Whose Candyfloss?

Christopher Hilliard: Richard Hoggart, 17 April 2014

Richard Hoggart: Virtue and Reward 
by Fred Inglis.
Polity, 259 pp., £25, October 2013, 978 0 7456 5171 2
Show More
Show More
... isn’t a biographer who makes excuses or concessions in the hope of holding on to readers who may be sympathetic to some aspects of his subject but sceptical about others. He wants his readers to agree that Hoggart is ‘someone who has met the moral duty of the citizen to look out hard for the best parts of our history and has sought to make them tell in ...

America comes to the USSR

J. Hoberman: The 1950s’ Soviet Dream, 6 January 2011

Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the 1950s’ Soviet Dream 
by Francis Spufford.
Faber, 434 pp., £16.99, August 2010, 978 0 571 22523 1
Show More
Show More
... failure was a crushing blow for faith in reason. Zoya’s exile from the scientific city of hope may be Red Plenty’s saddest chapter. (As she is en route to her departmental show trial, the great Kantorovich absentmindedly waves to her and, in a parody of her own precarious situation – or his – slips on the ice. ‘Just another fat little zhid falling ...

Festschriftiness

Susan Pedersen, 6 October 2011

Structures and Transformations in Modern British History 
edited by David Feldman and Jon Lawrence.
Cambridge, 331 pp., £50, January 2011, 978 0 521 51882 6
Show More
The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain 
edited by Simon Gunn and James Vernon.
California, 271 pp., £20.95, May 2011, 978 0 9845909 5 7
Show More
Classes, Cultures and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin 
edited by Clare Griffiths, John Nott and William Whyte.
Oxford, 320 pp., £65, April 2011, 978 0 19 957988 4
Show More
Show More
... of the Institute of Historical Research and didn’t contribute to any of these volumes.) They may have realised, too, that, with the Labour Party now less socialist than Macmillanite Tories, the time for internal squabbles has passed. But their intellectual mentors, too, have moved in different directions, leaving the students with less to argue ...

Money and the Love of Money

Ross McKibbin: Crisis of the System, 2 August 2012

... political system. The Lib Dems don’t see that as any responsibility of theirs, and they may choose to get out while the going is good. 20 ...

Everyone Loves Her

Will Frears: Stieg Larsson, 16 December 2010

Stieg Larsson, My Friend 
by Kurdo Baksi.
MacLehose Press, 143 pp., £14.99, 0 85705 021 4
Show More
Show More
... but simply quite nice and quite sexy, which doesn’t often happen in thrillers, however common it may be in real life. It turns out, conveniently, that Berger has an open marriage, and the two heroes go to bed with each other on a regular basis. This has caused Blomkvist’s marriage to break up, but only because of his wife’s petty jealousy; denying two ...

My Heart on a Stick

Michael Robbins: The Poems of Frederick Seidel, 6 August 2009

Poems 1959-2009 
by Frederick Seidel.
Farrar, Straus, 509 pp., $40, March 2009, 978 0 374 12655 1
Show More
Show More
... his poetic “I” . . .’ Such assurances are merely comfortable seats from which we may safely enjoy Seidel’s Guignol, remnants of an academic orthodoxy with no room for extreme autobiography. It has been almost 60 years since Cleanth Brooks wrote that ‘the typical professor of literature in the graduate school’ would find the severance of ...

A Hell of a Spot

Andrew Bacevich: Eisenhower and Suez, 16 June 2011

Eisenhower 1956: The President’s Year of Crisis: Suez and the Brink of War 
by David Nichols.
Simon and Schuster, 346 pp., £21, March 2011, 978 1 4391 3933 2
Show More
Show More
... smacking of subservience, Nasser signed an agreement to buy weapons from Czechoslovakia. Then, in May 1956, he defied Washington by establishing diplomatic relations with China. Faced with these complications, Dulles reversed course, casting Nasser as the villain. Yet, according to Nichols, his motives had less to do with Nasser’s behaviour than with ...

On Not Getting the Credit

Brian Dillon: Eileen Gray, 23 May 2013

Eileen Gray 
Pompidou Centre, 20 February 2013 to 20 May 2013Show More
Show More
... accounts, spend much time alone there. Badovici was a heavy drinker and a womaniser: factors that may have had less to do with their eventual split than his more general need for company and the intrusion into their life together of the architect they both revered. Le Corbusier had admired Gray’s unrealised projects, and now became a regular visitor to ...

