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What was it that drove him?

David Runciman: Gordon Brown, 4 January 2018

My Life, Our Times 
by Gordon Brown.
Bodley Head, 512 pp., £25, November 2017, 978 1 84792 497 1
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... hear the arguments debated through TV questioning.’ He also felt it would help level the playing field, since the Tories had more money to spend on advertising and this was free publicity. What he won’t say is that he was desperate, a long way behind in the polls, and willing to roll the dice. Yet that’s where he was. At times his desire to avoid ...

Failed Vocation

James Butler: The Corbyn Project, 3 December 2020

Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn 
by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire.
Bodley Head, 376 pp., £18.99, September, 978 1 84792 645 6
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This Land: The Story of a Movement 
by Owen Jones.
Allen Lane, 336 pp., £20, September, 978 0 241 47094 7
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... having responsibility for matters that don’t interest him, even though, as his policy architect Andrew Fisher observes, ‘if you’re the leader you have to lead on everything, not just the things you care about.’Corbyn’s reluctance to compromise on political matters can be overstated: political realism led him to jettison his long-held ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: A Shameful Year, 8 January 2004

... on the north side, some for a family called Secker who seem to live in the manor house across the field, a romantic rambling house that looks unrestored and has oddly in its grounds an ornate seaside-looking Edwardian clock tower.The Windrush tumbles through the weir on this mild winter morning, but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen ...

Higher Ordinariness

Jonathan Meades: Poor Surrey, 23 May 2024

Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 
by Gavin Stamp.
Profile, 568 pp., £40, March, 978 1 80081 739 5
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The Buildings of England: Surrey 
by Charles O’Brien, Ian Nairn and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 854 pp., £60, November 2022, 978 0 300 23478 7
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... and writers of opposing tastes in delighted admiration, provided they didn’t look too closely.As Andrew Saint​ has observed, among the first colonisers of the no longer distant Surrey hills were the painters Myles Birket Foster and James Hook. They were in the van of an easeled army. Charles O’Brien, the latest editor of the Surrey volume of The ...

Why are you still here?

James Meek: Who owns Grimsby?, 23 April 2015

... are you still here?’It’s not that they don’t still fish out of Grimsby. One morning I met Andrew Allard, who runs a ten-vessel outfit called Jubilee Fishing from an office in the docks. When he showed me on a map on the wall where his boats were at that moment I got a sense of the big world of the Grimsby fishermen, how unprovincial it had been to ...

In the Workshop

Tom Paulin: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 22 January 1998

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 672 pp., £23.50, December 1997, 0 674 63712 7
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Shakespeare's Sonnets 
edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones.
Arden, 503 pp., £7.99, September 1997, 1 903436 57 5
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... in any case part of his attraction. I should add that I do not agree with Vendler’s rejection of Andrew Motion’s historicist view of Keats’s poems, in her review of his biography of Keats (LRB, 16 October 1997), and believe that ‘To Autumn’ is on one level a great political poem which elegises those who were massacred at Peterloo. Among the many ...

Is Wagner bad for us?

Nicholas Spice, 11 April 2013

... first minute of Carmen, Falstaff, Der Rosenkavalier and Wozzeck (operas written within the force field of Wagner’s immense influence and yet, in key respects, resisting it) throws into startling relief the distinctive character of Wagner’s compositional procedures. In a minute of Bizet, Verdi, Strauss or Berg, the rapid release of musical information and ...

Red Pill, Blue Pill

James Meek, 22 October 2020

... by pushing hard on the child abuse angle; when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, then died, and Prince Andrew failed to account for his friendship with him, it was QAnon gold. In effect crowdsourced, the QAnon narrative broke free of Q’s plodding cryptograms, which still look to Trump to mount a military coup against the government he leads, and moved towards ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2000, 25 January 2001

... had designed in Hampshire. Here she was surrounded by dogs, kept goats, had a donkey in the field and painted in a style that was vaguely Russian but which only came into its own when she took up needlework. Her needlework pictures are glowing with colour and intricate in texture, medieval in their richness. It was only in the last ten years or so that ...

Kipling’s Lightning-Flash

Barbara Everett, 10 January 1991

... for grown-ups. The dog and the train alike are media which circumvent that adult and social field of the novel which in some sense the writer couldn’t do, or didn’t want to. Kipling wanted something else. Even the late dog-stories can, for an impartial sympathy, hit a nerve curiously hard and centrally. These late stories are minimal by the side of ...

After Kemal

Perry Anderson, 25 September 2008

... or balconies; young people were replacing photographs of themselves with the crescent on a red field in Facebook; night after night, television news was reduced to solemn images of Erdogan and Gul, at the head of a phalanx of army commanders, presiding at the funeral of soldiers killed in the south-east, mothers sobbing over their coffins, intercut with ...

The Ribs of Rosinante

Richard Gott, 21 August 1997

Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life 
by Jon Lee Anderson.
Bantam, 814 pp., £25, April 1997, 0 593 03403 1
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Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara 
by Jorge Castañeda, translated by Marina Castañeda.
Bloomsbury, 480 pp., £20, October 1997, 0 7475 3334 2
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... six hundred men to the new techniques of counter-revolutionary warfare, and sent them out into the field the previous week.The following evening, in a café in the central square of Santa Cruz, one of these American officers told us that they had heard on their short-wave radio that Guevara had been captured. ‘He has been wounded,’ we were told, ‘and may ...

Festival of Punishment

Thomas Laqueur: On Death Row, 5 October 2000

Proximity to Death 
by William McFeely.
Norton, 206 pp., £17.95, January 2000, 0 393 04819 5
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Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment 
edited by Bonnie Bobit.
Bobit, 311 pp., $24.95, September 1999, 0 9624857 6 4
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... had graced the state flag since 1879 with the ‘stars and bars’: the blue and white cross of St Andrew on an in-your-face field of bright red. Its Civil War service done, this banner had rallied the Ku Klux Klan as it helped re-establish white power in the South during a half-century reign of terror. When, in 1993, the ...

Fiction and E.M. Forster

Frank Kermode: At the Cost of Life, 10 May 2007

... difficulty,’ James says, ‘would be to make and to keep her so limited consciousness the very field of my picture . . . the one presented register of the whole complexity would be the play of the child’s confused and obscure notation of it.’ Maisie cannot be expected to possess a full understanding of the doings of her divorced parents (‘the ...

In the Streets of Londonistan

John Upton: Terror, Muslims and the Met, 22 January 2004

... claiming that Sulayman was sending Muslims to train in Afghanistan. The Labour MP for Hendon, Andrew Dismore, raised the matter in Parliament. Ten days after the newspaper article was published, Sulayman became the first Muslim to be arrested and detained under the Terrorism Act 2000. He was charged with inviting another to receive weapons training and ...

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