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An Escalation of Reasonableness

Conor Gearty: Northern Ireland, 6 September 2001

To Raise up a New Northern Ireland: Articles and Speeches 1998-2000 
by David Trimble.
Belfast Press, 166 pp., £5.99, July 2001, 0 9539287 1 3
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... Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine – starved themselves to death in the months that followed. During that summer of 1981, the Northern Ireland crisis came closer than ever before or since to carnage. Levels of mob as well as of subversive violence were high. In Dublin two thousand ...

Perfuming the Money Issue

James Wood: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’, 11 October 2012

Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece 
by Michael Gorra.
Norton, 385 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 0 87140 408 4
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... When I think ideally of ‘the novel’, this is the one I recur to. One of the many pleasures of Michael Gorra’s book is that he too has loved this novel since he studied it in college, and wants to share his passion for it. He has also taught it for many years, at Smith College, and he has written the kind of patient, sensitive, acute study that gifted ...

Diary

Rory Stewart: In Papua, 20 July 2000

... a sudden Damascene vision, not a long, difficult period of negotiation. ‘Of course, we did not burn traditional things in the village,’ Cornelius said. ‘We were much more sensitive – we don’t do things like that any more. That was the old approach.’ But if that was right, what had happened to all the nose tusks? The first permanent settlement ...

‘No Bullshit’ Bullshit

Stefan Collini: Christopher Hitchens, Englishman, 23 January 2003

Orwell's Victory 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Allen Lane, 150 pp., £9.99, June 2002, 9780713995848
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... the political journalist as man of letters. He would have been entirely at home with the slash-and-burn style of the early partisan quarterlies, such as the Edinburgh or the Westminster, disposing of shoddy Romantic poetry and shoddy arguments in favour of the slave trade or the unreformed House of Commons with equal gusto, in a style two parts Hazlitt to one ...

Diary

Christian Lorentzen: At the Conventions, 27 September 2012

... to be funny. I suppose otherwise they’d never laugh at all. In their biography The Real Romney, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman write that ‘within the family, Romney’s zany side was well known.’* They give two examples: Romney assuming ‘the voices of cartoon characters’ in letters home from Bordeaux, where he was a missionary in the late ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Out of Essex, 8 January 2004

... knows, the relief of that, the pub, the slope down into Newman Passage, the opening sequence of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a puddle of bloody neon, awkward stone setts, smokers in doorways; and then out, immediately, into another world, Newman Street. Black leather, chrome, complimentary coffee. Film, television, advertising. Bikers with ...

Bonfire in Merrie England

Richard Wilson: Shakespeare’s Burning, 4 May 2017

... Kipling’s concerns and his allusion to Lear’s purifying ‘wheel of fire’, which will ‘burn the enhampering body’ and ‘scald like molten lead’, is disquieting in the context of his exhilaration at ‘the ignition of the dynamite’ that ‘indicts an overplus of humanity’ in Timon’s genocidal wish to see ‘the race die’. ‘The ...

Wedded to the Absolute

Ferdinand Mount: Enoch Powell, 26 September 2019

Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain 
by Paul Corthorn.
Oxford, 233 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 0 19 874714 7
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... stories he told. Only four days after the Birmingham speech, Ann Dummett, wife of the philosopher Michael Dummett and a community relations officer in Oxford, wrote to the Times that the anecdote about the widow from Wolverhampton had been recounted to her in Oxford recently, but about an old lady in London: ‘Almost every circumstantial detail was the ...

A Hit of Rus in Urbe

Iain Sinclair: In Lea Valley, 27 June 2002

... mixing relatively safe bottom ash with the contaminated fly ash that the process was introduced to burn off and neutralise. The end product was then used in road building, and in the manufacture of the breeze blocks out of which dormitory estates are assembled. Waltham Abbey and its satellites as Pompeii and Herculaneum. The defoliant Agent Orange, fifty ...

Closet Virtuoso

Seamus Perry: Magic Mann, 24 February 2022

The Magician 
by Colm Tóibín.
Viking, 438 pp., £18.99, September 2021, 978 0 241 00461 6
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... them for another decade, and at the end of his life, after some hesitation, he decided not to burn all the similarly revealing diaries that he had written subsequently but instead to leave them for the enlightenment of posterity, as though belatedly letting the cat out of the bag. ‘Let the world know me,’ he wrote in the diary, ‘but only when ...

The American Virus

Eliot Weinberger, 4 June 2020

... now that the attorney general has dropped his case against the former national security adviser Michael Flynn, even though Flynn has already twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. This move by the traditionally non-partisan Department of Justice leads more than two thousand former DOJ employees to sign ...

The Old Country

Thomas Laqueur: The troublesome marriage of Poles and Jews, 4 June 1998

Heshel's Kingdom 
by Dan Jacobson.
Hamish Hamilton, 242 pp., £15.99, February 1998, 0 241 13927 9
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Shtetl: The History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World 
by Eva Hoffman.
Secker, 269 pp., £15.99, January 1998, 0 436 20482 7
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... danger, from which they were saved only by his death seven years later. Our author and his son Michael were born in the safety of South Africa and England only because the rabbi’s untimely demise left a penniless widow and nine children with no means of support and no choice but to emigrate. Of course, Heshel could not have known what was coming, and ...

Diary

Andrew Brighton: On Peter Fuller, 7 November 1991

... in Britain. When Pilkington Glass went public a Scottish architect of no great distinction, Michael Spens, became a millionaire. He bought Studio International, which as the Studio had been publishing since 1893. It had more institutional subscribers – i.e. annually renewed subscriptions by libraries both here and abroad – than the whole print run ...

Sorrows of a Polygamist

Mark Ford: Ted Hughes in His Cage, 17 March 2016

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life 
by Jonathan Bate.
William Collins, 662 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 00 811822 8
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... That will render his whole world untouchable Or touchable only with a penalty Of radio-active burn. A scream That will lock him up in a labyrinth Made of ordinary streets As if he were the Minotaur.This scream is approaching disguised ‘in the likeness of a girl’, and it will initially sound like laughter and hope, ‘like all happiness, all ...

Gloves Off

Glen Newey: Torture, 29 January 2009

Death by a Thousand Cuts 
by Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon and Gregory Blue.
Harvard, 320 pp., £22.95, March 2008, 978 0 674 02773 2
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Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story 
by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris.
Picador, 286 pp., £8.99, January 2009, 978 0 330 45201 4
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Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law 
by Philippe Sands.
Allen Lane, 315 pp., £20, May 2008, 978 1 84614 008 2
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... in the post-Boxer period, throwing up such cultural tephra as Fu Manchu, and the ‘Chinese’ burn beloved of primary school playgrounds. But, as the authors point out, lingchi is not obviously grislier than familiar European practices such as the thumbscrew, the fustuarium, breaking on the wheel, garrotting, the rack, racial lynch mobs, autos-da-fé, or ...

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