True Grit

David Craig, 8 February 1996

Wainwright: The Biography 
by Hunter Davies.
Joseph, 356 pp., £16.99, October 1995, 0 7181 3909 7
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... the morning by way of Honister old quarry and consigned his dust to that hummocky moorland. When I took on Haystacks and its cliffs for the Fell & Rock Climbers’ guidebook to Buttermere eight years ago, I tried to evoke the bristling stature of the place, drawing on my own experience of its trickling and collapsing gullies, which few people have ...

Diary

Andrew Saint: Foscolo’s Grave, 20 September 2007

... streak. Eager to join Napoleon’s army at Boulogne for the famous invasion of England that never took place, he arrived late in 1804, delayed by political intrigue. With little to do, he was dispatched on light duties around the local towns. Among his tasks was to look after some British internees who had been concentrated in Valenciennes after the Treaty of ...

Marginal Man

Stephen Fender, 7 December 1989

Paul Robeson 
by Martin Bauml Duberman.
Bodley Head, 804 pp., £20, April 1989, 0 370 30575 2
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... by a white author, though scholarly opinion differs as to its degree of condescension. Robeson took the title role in three major productions – London in 1930, New York in 1942 and Stratford in 1959 – playing it as the noble Moor tragically (or perhaps ‘pathetically’ would be more accurate) betrayed by his inability to perceive the nastier side of ...

Burlington Bertie

Julian Symons, 14 June 1990

The Last Modern: A Life of Herbert Read 
by James King.
Weidenfeld, 364 pp., £25, May 1990, 0 297 81042 1
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... where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse influenced by ...

Digging up the Ancestors

R.W. Johnson, 14 November 1996

Hugh Gaitskell 
by Brian Brivati.
Cohen, 492 pp., £25, September 1996, 1 86066 073 8
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... Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell was the grandfather of Tony Blair’s revolution, the original Labour moderniser,’ the blurb begins. With Labour under Blair ...

Did Lady Brewster faint?

Eric Korn, 24 April 1997

Huxley: Evolution’s High Priest 
by Adrian Desmond.
Joseph, 372 pp., £20, March 1997, 0 7181 3882 1
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... granny, coming from a stratum where the existence of ancestors cannot be assumed, and consequently took offence where none – perhaps – was offered. But there was no one present with shorthand, a camera or an eidetic memory: contemporary accounts are thin and inconsistent. Henry Sidgwick’s sister wrote her memories of the battle in friends’ albums – I ...

The Great Percy

C.H. Sisson, 18 November 1982

Stranger and Brother: A Portrait of C.P. Snow 
by Philip Snow.
Macmillan, 206 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 333 32680 6
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... placed in the Fellows’ Garden at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he is commemorated beside John Milton. There is occasion to take a look at them, nonetheless, for we now have this account of the man by his brother, Philip Snow. ‘Brothers seldom write about each other,’ as the publisher says, and one may think that in general they are wise not to do ...

Sorcerer’s Apprentice

E.S. Turner, 19 December 1991

Alistair MacLean 
by Jack Webster.
Chapmans, 326 pp., £18, November 1991, 1 85592 519 2
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Alistair MacLean’s Time of the Assassins 
by Alastair MacNeill.
HarperCollins, 288 pp., £14.99, December 1991, 0 00 223816 0
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... near-homophonous Alistair MacNeill; two of his screenplays had already been turned into novels by John Denis; and a third screenplay is undergoing similar treatment by Simon Gandolfi. In this curious world there are occasional legal hiccups. One such, not so much a hiccup as a cardiac arrest, recently befell HarperCollins when they were prosecuted and heavily ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: On Greensill, 6 May 2021

... seems to have been making representations to his former colleagues. In April 2020, as the pandemic took hold, Cameron pressed the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, to include the now ailing Greensill in the government’s Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF). The scheme had been designed to give temporary taxpayer-funded loans to Britain’s biggest companies ...

Invidious Trumpet

Thomas Keymer: Find the Printer, 9 September 2021

The Paper Chase: The Printer, the Spymaster and the Hunt for the Rebel Pamphleteers 
by Joseph Hone.
Chatto, 251 pp., £18.99, November 2020, 978 1 78474 306 2
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... conformity’ – a dodge enabling non-conformists to hold public office if they periodically took communion in the Anglican Church – was opening the door, the Memorial argued, to Puritan fanaticism and the levelling politics that came with it. Daniel Defoe, an able provocateur in his own right, thought the Memorial ‘Mutinous Bluster’, ‘a ...

A chemistry is performed

Deborah Friedell: Silicon Valley Girl, 7 February 2019

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup 
by John Carreyrou.
Picador, 320 pp., £9.99, March 2019, 978 1 5098 6808 7
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... Centre, and it was just as promised: he felt no more than ‘a slight pinch’ as a phlebotomist took two drops. But as for how it all worked, Holmes would only say that ‘a chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed ...

Poet at the Automat

Eliot Weinberger: Charles Reznikoff, 22 January 2015

... and Zionist activist (she was Golda Meir’s best friend and a primary mentor to the young men who took over the New Republic in the 1970s). Reznikoff refused to accompany her on her many trips to postwar Europe, Palestine, and later Israel – explaining that he hadn’t finished exploring Central Park – but happily went to the meetings and fundraising ...

The Bad News about the Resistance

Neal Ascherson: Parachuted into France, 30 July 2020

A Schoolmaster’s War: Harry Rée, British Agent in the French Resistance 
edited by Jonathan Rée.
Yale, 204 pp., £14.99, March 2020, 978 0 300 24566 0
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... and – with the help of some ‘Jean faux-papiers’ forger – answered to no fixed identity. It took time for that glamour to wear thin, a process started in my case by getting to know the real France and French families in the postwar years. To my dismay, I discovered how many people who had hated ‘les Boches’ and could not be called collaborators ...

Bitter End

Alasdair St John, 27 October 1988

Hong Kong 
by Jan Morris.
Viking, 304 pp., £14.95, September 1988, 0 670 80792 3
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... observes that already many of Hong Kong’s richest capitalists, some of whom fled China after Mao took power in 1949, have made their peace with the Communists. Men like the archetypal Hong Kong billionaire Sir Y.K. Pao have built universities, hospitals and schools in their native provinces, where they are regarded as local heroes, and carry as much ...

What difference did she make?

Eric Hobsbawm, 23 May 1991

A Question of Leadership: Gladstone to Thatcher 
by Peter Clarke.
Hamish Hamilton, 334 pp., £17.99, April 1991, 0 241 13005 0
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The Quiet Rise of John Major 
by Edward Pearce.
Weidenfeld, 177 pp., £14.99, April 1991, 0 297 81208 4
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... who range from newspaper editors to political historians, it may make very little difference. As John Kenneth Galbraith has observed, changing the top man in important business corporations rarely affects the price of their shares on the market. A rapid glance at the history of the USA also suggests scepticism about the impact of individual leaders. That ...