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The Price of Pickles

John Lanchester: Planet Wal-Mart, 22 June 2006

The Wal-Mart Effect: How an Out-of-Town Superstore Became a Superpower 
by Charles Fishman.
Allen Lane, 294 pp., £12.99, May 2006, 0 7139 9825 3
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Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price 
directed by Robert Greenwald.
November 2005
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... Charles Fishman, in his punchy and valuable book The Wal-Mart Effect, cites the example of Vlasic pickles, the most popular brand in the US. Wal-Mart talked Vlasic into pricing the pickles so that a gallon jar was on sale for $2.97. That is a bizarre, surreal price for a gallon of pickled cucumbers; no one had ever seen ...

Yum-Yum Pickles

Alex Clark: Claire Messud, 6 June 2002

The Hunters: Two Short Novels 
by Claire Messud.
Picador, 181 pp., £12.99, February 2002, 0 330 48814 7
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... her with sandwiches on the days she came to work. ‘White bread, crusts trimmed, Bick’s yum-yum pickles always in a cut-glass dish between them at the table’: these lunches had become a token of order and plenitude for Maria, a symbol of grace and permanence. For Mrs Ellington, whom Maria ‘had held to be the stable and benevolent repository of as much ...

The Battle of Manywells Spring

Bernard Rudden: Property and the Law, 19 June 2003

Private Property and Abuse of Rights in Victorian England: The Story of Edward Pickles and the Bradford Water Supply 
by Michael Taggart.
Oxford, 235 pp., £45, October 2002, 9780199256877
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... return again and again to the late Victorian litigation between Bradford Corporation and Mr Edward Pickles. The case, or rather its name, is nowadays all too often invoked as a slogan, an allusion to an answer rather than an examination of the problem, and we have forgotten the actual matter of the dispute. Now, however, we can relive the tale, for Michael ...

Sorry to decline your Brief

Stephen Sedley, 11 June 1992

Judge for yourself 
by James Pickles.
Smith Gryphon, 242 pp., £15.99, April 1992, 1 85685 019 6
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The Barrister’s World 
by John Morison and Philip Leith.
Open University, 256 pp., £35, December 1991, 0 335 09396 5
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Advocates 
by David Pannick.
Oxford, 305 pp., £15, April 1992, 0 19 811948 8
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... The absurdity of ex-judge James Pickles is not that, the son of a mayor of Halifax and himself an Oxford graduate, he rails endlessly against the domination of the Bench by the Oxbridge upper middle class. There’s nothing wrong with being a traitor to one’s class. As the left-wing QC D. N. Pritt told the right-wing Labour leader Ernest Bevin, it was the only thing the two of them had in common ...

Short Cuts

James Meek: Voter ID, 4 May 2023

... case, the then prime minister, David Cameron, asked his ‘anti-corruption champion’, Eric Pickles, to look into electoral fraud. The subsequent report acknowledged its debt to Mawrey – ‘the judgment of Richard Mawrey QC was one of the reference points for this review,’ Pickles wrote. But he already had strong ...

Short Cuts

Tom Crewe: The Party Conferences, 19 October 2017

... Never despair​ of finding diamonds in the dust. Sir Eric Pickles, until 2015 Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, isn’t the sort of figure from whom one expects or desires fragments of autobiography, but, introducing his internal review of the Conservative Party’s performance in the 2017 election, he offered a gem, unasked: In my Whitehall office as a minister, over my left shoulder, facing visitors, was a photograph of Che Guevara ...

Demob

Robert Morley, 7 July 1983

Downing Street in Perspective 
by Marcia Falkender.
Weidenfeld, 280 pp., £10.95, May 1983, 0 297 78107 3
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... as the baked grapefruits marinated in liqueur with which dinner habitually commenced. Pickles and jams, she notes, are homemade and the brandy butter the best she ever tasted. No wonder she is disappointed when all this and much else besides comes to a rather abrupt end on the morning of Tuesday, 16 March 1976. Harold Wilson, four times prime ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: On Greensill, 6 May 2021

... his time in government. But who’s checking? Responsibility rests with Acoba’s chairman, Eric Pickles, who previously served as Cameron’s local government minister and anti-corruption tsar. Pickles has been more willing to criticise civil servants than politicians. He remains president of the Enterprise Forum, a ...

