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It all fell apart

Abigail Green: Pogroms in Ukraine, 21 July 2022

In the Midst of Civilised Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-21 and the Onset of the Holocaust 
by Jeffrey Veidlinger.
Picador, 480 pp., £30, November 2021, 978 1 5098 6744 8
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... iconography is indeed eerily familiar: Hebrew lettering framed by lilies, a memorial candle, and a rose whose thorny stem evokes barbed wire. As Veidlinger notes, however, the book was written in 1924, and the slaughter it commemorates was a different khurbn (catastrophe), a different Holocaust. ‘Or, perhaps’ – and this is the nub of his argument ...

Electroplated Fish Knife

Peter Howarth: Robert Graves’s Poems, 7 May 2015

Robert Graves: Selected Poems 
edited by Michael Longley.
Faber, 136 pp., £15.99, August 2013, 978 0 571 28383 5
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... silent but for the constant ‘voice of cold water’, with skies of ‘cutting snow’, even in June. This is a land of ‘fear and shock’ where the buzzard is king: He soars and he hovers, rocking on his wings, He scans his wide parish with a sharp eye, He catches the trembling of small hidden things, He tears them to pieces, dropping them from the ...

The Garment of Terrorism

Azadeh Moaveni, 30 August 2018

The Making of a Salafi Muslim Woman: Paths to Conversion 
by Anabel Inge.
Oxford, 320 pp., £16.99, May 2018, 978 0 19 088920 3
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Veil 
by Rafia Zakaria.
Bloomsbury, 160 pp., £9.99, September 2017, 978 1 5013 2277 8
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... On​ a warm summer evening last June, Rachida Serroukh took her 11-year-old daughter to an introductory evening for new pupils at Holland Park School in West London. Sometimes called the ‘socialist Eton’, the school is one of the few well-performing comprehensives in Kensington and Chelsea, a borough whose stark social and racial inequalities have occupied national attention in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire ...

The Leveller

Ben Ehrenreich: Famine in East Africa, 17 August 2017

... leading the drought response here. We drove east for hours through the open plains. Termite mounds rose like fingers from the earth, some of them as tall as the thorn trees that were among the only signs of life. Under normal circumstances, rain falls here in two wet seasons a year: the short, autumn deyr rains and the longer, spring gu rains that last from ...

Neo-Catastrophism

Eric Klinenberg: Sinful Cities?, 9 October 2003

The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea 
by Thomas Bender.
New Press, 287 pp., $30, September 2002, 1 56584 736 9
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Dead Cities: and Other Tales 
by Mike Davis.
New Press, 448 pp., $16.95, October 2003, 1 56584 844 6
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... Las Vegas is the national leader in unplanned growth and unruly sprawl, with a population that rose 83 per cent between 1990 and 2000 (more than any other American city), from roughly 850,000 to 1,560,000 – and that’s not counting undocumented residents and the permanent population of tourists (about 250,000). Davis is best known for his books about ...

In the Hornets’ Nest

Pamela Crossley: Empress Dowager Cixi, 17 April 2014

Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China 
by Jung Chang.
Cape, 436 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 224 08743 8
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... was chosen for the harem of the Xianfeng emperor of the Qing dynasty in 1852. In 1856 she rose steeply in rank after giving birth to the first (and as it happened only) male heir to the throne. When the emperor died in 1861, Cixi’s five-year-old son became the Tongzhi emperor. A regency of six male officials along with the late emperor’s ...

Diary

Pooja Bhatia: Aristide’s Brain, 8 March 2012

... anatomy of the brain?’ ‘Not very much.’ ‘Yes, it would take a very long time.’ Aristide rose and walked over to his desk, and picked up a plastic, grapefruit-size model of the brain – one of the few things on it. Then he sat down again across from me and pulled the model apart to show me the corpus callosum, which, he said, processes everything ...

