Ehud Barak

Avi Shlaim: Ehud Barak, 25 January 2001

... belief that he could impose his own terms on the Palestinians was the summit held at Camp David in Maryland in July last year. The request for the summit came from Barak – and Bill Clinton, ‘the last Zionist’ as one Israeli newspaper aptly called him, obliged. At the summit Barak presented a package which covered all the key final-status ...

Nom de Boom

Ian Penman: Arthur Russell's Benediction, 15 August 2024

Travels over Feeling: Arthur Russell, a Life 
by Richard King.
Faber, 296 pp., £30, April, 978 0 571 37966 8
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... morning chill-out. He even recorded two versions of some songs, one for the club and one for hi-fi or headphones: a vibrant oil painting followed by its preparatory sketch. Listening to the ethereal World of Echo in my office at home recently, I popped downstairs and was amazed to hear a big bass boom pulsing through the floor like a dub track. As if ...

Screaming in the Streets

Lucie Elven: On Nan Goldin, 20 February 2025

This Will Not End Well 
Neue Nationalgalerie, until 6 April 2025Show More
Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well 
edited by Fredrik Liew.
Steidl, 216 pp., £44, January 2023, 978 3 96999 058 2
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... was reticent and barely spoke, but became friends with a fellow student (and fellow photographer), David Armstrong. The camera became a solution to the problems of childhood, of growing up, of what was happening to her now – a way of proving her experiences were real.After leaving Satya, she moved into a flatshare with Armstrong in Boston. Her luminous ...

Seagull Soup

Fara Dabhoiwala: HMS Wager, 9 May 2024

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder 
by David Grann.
Simon & Schuster, 329 pp., £10.99, January, 978 1 4711 8370 6
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... number of survivors miraculously trickled back to England. Among them were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling ...

At the Royal Academy

Peter Campbell: Turner’s watercolours, 4 January 2001

... noble nature was intentional. ‘Staffage’ is the word for human and animal extras, I find, and David Teniers the Younger, whose work Turner admired, is offered as the source of their plain looks. Whatever his narrative intention, foreground accents – not just people, but boats, buoys, goats, ducks – are important parts of the visual machinery. They ...

Red Pill, Blue Pill

James Meek, 22 October 2020

... speaker at this rally, supposedly organised to fly the flag of resistance to state oppression, was David Icke.Icke was a BBC sports presenter in the 1980s, smooth, bland and remarkable only for a certain glassy coldness of manner. Before that he’d been a professional footballer. At a time when Britain had a handful of TV channels, everyone knew his ...

Diary

Ian Hamilton: The World Cup, 30 July 1998

... very start of the World Cup, questions of personal rig-out seemed to be of central consequence. David Beckham’s Jean Paul Gaultier sarong, plus his newly blonde-streaked looks, may well have had something to do with Glenn Hoddle’s less than friendly treatment of him in England’s opening games. And this treatment may in turn have led to Beckham’s ...

Wombiness

Mary Lefkowitz, 4 November 1993

In and Out of the Mind: Images of the Tragic Self 
by Ruth Padel.
Princeton, 210 pp., £18, July 1992, 0 691 07379 1
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The Age of Grace: Charis in Early Greek Poetry 
by Bonnie MacLachlan.
Princeton, 192 pp., £21.50, August 1993, 0 691 06974 3
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... translators are forced to rephrase the passage, to suggest an internal condition. For example, David Grene, whose translation is used in most American universities: ‘My body, too, has felt this thrill of pain.’ After reading Ruth Padel, one would understand, even if one did not know a word of Greek, that the women of Troezen were describing Phaedra’s ...

Facing both ways

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 19 August 1993

Bisexuality in the Ancient World 
by Eva Cantarella, translated by Cormac O Cuilleanain.
Yale, 284 pp., £19.95, September 1992, 0 300 04844 0
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... as a full warrior by the tuition of an older male who was his lover. Further, the American scholar David Halperin published A Hundred Years of Homosexuality (1990), a volume of essays in which he enthusiastically supports Foucault’s view that ‘homosexuality’ is a construction of Western culture that came into being only about a hundred years ago. These ...

Diary

Leslie Wilson: Talking Rubbish, 19 August 1993

... one of the dogs (very likely rabid, according to the professor). ‘What’s in it?’ I ask, but David, my husband, refuses to commit himself. That’s what you get for marrying into the trade. How will I manage not to breathe the smoke? It’s everywhere. The burnt, dusty men who work the dump are unmoved by the arrival of a coach bringing well-dressed ...
Cross Channel 
by Julian Barnes.
Cape, 211 pp., £13.99, January 1996, 0 224 04301 3
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... yet contains no lees. In going through some reviews of Barnes’s earlier novels, I noticed that David Coward called Flaubert’s Parrot ‘a Modernist text with a 19th-century heart’. By contrast Malcolm Bradbury, in The Modern British Novel, claims that – with its game with notions of the real and the fictional, its making its own rules and its ...

Deathward

Adam Begley, 24 November 1988

Libra 
by Don DeLillo.
Viking, 456 pp., £11.95, November 1988, 0 670 82317 1
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... turns out that the Presidential motorcade will pass directly beneath the building’s windows. As David Ferrie (the man in charge of persuading the reluctant Oswald to pull the trigger) would say, ‘coincidence is a science waiting to be discovered.’ Nicholas Branch, who has spent fifteen years sifting through the evidence in the hope of distinguishing ...

Nuthouse Al

Penelope Fitzgerald: Memory and culture in wartime London, 18 February 1999

Whistling in the Dark: Memory and Culture in Wartime London 
by Jean Freedman.
Kentucky, 230 pp., £28.50, January 1999, 0 8131 2076 4
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... in themselves, and she decides, in her introduction, that she cannot do better than quote David Lowenthal: ‘Even if future insights show up present errors and undermine present conclusions, evidence now available proves that some things almost certainly did happen and others did not.’ Freedman’s parents, Jewish refugees who settled in ...

To Fiji with Measles

Terence Ranger: Plagues, 4 February 1999

The Black Death and the Transformation of the West 
by David Herlihy.
Harvard, 117 pp., £17.95, October 1997, 0 674 07613 3
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Plague, Pox and Pestilence 
edited by Kenneth Kiple.
Weidenfeld, 176 pp., £25, January 1997, 0 297 82254 3
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Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism 
by Sheldon Watts.
Yale, 400 pp., £30, January 1997, 0 300 07015 2
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... of earthly things – epidemic disease has been to Euro-American empires. These books – even David Herlihy’s posthumously published account of the Black Death in Europe – are best approached as essays in World History. As Samuel Cohn makes clear in his incisive introduction, Herlihy’s argument that the plague acted as a stimulus to Europe’s ...

Diary

Clive James: Lord's Day, 7 February 1985

... Parliament. The argument against was rehearsed at the eleventh hour by Lord Chalfont, talking to David Dimbleby on BBC 1. Lord Chalfont was against the televising of the House of Lords because he suspected that it was just a stratagem on the part of the broadcasters so that they could force the door of the House of Commons, after which the House of ...