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Defensive, Not Aggressive

Andrew Cockburn: Khrushchev’s Cuban Gambit, 9 September 2021

The Silent Guns of Two Octobers: Kennedy and Khrushchev Play the Double Game 
by Theodore Voorhees.
Michigan, 384 pp., £27.95, September, 978 0 472 03871 8
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Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis 
by Serhii Plokhy.
Allen Lane, 464 pp., £25, April, 978 0 241 45473 2
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... his own role as a voice of reason, was buttressed by hagiographers of the Kennedy court, notably Arthur Schlesinger, the president’s special aide, and Ted Sorensen, his main speechwriter. Graham Allison’s 1972 study of the affair, Essence of Decision, largely sourced from those accounts, attained the status of holy writ in international relations ...

Benefits of Diaspora

Eric Hobsbawm: The Jewish Emancipation, 20 October 2005

... exposition of Bible and Talmud and its application to the contingencies of Jewish life, left little scope for anything else. Rabbinical authority banned philosophy, science and other branches of knowledge of non-Jewish origin – even, in darkest Volhynia, foreign languages. The gap between intellectual worlds is best indicated by the fact that the rare ...

Bordragings

John Kerrigan: Scotland’s Erasure, 10 October 2024

England’s Insular Imagining: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland 
by Lorna Hutson.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 1 009 25357 4
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... in Ireland after the execution of Charles I.A clear path runs from such writings to Milton’s little-read History of Moscovia and Guy Miege’s Relation of a 1663 embassy to Russia (a mission that included Marvell) because Russia was taken to be paradigmatic of the grandeur and fragility of empire. The tsar’s possessions had been growing before Henry ...

Bad John

Alan Bennett: John Osborne, 3 December 1981

A Better Class of Person 
by John Osborne.
Faber, 285 pp., £7.95, November 1981, 0 571 11785 6
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... wearisome evening in the theatre. I have never been bored by Osborne – well, by Bill Maitland a little, but that was meant. I often disagree with his plays but invariably find his tone of voice, however hectoring, much more sympathetic than the rage or the patronising ‘Oh dear, he’s at it again’ he still manages to provoke in an audience. (At ...

Father’ Things

Gabriele Annan, 7 August 1980

The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father 
by Geoffrey Wolff.
Hodder, 275 pp., £8.25, June 1980, 0 340 25469 6
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... means by which he kept himself and his wife and two sons in various states of grandeur or misery.Arthur Samuels Wolff was born in 1907, the only child of a well-to-do, respected middle-class Jewish doctor in Hartford, Connecticut. He was expelled from a series of first and second-rank private schools, refused by Yale and Princeton, and ended up at the ...

Young Brutes

R.W. Johnson: The Amerys, 23 February 2006

Speaking for England: Leo, Julian and John Amery: The Tragedy of a Political Family 
by David Faber.
Free Press, 612 pp., £20, October 2005, 0 7432 5688 3
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... he is chiefly remembered for helping to bring down Neville Chamberlain. When, in September 1939, Arthur Greenwood, the acting Labour leader, rose to reply to Chamberlain’s ludicrously inadequate response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, he began by saying he would speak for the Labour Party, but Amery, unable to control himself, burst out with ‘Speak ...

Outfits to die for

Gabriele Annan, 10 February 1994

A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-60 
by Jeanine Basinger.
Chatto, 528 pp., £14.99, January 1994, 0 7011 6093 4
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... starts off with a run-through of some of Temple’s more thought-provoking sequences: In Our Little Girl (1935) she says, ‘Maybe if I growed like a weed I could marry Daddy.’ In Captain January (1936) there is a fantasy scene in which Temple sings a love song to a man while he is dressed in baby clothes. She is dressed as a nurse and feeding him with ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: The films of Carol Reed, 19 October 2006

Odd Man Out 
directed by Carol Reed.
September 2006
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... furnish one of the more appropriate epitaphs: a sad, magnificent summing-up of a night city.’ A little earlier and in another paper he had called the film’s second part ‘half-baked’, and what’s interesting is that there is no real contradiction between the points of view. The movie in question is Odd Man Out (1947), reshown at this year’s ...

