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Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2014, 8 January 2015

“... on a courtesy visit to the USSR, as it then was, in 1988, a party which included Craig Raine, Paul Bailey and Timothy Mo. I don’t remember laughing more on any trip before or since; we were a very silly group, so much so that we often mystified our hosts and sometimes behaved disgracefully. Sue – and I even noticed this in the photo the Guardian used ...”

Cultivating Cultivation

John Mullan: English culture, 18 June 1998

The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the 18th Century 
by John Brewer.
HarperCollins, 448 pp., £19.99, January 1997, 0 00 255537 9Show More
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“... survey is devoted to the history of the arts as a commercial product. A generous acknowledgment to Paul Langford’s studies of the 18th century heads the bibliographical essay at the end of the book, and The Pleasures of the Imagination shares the emphases of Langford’s A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (1989). Politeness was to be the sign ...”

Between Victoria and Vauxhall

John Lanchester: The Election, 1 June 2017

“... part bolthole for when it kicks off at home, part speculative investment, part, to quote Boris Johnson, ‘safety deposit boxes in the sky’. Meaning: a device for getting capital out of your home country, where it might be stolen or expropriated, to the UK, where the only true and universal object of worship is property rights. The owners include ‘a ...”

An UnAmerican in New York

Lewis Nkosi: The Harlem Renaissance, 24 August 2000

Winds Can Wake Up the Dead: An Eric Walrond Reader 
edited by Louis Parascandola.
Wayne State, 350 pp., $24.95, December 1998, 0 8143 2709 5Show More
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“... of the new period into which Negroes appear to be emerging.’ Opportunity’s editor was Charles Johnson, a key figure in the New Negro movement, who thirty years later recalled the Harlem Renaissance as ‘that sudden and altogether phenomenal outburst of emotional expression, unmatched by any comparable period in American or Negro American history.’One ...”

Icicles by Cynthia

Michael Wood: Ghosts, 2 January 2020

Romantic Shades and Shadows 
by Susan J. Wolfson.
Johns Hopkins, 272 pp., £50, August 2018, 978 1 4214 2554 2Show More
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“... same gag: ‘Not only did he disbelieve in ghosts; he was not even frightened of them.’ As Dr Johnson said on the subject of the possibility of a post-mortem appearance among the living (he too is quoted in this remarkable book), ‘All argument is against it, but all belief is for it.’ And not just belief. History has a role as well. The ...”

What did the General have in mind when he said: ‘Je vous ai compris’?

Douglas Johnson: Algeria, 11 November 1999

A Les Trósors Retrouvós de la ‘Revue des deux Mondes’ 
edited by Jeanne Causse and Bruno de Cessole.
Maisonneuve, 582 pp., frs 185, January 1999, 2 7068 1353 9Show More
La Guerre d’Algórie par les Documents. Vol. II: Les Portes de la Guerre, 10 Mars 1946 à 31 Dócembre 1954 
edited by Jean-Charles Jauffret.
Service Historique de l’Armóe de Terre, 1023 pp., September 1998, 2 86323 113 8Show More
De Gaulle et L’Algóerie: Mon Tómoinage 1960-62 
by Jean Morin.
Albin Michel, 387 pp., frs 140, January 1999, 2 226 10672 3Show More
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“... General Calliès, the French C-in-C in Algeria, found cause for optimism in these disputes. But Paul Schoen, head of the Service des Liaisons Nord-Africaines, refers to paramilitary groups preparing for terrorist action in March 1954 and, the following month, to a Comité Révolutionnaire pour l’Unité et l’Action and to its publication, Le Patriote ...”

At the Movies

Michael Wood: Marlon Brando, 19 July 2007

“... is that the West, like revenge, is never finished. The point is wryly signalled when Ben Johnson, an actor known for many cowboy roles and for playing the old-fashioned outlaw in this film, says he’s tired of the sound of the ‘damn waves floppin’ in all day long’. Longworth wasn’t always a sheriff. Five years earlier he had been the senior ...”

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat

David Runciman: Thatcher’s Rise, 6 June 2013

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. Vol. I: Not for Turning 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 859 pp., £30, April 2013, 978 0 7139 9282 3Show More
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“... or lawyerly approach to political philosophy, ticking off useful concepts and ignoring the rest. Paul Johnson (perhaps not the most reliable witness) described her as ‘the most ignorant politician of her level that I’d come across until I met Tony Blair’, but he thought she was at least touchingly aware of her ignorance, ‘the eternal scholarship ...”