Beware the Extremists

Conor Gearty, 19 February 2015

... If there had been any doubt about the true targets of the policy, the recent letter sent by Eric Pickles, the secretary of state for communities and local government, to British Muslim leaders telling them that they had ‘an important responsibility in explaining and demonstrating how faith in Islam can be part of British identity’ surely put them to ...

Dennis Nilsen, or the Pot of Basil

John Ryle, 21 February 1985

Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen 
by Brian Masters.
Cape, 352 pp., £9.95, February 1985, 0 224 02184 2
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Queens 
by Pickles.
Quartet, 289 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 7043 2439 3
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Ritualised Homosexuality in Melanesia 
edited by Gilbert Herdt.
California, 409 pp., £19.95, October 1984, 0 520 05037 1
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... to Heaven, the electronic barn underneath Charing Cross which is Europe’s biggest gay club. Pickles’s queens appear to be encircled by some enchantment, an erotic delirium that hides the seediness surrounding them. It will be hard, though, for those who have never been caught in the sway of high-tech dance music to understand what is so alluring about ...

Blowing over the top of a bottle of San Pellegrino

Adam Mars-Jones: Protest Dance Pop, 15 December 2005

Plat du Jour 
by Matthew Herbert.
Accidental
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... heads up, hold on and stay strong’ and so on) and refers to his choice of last meal: a jar of pickles. Herbert asked Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck at Bray to create his own variations on a theme of pickles, as possible sound sources. Blumenthal came up with an electric pickle, a pickle milkshake served in a ...

Who they think they are

Julian Symons, 8 November 1990

You’ve had your time 
by Anthony Burgess.
Heinemann, 391 pp., £17.50, October 1990, 0 434 09821 3
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An Immaculate Mistake: Scenes from Childhood and Beyond 
by Paul Bailey.
Bloomsbury, 167 pp., £14.99, October 1990, 0 7475 0630 2
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... suffering from dyspepsia he tried to reach crisis point via a midnight supper of cold pork, mixed pickles and potato salad, followed by cheddar cheese, beetroot and pickled walnuts, all washed down with inferior claret. ‘I slept like a baby and woke eager for breakfast.’ The first and most interesting part of the book ends with Lynne’s death. The ...

Ruling the Roast

David A. Bell: A Nation of Beefeaters, 25 September 2003

Beef and Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation 
by Ben Rogers.
Chatto, 207 pp., £17.99, April 2003, 9780701169800
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... wounded American spirit like the famous ‘two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions on a sesame-seed bun’. Yes, the burgers are assembled from the meat of dozens of separate animals, then flash frozen in a distant factory. Yes, the animals themselves are raised and slaughtered in abhorrent conditions, and stuffed with ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2013, 9 January 2014

... decision about Smithfield will presumably end up on the desk of the planning minister, Eric Pickles, a native of Bradford. In the 1960s Bradford, having already castrated itself via a motorway welcomed into its very guts, embarked on a programme of wholesale destructions which included the delightful covered market in Kirkgate. Bradford’s neighbour ...

Oops, I’m trapped

Blake Morrison: ‘Tomb of Sand’, 6 October 2022

Tomb of Sand 
by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell.
Tilted Axis, 735 pp., £12, August 2021, 978 1 911284 61 1
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... the only nurse and enabler. The deep-voiced Rosie Bua begins to visit Ma, bringing flowers, herbs, pickles, ointments and luxurious gowns. The two of them go back a long way, though quite how far isn’t disclosed till near the end of the book. Beti feels ambivalent about Rosie’s intrusions: having wrested Ma away from Bade, and restored her to life, she ...

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