Diary

Antonia Hitchens: At CPAC, 20 March 2025

... from Washington to Palm Beach, Trump fired the national archivist, made himself chair of the Kennedy Centre and revoked Biden’s security clearance.His administration was ‘flooding the zone’, as Steve Bannon put it in 2018. (‘The Democrats don’t matter,’ he said. ‘The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood ...

‘Everyone is terribly kind’

Deborah Friedell: Dorothy Thompson at War, 19 January 2023

The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler 
by Kathryn Olmsted.
Yale, 314 pp., £25, April 2022, 978 0 300 25642 0
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Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War 
by Deborah Cohen.
William Collins, 427 pp., £10.99, March, 978 0 00 830590 1
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... cynicism’, ‘afraid to wake up and live’. She was particularly cross with the national hero Charles Lindbergh. He’d been ‘beloved’ to her when he’d flown solo from New York to Paris; but he’d taken to headlining rallies to defend the Neutrality Act against the ‘British and Jewish races’ who would ‘lead our country to destruction’. He ...

Beaverosity

Seamus Perry: Biography of a Biography, 11 September 2025

Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker 
by Zachary Leader.
Harvard, 449 pp., £29.95, May, 978 0 674 24839 7
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... Bloom objects to the singing of Kathleen Kearney, the name is a modification of that of Olive Kennedy, who appeared on a concert programme with Joyce in 1902.’ Another: ‘the name of Mrs Purefoy, whose labour pains end in the “Oxen of the Sun” episode with the birth of a boy, comes appropriately enough from Dr R. Damon Purefoy, in 1904 Dublin’s ...

I’d smash you in the face

Thomas Meaney: MAGA’s Debt to Buckley, 22 January 2026

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America 
by Sam Tanenhaus.
Random House, 1040 pp., £33, June 2025, 978 0 375 50234 7
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... able to attract support from Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, Chester Bowles and John F. Kennedy. The right wing of the organisation was awash with antisemitism and Charles Lindbergh worship, but most of its followers eventually accepted the task of defeating Nazism. Arriving at Yale after the war, Buckley and his ...

Riding the Night Winds

Ron Ridenhour, 22 June 1995

Derailed in Uncle Ho’s Victory Garden: Return to Vietnam and Cambodia 
by Tim Page.
Touchstone, 248 pp., £14.99, April 1995, 0 671 71926 2
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In the Lake of the Woods 
by Tim O’Brien.
Flamingo, 306 pp., £5.99, April 1995, 0 00 654395 2
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In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam 
by Robert McNamara.
Random House, 432 pp., $27.50, April 1995, 0 8129 2523 8
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... of the New Republic. In ‘The Legend of Colin Powell: Anatomy of an Establishment Career’, Charles Lane examined Powell’s ascent to power during April 1969, when the Army’s official investigation into the My Lai massacre was reluctantly creaking to life. Powell, it turns out, was assigned to Americal Division headquarters at Chu Lai. Charlie ...

11 September

LRB Contributors, 4 October 2001

... foundation for what is going to be a very long struggle’. The struggle has been long already. Charles Glass Jerusalem Because I live ten blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, my response to the events of 11 September is intensely localised; but because I was a thousand miles away in a foreign country when the events occurred, my experience of ...

Berenson’s Elixir

Simon Schama, 1 May 1980

Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur 
by Ernest Samuels.
Harvard, 477 pp., £9.50, June 1979, 0 674 06775 4
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Being Bernard Berenson 
by Meryle Secrest.
Weidenfeld, 473 pp., £8.50, January 1980, 0 297 77564 2
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... such marginal representatives of the Civilised Life as Harry S. Truman, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (whose presence was, BB felt, ‘life-enhancing’), and, most improbable of all, Ernest Hemingway. Meryle Secrest discloses that Hemingway was desperate in his suit for Berenson’s favours, and would have prostrated himself for a petal from the Great ...

Time for Several Whiskies

Ian Jack: BBC Propaganda, 30 August 2018

Auntie’s War: The BBC during the Second World War 
by Edward Stourton.
Doubleday, 422 pp., £20, November 2017, 978 0 85752 332 7
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... of ships sunk’. Reporters​ soon understood they had to be cheerful. Dimbleby’s BBC colleague Charles Gardner was attached to the RAF in France when British forces were falling back to the Channel in the late spring of 1940. His diary records that an officer told the press corps they should ‘go around with bright smiling faces’. Gardner added ...

