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The Politics of Good Intentions

David Runciman: Blair’s Masochism, 8 May 2003

... nation to have vindicated the higher principles of humanity.’ The Leader of the Opposition, William Gladstone, seconding Disraeli’s vote of thanks to the troops who had pulled off this masterly campaign, could only acquiesce. Unfortunately, however, Disraeli meant by the purity of his purpose precisely the opposite of the course the Guardian was ...

Literary Friction

Jenny Turner: Kathy Acker’s Ashes, 19 October 2017

After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography 
by Chris Kraus.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 1 63590 006 4
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... Acker photographed brilliantly, especially in the shots taken by Robert Mapplethorpe: that soft, white face, with big, round eyes in the cheeks of a chubby cherub; that soft, white skin, pierced and pinched and hyperextended with hooks and rings and belts and dumb-bells: Acker was lifting weights long before lifting ...

The Lives of Ronald Pinn

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 January 2015

... that I saw him in grainy photos posted by ex-pupils on Friends Reunited. Was he not the boy in the white shirt at the edge of a photograph taken in front of the school in 1980, with kids tumbling over each other and somebody spraying from a shook-up can?He tended to do well in class but on a report card for July 1978 you can see things were changing. His ...

No Accident

Zachary Leader: Gore Vidal’s Golden Age, 21 June 2001

The Golden Age: A Novel 
by Gore Vidal.
Little, Brown, 467 pp., £17.99, October 2000, 0 316 85409 3
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... good on food, as in The Golden Age, with its descriptions of the disgusting fare served at FDR’s White House) of the eras in which each of the novels is set. To debunk the ‘breathtaking lies’ of received opinion, academic as well as popular. To trace a great theme: America’s rise (or fall) from ‘flawed republic’ to ‘murderous ...

Dropping Their Eggs

Patrick Wright: The history of bombing, 23 August 2001

A History of Bombing 
by Sven Lindqvist, translated by Linda Haverty Rugg.
Granta, 233 pp., £14.99, May 2001, 1 86207 415 1
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The Bomber War: Arthur Harris and the Allied Bomber Offensive 1939-45 
by Robin Niellands.
Murray, 448 pp., £25, February 2001, 0 7195 5637 6
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Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War 
by Frances FitzGerald.
Touchstone, 592 pp., $17, March 2001, 0 7432 0023 3
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... and destruction. Lindqvist draws on an extraordinary array of apocalyptic novels, starting with William D. Hay’s Three Hundred Years Hence, published in 1881. ‘I know what is going to happen to you, since for me it has already happened,’ Professor Meister, its visionary hero, insists. The future on which he reports is to be one of massive population ...

The Robots Are Coming

John Lanchester, 5 March 2015

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies 
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.
Norton, 306 pp., £17.99, January 2014, 978 0 393 23935 5
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Average Is Over: Powering America beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation 
by Tyler Cowen.
Plume, 290 pp., £12.99, September 2014, 978 0 14 218111 9
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... a public unveiling of their amazing new healthcare robot, the Asimo. Asimo is short (4’3”) and white with a black facemask and a metal backpack. It resembles an unusually small astronaut. In the video Asimo advances towards a staircase and starts climbing while turning his face towards the audience as if to say, à la Bender from Futurama, ‘check out my ...

Too Obviously Cleverer

Ferdinand Mount: Harold Macmillan, 8 September 2011

Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan 
by D.R. Thorpe.
Pimlico, 887 pp., £16.99, September 2011, 978 1 84413 541 7
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The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II: Prime Minister and After 1957-66 
edited by Peter Catterall.
Macmillan, 758 pp., £40, May 2011, 978 1 4050 4721 0
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... war the only bit that is much remembered is the tragic finale: the handing over of Cossacks and White Russians and Croats at Klagenfurt in May 1945. The appalling consequences of this decision – thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered by Stalin and Tito – remain a black and unforgettable chapter. The accusations against Macmillan ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... en route home I generally stop and have some tea at Bettys in Ilkley where I also buy an organic white loaf. Today the assistant tells me that the café (and presumably the four or five other branches in the Bettys chain) no longer does organic produce as they’ve changed their flour miller. ‘However,’ she assures me, ‘the flour is locally ...

