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The Passion of the Bureaucrats

Tim Parks: Skulduggery in the Vatican, 18 February 2016

Avarizia: Le Carte che Svelano. Ricchezza, Scandali e Segreti della Chiesa di Francesco 
by Emiliano Fittipaldi.
Feltrinelli, 224 pp., €14, December 2015, 978 88 07 17298 4
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Merchants in the Temple: Inside Pope Francis’s Secret Battle against Corruption in the Vatican 
by Gianluigi Nuzzi, translated by Michael Moore.
Holt, 224 pp., £24.99, December 2015, 978 1 62779 865 5
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... Most​ blessed Father,’ five international auditors wrote to Pope Francis on 27 June 2013, three months into his papacy, ‘there is an almost total lack of clarity in the accounts of both the Holy See and the Governorate.’ The letter goes on: This lack of clarity makes it impossible to establish a proper estimate of the real financial position of the Vatican, whether as a whole or with regard to the single elements of which it is made up ...

Lucky’s Dip

James Fox, 12 November 1987

Trail of Havoc: In the Steps of Lord Lucan 
by Patrick Marnham.
Viking, 204 pp., £10.95, October 1987, 0 670 81391 5
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Lucan: Not Guilty 
by Sally Moore.
Sidgwick, 271 pp., £12.95, October 1987, 9780283995361
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... what an unsympathetic appearance they gave to the rest of the world,’ writes Marnham. Sally Moore began her book in 1975, had a manuscript ready by 1980 and has been struggling for publication ever since. Hers is a crusade to exonerate Lucan, with the help of his family, and with the piling-on of a mass of detail, as if the sheer weight of her ...

Tales of Hofmann

Blake Morrison, 20 November 1986

Acrimony 
by Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 79 pp., £8.95, October 1986, 0 571 14527 2
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Idols 
by Stephen Romer.
Oxford, 48 pp., £3.95, September 1986, 0 19 281984 4
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Opia 
by Alan Moore.
Anvil, 83 pp., £4.50, August 1986, 9780856461613
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New Chatto Poets 
edited by Andrew Motion.
Chatto, 79 pp., £4.95, September 1986, 0 7011 3080 6
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A.D. Hope: Selected Poems 
edited by Ruth Morse.
Carcanet, 139 pp., £3.95, April 1986, 0 85635 640 9
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The Electrification of the Soviet Union 
by Craig Raine.
Faber, 69 pp., £8.95, August 1986, 0 571 14539 6
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... The acrimony in Michael Hofmann’s book is that of a son towards his father. Like a family photograph album, the sequence ‘My Father’s House’ records the son’s growth from childhood to manhood, and the father’s from early to late middle age: each poem denotes some new phase, and usually low point, in the relationship ...

Vote for the Beast!

Ian Gilmour: The Tory Leadership, 20 October 2005

... leader was far too damaging to be employed only two years before an election, and by a clever coup Michael Howard was installed without opposition. Not surprisingly, he proved infinitely better than his two predecessors, but he did not have enough time, and never looked anything like a winner. As a result of Tory inadequacy, Labour won easily in 2005 and ...

Capital W, Capital W

Michael Wood: Women writers, 19 August 1999

Women Writers at Work 
edited by George Plimpton.
Harvill, 381 pp., £9.99, February 1999, 1 86046 586 2
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Just as I Thought 
by Grace Paley.
Virago, 332 pp., £8.99, August 1999, 1 86049 696 2
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... to look a little shaky. All is not lost, though. What these writers have in common – Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Bishop, Nadine Gordimer and Anne Sexton, who appear in the volume alongside the writers already mentioned – is that they are not men, which is not as tautological a ...

I really mean like

Michael Wood: Auden’s Likes and Dislikes, 2 June 2011

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose Vol. IV, 1956-62 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 982 pp., £44.95, January 2011, 978 0 691 14755 0
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... to overdo, but it also chimes with a recurring trope in modern literature in English. Marianne Moore says of poetry that she too dislikes it; Eliot tells us that it doesn’t matter; Auden says it makes nothing happen. In fact, none of these propositions represents anything like the whole story for any of these poets, but there’s an element of ...

