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Lethal Pastoral

Paul Keegan: Housman’s Lethal Pastoral, 17 November 2016

Housman Country: Into the Heart of England 
by Peter Parker.
Little, Brown, 446 pp., £25, June 2016, 978 1 4087 0613 8
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... about writing or assembling poems), its slow take-off then rapid ascent; his election in 1911 as Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge; his separate apotheoses as scholar and poet. Apart from a sabbatical term in 1934, he lectured in Cambridge twice a week for 25 years, until only days before his death. He was aware that the less he said the more was said ...

Get a Real Degree

Elif Batuman, 23 September 2010

The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing 
by Mark McGurl.
Harvard, 480 pp., £25.95, April 2009, 978 0 674 03319 1
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... years.One example is McGurl’s discussion of ‘meta-slave narrative’, a genre illustrated by William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), the first-person novelisation of a historical account left by a rebel slave awaiting execution. By ‘refusing the perspectival limitations imposed by his own whiteness,’ McGurl claims, Styron’s novel ...

Subversions

R.W. Johnson, 4 June 1987

Traitors: The Labyrinths of Treason 
by Chapman Pincher.
Sidgwick, 346 pp., £13.95, May 1987, 0 283 99379 0
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The Secrets of the Service: British Intelligence and Communist Subversion 1939-51 
by Anthony Glees.
Cape, 447 pp., £18, May 1987, 0 224 02252 0
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Freedom of Information – Freedom of the Individual? 
by Clive Ponting, John Ranelagh, Michael Zander and Simon Lee, edited by Julia Neuberger.
Macmillan, 110 pp., £4.95, May 1987, 0 333 44771 9
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... moles. This seems to me wrong-headed in several different ways. The key judgment is surely that of William Strang, the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, in a paper of May 1943: We need Russian collaboration. The conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty marks our decision that this must be our policy … even if fears that Russia lay a ‘heavy ...

Real Busters

Tom Crewe: Sickert Grows Up, 18 August 2022

Walter Sickert 
Tate Britain, until 18 September 2022Show More
Walter Sickert: The Theatre of Life 
edited by Matthew Travers.
Piano Nobile, 184 pp., £60, October 2021, 978 1 901192 59 9
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Sickert: A Life in Art 
by Charlotte Keenan McDonald.
National Museums Liverpool, 104 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 1 902700 63 2
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... mirror on the opposite wall. There is a tendency to discuss these pictures as documentary. Thomas Kennedy writes in the Tate catalogue that Sickert is offering ‘realistic representations of people who visited music halls … His works show how people unconsciously engage with the social performative act of being part of an audience.’ But though the ...

Dropping Their Eggs

Patrick Wright: The history of bombing, 23 August 2001

A History of Bombing 
by Sven Lindqvist, translated by Linda Haverty Rugg.
Granta, 233 pp., £14.99, May 2001, 1 86207 415 1
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The Bomber War: Arthur Harris and the Allied Bomber Offensive 1939-45 
by Robin Niellands.
Murray, 448 pp., £25, February 2001, 0 7195 5637 6
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Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War 
by Frances FitzGerald.
Touchstone, 592 pp., $17, March 2001, 0 7432 0023 3
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... Athos peninsula, when he looks up and sees the first Sputnik coursing across the sky. When J.F. Kennedy assumes the US Presidency in 1961, Lindqvist is studying in Peking, living near Communist Party HQ, and only vaguely aware of the numerous US hydrogen bombs then targeted on him. In 1964, his wife is pregnant and his dissertation in comparative literature ...

Act One, Scene One

David Bromwich: Don’t Resist, Oppose, 16 February 2017

... who warmly sympathised with Hitler’s politics. (How many of these people also know that John F. Kennedy was an early supporter of America First?) But the underlying question was not whether Trump was giving a secret signal to anti-Semites – among his biggest supporters are the prime minister of Israel and the mayor of Jerusalem – but rather what he ...

What does a snake know, or intend?

David Thomson: Where Joan Didion was from, 18 March 2004

Where I Was From 
by Joan Didion.
Flamingo, 240 pp., £14.99, March 2004, 0 00 717886 7
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... mysterious. But it surely cries out for more commentary when Didion recalls that as the deaths of Kennedy and Lee Oswald were being shown on television, Eduene remarked: Well, Oswald and Ruby had ‘every right’ to do as they did. That is an alarming mother to be uncertain of. That is more than being right of centre. That is something like giving up the ...