The Honoured Society

Edward Luttwak, 10 October 2013

Mafia Republic: Italy’s Criminal Curse: Cosa Nostra, Camorra and ’Ndrangheta from 1946 to the Present 
by John Dickie.
Sceptre, 524 pp., £25, May 2013, 978 1 4447 2640 4
Show More
Show More
... been anointed by the media and Italy’s chatterbox prosecutors as the capo della mafia. Decades may have passed since my childhood in Palermo but it’s as improbable as ever that its chief would be a rustic outlaw. The evidence that proves the continuity of high-level leadership begins with Salvatore ‘Totò’ Cuffaro, until January 2008 president of the ...

Wrong Kind of Noise

Marina Warner: Silence is Best, 19 December 2013

Silence: A Christian History 
by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Allen Lane, 337 pp., £20, April 2013, 978 1 84614 426 4
Show More
Show More
... By a bizarre twist, G.K. Chesterton may be en route to sanctity: it was reported in August that the Bishop of Northampton has begun a suit for his canonisation. Diarmaid MacCulloch doesn’t invoke Chesterton’s miracle-working powers, but he opens this expanded version of his 2012 Gifford Lectures with a Father Brown story, ‘The Oracle of the Dog’: by howling at a certain time, the animal gives the priestly sleuth the clue to the murder weapon ...

Under the Steinway

Jenny Diski: Marco Roth, 7 March 2013

The Scientists: A Family Romance 
by Marco Roth.
Union Books, 196 pp., £14.99, January 2013, 978 1 908526 19 9
Show More
Show More
... dramatic dimensions. Only the postgraduate’s philosophical and literary adventures with Theory may be one dimension too many, not doing much to further an understanding of Hegel, Marx, Foucault and Adorno, or of Marco Roth. Eugene was an emotional monster of a father, but he did at least point his son to The Way of All Flesh, Fathers and ...

So Many Handbags, So Little Time

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bling Ring, 20 June 2013

The Bling Ring 
by Nancy Jo Sales.
HarperCollins, 288 pp., £7.99, May 2013, 978 0 00 751822 7
Show More
Show More
... on the pilot got up and running. ‘Shut off your cameras,’ said the arresting officer, which may be what Los Angeles police say now instead of reading people their Miranda Rights. But don’t worry: the cameras were back on soon enough to catch the family deploring the idea that Alexis was a thief. ‘Maybe this was just the universe sending a wake-up ...

The age is ours!

Sam Sacks: ‘The Tale of the Heike’, 21 November 2013

The Tale of the Heike 
translated by Royall Tyler.
Viking, 734 pp., $50, October 2012, 978 0 670 02513 8
Show More
Show More
... generals succeed and become celebrated, to contrive excuses to have them killed. ‘A man of power may do little himself, yet gain glory through his retainers,’ a soldier says on the eve of a battle, while Yoritomo is safely ensconced on his estate in Kamakura. It could be the motto of the new feudal age. ‘The Heike felt still caught in ice,/like birds of ...

The First Hostile Takeover

James Macdonald: S.G. Warburg, 4 November 2010

High Financier: The Life and Time of Siegmund Warburg 
by Niall Ferguson.
Allen Lane, 548 pp., £30, July 2010, 978 0 7139 9871 9
Show More
Show More
... of 2008? Ferguson argues strongly that it does not. The advent of the hostile takeover bid may have presaged a more aggressive style of capitalism, but the eurobond market was in many ways financially conservative – turning hot money into a stable source of long-term capital. Ferguson’s main point, however, is that Warburg was a strong advocate of ...

Nothing Nice about Them

Terry Eagleton: The Brontës, 4 November 2010

The Brontës: Tales of Glass Town, Angria and Gondal 
edited by Christine Alexander.
Oxford, 620 pp., £12.99, September 2010, 978 0 19 282763 0
Show More
Show More
... was once burned in effigy by the plain people of Haworth with a potato in his hand.* The Brontës may have tried to become plus anglais que les anglais, in a long tradition of literary emigration to these shores, but their neighbours weren’t fooled. The family was lower middle-class, caught between a hard-headed contempt for the gentry whose pampered brats ...