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No Cleaning, No Cooking

Richard Beck: Nell Zink, 16 July 2015

‘The Wallcreeper’ and ‘Mislaid’ 
by Nell Zink.
Fourth Estate, 168 pp. and 288 pp., £20, June 2015, 978 0 00 813960 5
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... When​ a tiny press called Dorothy published Nell Zink’s first novel, The Wallcreeper, in October, nobody knew much about her. She was American but had lived in Germany for years, though not in Berlin, the usual home of American artists in exile. Her novel had an opening sentence that would make an MFA instructor proud, even as it seemed to parody MFA style: ‘I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage ...

I will give thee Madonna

Richard Beck: After Waco, 21 March 2024

Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI and the Birth of America’s Modern Militias 
by Kevin Cook.
Holt, 272 pp., £18.99, January, 978 1 250 84051 6
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Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians and a Legacy of Rage 
by Jeff Guinn.
Simon & Schuster, 383 pp., £20, February 2023, 978 1 9821 8610 4
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... Vernon Howell​ – better known as David Koresh – arrived at Mount Carmel, the Texas base of a Seventh Day Adventist splinter sect called the Branch Davidians, in the summer of 1981. He was 21 years old and looking for a new church. A ‘wandering bonehead’, as he would later describe himself, he had been kicked out of a mainstream Seventh Day Adventist congregation in Tyler, Texas for having sex with the 15-year-old daughter of a church elder (or at least trying to), and for refusing to stop haranguing church leaders about the correct interpretation of scripture ...

The Righteous Community

Jackson Lears: Legacies of the War on Terror, 24 July 2025

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life 
by Richard Beck.
Verso, 556 pp., £30, March, 978 1 83674 072 8
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... the war on terror; Israelis who descend from survivors of one holocaust are now creating another.Richard Beck’s Homeland supplies abundant matter for contemplation. He deftly reconstructs the coup d’état that unfolded in the corridors of power after 9/11, but also explores the darker reaches of the American psyche: the vicarious sadism; the ...

Dancing Senator

Pat Rogers, 7 November 1985

Memoirs of King George II: Vols I, II and III 
by Horace Walpole, edited by John Brooke.
Yale, 248 pp., £65, June 1985, 0 300 03197 1
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... that see in a cloud of metaphysics, and remained absorbed in it’ (this is 1751). ‘The younger [Richard] Beck-ford, who had been announced for a genius, and had laid a foundation for being so, by studying magazines and historical registers ...’ Or this Tacitean thrust at the French: ‘While they were purchasing the ...

Global Style

Hal Foster: Renzo Piano, 20 September 2007

Piano: Renzo Piano Building Workshop 1966-2005 
by Philip Jodidio.
Taschen, 528 pp., £79.99, February 2005, 3 8228 5768 8
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Renzo Piano Building Workshop Vol. IV 
by Peter Buchanan.
Phaidon, 240 pp., £22.95, January 2005, 0 7148 4287 7
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... Yet Piano burst into public view with the Centre Pompidou (1971-77), which, designed with Richard Rogers, is the most celebrated of the high-tech megastructures of the period, and today he is also associated with large urban schemes, including the redevelopment of the old harbour in Genoa (1985-92) and Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (1992-2000), as well as ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2009, 7 January 2010

... dinner consisted of a poached egg. ‘Oh. Credit crunch, was it?’ Two dead salmon in the beck just above Mafeking Bridge, both of them huge creatures, nearly two feet long, so big that one wonders how the beck at low water can accommodate them, though there are a few deepish pools. It’s thought at first that an ...

Falklands Title Deeds

Malcolm Deas, 19 August 1982

The Struggle for the Falkland Islands 
by Julius Goebel, introduced by J.C.J. Metford.
Yale, 482 pp., £10, June 1982, 0 300 02943 8
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The Falklands Islands Dispute: International Dimensions 
edited by Joan Pearce.
Chatham House, 47 pp., £2.75, April 1982, 0 905031 25 3
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The Falkland Islands: The Facts 
HMSO, 12 pp., £50, May 1982, 0 11 701029 4Show More
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... in the British Year Book of International Law, Vol. 9, 1928, at first appeared winded (Peter Beck, Guardian, 26 July, has since I wrote this revealed that the review was a Foreign Office plant and that ‘C.D.’ was Sir Cecil Hurst, the Foreign Office’s chief legal adviser. Corps Diplomatique?). According to D.C., ‘although the reader may, on ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1998, 21 January 1999

... to Bainbridge. Then through Oughtershaw and along Langstrothdale by what is called Oughtershaw Beck but is in fact the Wharfe, both the Wharfe and the Ribble rising in these hills, one flowing south, the other west. The stone circle is small and hard to find and the search is made harder because all down the beck cars ...

