Gallop, Gallop

Anna Della Subin: Right and Left Cids, 5 February 2026

El Cid: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary 
by Nora Berend.
Hodder, 236 pp., £25, November 2024, 978 1 3997 0962 0
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... coverage of Franco’s speech in Burgos, for instance, is ‘nauseating’.) That a candidate may have committed bloodshed or pillage has never posed much of a problem in the annals of canonisation. Berend doesn’t demonstrate that it was an issue for medieval ecclesiasts to receive huge booty from someone who killed large numbers of people, or was too ...

Zip it

Hal Foster: Barnett Newman’s Anarchism, 5 February 2026

Barnett Newman: Here 
by Amy Newman.
Princeton, 693 pp., £35, January, 978 0 691 24918 6
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... a sort of indignation disorder.) New in this text is the priority given to man as artist; Adam may have fallen, but actually he ‘sought the creative life’. For Newman ‘the aesthetic act always precedes the social one’; ‘man’s first expression’ was ‘a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication’. Once more an American version of ...

All they will find is sand

Eyal Weizman: Gaza’s Yellow Line, 23 April 2026

... the village where he was born and from which he was expelled with the rest of his family on 14 May 1948. Al-Ma’in and other Palestinian villages were soon cleared and replaced by the agrarian kibbutz settlements that were attacked on 7 October 2023. The settlers expanded Israeli territory through cultivation, removing the remnants of Palestinian ...

Time Unfolded

Perry Anderson: Powell v. the World, 2 August 2018

... maintained in Minima Moralia, are inevitably at once refused and demanded by them. That they may simply be incongruous he disregarded. Cases where parallels are as close as those between Proust and Powell lend ‘the compulsion to evaluate’ he thought so generally inescapable a particular force, requiring especial care. We are dealing with two great ...

Market Forces and Malpractice

James Meek: The Housing Crisis, 4 July 2024

... Stockport and Rochdale – made the housing crisis central to his re-election campaign in May, when he won a third term by an overwhelming margin. He donates 15 per cent of his salary towards the effort to end rough sleeping. He says he’ll bear down on exploitative landlords who squeeze high rents out of tenants living in damp, chilly, crowded ...

Don’t abandon me

Colm Tóibín: Borges and the Maids, 11 May 2006

Borges: A Life 
by Edwin Williamson.
Penguin, 416 pp., £9.99, August 2005, 0 14 024657 6
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... an extent that plagiarism becomes innovation, and reading itself a form of literary experiment. It may also not have been lost on Borges, and it is not lost on the reader, that ‘The Congress’ is not only a version of El Caudillo, but also a parody of Borges’s earlier work, playing with all his old tricks, using a deadpan narrative, full of recondite ...

West End Vice

Alan Hollinghurst: Queer London, 8 May 2025

Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945-59 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 445 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 241 37060 5
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Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-67 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 416 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 241 68370 5
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... five exemplars, and pictures their lives and their probable futures with dry wit and what readers may have felt was an unusually fine grasp of detail. His types hover somewhere between reportage and fiction, each showing a different reaction when offered a bath by their client in his ‘nicely furnished bachelor apartment’. Len ‘ungraciously accepts, on ...

Porringers and Pitkins

Keith Thomas: The Early Modern Household, 5 July 2018

A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500-1700 
by Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson.
Yale, 311 pp., £40, October 2017, 978 0 300 19501 9
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... owners, so those who find themselves in a house with a formal dining room and drawing room may well feel some pressure to use them in the way their architect intended. One of the many merits of Hamling and Richardson’s book is that it makes its readers wonder whether they are in control of their own domestic environment or prisoners of ...

The Italian Disaster

Perry Anderson, 22 May 2014

... her to ‘publish a Hutton-style report’, as he had done to sanitise any part his administration may have had in the death of a whistleblower on his war in Iraq: an invasion from which he went on to net – of course, for his Faith Foundation – assorted tips and deals around the world, prominent among them cash from a South Korean oil company run by a ...

After Martha

Paul Laity, 25 September 2025

... investigation is ‘not to place blame … This is not going to be on any permanent record, you may have to … reflect on it but that’s all. It won’t affect your career going forward.’ In any case, both the registrar and the SHO were now working at another trust so King’s couldn’t tell them to attend a meeting, or do anything. Recalling his time ...

How criminals think

John Lanchester, 13 September 1990

Love and Death on Long Island 
by Gilbert Adair.
Heinemann, 138 pp., £10.95, July 1990, 9780434006229
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Going wrong 
by Ruth Rendell.
Hutchinson, 250 pp., £12.99, September 1990, 0 09 174300 1
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The Burden of Proof 
by Scott Turow.
Bloomsbury, 515 pp., £13.99, August 1990, 0 7475 0673 6
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Crucible of Fools 
by M.S. Power.
Hamish Hamilton, 165 pp., £12.99, August 1990, 0 241 13006 9
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... shortage of plot and character in The Burden of Proof. There’s also no shortage of data – you may learn more about commodity dealing than you thought you wanted to know. Stern, compared with Sabich, is a trifle stodgy as a central character, though even that stodginess has its benefits: Turow does well with Stern’s first explorations of his newly single ...

What is this Bernard?

Christopher Hitchens, 10 January 1991

Good and Faithful Servant: The Unauthorised Biography of Bernard Ingham 
by Robert Harris.
Faber, 202 pp., £14.99, December 1990, 0 571 16108 1
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... Thatcher Front Bench, had hinted at prime ministerial megalomania in a Weekend World interview in May 1986, Ingham summoned the Lobby and instructed them that Biffen, then Leader of the House of Commons, was an un-person. The phrase employed was ‘semi-detached’. In the next day’s Times: ‘The sources said that Mr Biffen was a “semi-detached member of ...

Maerdy Diary

Boris Ford: The last pit closes, 21 February 1991

... off the train we hardly recognised him: he seemed altogether smaller and more frail, though this may have been the effect of his being dressed in a new-looking suit and tie and carrying a new suitcase. He looked rather like a respectable bank clerk from Surbiton, and for a time talked like one, apparently doing his best to mask his Welsh intonation. We ...

Diary

Karl Miller: Football Tribes, 1 June 1989

... civilisation. Presently he was attacked in the street, and knocked unconscious, by two youths, who may have decided he was a foreigner. They were engaged in throwing him over the parapet of a bridge when the Police intervened. Whereupon they attacked the Police. The other evening the same youths, apparently, were interviewed on television by a kindly ...

La Côte St André

Julian Rushton, 22 June 1989

Berlioz 1803-1832: The Making of an Artist 
by David Cairns.
Deutsch, 586 pp., £25, February 1989, 0 233 97994 8
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... on his musical language, and more far-reaching effects on his forms. The effect of Beethoven may have declined in the 1850s, the period of The Trojans, but Gluck re-emerges as a first and last love; Berlioz supervised his works in performance and inspired the superb editions of the 1870s. Still in Chapter 13, I am unconvinced by Cairns’s aesthetic ...