Festival of Punishment

Thomas Laqueur: On Death Row, 5 October 2000

Proximity to Death 
by William McFeely.
Norton, 206 pp., £17.95, January 2000, 0 393 04819 5
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Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment 
edited by Bonnie Bobit.
Bobit, 311 pp., $24.95, September 1999, 0 9624857 6 4
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... punishment in the United States subsists – inescapably – in a miasma of race. The Honorable John H. Land in 1977 presided over the trial of a black man called William Brooks, whose case McFeely follows. Land is the son of a prominent local dignitary who had seen to the lynching of an adolescent boy 65 years earlier. The barefoot ‘little black ...

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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... some of the best contemporary poets and translators such as Alastair Reid, Richard Wilbur and John Hollander. He also worked with Borges on translating his prose works into English, and coaxed him into producing new stories and a long autobiographical piece for the New Yorker. All of this is vividly described in The Lesson of the Master: On Borges and His ...

The Force of the Anomaly

Perry Anderson: Carlo Ginzburg, 26 April 2012

Threads and Traces: True False Fictive 
by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi.
California, 328 pp., £20.95, January 2012, 978 0 520 25961 4
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... from his first physiognomic depiction as the outcome of Charles Bovary’s operation on the club-foot, once the chemist produces his nostrum), remains as distant from the construction of any serious history as Tolstoy’s insistence on its unintelligibility. In Ginzburg’s use of the novels as exemplars, features of them such as these, which do not serve ...

A New Kind of Being

Jenny Turner: Angela Carter, 3 November 2016

The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography 
by Edmund Gordon.
Chatto, 544 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 7011 8755 2
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... imagination Carter may perform, she always comes to rest in the right ideological position,’ John Bayley wrote in a notoriously slighting 1992 review: the ballet idea works well, but otherwise he’s a bit tin-eared. A ‘moral pornographer’, Carter called herself sometimes; she could also have called herself an ideological choreographer. It’s not ...

That was the year that was

Tariq Ali, 24 May 2018

... the BBC who couldn’t be public, but we can name them now – Ken Trodd, Ken Loach, Tony Garnett, John McGrath. You know, from the cultural milieu. There was Clive, Fred Halliday, later Sheila Rowbotham got involved, and Roger Smith, script editor at the BBC. The French May erupted as we were about to launch the first issue, which had come out looking ...

Alas! Deceived

Alan Bennett: Larkin the Librarian, 25 March 1993

Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life 
by Andrew Motion.
Faber, 570 pp., £20, April 1993, 0 571 15174 4
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... the morning and read in the afternoon. This was the old Coventry Central Library, nestling at the foot of the unbombed cathedral, filled with tall antiquated bookcases (blindstamped Coventry Central Libraries after the fashion of the time) with my ex-schoolfellow Ginger Thompson ... This was my first experience of the addictive excitement a large open-access ...

Ever Closer Union?

Perry Anderson, 7 January 2021

... wave of appointees also included one who was, in the words of an admirer, Europe’s equivalent of John Marshall, the patriarch of the Supreme Court in the US, responsible for establishing its authority across the land. Robert Lecourt was a leading politician in the French version of the Christian Democratic parties of Italy and Germany, the Mouvement ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... for the day and made her way home. Grenfell Tower and the low-rise blocks at the tower's foot shortly after they were finished in 1974. Standing at 221 feet, Grenfell Tower was opened in 1974. It is owned by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and was managed on behalf of the council by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
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... three acknowledged illegitimate children. ‘I wonder what Lady Wilde thought of her husband?’ John Butler Yeats wrote to his son in 1921. ‘When she was Miss Elgee, Mrs Butt found her with her husband when her circumstances were not doubtful, and told my mother about it – so that she could afford to be wise and tolerant.’ (Mrs Butt’s husband was ...

Germs: A Memoir

Richard Wollheim, 15 April 2004

... through it, or who had seen it but hadn’t noticed how deep it was, and slammed down, first one foot, then the other, to make the water splash up over the top of my boots. For a minute or so, I became the rough boy I never wanted to be. Next there was the delay as the tickets had to be bought, and the small violet or cherry-coloured pieces of paper curled ...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

... signed by its sender and encrypted to its receiver’. The public key, or address, is matched, as John Lanchester handily described it in the LRB, to ‘a private key which provides access to that address’. A key is really just a string of numbers and digits: the public key demonstrates ownership of any given address; the private key can only be used by the ...

Who said Gaddafi had to go?

Hugh Roberts, 17 November 2011

... enthusiasm across North Africa from 1952 onwards, putting the champions of Islam on the back foot. But Gaddafi & Co were latecomers to the Arab nationalist revolutionary ball and little more than a year after their seizure of power Nasser was dead. For some time Gaddafi persisted with the idea of a strategic relationship with Egypt, which would have ...
... with the job, the baton passed to civil servants and to a junior minister responsible for energy, John Battle. Battle was from Leeds, a Catholic and an activist for social justice whose life until that point – studying the poetry of William Empson, training for the priesthood, setting up Church Action on Poverty to campaign for a minimum wage and mastering ...

The Suitcase: Part Three

Frances Stonor Saunders, 10 September 2020

... I see his loving gaze falling on the objects in it: a conch shell on a side table, a painting by John Piper (a wedding gift). Home is never a neutral place, it is a very specific context, an animated expression of the presence it contains. Why can’t it be loved?‘You can’t love an inanimate object.’ I don’t know where he got the sentence from. My ...

Bites from the Bearded Crocodile

G. Cabrera Infante, 4 June 1981

... except in such recherché musical circles as the coterie around Nadia Boulanger in Paris or by John Cage’s epigoni everywhere. Roldan, also a remarkable conductor, died of a skin cancer in the face in his early thirties. Cruelly deformed, in his last performances he had to climb the podium wearing a silk mask. Caturla, a country judge who used to compose ...