Diary

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

... film stars I had queued as a boy to see at the Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here were Alexis Smith, Eve Arnold, Charles Boyer, and Tarzan’s Jane (and Mia Farrow’s mother) Maureen O’Sullivan. The four of us from Beyond the Fringe had been invited as a unit and Dudley Moore had been prevailed on (may even have volunteered) to play the piano. With ...

Gaelic Gloom

Colm Tóibín: Brian Moore, 10 August 2000

Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist 
by Denis Sampson.
Marino, 344 pp., IR£20, October 1998, 1 86023 078 4
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... Hepburn was to play the lead. (It was never used; many years later the role was played by Maggie Smith.) Moore wrote to Friel: ‘I know this sounds un-Ulster and extreme, but as it is much easier for me to say it in print than to your face, I am first among your many admirers.’ The correspondence contains a great deal of the banter which passes for ...

The Strange Death of Municipal England

Tom Crewe: Assault on Local Government, 15 December 2016

... by nearly 50 per cent since 2010, revealed unpopular plans to remove youth services, Iain Duncan Smith was derisive: If you look at the successful local authorities, they are the people who have worked out what the vitally important things are that they do, and have managed to get through this process without savaging the things that really matter. My only ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Didn’t Do in 2007, 3 January 2008

... whoops. This quickly became standard and a customary feature of live shows today, particularly Graham Norton’s, with the audience readily entering into the subterfuge, knowing that they are part of the event as they would be at a pop concert. It’s not a big step, therefore, from helping the show along in this way to manipulating competition results to ...

Bournemouth

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bournemouth Set, 21 May 2020

... allowed to visit the house. ‘It was no uncommon experience,’ Stevenson’s first biographer, Graham Balfour, wrote, ‘for a visitor who had come to Bournemouth specially to see him, to find himself put to the door, either on the ground of having a cold, to the contagion of which it was unsafe for Stevenson to be exposed, or because his host was already ...

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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... Florida from 150 years of racial discrimination’. The judge issued a stay. But Governor Bob Graham, a former opponent of the death penalty, who, McFeely suggests, balanced his progressive policies on race with toughness on crime, refused clemency. Graham’s behaviour was typical of the new South. Bill Clinton’s ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... political land-grab. Your browser does not support html5 video. Councillor Kim Taylor-Smith, deputy leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council from September 2017, is asked if the government has been helpful.Headlines seem like wisdom to those who rely on them. ‘Fire Victims Left in Lurch by Chaotic Relief Effort’, ‘Grenfell: The Net Closes ...