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Spookery, Skulduggery

David Runciman: Chris Mullin, 4 April 2019

The Friends of Harry Perkins 
by Chris Mullin.
Scribner, 185 pp., £12, March 2019, 978 1 4711 8248 8
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... Coup, the first result was an article by Robert Peston describing the recent attempt by Yvette Cooper, Hilary Benn and Oliver Letwin to seize parliamentary control of the Brexit process. The headline read: ‘A very British coup against the PM’.) The second thing is Jeremy Corbyn. The book is now being marketed with ...

Mushroom Cameo

Rosemary Hill: Noël Coward’s Third Act, 29 June 2023

Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 634 pp., £30, March 2023, 978 1 4746 1280 7
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... in the Willows, Beatrix Potter produced eleven of her most popular illustrated tales, including Jeremy Fisher and The Flopsy Bunnies, and Edith Nesbit, who had more or less invented the children’s adventure story, published The Railway Children. Nesbit’s work was shaped by memories of her unhappy childhood and in her novels the cheerful Bastable ...

The Dreamings of Dominic Cummings

James Meek, 24 October 2019

... told. If we had another vote tomorrow I would vote to remain, absolutely.’She couldn’t imagine Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister; she didn’t trust him or Johnson. She was ready not merely to vote for the Liberal Democrats but to campaign for them – she joined the party a few weeks ago. We spoke just after the Lib Dems endorsed Jo Swinson’s radical ...

Whose Body?

Charles Glass: ‘Operation Mincemeat’, 22 July 2010

Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War Two 
by Ben Macintyre.
Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £16.99, January 2010, 978 0 7475 9868 8
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... years after the war ended. Its first exposure came in fictional form in November 1950, when Duff Cooper published a novel, Operation Heartbreak, that barely concealed the actual facts. The next version, released in 1953, was a non-fiction book by the gambit’s architect, Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu of naval intelligence. Three years later, his ...

The Groom Stripped Bare by His Suitor

Jeremy Harding: John Lennon, 4 January 2001

Lennon Remembers 
by Jann Wenner.
Verso, 151 pp., £20, October 2000, 1 85984 600 9
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... to consolidate. Not the extremist accounts of the damaged, beatific self in R.D. Laing and David Cooper, but a running tally of private hurt combined with an inventory of (equally private) need that thrived on a domestication of the visionary beliefs which gained currency in the 1960s. ‘Alienation’ was still being claimed as a negative human right and ...

Lights On and Away We Go

Keith Thomas: Happy Thoughts, 20 May 2021

The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 
by Ritchie Robertson.
Allen Lane, 984 pp., £40, November 2020, 978 0 241 00482 1
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... and intolerance.In March 1706, in the midst of the War of the Spanish Succession, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, wrote excitedly to the Swiss biblical scholar Jean Le Clerc. ‘There is,’ he declared, ‘a mighty light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those two free nations of England and Holland, upon whom the affairs ...

Serried Yuppiedromes

Owen Hatherley: What happened to London?, 21 August 2014

Guide to the Architecture of London 
by Edward Jones and Christopher Woodward.
Phoenix, 511 pp., £16.99, July 2013, 978 1 78022 493 0
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... but also that of Lutyens, Giles Gilbert Scott, Charles Holden and lesser lights such as Edwin Cooper or W. Curtis Green. Practically every Georgian terrace they can find features in the book. They disapprove of the City’s ‘untidy and expanding cluster’ of skyscrapers, and are more pleased with the beaux-arts plan that defines the placing of ...

Now he had opps

Daniel Trilling: Youth Work, 12 May 2022

Cut Short: Why We’re Failing Our Youth – and How to Fix It 
by Ciaran Thapar.
Penguin, 352 pp., £10.99, June 2022, 978 0 241 98870 1
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... the academy in Elephant and Castle, Thapar ran a workshop at which the pupils discussed Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. It made them think of CCTV cameras and an ‘undie’s whip’ (an undercover police officer’s car). Demetri felt under scrutiny in his own neighbourhood: Elephant and Castle has become one of the frontlines of gentrification in ...

Always the Same Dream

Ferdinand Mount: Princess Margaret, 4 January 2018

Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 423 pp., £16.99, September 2017, 978 0 00 820361 0
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... 5’4”, he would have towered over her. He made paper crowns for the vinegary art critic Douglas Cooper and his scarcely less acerbic biographer John Richardson, and taught them how to bow properly for his royal wedding (another example of how artists’ jokes are almost as unfunny as musicians’).Brown takes the fantasy a stage further by imagining how ...

The Comeuppance Button

Colin Burrow: Dreadful Mr Dahl, 15 December 2022

Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, an Unofficial Biography 
by Matthew Dennison.
Head of Zeus, 264 pp., £20, August 2022, 978 1 78854 941 7
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... married one. Patricia Neal, co-star with Ronald Reagan in The Hasty Heart and former lover of Gary Cooper, was infinitely glamorous and their marriage was more or less instantly unhappy, since Neal wanted to be a movie star and Dahl wanted to be more than a movie star’s husband. Moreover, he wanted someone to cook him his lunch.Over these years he met his ...

Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?

Andrew O’Hagan, 22 October 2015

... anti-jihad movement.Elsewhere in his manifesto, he bemoans the feminisation of men. He approves of Jeremy Clarkson and thinks Ayaan Hirsi Ali should win the Nobel Prize. He hates the BBC and quotes Ayn Rand (‘We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality’). He builds a messianic purpose from a lifetime of slights, making him ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2012, 3 January 2013

... is the first person I’ve spoken to who is actually looking forward to the Olympics.2 May. Jeremy Hunt has the look of an estate agent waiting to show someone a property.10 May, Rome. I sit in Rome airport while R. stands by the baggage carousel. We’re only here for four days, and did either of us have bags on wheels we would not have to wait as most ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... to have mental problems to make false confessions, or be a drug addict. Or even be Irish. Roger Cooper confessed to being a British spy in Teheran after an interrogation during which he was threatened and beaten. In the same way that Armstrong invented details about the IRA to satisfy his captors, Cooper invented a ...

A Car of One’s Own

Andrew O’Hagan: Chariots of Desire, 11 June 2009

... it is no mistake that Middle England finds its values most strikingly represented these days by Jeremy Clarkson, the presenter of the BBC’s Top Gear. The man is pugnacious, dismissive and bigoted, but he knows a lot about the boringness of the Vauxhall Vectra and is considered by a great many to be the authentic voice of the nation. That is England ...

Where are we now?

LRB Contributors: Responses to the Referendum, 14 July 2016

... James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say ...

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