America and Israel

Ian Gilmour, 18 February 1982

The Struggle for Peace in the Middle East 
by Mahmoud Riad.
Quartet, 365 pp., £11.95, October 1981, 0 7043 2297 8
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Palestinian Self-Determination 
by Hassan Bin Talal.
Quartet, 138 pp., £6.95, July 1981, 0 7043 2312 5
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This Year in Jerusalem 
by Kenneth Cragg.
Darton, Longman and Todd, 192 pp., £5.95, February 1982, 0 232 51524 7
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... to the Zionist takeover of their territory. Now things are better. Few columnists, of whom Mr William Safire is one, are as crude in their partisanship as was most of the American press until recently. The serious newspapers, whose education has been furthered by the activities of Menachim Begin, do at least make their readers aware that there are two ...

Cinematically Challenged

Adam Mars-Jones, 19 September 1996

The Cinema of Isolation 
by Martin Norden.
Rutgers, 385 pp., $48, September 1994, 0 8135 2103 3
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... were cut off by the edges of the frame, executed in bad lighting, or obscured when the performer, [William] Hurt, usually turned away from the camera, and hearing characters would sometimes talk without signing.’ Norden doesn’t spell out what is implied here: that for signing to be properly intelligible it must take precedence over lighting, composition ...

The Shoreham Gang

Seamus Perry: Samuel Palmer, 5 April 2012

Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer 
by Rachel Campbell-Johnston.
Bloomsbury, 382 pp., £25, June 2011, 978 0 7475 9587 8
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... delicacy to be found in a Constable cloud study as they could possibly be. And he is right: the white clouds in Palmer’s luminously bright cloud pictures (there is one in the Ashmolean, another in Manchester City Art Gallery) are anything but airy and breezy. The Magic Apple Tree struck Herbert as beautiful and peculiar in equal measure: ‘bright crimson ...

I gotta use words

Mark Ford: Eliot speaks in tongues, 11 August 2016

The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume I: Collected & Uncollected Poems 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
Faber, 1311 pp., £40, November 2015, 978 0 571 23870 5
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The Poems of T.S. Eliot: Volume II: Practical Cats & Further Verses 
edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue.
Faber, 667 pp., £40, November 2015, 978 0 571 23371 7
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... Room and the Patient, a 1906 book which includes a reference to ‘anaesthetic tables’), William James, James Thomson, William Acton, Charles-Louis Philippe, W.R. Burnett (a crime novelist in whose High Sierra – published in 1940 – the phrase ‘She was … a one-night-stand type’ occurs), Edward Winslow ...

At the End of a Dirt Road

Thomas Powers: The Salinger File, 24 October 2019

The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour – an Introduction 
by J.D. Salinger.
Little, Brown, 1072 pp., $100, November 2018, 978 0 316 45071 3
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... own. What he resisted was the idea he was a Jew. He never said as much, but how else explain the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant name of his most famous fictional character, Holden Caulfield, whose height (6' 2½") and patch of grey hair, his Park Avenue family home, his chequered record in a succession of smart private schools, his wardrobe from Brooks ...

Isn’t London hell?

Seamus Perry: Evelyn Waugh, 10 August 2023

Brideshead Revisited 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 480 pp., £16.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58531 3
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Decline and Fall 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 320 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58529 0
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A Handful of Dust 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 336 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58527 6
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Vile Bodies 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 304 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58528 3
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Sword of Honour 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 928 pp., £18.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58532 0
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... grand and wealthy Margot Beste-Chetwynde. As it happens, her riches derive principally from the white slave trade, in which Pennyfeather becomes unwittingly implicated, and for which he uncomplainingly takes the rap. After some strings are pulled, however, he is released from prison and goes back to Oxford to pursue his theology degree. So anonymous a ...

Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

... its demolition in 1941 was a disgrace.Augusta Persse was born in 1852, and in 1880 she married Sir William Gregory, who was 35 years older than her. He died in 1892, and she outlived him by forty years. Lady Gregory made herself useful to Yeats, as Roy Foster shows in his biography of the poet, because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area ...

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