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Abolish the CIA!

Chalmers Johnson: ‘A classic study of blowback’, 21 October 2004

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to 10 September 2001 
by Steve Coll.
Penguin, 695 pp., $29.95, June 2004, 1 59420 007 6
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... 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called ‘Maryknoll’, on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on anyone who asked his advice. Once settled as CIA director under Reagan, he began to funnel covert action funds through the Catholic Church to ...

Move like a party

Mendez: George Michael’s Destiny, 5 January 2023

George Michael: A Life 
by James Gavin.
Abrams, 502 pp., £25, June 2023, 978 1 4197 4794 6
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George Michael: Freedom Uncut 
directed by David Austin and George Michael.
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... Gavin claims. Michael’s response was that the song and video – featuring his long-term beard, Kathy Jeung – were promoting monogamy, but ‘the problem was that nothing in the lyrics made the message clear.’Faith is a more muted and introverted album than its success, the controversies associated with it and the cockiness of its cover image ...

Places Never Explained

Colm Tóibín: Anthony Hecht, 8 August 2013

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht 
edited by Jonathan Post.
Johns Hopkins, 365 pp., £18, November 2012, 978 1 4214 0730 2
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... of Lowell’s war poems are driven as much by his fervid Catholic faith and devotion to the Virgin Mary as by his anti-war sentiments. The diction is clotted and dense; the tone is earnest and overwrought. ‘The Dead in Europe’ begins: After the planes unloaded, we fell down Buried together, unmarried men and women; Not crown of thorns, not iron, not ...

Not Even a Might-Have Been

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Chips’s Adventures, 19 January 2023

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1024 pp., £35, March 2021, 978 1 78633 181 6
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1120 pp., £35, September 2021, 978 1 78633 182 3
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1943-57 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1168 pp., £35, September 2022, 978 1 5291 5172 5
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... For the Duchess of Sutherland’s ball in 1923, Channon ‘went as a Bolshie with a red wig and beard. People were most caustic in their comments. Serge [Obolensky] and Bessborough were drunken waiters and upset soup and generally caused confusion before people realised who they were. The prince and his equerry, Fruity [Metcalfe], came as coolies and no one ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1995, 4 January 1996

... again to God, this time in despair. Suddenly the clouds part and there is a figure with a grey beard leaning down between the clouds: ‘OK. So you want to win the lottery. But please, meet me halfway: buy a ticket.’ 3. Man buys green bottle at car-boot sale. Rubs it. Out pops genie. Offers him one wish. Man asks to be the luckiest man in the world. The ...

The University Poem

Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Dmitri Nabokov: ‘The University Poem’, 7 June 2012

... regal dining hall graced by the likeness of Henry the Eighth – those tight-sheathed calves, that beard – all by the sumptuous Holbein limned; inside that singularly towering hall that choir lofts made appear so tall, it was perpetually murky despite the violet conflagration, that filtered through the colour panes. The naked benches stretched along the ...

Diary

James Meek: In Athens, 1 December 2011

... obliged to look up and squirm. Behind him are furled Greek and EU flags, a painting of the Virgin Mary and child and a painting of the adult Jesus got up in Byzantine bling. I remember how Hesketh mixed his talk of corruption with complaints about his sons being pampered by their Greek mother and grandmother, and wonder if there is something about Orthodox ...

Sex on the Roof

Patricia Lockwood, 6 December 2018

Evening in Paradise: More Stories 
by Lucia Berlin.
Picador, 256 pp., £14.99, November 2018, 978 1 5098 8229 8
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Welcome Home: A Memoir with Selected Photographs 
by Lucia Berlin.
Picador, 160 pp., £12.99, November 2018, 978 1 5098 8234 2
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... contains something we’ve seen before. Berlin was born in Juneau, Alaska, in 1936, to Ted and Mary Brown. Her father was a mining engineer, and her mother, as would be repeated over and over in the stories, was a Moynihan. The family name is significant. We are offered a picture of Lucia sucking worriedly at a bottle, not yet understanding that some days ...

Buy birthday present, go to morgue

Colm Tóibín: Diane Arbus, 2 March 2017

Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer 
by Arthur Lubow.
Cape, 734 pp., £35, October 2016, 978 0 224 09770 3
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Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov 
by Alexander Nemerov.
Fraenkel Gallery, 106 pp., $30, March 2015, 978 1 881337 41 6
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... the other fellow … but none of them was sorry for himself.’ Olga Roderick, whose grey-streaked beard reached down to her waist, ‘was very grand and ritzy. You almost expected her to peer at you through a lorgnette.’ The actors suffered from ‘professional jealousy’, he noted, more than self-pity. ‘Not one of them had a good word to say for the ...

You are not Cruikshank

David Bromwich: Gillray’s Mischief, 21 September 2023

James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire 
by Tim Clayton.
Yale, 400 pp., £50, November 2022, 978 1 913107 32 1
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Uproar! Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London 
by Alice Loxton.
Icon, 397 pp., £25, March, 978 1 78578 954 0
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Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps and Spectres 
by Joseph Monteyne.
Toronto, 301 pp., £49.99, June 2022, 978 1 4875 2774 7
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... wise men of the East turning up for the birth of Christ, then the Prince of Wales is the Virgin Mary and the baby is no more his child than Jesus (strictly speaking) was hers.Such complications of image by word are a constant feature of Gillray’s art. He loads down his political personalities with visual and verbal reminders of their past ...

Sisyphus at the Selectric

James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021

Philip Roth: The Biography 
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5
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Philip Roth: A Counterlife 
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8
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Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth 
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2
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... of the book, reflecting the satisfaction of an author who believes he has steered the Queen Mary into port. And why wouldn’t he have felt all pink and pleased? At nine hundred pages, Philip Roth: The Biography delivers the surplus goods, as if subscribing to the notion that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Each paragraph is as firmly packed as ...

Bournemouth

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bournemouth Set, 21 May 2020

... with the dying, he began to collect remains, and had those of his grandparents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, transported from St Pancras Old Church in London to the cemetery of St Mary’s in Bournemouth, where they lie today with his mother, Mary.After a number of ‘thundering ...

My Heroin Christmas

Terry Castle: Art Pepper and Me, 18 December 2003

... on my right forearm. On my right bicep I got a Chinese skull, with a long moustache and a Van Dyke beard, smoking an opium pipe. Above my left breast I got a naked lady, a rear view of her squatting, but that one faded. And then on my back I got a chick doing the limbo, going under the bar, with little black panties on. That one came out nice. Just before I ...

Bitter Chill of Winter

Tariq Ali: Kashmir, 19 April 2001

... off for not being ‘more vigorous on human rights in Kashmir’. He needn’t have bothered. A beard rose to ask why the US Government had betrayed them. The repetition irritated the Congressman. He took the offensive, complaining about this being an all-male meeting. Why were these men’s wives and daughters not present? The bearded faces remained ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... one of the bends, I fell. I landed on a body: it was an Arab man, lying on his side, long hair and beard, and he was gone. By the time I got to the third floor I couldn’t feel my arms. I’d breathed in a lot of carbon monoxide – I was being poisoned and I fell. That’s when the firefighters came and picked me up.’‘The fire was all the way round the ...

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