Get off your knees

Ferdinand Mount: An Atheist in the House, 30 June 2011

Dare to Stand Alone: The Story of Charles Bradlaugh, Atheist and Republican 
by Bryan Niblett.
Kramedart, 391 pp., £19.99, January 2011, 978 0 9564743 0 8
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... between him and his taking of the oath.’ The leader of the House, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, rose to object. The speaker silenced him, reminding him that Hicks-Beach had himself not yet taken the oath. And that was the end of it. What is so remarkable is that Bradlaugh took the oath, which is precisely what he had sought not to do at the outset. Even ...

Death in Plain Sight

Marina Warner: Emily Davison, Modern Martyr, 4 July 2013

... in the cathedral of Notre-Dame. A profanity, a metamorphosis? Children who were used to strewing rose petals in the path of the Eucharist as it was carried through the village on the feast of Corpus Domini now skipped and sang around the liberty trees set up on the village green. The model lingered in the vast parades of Soviet Russia and continues still in ...

Bed-Hopping and Coup-Plotting

Michael Kulikowski: Attila and the Princess, 12 February 2009

Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire 
by Christopher Kelly.
Bodley Head, 290 pp., £17.99, September 2008, 978 0 224 07676 0
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... battles, we know precious little about how it actually developed. Repulsed from Orléans on 14 June, Attila was brought to battle by a combined army of Goths, Romans and Aetius’ clients among the petty tribes of the Rhineland. Both armies suffered heavy casualties, the aged Theoderic was killed and Attila suffered his first great battlefield loss. Gothic ...

Rumour Is Utterly Unfounded

Jenny Diski: Family Newspapers, 8 October 2009

Family Newspapers?: Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press 1918-78 
by Adrian Bingham.
Oxford, 298 pp., £55, February 2009, 978 0 19 927958 6
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... traditional entertainment for the working classes, just like Chaucer and Shakespeare. In late June 1963, the front page of the Daily Mirror had a banner headline: ‘Prince Philip and the Profumo Scandal – Rumour Is Utterly Unfounded’. Excited readers scanned the story in vain for what the rumour might be. The Prince Philip ‘allegation’ was a ...

It doesn’t tie any shoes

Madeleine Schwartz: Shirley Jackson, 5 January 2017

Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life 
by Ruth Franklin.
Liveright, 585 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 87140 313 1
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Dark Tales 
by Shirley Jackson.
Penguin, 208 pp., £9.99, October 2016, 978 0 241 29542 7
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... home.’ Jackson’s description in ‘The Lottery’ of the ‘clear and sunny’ morning of 27 June, ‘with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day’, seemed so real that some readers wrote to the magazine to ask where the stoning of Tessie Hutchinson had taken place. These queries tired Jackson. ‘The number of people who expected Mrs Hutchinson to win a ...

King Cling

Julian Bell: Kings and Collectors, 5 April 2018

Charles I: King and Collector 
Royal Academy, London, until 15 April 2018Show More
Charles II: Art and Power 
Queen’s Gallery/London, until 13 May 2018Show More
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... her subjects. Their fluctuating satins, the swags of laurel-green curtain behind them and the late June evening clouds all rise and fall to an inner rhythm that is unmistakeably amorous. To view this painting is to get tossed up in that convulsion, but it’s also to recognise that its wellsprings do not belong to you. Love such as this is reserved for higher ...

Marquess Untrussed

Malcolm Gaskill: The Siege of Basing House, 30 March 2023

The Siege of Loyalty House: A Civil War Story 
by Jessie Childs.
Vintage, 318 pp., £12.99, May, 978 1 78470 209 0
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... to Oxford instead. Still in the area, however, was Colonel Richard Norton. In the first week of June the Royalist garrison was catastrophically ambushed by Norton while out on a pre-emptive spree, and the second siege began. By now the house had become ‘a great annoyance to all the country’, but it was not long before Norton himself was summoned away to ...

Ehud Barak

Avi Shlaim: Ehud Barak, 25 January 2001

... Minister’s preoccupation with military power underlay his long interview with Ha’aretz (18 June 1999), in which he made a case for trying to reach an agreement with Syria first, on the grounds that it was a serious military power whereas the Palestinians were not. ‘The Palestinians are the source of legitimacy for the continuation of the ...

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