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The Big Con

Pankaj Mishra, 4 May 2023

... regulatory agencies in India conspicuously failed to investigate Adani’s use of offshore shell companies; and his supporters took to the airwaves to allege that white people just couldn’t bear to see India make progress.In the weeks since then, Adani’s spectacular fall has continued: among other reverses, he had to cancel the $2.5 billion share ...

The Suitcase: Part Three

Frances Stonor Saunders, 10 September 2020

... all shared until the van turned up), I see his loving gaze falling on the objects in it: a conch shell on a side table, a painting by John Piper (a wedding gift). Home is never a neutral place, it is a very specific context, an animated expression of the presence it contains. Why can’t it be loved?‘You can’t love an inanimate object.’ I don’t know ...

One Summer in America

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2019

... the top.*A well-known magazine columnist, E. Jean Carroll, graphically describes being raped by Donald Trump in the mid-1990s. The president denies knowing her, but after photos of the two of them in groups at social gatherings are produced, he says: ‘It never happened. She’s not my type. I’ll say it with great respect: number one, she’s not my ...

Big toes are gross

Hal Foster: Surrealism's Influence, 6 June 2024

Why Surrealism Matters 
by Mark Polizzotti.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 25709 0
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... a current of trauma courses through the movement. A one-time medical student, Breton tended to shell-shocked soldiers during the First World War, and a recurring trope in his writing is a ‘man cut in two by the window’, the very figure of a divided subject. Max Ernst, the most traumatophilic of Surrealists, read Freud in the original German and related ...

Goldfish are my homies

John Lahr, 22 October 2020

Casting Shadows: Fish and Fishing in Britain 
by Tom Fort.
William Collins, 368 pp., £20, April, 978 0 00 828344 5
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... defies rational expression; Fort’s description of the salmon’s strike – ‘like an artillery shell leaving the barrel of a gun’ – proves the point. While he gives the salmon its props, Fort feels compelled to conclude with typical fustian formality: ‘I speak as one who has flirted with salmon-fishing for a long time without ever falling in ...

Gravity’s Smoothest Dream

Matthew Bevis: A.R. Ammons, 7 March 2019

The Complete Poems 
by A.R. Ammons.
Norton, two vols, 2133 pp., £74, December 2017, 978 0 393 25489 1
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... But I also found myself wondering why Ammons isn’t read more outside the US and was reminded of Donald Davie’s 1975 review of Sphere, which he began by admitting that the idea of yet another ‘major visionary poet’ was an unattractive proposition. Still, he confessed, ‘I can’t refuse the evidence of my senses and my feelings – there wasn’t one ...

Forty-Eighters

Peter Pulzer, 4 September 1986

Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Oxford, 304 pp., £17.50, July 1986, 0 19 212239 8
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... in England, Jenny Marx wrote: ‘Here ... you can withdraw into yourself and your snail’s shell – no one bothers about you, whereas in Germany people know the next morning what you had for dinner last night and how much your husband earns.’ Followers of Johanna Kinkel’s advice ‘those who have been forced into exile here ought really to make a ...

How Movies End

David Thomson: John Boorman’s Quiet Ending, 20 February 2020

Conclusions 
by John Boorman.
Faber, 237 pp., £20, February, 978 0 571 35379 8
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... We’re not​ dealing with an ordinary man, or a conformist. There he is in the abandoned shell of Fort Point in San Francisco, this fierce and frightened man, looking like Lee Marvin. The fat parcel of money he has been demanding throughout the film is at his feet. All he has to do is pick it up. Instead, he fades into the darkness ...

There is only one Harrods

Paul Foot, 23 September 1993

Tiny Rowland: A Rebel Tycoon 
by Tom Bower.
Heinemann, 659 pp., £16.99, May 1993, 0 434 07339 3
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... by the Department of Trade, Tiny issued a devastating letter to the newspapers demonstrating how Shell and BP were transporting oil into Rhodesia, not just breaking sanctions but keeping white Rhodesia afloat. The allegations were immediately and vigorously denied, but the cat was out of the bag. Tiny’s letter led inexorably to the 1978 Bingham Inquiry ...

Devolution Doom

Christopher Harvie: Scotland’s crisis, and some solutions, 5 September 2002

... Whoever wins, is Holyrood to be little more than a Glasgow-Council-writ-large, a magnificent shell housing a small, dim creature? Has transparency done its business, only to expose the morbidity of the Scottish body politic? Scottish devolution reasserted itself in the 1980s as a by-product of Europeanisation. Technology, politics and culture would, it ...

Father, Son and Sewing-Machine

Patrick Parrinder, 21 February 1985

Garden, Ashes 
by Danilo Kis, translated by William Hannaher.
Faber, 170 pp., £8.95, January 1985, 9780571134533
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Star Turn 
by Nigel Williams.
Faber, 314 pp., £9.95, January 1985, 0 571 13296 0
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On Glory’s Course 
by James Purdy.
Peter Owen, 378 pp., £9.95, January 1985, 0 7206 0633 0
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... bluebells? There are further guest appearances by Proust, Freud, Virginia Woolf, Ramsay Mac Donald, Winston Churchill and other ‘stars’, and it is not every pair of Cockney youngsters who travel to France, as Amos and Zak do, in a laundry-basket full of General Haig’s underpants. All this is good fun, but the dialogue is sometimes inexcusably ...

Darling Clem

Paul Addison, 17 April 1986

Clement Attlee 
by Trevor Burridge.
Cape, 401 pp., £20, January 1986, 0 224 02318 7
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The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton 1940-1945 
edited by Ben Pimlott.
Cape in association with the London School of Economics, 913 pp., £40, February 1986, 9780224020657
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Loyalists and Loners 
by Michael Foot.
Collins, 315 pp., £15, March 1986, 0 00 217583 5
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... effective leader of his party and an outstanding prime minister. Having reacted against Ramsay Mac-Donald, the argument runs, Labour stood in need of a personality who would put party above self, and Attlee fitted the bill. Yet in his quiet fashion he was skilful in managing the Party and holding it together. Hence Labour’s victory in the General Election of ...

We blitzed it

Laleh Khalili: Inhabiting the Oil World, 4 August 2022

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century 
by Helen Thompson.
Oxford, 384 pp., £20, February 2022, 978 0 19 886498 1
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... two of the most dramatic events in recent Anglo-American politics: Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Brexit was a result of ‘the long-standing monetary divergence between Britain and the Eurozone’, which ‘became particularly consequential from 2011 because of the very different responses’ of the Bank of England and the European Central Bank ...

The Leveller

Ben Ehrenreich: Famine in East Africa, 17 August 2017

... a tortoise. It was nearly a metre long, with short, spikily scaled legs tucked beneath its shell. A black liquid stained the dry red earth around it. Beside it was the carcass of a donkey, white bone showing beneath what little flesh remained. A few metres away a warthog lay rotting, and beyond that a camel. For miles outside the village – and ...

Damsons and Custard

Paul Laity: Documentary cinema’s unsung poet, 3 March 2005

Humphrey Jennings 
by Kevin Jackson.
Picador, 448 pp., £30, October 2004, 0 330 35438 8
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... out: ‘Look at me! … Don’t you think I’m beautiful?’ In fact, she thought he looked like Donald Duck, and insisted he put his clothes on and take her to meet André Breton. ‘There has only been one really good edition of anything that Shakespeare wrote,’ he told the writer Ruthven Todd, ‘and that is an edition of Venus and Adonis that I did ...

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