Warmer, Warmer

John Lanchester: Global Warming, Global Hot Air, 22 March 2007

The Revenge of Gaia 
by James Lovelock.
Allen Lane, 222 pp., £8.99, February 2007, 978 0 14 102597 1
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Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis Summary for Policymakers: Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 
IPCC, February 2007Show More
Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning 
by George Monbiot.
Allen Lane, 277 pp., £17.99, September 2006, 0 7139 9923 3
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The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies 
by Richard Heinberg.
Clairview, 320 pp., £12.99, October 2005, 1 905570 00 7
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The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review 
by Nicholas Stern.
Cambridge, 692 pp., £29.99, January 2007, 978 0 521 70080 1
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... apparent eagerness to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and when Richard Nixon got to the White House four years later he was convinced that scientists were a dangerously anti-Republican political lobby. Nixon shut down the Office of Science and Technology, and kicked the presidential science adviser out of the cabinet – an ...

The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
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... meanwhile, prepared his son’s entry to the Observer by suggesting to its editor, who was still J.L. Garvin, that David attend directors’ meetings and editorial lunches, a prelude to the shareholding and the seat on the board that soon came his way. ‘He has been a slow developer,’ Waldorf wrote to Garvin, ‘but he is getting keener on the ...

‘We’ve messed up, boys’

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Bad Blood, 16 November 2023

The Poison Line: A True Story of Death, Deception and Infected Blood 
by Cara McGoogan.
Viking, 396 pp., £20, September 2023, 978 0 241 62750 1
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Death in the Blood: The Inside Story of the NHS Infected Blood Scandal 
by Caroline Wheeler.
Headline, 390 pp., £22, September 2023, 978 1 0354 0524 4
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... available in light of the medical knowledge at the time.’ These claims were not true.In​ 1970, Richard Titmuss celebrated Britain’s tradition of voluntary blood donation in The Gift Relationship, warning that paid-for blood carried a greater risk of contamination. But while it was true that most ‘whole blood’ in the UK came from volunteers, blood ...

Come hungry, leave edgy

Sukhdev Sandhu: Brick Lane, 9 October 2003

Brick Lane 
by Monica Ali.
Doubleday, 413 pp., £12.99, June 2003, 9780385604840
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... Arnold White, in whose book Reaney’s anti-semitic comments appeared, had teamed up with Major Evans Gordon, the MP for Stepney and founder of the British Brothers’ League, in a campaign to restrict Jewish immigration. Successfully so: in 1905 the Government passed the first Aliens Act. Forty years after Mosley’s efforts to stir up racial tension in ...

Buy birthday present, go to morgue

Colm Tóibín: Diane Arbus, 2 March 2017

Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer 
by Arthur Lubow.
Cape, 734 pp., £35, October 2016, 978 0 224 09770 3
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Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov 
by Alexander Nemerov.
Fraenkel Gallery, 106 pp., $30, March 2015, 978 1 881337 41 6
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... who became her lover and one of the great influences on her life. He introduced her to Walker Evans, who was, in 1938, the first photographer ever to have a solo show at MoMA. ‘He was totally overwhelmed’ by Arbus’s work, Evans’s wife recalled. ‘He saw that the pictures were posed. He admired that very much ...

Magnifico

David Bromwich: This was Orson Welles, 3 June 2004

Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life 
by Peter Conrad.
Faber, 384 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 571 20978 5
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... slow swing replaced by a nocturne. The station cut in again with a learned authority, ‘Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer’, direct from the Princeton observatory to explain the discharge and point out that Mars could not support intelligent life. Pierson, however, confessed that he could not explain the regularity of the emissions. More ...

Infisal! Infisal! Infisal!

Jonathan Littell: A Journey in South Sudan, 30 June 2011

... of the Mahdi, the Fashoda Incident; then come the founding fathers of colonial ethnology, with Evans-Pritchard in the lead, followed by a legion of administrator-anthropologists and foreign travellers like Marcel Griaule and Michel Leiris, who flesh out the myth – which is then taken to a new level, as erotic as political, by photography, Leni ...

Memoirs of a Pet Lamb

David Sylvester, 5 July 2001

... torn apart.My parents also chose some impressive theatrical visits, starting in 1935 with Maurice Evans in Hamlet at the Old Vic, followed there by Laurence Olivier in Macbeth and, at the Golders Green Hippodrome, by John Gielgud in Richard II. I was also taken to things picked out by myself: the Crazy Gang in OK for Sound ...