Diary

Ian Hamilton: Who will blow it?, 22 May 1997

... if it might be going places, but not for very long. Players like Graeme Souness, Bobby Murdoch and David Armstrong got them to the sixth round of the Cup, the semi-finals of the old League Cup, and to seventh in Division One, and this was thought to be a peak achievement. But the upsurge swiftly fizzled out. Indeed Souness, who the Boro fans believed was ...

Church of Garbage

Robert Irwin, 3 February 2000

The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives 
by Carole Hillenbrand.
Edinburgh, 648 pp., £80, July 1999, 0 7486 0905 9
Show More
Show More
... skewed picture of the Crusades in Western scholarship.’ I’m not sure what he means by this. David Hume, in his History of Great Britain (1754-62), denounced the Crusades as ‘the most signal and durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’. Gibbon considered them to be an expression of ‘savage fanaticism’. In a ...

Diary

Lorna Scott Fox: Reality in the Aguascalientes, 23 January 1997

... rather than La Realidad, misled by assurances that I would find the local leader, Comandante David; I was stranded where not much was happening for the third anniversary of the uprising. But was I the only one who was not ‘in Reality’? After all, the Zapatista movement likes to appear as something of a phantom, expressing itself in concealments and ...

Vote for the Beast!

Ian Gilmour: The Tory Leadership, 20 October 2005

... will filch it. Moore has even complained of Clarke flattening the flat tax. The flat tax may well be right for, say, the new economies of Eastern Europe, but in long-established economies like those of the United States and Western Europe it would be largely a device for making the rich richer, which is no doubt why it appeals to the neo-cons here ...

Through the Mill

Jane Humphries: The Industrial Revolution, 20 March 2014

Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution 
by Emma Griffin.
Yale, 303 pp., £12.99, March 2014, 978 0 300 20525 1
Show More
Show More
... to illustrate various aspects of working-class life in Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure. By 1981, David Vincent had found 142 memoirs spanning the years from 1790 to 1850, and in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom used them to explore the response of ordinary people to economic and social change. In 1989, Vincent, Burnett and ...

At the Royal Academy

Charles Hope: Giorgione, 31 March 2016

... would better describe the process. One of the exhibits at the Royal Academy, a picture called David between Saul and Jonathan, illustrates this very well. It was first attributed to Giorgione by the most influential Italian art historian of the last century, Roberto Longhi. In 1992 a letter about the picture Longhi wrote to the owner in 1944 was published ...

A Severed Penis

Elizabeth Lowry: Magic realism in Mozambique, 3 February 2005

The Last Flight of the Flamingo 
by Mia Couto, translated by David Brookshaw.
Serpent’s Tail, 179 pp., £9.99, March 2004, 1 85242 813 9
Show More
Show More
... doubts are ‘voxpopulated’, orders ‘spontaneified’, someone arrives ‘envehicled’. David Brookshaw’s dexterity achieves a seemingly effortless fit with Couto’s idiosyncrasies. A virginal heiress, Temporina, ‘hadn’t been legged over, but at least she was worth a legacy’; the ex-Marxist Jonas calls his black market deals ‘my ...

The smallest details speak the loudest

John Upton: The Stephen Lawrence inquiry, 1 July 1999

The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry 
by Sir William Macpherson.
Stationery Office, 335 pp., £26, February 1999, 0 10 142622 4
Show More
The Case of Stephen Lawrence 
by Brian Cathcart.
Viking, 418 pp., £16.99, May 1999, 0 670 88604 1
Show More
Show More
... from among the large volume of information that the police received: Jamie Acourt, Neil Acourt, David Norris and Gary Dobson. The names came from unreliable sources – an ex-girlfriend, youths with grudges against them. All four had been suspects in connection with previous acts of racial violence. Despite a barrage of teenage estate gossip with all the ...

Educating Georgie

E.S. Turner, 6 December 1984

Matriarch: Queen Mary and the House of Windsor 
by Anne Edwards.
Hodder, 462 pp., £12.95, September 1984, 0 340 24465 8
Show More
Show More
... then? Well no, not quite. Eddy died in 1892 only weeks after he became engaged to Princess May (as the future queen was then known). We are invited to wonder whether his demise was deliberately accelerated by a doctor. Was it just coincidence that the young man took a dramatic turn for the worse directly after the arrival of the Queen’s ...