My son has been poisoned!

David Bromwich: Cold War movies, 26 January 2012

An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War 
by J. Hoberman.
New Press, 383 pp., £21.99, March 2011, 978 1 59558 005 4
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... of non-co-operation. Dorothy Comingore (now mostly remembered for her part as the second wife of Charles Foster Kane) had been disgusted by the friendly testimony of her ex-husband, Richard Collins. ‘So,’ she said, ‘I went out and had my hair shaved off.’ Comingore joined the picket line outside the HUAC sessions in Los Angeles, appeared as an ...

In Praise of Mess

Richard Poirier: Walt Whitman, 4 June 1998

With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. VIII: 11 February 1891-30 September 1891 
by Horace Traubel, edited by Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac.
Bentley, 624 pp., $99.50, November 1996, 0 9653415 8 5
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With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. IX: 11 February 1891-30 September 1891 
by Horace Traubel, edited by Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac.
Bentley, 624 pp., £99.50, November 1996, 0 9653415 9 3
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... began recording their conversations, for example, Whitman wrote to an admirer named William Sloan Kennedy, who once worked on the editorial board of the Saturday Evening Post, that ‘it is of no importance whether I read Emerson before starting L of G. It just happens to be that I had not. If I were to unbosom to you in the matter, I should say that I never ...

Real Busters

Tom Crewe: Sickert Grows Up, 18 August 2022

Walter Sickert 
Tate Britain, until 18 September 2022Show More
Walter Sickert: The Theatre of Life 
edited by Matthew Travers.
Piano Nobile, 184 pp., £60, October 2021, 978 1 901192 59 9
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Sickert: A Life in Art 
by Charlotte Keenan McDonald.
National Museums Liverpool, 104 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 1 902700 63 2
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... England from Munich in 1868, when Sickert was eight). He already shared Degas’s admiration for Charles Keene, an illustrator for Punch whom he later described as ‘the greatest English artist of the 19th century’. His apprenticeship preparing Whistler’s etchings, and his experiments in the same field, must have further refined his draughtsmanship. It ...

Dropping Their Eggs

Patrick Wright: The history of bombing, 23 August 2001

A History of Bombing 
by Sven Lindqvist, translated by Linda Haverty Rugg.
Granta, 233 pp., £14.99, May 2001, 1 86207 415 1
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The Bomber War: Arthur Harris and the Allied Bomber Offensive 1939-45 
by Robin Niellands.
Murray, 448 pp., £25, February 2001, 0 7195 5637 6
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Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War 
by Frances FitzGerald.
Touchstone, 592 pp., $17, March 2001, 0 7432 0023 3
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... reality, brought to the heart of European cities or visited on Korea, Cambodia or Vietnam. In 1869 Charles Dilke wrote that ‘the gradual extinction of the inferior races is not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind,’ and with ghoulish eugenist fervour praised Anglo-Saxons as ‘the only extirpating race on earth’. Bombing was first thought of ...

Act One, Scene One

David Bromwich: Don’t Resist, Oppose, 16 February 2017

... by people who know that the spokesman for the original America First movement, 77 years ago, was Charles Lindbergh, an anti-Semite who warmly sympathised with Hitler’s politics. (How many of these people also know that John F. Kennedy was an early supporter of America First?) But the underlying question was not whether ...

What you can get away with

James Wolcott: Updike Reconsidered, 19 February 2026

John Updike: A Life in Letters 
by John Updike, edited by James Schiff.
Hamish Hamilton, 874 pp., £40, November 2025, 978 0 241 70758 6
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... 1932 and raised in Pennsylvania, a child of the Depression, Updike reached prominence during the Kennedy era as American literature’s princely elf, his Jiminy Cricket nose peering down with amusement, his tall, gangly frame having the lanky assurance of someone preparing to sink a basket from the free throw line. (The scrape of sneakers on the basketball ...

The Raging Peloton

Iain Sinclair: Boris Bikes, 20 January 2011

... was the acknowledged inspiration for J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’. The psychosexual derangement of Ballard’s Crash would have dissolved into low comedy if the humble Raleigh had replaced the Ford Cortina as the vehicle of choice for navigating the edgelands of suburban ...