tigray War 
by Martin Plaut and Sarah Vaughan.
Hurst, 459 pp., £25, February 2023, 978 1 78738 811 6
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... federalism was established. The EPRDF system stressed autonomy, regional government and self-determination, and lasted for almost three decades. Its executive committee was composed of 36 members, with equal representation from the four parties, though the TPLF held the balance of power. The impetus for the federal system came principally from ...

Five Ring Circus

David Goldblatt: Blame it on the Olympics, 18 July 2024

What are the Olympics for? 
by Jules Boykoff.
Bristol, 157 pp., £8.99, March, 978 1 5292 3028 4
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Igniting the Games: The Evolution of the Olympics and Bach’s Legacy 
by David Miller.
Pitch, 272 pp., £12.99, July 2022, 978 1 80150 142 2
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... could be put into the hands of athletes and their unions. This might well be an improvement on the self-selecting membership of the IOC, but I’m not convinced that these organisations are good representatives of the sporting world or that they have adequate forms of democratic accountability themselves. In any case, the IOC is not going to reform itself out ...

How to Measure Famine

Alex de Waal, 6 February 2025

... to mount a highly effective vaccination programme throughout the strip. Israel acted from self-interest: the ultra-orthodox Haredi community are opposed to vaccination, leaving 175,000 of their children vulnerable to a virus that spreads swiftly and silently.Rarely has the space for humanitarian action been as constricted as it was in Gaza when the ...

Poison is better

Kevin Okoth: Africa’s Cold War, 15 June 2023

White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa 
by Susan Williams.
Hurst, 651 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 1 78738 555 9
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Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-75 
by Natalia Telepneva.
North Carolina, 302 pp., £37.95, June, 978 1 4696 6586 3
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... and Williams both trace with regret the arc of movements that started off calling for freedom and self-determination but ended up running neocolonial or authoritarian regimes. Williams’s portrayal of Lumumba and Nkrumah is hagiographic at times, but she also offers an alternative story of national liberation, told from the perspective of ...

Putting the Silicon in Silicon Valley

John Lanchester: Making the Microchip, 16 March 2023

Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology 
by Chris Miller.
Simon and Schuster, 431 pp., £20, October 2022, 978 1 3985 0409 7
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... and improved on Kilby’s version because there were no free-standing wires: the chip was entirely self-contained. ‘The transistors were built into a single block of material. Soon, the “integrated circuits” that Kilby and Noyce had developed would become known as “semiconductors” or, more simply, “chips”.’ The people at Fairchild immediately ...

Everybody gets popped

David Runciman: Lance Armstrong’s Regime, 22 November 2012

The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups and Winning at All Costs 
by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle.
Bantam, 290 pp., £18.99, September 2012, 978 0 593 07173 1
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... If Armstrong really is Trump then he’s likely to remain trapped in his bubble of bluster and self-delusion until the money runs out. However, the person he increasingly reminds me of is Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor in The Thick of It, who may or may not bear a passing resemblance to Alastair Campbell. For Tucker the only line of defence ...

Sleeping Women

Sophie Smith: On the Pelicot trial, 26 December 2024

... of Avignon’.The defence tried to insist on closed hearings, but their arguments were ultimately self-defeating. The videos of Gisèle Pelicot’s abuse were, they said, too ‘nauseating’, too ‘indecent and shocking’ for public view; they would disturb the need for ‘serenity and dignity’ in the court. Her willingness to allow the videos to be seen ...

Pavilion of Heaven

Ferdinand Mount: Adventures of Raffles, 2 April 2026

Raffles, Gentleman Thief 
by E.W. Hornung.
Penguin, 304 pp., £10.99, January, 978 0 241 79022 9
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Writers in Whites: How a Group of Literary Cricketers Changed English Culture 
by Ollie Randall.
Fairfield, 288 pp., £22, May, 978 1 915237 74 3
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... the last people I wished to see – Somehow that the Downs should be seen by cultivated eyes, self-conscious eyes, spoils them to me.’ Her countryside was not to be taken over by these philistine middlebrows. Modernism was on the march, and the enemy was the Squirearchy.Woolf called Squire ‘more repulsive than words can express, and malignant into the ...

Iraq, 2 May 2005

Andrew O’Hagan: Two Soldiers, 6 March 2008

... didn’t bother him. The circumstances of his childhood and his brother’s loss have made Paul self-absorbed, understandably so perhaps, but he doesn’t see how difficult it must be for Ann bringing up three children on her own. Paul and Anthony’s difficulties with their own mother may lie behind some of this confusion. Paul was boiling with rage about ...

Mother One, Mother Two

Jeremy Harding: A memoir, 31 March 2005

... suddenly in the direction of the drinks cabinet to obliterate a gin and tonic. I felt oddly self-satisfied to have the pursuit of Margaret Walsh interrupted by the memory – a discovery in effect – of Maureen’s infatuation with Nancy and her passion for Eliza Doolittle. At the same time, it was as though three real people, Maureen, Margaret and ...