Then came the Hoover

Hugh Pennington: The Allergy Epidemic, 22 June 2006

Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady 
by Mark Jackson.
Reaktion, 288 pp., £25, May 2006, 1 86189 271 3
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... superb opportunities for quacks and charlatans. Jackson’s account is underpinned by Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1986). Beck describes a new modernity, one no longer coextensive with industrial society. These days, the risks created by industry and science are of a new kind, ‘somehow universal and ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Bennett’s Dissection, 1 January 2009

... and walk down the muddy lane to the clapper bridge. There are sheep and lambs everywhere and the beck is very full, gliding wickedly between the stones before flattening out over the fields. It’s a perfect scene and R. is just saying how we must try and keep it in mind next week (when I have to go into hospital) when deep in the water comes the spectral ...

Leaving Paradise

Adam Shatz: Iraqi Jews, 6 November 2008

Memories of Eden: A Journey through Jewish Baghdad 
by Violette Shamash, edited by Mira Rocca and Tona Rocca.
Forum, 326 pp., £14.99, February 2008, 978 0 9557095 0 0
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Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew 
by Sasson Somekh.
Ibis, 186 pp., £9.50, November 2007, 978 965 90125 8 9
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... On 27 April 1950 a man whose passport identified him as Richard Armstrong flew from Amsterdam to Baghdad. He came as a representative of Near East Air Transport, an American charter company seeking to win a contract with Iraq’s prime minister, Tawfiq al-Suwaida, to fly Iraqi Jews to Cyprus. Only six weeks earlier, the Iraqi government had passed the Denaturalisation Act, which allowed Jews to emigrate provided they renounced their citizenship, and gave them a year to decide whether to do so ...

More a Voyeur

Colm Tóibín: Elton Took Me Hostage, 19 December 2019

Me 
by Elton John.
Macmillan, 376 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 1 5098 5331 1
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... the Royal Academy of Music, and eventually started playing in a bar, becoming fascinated by Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. He got a Saturday job to fund his record-buying habit. As he became more involved with what was happening in music, he was aware that the older generation was not amused. ‘People fucking hated it. And no one hated it more than my ...

War Therapy

Chase Madar: Victors’ Justice, 22 April 2010

Victors’ Justice: From Nuremberg to Baghdad 
by Danilo Zolo, translated by M.W. Weir.
Verso, 189 pp., £14.99, October 2009, 978 1 84467 317 9
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... years, but nothing to compare with what happened in response to 9/11. According to the jurist Richard Falk, September 11 saw a terrible departure from the norm that prevailed in the aftermath of the Second World War, when, so it was said, the right to make war – the jus ad bellum – came under strict legal control: World War Two ended with the ...

Holy-Rowly-Powliness

Patrick Collinson: The Prayer Book, 4 January 2001

Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England 
Churchhouse, 864 pp., £15, December 2000, 9780715120002Show More
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... a Norfolk man to make of the advice he received in Nottinghamshire: ‘Yaw mun een goo thruft yon beck, then yaws’t corn to a new yate’ – and so on), they consolidated local and professional identities, so many little worlds which we have still not entirely lost. So ‘the people’ would have known that they were in church, and most of them would not ...

Perfectly Mobile, Perfectly Still

David Craig: Land Artists, 14 December 2000

Time 
by Andy Goldsworthy.
Thames and Hudson, 203 pp., £35, August 2000, 0 500 51026 1
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... at this time. What does link them, inside their luxuriant variety? The most austere among them, Richard Long, makes his works by walking, shuffling, treading. Many of them have probably been seen only by his camera. He fashioned a circle in the gibber-desert of the Hoggar region of the Sahara by clearing the gravel and shingle, leaving the dusty sand. He ...

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