The Importance of Aunts

Colm Tóibín, 17 March 2011

... to see the tender and constant feelings which Fanny Price in Mansfield Park has for her brother William, also away at sea, as being a fundamental part of Austen’s emotional world. The novel begins by breaking a family, by taking Fanny from her own impoverished family and handing her over, almost as a changeling, to the care of her two aunts. The fact that ...

Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
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The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
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... The Color of Truth*, the American scholar Kai Bird presents his study of McGeorge (‘Mac’) and William Bundy. These were the two dynastic technocrats who organised and justified the hideous war in Vietnam. Cold War liberals themselves, with the kept conservative journalist Joseph Alsop they formed a Three of Hearts in the less fastidious quarters of ...

The Hijackers

Hugh Roberts: What will happen to Syria?, 16 July 2015

From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-Revolution and Its Jihadi Legacy 
by Jean-Pierre Filiu.
Hurst, 328 pp., £15.99, July 2015, 978 1 84904 546 9
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Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising 
by Jonathan Littell.
Verso, 246 pp., £12.99, April 2015, 978 1 78168 824 3
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The Rise of Islamic State: Isis and the New Sunni Revolution 
by Patrick Cockburn.
Verso, 192 pp., £9.99, January 2015, 978 1 78478 040 1
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Isis: Inside the Army of Terror 
by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan.
Regan Arts, 288 pp., £12.99, February 2015, 978 1 941393 57 4
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... what was described as an ‘action group’ on Syria, comprising Hillary Clinton, Sergei Lavrov, William Hague and a representative of the Chinese government, was held at Annan’s invitation in Geneva (the meeting is known as ‘Geneva I’). During the meeting Annan issued a communiqué announcing that the action group had agreed on the need for a ...

I am a knife

Jacqueline Rose: A Woman’s Agency, 22 February 2018

Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus 
by Vanessa Grigoriadis.
Houghton Mifflin, 332 pp., £20, September 2017, 978 0 544 70255 4
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Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus 
by Laura Kipnis.
HarperCollins, 245 pp., £20, April 2017, 978 0 06 265786 2
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Living a Feminist Life 
by Sara Ahmed.
Duke, 312 pp., £20.99, February 2017, 978 0 8223 6319 4
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Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body 
by Roxane Gay.
Corsair, 288 pp., £13.99, July 2017, 978 1 4721 5111 7
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Difficult Women 
by Roxane Gay.
Corsair, 272 pp., £13.99, January 2017, 978 1 4721 5277 0
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... Remember the images of Angelina Jolie walking across the stage, hand outstretched to greet William Hague at their ‘summit’ on rape as a war crime in London in 2014? It struck me then that she was being offered as a trade-off or collateral damage in the effort to bring such violence to an end. The initiative is now seen as a costly failure; the ...

Palestinianism

Adam Shatz, 6 May 2021

Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said 
by Timothy Brennan.
Bloomsbury, 437 pp., £20, March 2021, 978 1 5266 1465 0
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... against the concealment and silence that the loss of Palestine had imposed, and that his father, William Said, had accepted, leaving behind not only the family’s past in Jerusalem but also his Arab name, Wadie. After 1967, Said embraced the Palestinian struggle – an act of ‘affiliation’, as he put it, a commitment based on belief, rather than ...

The Deaths Map

Jeremy Harding: At the Mexican Border, 20 October 2011

... and for ‘unconstitutional’ searches. In a devastating profile for the New Yorker in 2009, William Finnegan showed that whatever the sheriff had spared the taxpayer by serving inedible food to inmates, it was nothing beside the millions demanded by the courts as compensation for violent deaths in his custody. Pearce was once chief deputy sheriff under ...

You’re with your king

Jeremy Harding: Morocco’s Secret Prisons, 10 February 2022

Tazmamart: Eighteen Years in Morocco’s Secret Prison 
by Aziz BineBine, translated by Lulu Norman.
Haus, £9.99, March 2021, 978 1 913368 13 5
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... decorated by de Gaulle. Not long after his coronation he was welcomed in Washington by President Kennedy; France, for its part, had high hopes that he would manage its postcolonial interests in the Maghreb – he was known to be astute and an implacable adversary.He had been on the throne a little more than two years when Moumen Diouri, a revolutionary ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... children, were elaborate cakes and the latest iPhone.She was fond of a quote she’d found from William Golding. ‘I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men,’ it said. ‘They are far superior and always have been.’ Most of the women thought this was a bit untrue, but Rania was very much herself. When her brother-in-law Tariq became ...

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