Shite

Karl Miller, 2 March 1989

A Disaffection 
by James Kelman.
Secker, 344 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 436 23284 7
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The Book of Sandy Stewart 
edited by Roger Leitch.
Scottish Academic Press, 168 pp., £15, December 1988, 0 7073 0560 8
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... children – and the rights of parents.    Patrick said: Do you know what I tell parents Arthur? I tell them to go and fuck themselves. Patrick held both hands up in a gesture of peace, he smiled for a moment; I’m no trying to get at you personally but I just fucking feel that you cant expect the teacher to be the everything, the heavyweight boxing ...

Lovelinesses

Naomi Fry: Nicole Krauss, 28 April 2011

Great House 
by Nicole Krauss.
Viking, 289 pp., £16.99, February 2011, 978 0 670 91932 1
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... and ‘a Trojan horse’, among other menacing epithets. ‘To call it a desk is to say too little,’ one of them explains. ‘The word conjures some homely, unassuming article of work or domesticity, a selfless and practical object that is always poised to offer up its back for its owner to make use of … This desk was something else ...

A State Jew

David A. Bell: Léon Blum, 5 November 2015

Léon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist 
by Pierre Birnbaum, translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Yale, 218 pp., £14.99, July 2015, 978 0 300 18980 3
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... but it’s lively, witty and draws effectively on Blum’s massive and eloquent correspondence. Arthur Goldhammer has, as usual, produced a lucid, engaging English text. Birnbaum seems to have written the book in some haste: he repeats facts and quotations, and makes a few historical slips – France was not a ‘largely peasant nation’ in 1936; Hitler ...

It isn’t the lines

Bee Wilson: Paul Newman’s Looks, 16 February 2023

Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man 
by Paul Newman, edited by David Rosenthal.
Century, 320 pp., £25, October 2022, 978 1 5291 9706 8
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The Last Movie Stars 
directed by Ethan Hawke.
HBO/CNN
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... much more convincing and exciting in stills. The speaking Newman, though charismatic, gives very little of himself. There is often a vacancy to his acting, which can give the illusion of mystery. The producer John Foreman recalled that Newman’s second wife, Joanne Woodward, once said to him: ‘If you think he’s thinking something, he’s not always ...

What Charlotte Did

Susan Eilenberg, 6 April 1995

The Brontës 
by Juliet Barker.
Weidenfeld, 1003 pp., £25, November 1994, 0 297 81290 4
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... who exploited those reports; close friends such as Ellen Nussey who defied Charlotte’s husband Arthur Nicholls and refused to burn the letters Charlotte sent her; even Charlotte herself, who, by reading her sister Emily’s poems, violated her privacy and thus allied herself with the intruders and the voyeurs. As a biographer and as a scholar of the ...

Perfectly Human

Jenny Diski: Lillie Langtry and Mrs Vladimir Nabokov, 1 July 1999

Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals 
by Laura Beatty.
Chatto, 336 pp., £20, March 1999, 1 85619 513 9
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Véra (Mrs Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage 
by Stacy Schiff.
Random House, 456 pp., $27.95, April 1999, 0 679 44790 3
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... career. Beatty’s contribution to Langtry’s biography is the discovery of letters to her lover Arthur Jones. Most of what we know of the woman is gossip-column scandal and her own heavily massaged memoirs. She destroyed her own papers, and told her story as she wished it to be heard. Arthur Jones may or may not have been ...

Brideshead Revered

David Cannadine, 17 March 1983

The Country House 
by James Lees-Milne.
Oxford, 110 pp., £4.50, November 1982, 0 19 214139 2
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English Country Houses and Landed Estates 
by Heather Clemenson.
Croom Helm, 244 pp., £15.95, July 1982, 0 85664 987 2
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The Last Country Houses 
by Clive Aslet.
Yale, 344 pp., £15, October 1982, 0 300 02904 7
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... gravel, two great charms’. To judge from such opinions, contemporaries like Horace Walpole and Arthur Young would have regarded the present cult of the country house with amazement and incredulity. Moreover, the life which was actually lived within their walls emerges as far from beguiling. Most country houses were cold, gloomy, eerie, filthy, smelly and ...

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