Forms and Inspirations

Vikram Seth, 29 September 1988

... cloud-carpeted but clear Day. The eucalypti growing here Are now refreshed, and all along their white And slender stems appears a violet light. And this is the version I saw after Tim’s excisions: It is cloud-carpeted but clear. The eucalypti growing here Are now refreshed; along their white Slim stems appears a ...

A Reparation of Her Choosing

Jenny Diski: Among the Sufis, 17 December 2015

... with one leg pointing downwards to the sea and the other playfully curled beneath her in her white playsuit. Her arms behind her back were keeping her upright, exposing her breasts. Douglas Fairbanks was looking towards her appreciatively. The photo said no more than that a famous man looked at her, as if she were a mirror in which to check he still had ...

The Nominee

Andrew O’Hagan: With the Democrats, 19 August 2004

... ever have been, in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.’ Lincoln was a Republican, of course, but John Kerry’s journey has been a very modern one for a Democrat, a journey around every aspect of himself and every issue pressing in America, cutting and rounding and paring away as he ...

The Dreamings of Dominic Cummings

James Meek, 24 October 2019

... the streets bustling with shops, cafés and restaurants. Leaveland is a country of the old, the white and the nostalgic, of ruined factories and boarded-up shops. Rushing along the network of high-speed rail corridors that enable Remainians to move from point to point around their country without touching Leaveland, a middle-aged Remainian writer confronts ...

Don’t be a Kerensky!

David Runciman: Kissinger looks for his prince, 3 December 2020

The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World 
by Barry Gewen.
Norton, 452 pp., £22.99, April 2020, 978 1 324 00405 9
Show More
Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography 
by Thomas Schwartz.
Hill and Wang, 548 pp., £27.99, September 2020, 978 0 8090 9537 7
Show More
Show More
... Kissinger lost his job as secretary of state in January 1977, on Jimmy Carter’s arrival in the White House. Before that he had been one of the most famous men in the world, repeatedly on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and in one red-letter week in 1972 fronting both magazines at the same time. In June 1974, two months before Watergate drove his boss ...

Benign Promiscuity

Clair Wills: Molly Keane’s Bad Behaviour, 18 March 2021

Good Behaviour 
by Molly Keane.
NYRB, 291 pp., £12, May, 978 1 68137 529 8
Show More
Show More
... them for their preparatory school.But things go wrong with the education of her eldest charge, Richard.Richard was a beautiful child and, despite a proper interest in and aptitude for all the importances of outdoor life, there were times when he would lean in silence against Mrs Brock as she played the piano, or even ...

Strong Government

Linda Colley, 7 December 1989

The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1788 
by John Brewer.
Unwin Hyman, 289 pp., £28, April 1989, 0 04 445292 6
Show More
Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution 
by John Gascoigne.
Cambridge, 358 pp., £32.50, June 1989, 0 521 35139 1
Show More
Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 
by C.A. Bayly.
Longman, 295 pp., £16.95, June 1989, 0 582 04287 9
Show More
Show More
... caste. George III and the Prince Regent built themselves expensive new palaces in Britain, while Richard Wellesley co-opted native revenues to create a new Palladian-style Government House in Calcutta, and a college at Fort William where members of the master race could be trained in colonial administration free from contact with any men and women who were ...

Touching the music

Paul Driver, 4 January 1996

Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship 
by Robert Craft.
Vanderbilt, 588 pp., £35.95, October 1994, 0 8265 1258 5
Show More
Show More
... degree of detail unprecedented for a composer since Cosima Wagner’s diaries gave us a quotidian Richard. Stravinsky may well have reckoned on this in forging the intimate relationship (‘dearest Bobsky’) with Craft but he cannot have known just how acute and gifted an observer he would prove, how naturally sensitive a Stravinskologist. In describing the ...

Cheering us up

Ian Jack, 15 September 1988

In for a Penny: The Unauthorised Biography of Jeffrey Archer 
by Jonathan Mantle.
Hamish Hamilton, 264 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 241 12478 6
Show More
Show More
... question here. Why should Archer, normally so bumptious about his Struggle from Log Cabin to White House, miss out so much of the log-cabin experience? A clue may lie in the curriculum vitae which Archer submitted to Cobb in 1961, and was later obtained by Levy of the Mail to help him with his ‘background’ piece during Archer’s libel action (Daily ...

