Aha!

Liam Shaw: Plant Detectives, 7 September 2023

Planting Clues: How Plants Solve Crimes 
by David J. Gibson.
Oxford, 237 pp., £18.99, August 2022, 978 0 19 886860 6
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... the new study of forensics had given the police, ‘the principle of the trace and so on’. As David Gibson recounts in Planting Clues, Locard was also a keen botanist. One of the scores of cases he included in his textbooks described a man who had been found murdered in the countryside outside Lyon. A group of suspects was rounded up. Inspecting one of ...

Wrecking Ball

Adam Shatz: Trump’s Racism, 7 September 2017

... man has revealed the hidden depths, the ugly unmastered history, of the country he claims to lead. David Duke, the former Imperial Wizard of the Klan and a former Louisiana state representative, whose endorsement Trump could barely bring himself to disavow, said that Unite the Right was intended to ‘fulfil the promises of Donald Trump’. When Fields set off ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: Dining Out, 4 June 1998

... that this is not an issue which I am strongly minded to open up at this stage,’ and ends with ‘may I reiterate’ thanks to me for chairing the 1991-93 Royal Commission on Criminal Justice (which is, I suppose, all the nicer since in fact it’s the first thanks I’ve had from him). He tells me to go and talk to John Wakeham, which I do. Wakeham is as ...

Secrets are best kept by those who have no sense of humour

Alan Bennett: Why I turned down ‘Big Brother’, 2 January 2003

... a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country house where some amateurs are rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This house seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that ...

Diary

Kathleen Jamie: Stay alive! Stay alive!, 18 August 2022

... see the Bass on the horizon on the south edge of the firth. Further north lies the lower Isle of May, a mile long. I try to go to the May in May every year, to mark my birthday; a tourist boat sails daily from Anstruther throughout the season. Or ordinarily it does. In 2018, I went not ...

Short Cuts

James Meek: Yulia Tymoshenko, 7 June 2012

... spearhead of the campaign to shame Ukraine’s government into letting Tymoshenko go abroad. On 10 May, a few days after pictures appeared showing bruises and grazes on Tymoshenko’s skin, caused, Tymoshenko said, by a beating at the hands of prison staff, Merkel raised the stakes. In a speech to the Bundestag, she bracketed Ukraine with Belarus as a European ...

At the Royal Scottish Academy

Nicholas Penny: The Age of Titian, 21 October 2004

... which not only evoke the type of frame that might originally have surrounded the painting, but may even be considered as an abstract or epitome of Bassano’s tightly interlaced composition, with the browns, yellows and whites of the painting matched by the partly gilded and silvered walnut.In another room, however, daylight has been cut out to protect ...

Sappho speaks

Mary Beard, 11 October 1990

The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome 
by Jane McIntosh Snyder.
Bristol Classical Press, 199 pp., £25, May 1989, 1 85399 062 0
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The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece 
by J.J. Winkler.
Routledge, 240 pp., £30, February 1990, 0 415 90122 7
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Greek Virginity 
by Giulia Sissa, translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Harvard, 240 pp., $29.95, March 1990, 0 674 36320 5
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... laws of vocal harmony, imaginative portrayal, and arrangement of the details of thought.’ For David Robinson, writing in the Twenties and reprinted in the Sixties, the ‘perfection’ of Sappho’s verse was clear enough proof of her unblemished character. He was perhaps unusual in his unshakable confidence that (at least in the case of female ...

Pugin’s Law

Mark Swenarton, 4 December 1980

The Work of Sir Gilbert Scott 
by David Cole.
Architectural Press, 244 pp., £25, May 1980, 0 85139 723 9
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Lutyens Country Houses 
by Daniel O’Neill.
Lund Humphries, 167 pp., £8.95, May 1980, 0 85331 428 4
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A Revolution in London Housing: LCC Housing Architects and their Work 1893-1914 
by Susan Beattic.
GLC/Architectural Press, 127 pp., £6.95, July 1980, 0 85139 560 0
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... to questions of this sort in the new study of the principal architect involved. Sir Gilbert Scott. David Cole looks at 19th-century architecture as if from the drawing-office of the architect: commissions appear (their source and significance is not questioned); the architect provides a design, supervises construction and moves on to the next job. The story is ...

Point of Principle

Michael Irwin, 2 April 1981

The Country 
by David Plante.
Gollancz, 159 pp., £6.95, March 1981, 0 575 02938 2
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The Radiant Future 
by Alexander Zinoviev, translated by Gordon Clough.
Bodley Head, 287 pp., £7.50, March 1981, 0 370 30219 2
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Farewell to Europe 
by Walter Laqueur.
Weidenfeld, 310 pp., £6.50, March 1981, 0 297 77870 6
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... The story can fairly be summarised since its meaning and power are vested in the telling. It is David Plante’s manner that will attract or alienate readers. The Country exemplifies a mode of contemporary writing almost sufficiently distinct to constitute a genre. The defining characteristic of a novel of this kind is that it seems to consist substantially ...

Diary

A.J.P. Taylor: On Not Being Egocentric Enough, 4 August 1983

... this hotchpotch of a party will expire before the next general election. Incidentally, how much David Owen must be regretting that the SDP is still alive. If he had remained in the Labour Party nothing could have prevented his becoming its leader. Perhaps the Executive Committee of the Labour Party could dispatch a telegram saying: ‘Come back, ...

At the Pompidou

Jeremy Harding: David Goldblatt, 26 April 2018

... South Africa through a European-style industrial revolution compressed into twenty years. David Goldblatt (b.1930) began taking photographs in the gold-mining areas in his teens. Many of them, and the ones that followed, tell the story of South Africa’s labouring classes, predominantly black, in a world shaped by race laws and extractive ...

North and South

Linda Colley, 2 August 2012

... Hallam, Macaulay, Stubbs, Maitland and Dicey, and by multitudes of lesser authors such as David Lindsay Keir, the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister. Keir’s workmanlike Constitutional History of Modern Britain since 1485 went through nine editions between 1938 and 1969, and was both a celebration of how government in the UK was ‘conducted by ...

Short Cuts

Jonathan Parry: Harry Goes Rogue, 6 February 2020

... twenty years after her death, still drew the crowds. Last year Prince Charles came higher than David Gandy and David Beckham in GQ’s rankings for best-dressed Briton. The queen has been a global celebrity longer than anyone anywhere.The contract between the royal family and the nation thus relies on a curious bargain ...

Who won the Falklands War?

Edward Luttwak, 23 April 1992

One Hundred Days: The Memoirs of the Falklands Battle Group Commander 
by Admiral Sandy Woodward and Patrick Robinson.
HarperCollins, 359 pp., £18, January 1992, 0 00 215723 3
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... other, Lieutenant Kens DSC, RNR, a submarine officer, was lost at sea.’ And again: ‘Captain David Hart-Dyke was another of my officers from a family with dark blue naval blood. His father Commander Eric Hart-Dyke fought the U-boats in the Second World War ... David’s wife Diana bore the well-known naval name of ...