During the war and after the war

J.R. Pole, 11 January 1990

Oxford History of the United States. Vol. VI: Battle Cry of Freedom, The Civil War Era 
by James McPherson.
Oxford, 904 pp., $35, June 1988, 0 19 503863 0Show More
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 
by Eric Foner.
Harper and Row, 690 pp., $21.95, April 1988, 0 06 015851 4Show More
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“... radical solutions – to ‘the left’ – and would have gone further to meet the Radicals than Johnson was psychologically capable of doing; quite apart from his convictions, Lincoln was too politically canny to have got embroiled with Congress as Johnson did. But Lincoln never wanted to convert the war into a social ...”

Parliamentary Sovereignty

Betty Kemp, 22 December 1983

The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Vol. II: Party, Parliament and the American Crisis, 1766-1774 
edited by Paul Langford.
Oxford, 508 pp., £40, April 1981, 0 19 822416 8Show More
The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Vol. V: India: Madras and Bengal, 1774-1785 
edited by P.J. Marshall.
Oxford, 667 pp., £55, July 1983, 0 19 822417 6Show More
The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Constitutional Code, Vol. I 
edited by F. Rosen and J.H. Burns.
Oxford, 612 pp., £48, April 1983, 9780198226086Show More
The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Deontology, together with a Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitarianism 
edited by Amnon Goldworth.
Oxford, 394 pp., £38, July 1983, 0 19 822609 8Show More
The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Chrestomathia 
edited by M.J. Smith and W.H. Burston.
Oxford, 451 pp., £40, November 1983, 0 19 822610 1Show More
Bentham and Bureaucracy 
by L.J. Hume.
Cambridge, 320 pp., £22.50, September 1981, 0 521 23542 1Show More
Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democracy: A Study of the Constitutional Code 
by Frederick Rosen.
Oxford, 255 pp., £19.50, May 1983, 9780198226567Show More
Bentham 
by Ross Harrison.
Routledge, 286 pp., £14.95, September 1983, 0 7100 9526 0Show More
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“... to disprove Hobbes’s contention that sovereignty was indivisible. Burke followed closely on Dr Johnson and Bentham. In 1775 Dr Johnson pronounced that ‘there must in every society be some power or other from which there is no appeal – exempt itself from question or control, and bounded only by physical necessity ...”

The Jump-out Boys

J. Robert Lennon: The Drug-Bust that Wasn’t, 3 August 2006

Tulia: Race, Cocaine and Corruption in a Small Texas Town 
by Nate Blakeslee.
PublicAffairs, 450 pp., £15.99, September 2005, 9781586482190Show More
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“... jurors, was really what being on a jury boiled down to, in McEachern’s view. He was a master, Paul Holloway [a defence attorney] said later, at ‘changing “beyond a reasonable doubt”, to something more akin to a gut instinct’. Gut instinct, in this case, was the widespread and long-held conviction that black people were criminals. Remember Lana ...”

On Thatcher

“... finds her measuring ‘my performance against that of other countries in the real world’.R.W. Johnson, 20 April 1989If​ you want to see the cutting edge of Thatcherism, go to Basingstoke. There, as we learn in Paul Hirst’s After Thatcher, the local council (careful, no doubt, with its ratepayers’ money) has ...”

Intelligence in a Cymbal

Ian Pace: Hugo Wolf’s Songs, 16 February 2023

The Complete Songs of Hugo Wolf: Life, Letters, Lieder 
by Richard Stokes.
Faber, 602 pp., £30, September 2021, 978 0 571 36069 7Show More
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“... had explored experimental musical forms inspired by iconoclastic literary figures such as Jean Paul and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Liszt, despite being implicitly attacked by Brahms as the epitome of Zukunftsmusik, showed a historicist side in his transcriptions of works by Bach and Beethoven. It was only with the appearance of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht in ...”

Diary

Paul Farmer: Ebola, 23 October 2014

“... to win a presidential election in an African democracy. There were rumours that President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was not attending the UN meeting because she was busy dealing with the crisis, or because she faced political instability at home. But we knew that one of her staff had fallen ill with Ebola. A few days ago, we heard that another of our Liberian ...”

Rising Moon

R.W. Johnson, 18 December 1986

L’Empire Moon 
by Jean-Francois Boyer.
La Découverte, 419 pp., August 1986, 2 7071 1604 1Show More
The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection 
by Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead.
Sheridan Square, 255 pp., $19.95, May 1986, 0 940380 07 2Show More
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“... on editorial desks around the world. The story originated with three writers: Claire Sterling, Paul Henze and Michael Ledeen. None could exactly be termed reliable sources. Sterling has long been known for her somewhat wild right-wing views and her heavy reliance on anonymous ‘intelligence sources’. Henze was a long-time CIA station chief in Turkey ...”

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