Strange, Angry Objects

Owen Hatherley: The Brutalist Decades, 17 November 2016

A3: Threads and Connections 
by Peter Ahrends.
Right Angle, 128 pp., £18, December 2015, 978 0 9532848 9 4
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Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism 
by Barnabas Calder.
Heinemann, 416 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 0 434 02244 1
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Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945-75 
by Elain Harwood.
Yale, 512 pp., £60, September 2015, 978 0 300 20446 9
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Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings around the World 
by Christopher Beanland.
Frances Lincoln, 192 pp., £18, February 2016, 978 0 7112 3764 3
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This Brutal World 
by Peter Chadwick.
Phaidon, 224 pp., £29.95, April 2016, 978 0 7148 7108 0
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Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th-Century Architecture 
by Nicolas Grospierre.
Prestel, 224 pp., £29.99, February 2016, 978 3 7913 8229 6
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Modernist Estates: The Buildings and the People Who Live in Them 
by Stefi Orazi.
Frances Lincoln, 192 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 0 7112 3675 2
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Architecture an Inspiration 
by Ivor Smith.
Troubador, 224 pp., £24.95, November 2014, 978 1 78462 069 1
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... an argument made in the private sector’. The few NHS hospitals of architectural interest, like Powell and Moya’s general hospital in Swindon, disappeared after less than forty years. The best surviving buildings, it seems from Harwood’s account, are the private houses that architects built for the wealthy or for themselves, which appear in Davies’s ...
... longer than him to learn it.’ Was this what led him to romanticise failure – the failure of Charles Ryder to get religion or to get Julia, the failure of Guy Crouchback to make his fellow officers see what the war was really about?What is it, then, that makes Waugh a deviant in the history of our culture? Not, surely, that he was a man of the Right, an ...

Olivier Rex

Ronald Bryden, 1 September 1988

Olivier 
by Anthony Holden.
Weidenfeld, 504 pp., £16, May 1988, 0 297 79089 7
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... a windfall of new evidence, but Mr Holden is too courtly (his previous subjects include Prince Charles and the Queen Mum) to name it. He merely says demurely that he persuaded Olivier’s friend, their shared publisher Lord Weidenfeld, that – how does he put it? – ‘between them [Olivier’s] two books did not add up to a comprehensive, let alone ...

Love that Bird

Francis Spufford: Supersonic, 6 June 2002

... the machines people build for more everyday tasks. Even now, when the carparks at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle are filled with sleek creations, art-directed to the max by Mercedes and Renault to convey futurity, Concorde still looks as if a crack has opened in the fabric of the Universe and a message from tomorrow has been poked through. Age ...

Museums of Melancholy

Iain Sinclair: Silence on the Euston Road, 18 August 2005

... shudders from the silent pounding of stone ordnance, the mute thunder of that lifesize howitzer by Charles Sergeant Jagger on the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner. Arranged on obelisks are squadrons of engineless planes that will never achieve flight. Granite battleships hide in alcoves. Ghost armies perch on temporary plinths in a psychosexual ...

The European Coup

Perry Anderson, 17 December 2020

... of free market economics and anti-immigrant sentiment, he had been the Dutch version of Enoch Powell. Both proved lastingly influential, yet remained outsiders and personal failures. Though Bolkestein was well-read and, compared with the norms of the Dutch elite, at home with ideas, he was not, as he confessed, really an intellectual, more of ‘a ...

Le Roi Jean Quinze

Stefan Collini: Roy Jenkins and Labour, 5 June 2014

Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life 
by John Campbell.
Cape, 818 pp., £30, March 2014, 978 0 224 08750 6
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... journalist and author. After well-received books on the parliamentary crisis of 1910 and on Charles Dilke, he undertook a biography of Asquith, a figure he admired and identified with. Campbell supplies a long list of characteristics the two shared, including a ‘lack of interest in speculative thought’. His standing as a serious journalist was ...

Freedom of the Press

Anthony Lewis, 26 November 1987

... of the press. It is the freedom to perform a function on behalf of the polity. Nowadays, Justice Powell of our Supreme Court has said: ‘no individual can obtain for himself the information needed for the intelligent discharge of his political responsibilities ... By enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process, the press ...

High Jinks at the Plaza

Perry Anderson, 22 October 1992

The British Constitution Now 
by Ferdinand Mount.
Heinemann, 289 pp., £18.50, April 1992, 0 434 47994 2
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Constitutional Reform 
by Robert Brazier.
Oxford, 172 pp., £22.50, September 1991, 0 19 876257 7
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Anatomy of Thatcherism 
by Shirley Letwin.
Fontana, 364 pp., £6.99, October 1992, 0 00 686243 8
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... of American neo-conservatism – Alan Bloom, Harvey Mansfield, Joseph Epstein, Hilton Kramer, Charles Murray, Paul Craig Roberts, Irving Kristol, even such names for the connoisseur as Richard Cornuelle – they are among the fruits of a mutually beneficial association. For on the one side, there are limits to local supply – the efforts of Conor Cruise ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1998, 21 January 1999

... recording ‘Nights in the Gardens of Spain’ with Penelope Wilton, directed by Tristram Powell. She does it beautifully and Tristram keeps it simple and static, which is exactly right. [Predictably, when it comes to be transmitted it is this monologue, the simplest in form and entirely perfect in execution, which the sad creatures who preview TV ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2004, 6 January 2005

... it wants it to be, making the whole play some sort of expiation. I often read and reread Anthony Powell’s Journals where a recurring theme is the stupidity and bad behaviour of journalists by whose crassness Powell was always unsurprised. So no change there. 26 May. Do a question and answer session at Warwick Arts ...

What are we telling the nation?

David Edgar: Thoughts about the BBC, 7 July 2005

Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC 
by Georgina Born.
Vintage, 352 pp., £10.99, August 2005, 0 09 942893 8
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Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a Digital World 
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... 1985 anti-nuclear six-parter Edge of Darkness was commissioned by the head of serials, Jonathan Powell, produced by the Birmingham regional drama head, Michael Wearing, and scheduled before Martin had finished the scripts. Third, as a result of its plural structure, the department had gained and kept its reputation as a producer-led, oppositional space, not ...

Yeats, Auden, Eliot: 1939, 1940, 1941

Colm Tóibín, 22 January 2026

... together with their common dialect and concerns.’ Responding to Auden’s death in 1973, Anthony Powell was less circumspect: ‘No more Auden. I’m delighted that little shit has gone … It should have happened years ago … Scuttling off to America in 1939 with his boyfriend like a … like a …’Auden’s elegy, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, begins ...

You better not tell me you forgot

Terry Castle: How to Spot Members of the Tribe, 27 September 2012

All We Know: Three Lives 
by Lisa Cohen.
Farrar Straus, 429 pp., £22.50, July 2012, 978 0 374 17649 5
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... the New York society hostess Muriel Draper, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Nancy Mitford, Dawn Powell, even Mary McCarthy, whose rivalrousness towards other intellectual women is legendary. The fact that Murphy seems to have been one of the kindliest people on earth no doubt only magnified her attractiveness. Though lacking scholarly training (like ...

The Breakaway

Perry Anderson: Goodbye Europe, 21 January 2021

... whatever side they preferred in the ensuing campaign, in which Tony Benn from Labour and Enoch Powell from the opposition – he had by then left the Tories and joined the Ulster Unionists – campaigned for a No vote. In June 1975, on a turnout of 64 per cent, two-thirds of those who voted – 67 per cent – approved the deal Wilson had obtained. British ...