Ineffectuals

Peter Campbell, 19 April 1990

The World of Nagaraj 
by R.K. Narayan.
Heinemann, 186 pp., £12.95, March 1990, 0 434 49617 0
Show More
The Great World 
by David Malouf.
Chatto, 330 pp., £12.95, April 1990, 0 7011 3415 1
Show More
The Shoe 
by Gordon Legge.
Polygon, 181 pp., £7.95, December 1989, 0 7486 6080 1
Show More
Trying to grow 
by Firdaus Kanga.
Bloomsbury, 242 pp., £13.95, February 1990, 0 7475 0549 7
Show More
Show More
... the reader understand all, and hope those you see will forgive each other. In novels Australians may think more than they say. What do Digger and Vic, in The Great World, talk about? Does Vic talk about the money he has made?   ‘Doesn’t ’e talk to you about it?’ he asked Digger.   ‘No. Why should ’e? I don’t know anything about ...

A Storm in His Luggage

C.K. Stead, 26 January 1995

Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters 
edited by David Gordon.
Norton, 313 pp., £23, June 1994, 0 393 03540 9
Show More
‘Agenda’: An Anthology. The First Four Decades 
edited by William Cookson.
Carcanet, 418 pp., £25, May 1994, 1 85754 069 7
Show More
Show More
... unaffected by this kind of attention. His brassiness has the hollow ring of insecurity. Perhaps we may thank Blackmur in part for the largely unfortunate increase in ‘content’ which the 40 Cantos written in the next seven years displayed. Pound had come to intellectual consciousness at the time of Fin de Siècle aestheticism and its hearty aftermath, and ...

Triumphalism

John Campbell, 19 December 1985

The Kitchener Enigma 
by Trevor Royle.
Joseph, 436 pp., £15, September 1985, 0 7181 2385 9
Show More
Kitchener: The Man behind the Legend 
by Philip Warner.
Hamish Hamilton, 247 pp., £12.95, August 1985, 0 241 11587 6
Show More
Show More
... Suez: theirs is the triumphalist tone of the Falklands, taking a robust view of the methods that may regrettably be necessary to govern empires. ‘It was brutal, savage and above all degrading,’ Warner writes with approval of the humiliation of Mahmoud: ‘Kitchener knew exactly what he was doing.’ Royle is less explicit, but he glosses over all the ...

Aspasia’s Sisters

Mary Lefkowitz, 1 September 1983

The Family, Women and Death: Comparative Studies 
by Sally Humphreys.
Routledge, 210 pp., £15, March 1983, 0 7100 9322 5
Show More
The Golden Lyre: The Themes of the Greek Lyric Poets 
by David Campbell.
Duckworth, 312 pp., £28, February 1983, 0 7156 1563 7
Show More
Show More
... the customs of a remote tribe. She is keenly aware that, as anthropologists have often done, she may be asking the wrong questions, and relying too heavily on modern analogies or notions. Her task is further complicated because there are no living natives to study or examine. The ancients speak to us, but cannot answer our inquiries; virtually every text ...

London Review of Crooks

Robert Marshall-Andrews, 15 July 1982

Rough Justice: The Extraordinary Truth about Charles Richardson and his Gang 
by Robert Parker.
Fontana, 352 pp., £1.95, October 1981, 0 00 636354 7
Show More
Web of Corruption: The Story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith 
by Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor.
Granada, 282 pp., £12.50, October 1981, 0 246 10915 7
Show More
Inside Boss: South Africa’s Secret Police 
by Gordon Winter.
Penguin, 640 pp., £7.95, October 1981, 9780140057515
Show More
Crime in Wartime: A Social History of Crime in World War II 
by Edward Smithies.
Allen and Unwin, 219 pp., £12.50, January 1982, 0 04 364020 6
Show More
Show More
... These operations were restored to topicality after Charles Richardson’s escape from prison in May 1980 and his subsequent letter to the Times. The first question which needs to be asked is whether such books should be written at all. And if they are written, should any serious notice be taken of them? The existence of violent, sadistic and resourceful ...

Had we lived …

Jenny Diski: The Afterlife of Captain Scott, 9 February 2006

Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South 
by David Crane.
HarperCollins, 637 pp., £25, November 2005, 0 00 715068 7
Show More
Show More
... assessment came due in 1996 and the old material was viewed by Francis Spufford in his eloquent I May Be Some Time with less animus and a more historically minded cultural analysis, mellowing the harshness of the previous ruling. Scott was perhaps a child of the Romantics, a son of the Sublime, a victim of the need for a large, empty metaphor to redeem the ...