We need a better plan

Alexander Bevilacqua: Dinosaurs on the Ark, 5 March 2026

Noah and the Flood in Western Thought 
by Philip C. Almond.
Cambridge, 396 pp., £35, April 2025, 978 1 009 55722 1
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... source’ and the ‘priestly source’ so paradigmatically that the biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman uses it to explain the documentary hypothesis in his book Who Wrote the Bible? (1987). Other interpretative problems include dating the Flood and measuring its extent. Where did the waters come from, and where did they go? As the English ...

Little and Large

David Trotter: Lydia Davis’s Method, 5 March 2026

Into the Weeds 
by Lydia Davis.
Yale, 139 pp., £12.99, January, 978 0 300 27974 0
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... paragraph cites, in no particular order, George Sturt, J.A. Baker, James Agee, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Knut Hamsun and Elizabeth Smart. But I’m not being entirely fair. For one of these writers has already been singled out for extensive analysis.It’s an odd choice. Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) is a book Davis would have been ...

We were doing well when I left

Tom Stevenson: America’s Afghanistan Delusion, 21 May 2026

Choosing Defeat: The Twenty-Year Saga of How America Lost Afghanistan 
by Paul D. Miller.
Cambridge, 545 pp., £35, October 2025, 978 1 009 61437 5
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... which was festering in a way that was obvious even to the US officials who visited. When Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative, and Vice President Joe Biden met Karzai they immediately saw the problem. In 2009, Holbrooke and Karzai tried to rig the upcoming elections in different directions. In the resulting mess Karzai remained in ...

Secrets are best kept by those who have no sense of humour

Alan Bennett: Why I turned down ‘Big Brother’, 2 January 2003

... best forgotten; now their memory must be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the ...

‘Make sure you say that you were treated properly’

Gareth Peirce: Torture, Secrecy and the British State, 14 May 2009

... greater difficulty in admitting that we knew all along that it was happening. By 1 August 2002, White House lawyers were itemising techniques that would not in their view constitute torture under the Federal Torture Act, including forced standing, hooding, starvation and thirst, sleep deprivation, the ‘frog crouch’, the Israeli shabeh and extreme ...

Against the Same-Old Same-Old

Seamus Perry: The Brownings, 3 November 2016

The Brownings’ Correspondence, Vol 21 
edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Joseph Phelan, Edward Hagan and Rhian Williams.
Wedgestone, 432 pp., $110, April 2014, 978 0 911459 38 8
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The Brownings’ Correspondence, Vol 22 
edited by Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Joseph Phelan, Edward Hagan and Rhian Williams.
Wedgestone, 430 pp., $110, June 2015, 978 0 911459 39 5
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Robert Browning 
edited by Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan.
Oxford, 904 pp., £95, December 2014, 978 0 19 959942 4
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Browning Studies: Being Select Papers by Members of the Browning Society 
edited by Edward Berdoe.
Routledge, 348 pp., £30, August 2015, 978 1 138 02488 5
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... only make men and women speak – give you truth broken into prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me.’ He is finding fault with himself on grounds Shelley provided: ‘The One remains, the many change and pass;/Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;/Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,/Stains the ...

The Sound of Voices Intoning Names

Thomas Laqueur, 5 June 1997

French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial 
by Serge Klarsfeld.
New York, 1881 pp., $95, November 1996, 0 8147 2662 3
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... determined the placements of pictures. Her mother and sister fill the other slots. The album is in white marble and it sits on a black polished slab on which we can just see, at the very bottom of the image, four stones, two black and two white, which are put on Jewish graves by visitors. The legend in black reads, ‘Mortes ...

Blood for Oil?

Retort: The takeover of Iraq, 21 April 2005

... more than $500 billion (almost twice the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa), have scaled the walls of the White House. In a bullish five years in the 1990s as CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil and gas services company, Dick Cheney drew $44 million in salary from an outfit that on his own Brechtian admission saw war as offering ‘growth ...

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 
BBC, 135 pp.Show More
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... each other. Birt’s first innovation was ‘producer choice’ (recommended by a Major government White Paper in 1992), which required BBC resource departments to charge producers the ‘real’ costs of their services, giving producers the complementary right to shop where they liked. This reform propelled cost-conscious producers into W.H. Smith, where ...

Vertiginous

Nicholas Penny, 12 December 1996

Grands Décors français 1650-1800 
by Bruno Pons.
Faton, 439 pp., £130, June 1995, 2 87844 023 4
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The Rococo Interior 
by Katie Scott.
Yale, 342 pp., £39.95, November 1995, 0 300 04582 4
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Chardin 
by Marianne Roland Michel, translated by Eithne McCarthy.
Thames and Hudson, 293 pp., £60, March 1996, 0 500 09259 1
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... open to the public – still serve as overdoors). One of Chardin’s most famous paintings, The White Tablecloth (or The Saveloy) in the Art Institute of Chicago, which has a high vanishing-point (anticipating examination from above) and originally had arched upper corners, must have been made to fill a chimney-piece in summer. Other leading painters of ...

A Matter of War and Peace

James Buchan, 31 July 1997

... when people are handling euro coins and notes will they understand that the Union is more than white nights of herring quotas and Danish apples. Money, for Schopenhauer, was ‘an inexhaustible Proteus’ ever ready to be transformed into our newest and most pressing object of desire. In Spain and Portugal, the euro is somehow the guarantee that there will ...
... I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. Elizabeth Taylor was more famous than ...

Rat Poison

David Bromwich, 17 October 1996

Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Beacon, 143 pp., $20, February 1996, 0 8070 4108 4
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... does. She addresses obliquely a single contemporary opponent in matters of law and morality, Judge Richard Posner, a leader of the law and economics movement and a professor of law at Chicago. Intellectually as omnivorous as Nussbaum, as prolific and as well read, Posner came to her lectures and wrote out engaging comments, and she in turn, praising his ...

Shoe-Contemplative

David Bromwich: Hazlitt, 18 June 1998

The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style 
by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 382 pp., £22.50, June 1998, 0 571 17421 3
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... of his ‘Rhymes’ upon the onward tide of time than of the snow-falls in the river, A moment white, then melts for ever! It might be some increasing consciousness of the frail tenure by which he holds his rank among the great heirs of Fame, that urged our Bard to pawn his reversion of immortality for an indulgent smile of patrician approbation, as he ...

What a Mother

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Marianne Moore and Her Mother, 3 December 2015

Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore 
by Linda Leavell.
Farrar, Straus, 455 pp., $18, September 2014, 978 0 374 53494 3
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... of Poetry, accepted five poems; in April 1915 two of her poems appeared in the Egoist, the paper Richard Aldington edited (‘I am so delighted to have them take me I shouldn’t mind if they charged me’); in August, HD invited her to come to London (she didn’t take up the invitation); and in October Alfred Kreymborg, the editor of Others, took five ...