Eating people

Claude Rawson, 24 January 1985

Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the ‘Mignonette’ 
by A.W.B. Simpson.
Chicago, 353 pp., £21.25, July 1984, 0 226 75942 3
Show More
Show More
... I’d eat you!                     In a nice little, white little, soft little, tender little, Juicy little, right little, missionary stew. What for Sweeney is a façon de parler turns in some modern novels – Genet’s Pompes Funèbres, Monique Wittig’s Le Corps Lesbien – into full-scale devourings of the ...

Gentlemen Travellers

D.A.N. Jones, 15 September 1983

George Borrow: Eccentric 
by Michael Collie.
Cambridge, 275 pp., £19.50, November 1982, 0 521 24615 6
Show More
A World of his Own: The Double Life of George Borrow 
by David Williams.
Oxford, 178 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 0 19 211762 9
Show More
Eothen: Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East 
by Alexander Kinglake and Jan Morris.
Oxford, 279 pp., £2.95, November 1982, 0 19 281361 7
Show More
Eothen 
by Alexander Kinglake and Jonathan Raban.
Century, 226 pp., £6.95, September 1982, 0 7126 0031 0
Show More
Show More
... Kinglake just sat there, not understanding the dialogue. ‘I was only the death’s head and white sheet with which he scared the enemy,’ Kinglake smiles, ‘I think that I played this spectral part exceedingly well.’ Dthemetri advised Kinglake to kill a guide who led them to the wrong bank of the Jordan. ‘There was something fascinating in this ...

Making strange

John Sutherland, 19 March 1981

Other people 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 223 pp., £5.95, March 1981, 0 224 01766 7
Show More
The Magic Glass 
by Anne Smith.
Joseph, 174 pp., £6.50, March 1981, 9780718119867
Show More
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page 
by Gerald Edwards.
Hamish Hamilton, 400 pp., £7.50, March 1981, 0 241 10477 7
Show More
Sharpe’s Eagle 
by Bernard Cornwell.
Collins, 266 pp., £6.50, February 1981, 0 00 221997 2
Show More
XPD 
by Len Deighton.
Hutchinson, 397 pp., £6.95, March 1981, 0 09 144570 1
Show More
Show More
... First, to describe the novel. The narrative follows a heroine who has woken in hospital (‘a white room’) lacking all long- and short-term memory. The amnesiac gimmick is common enough in SF and thriller fiction (Other People is subtitled ‘A Mystery Story’, though the blurb somewhat nervously qualifies the description with the term ...
... dried-out sacking, cuirasses and boots suggesting feudal Tudors and Japanese samurais, saffron and white robes against glittering sand – open out the harmonics of the story and the national variety of the actors, while Brook makes her bamboo screens, bows and arrows and chariot-wheels into both literal story elements and symbolic emblems of the mastery of ...

Inhumane, Intolerant, Unclean

Ian Gilmour, 31 October 1996

A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths 
by Karen Armstrong.
HarperCollins, 474 pp., £20, July 1996, 0 00 255522 0
Show More
Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years 
by Israel Shahak.
Pluto, 118 pp., £11.99, April 1994, 9780745308180
Show More
City of the Great King: Jerusalem from David to the Present 
edited by Nitza Rosovsky.
Harvard, 562 pp., £25.50, April 1996, 0 674 13190 8
Show More
Jerusalem in the 20th Century 
by Martin Gilbert.
Chatto, 400 pp., £20, May 1996, 0 7011 3070 9
Show More
Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict 
by Norman Finkelstein.
Verso, 230 pp., £39.95, December 1995, 1 85984 940 7
Show More
To Rule Jerusalem 
by Roger Friedland and Richard Hecht.
Cambridge, 554 pp., £29.95, June 1996, 0 521 44046 7
Show More
Show More
... Friedland and Hecht had a revealing conversation with Stan Cohen, who was formerly part of the white resistance to South Africa’s apartheid regime and now teaches at the Hebrew University’s law school. Cohen is relieved that Israel never developed a theory of racial supremacy, but sees many parallels between the two apartheid regimes and thinks that ...

In real sound stupidity the English are unrivalled

Stefan Collini: ‘Cosmo’ for Capitalists, 6 February 2020

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the ‘Economist’ 
by Alexander Zevin.
Verso, 538 pp., £25, November 2019, 978 1 78168 624 9
Show More
Show More
... In the course of the agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law ...