A Predilection for the Zinger

Rebecca Mead: Lorrie Moore, 10 December 1998

Birds of America 
by Lorrie Moore.
Faber, 291 pp., £9.99, November 1998, 0 571 19529 6
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... television shows. But that is what happened in January 1997, when the New Yorker published Lorrie Moore’s short story, ‘People like that Are the Only People Here’. What was so powerful about this story? The subject-matter, in the first place, was irresistibly painful. It concerns a mother, never named, who finds a blood clot while changing her ...

Fear in Those Blue Eyes

David Runciman: Thatcher in Her Bubble, 3 December 2015

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. II: Everything She Wants 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 821 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 7139 9288 5
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... principles and her private interests were at odds with each other. She was a conservative. Charles Moore’s​ recounting of this episode reveals the strengths and weaknesses of his biography as it arrives at the apogee of Thatcher’s power. He is excellent on the high politics and the potency of personal connections. Powell, who provides the source for some ...

Heart of Darkness

Christopher Hitchens, 28 June 1990

Not Many Dead: Journal of a Year in Fleet Street 
by Nicholas Garland.
Hutchinson, 299 pp., £16.95, April 1990, 0 09 174449 0
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A Slight Case of Libel: Meacher v. Trelford and Others 
by Alan Watkins.
Duckworth, 241 pp., £14.95, June 1990, 0 7156 2334 6
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... general and President Reagan in particular. Entry for 18 April 1986, Not Many Dead The success of Michael Moore’s film about Roger Smith and General Motors has aroused an envious spirit of emulation in my breast. ‘Conrad and Me’, a script which I hone and burnish in slack moments, has the following points of mild interest. In the summer of 1985, I ...

On the Sofa

Lidija Haas: ‘Girls’, 8 November 2012

... in the UK on Sky Atlantic, was nominated for five Emmys and made much of by everyone from Lorrie Moore to Michael Bloomberg. Before this, 26-year-old Dunham had made short films, web comedy series and two movies – the best and best-known thing she’s done so far is the movie Tiny Furniture – in which she also plays ...

Mostly Middle

Michael Hofmann: Elizabeth Bishop, 8 September 2011

Poems 
by Elizabeth Bishop.
Chatto, 352 pp., £14.99, February 2011, 978 0 7011 8628 9
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... but where else have the culture vultures not been, with their guides and follow-me signs?Marianne Moore and her mother finished her in Brooklyn (decorum studies?) after she left Vassar. James Laughlin, founder of New Directions, publisher and friend of Ezra Pound, was so desperate to publish her that even after he accepted he wasn’t going to be allowed ...

A Tove on the Table

A.W. Moore: Versions of Wittgenstein, 1 August 2024

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Michael Beaney.
Oxford, 100 pp., £8.99, May 2023, 978 0 19 886137 9
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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Alexander Booth.
Penguin, 94 pp., £14.99, December 2023, 978 0 241 68195 4
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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Damion Searls.
Norton, 181 pp., £19.99, April, 978 1 324 09243 8
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... is often clunky. Its chief drawback, as Wittgenstein’s remark to Ogden intimates, and as Michael Morris has marvellously put it, is that it is ‘dog-literal’. Moreover, it is insensitive to some philosophically critical features of the German. A well-known example is its failure to heed the distinction that Wittgenstein draws between what is ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Hunger Games’, 17 December 2015

... to look glamorous at times and a pudgy mess at others without changing her character. Julianne Moore is very good too, as Alma Coin, president of District 13. She is smooth and eloquent, and no one suspects her of being anything other than the idealistic leader of the opposition. Perhaps the Mao suit might have given us a clue, and we should have known ...

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat

David Runciman: Thatcher’s Rise, 6 June 2013

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. Vol. I: Not for Turning 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 859 pp., £30, April 2013, 978 0 7139 9282 3
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... keep going longest. But it does. That is one of the clear lessons from the first volume of Charles Moore’s exhaustive and exhausting authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, which takes the story up to the Falklands War in 1982. The person on display here is not more intelligent than her rivals, or more principled. She chops and changes as much as they ...

The Ramsey Effect

Kieran Setiya, 18 February 2021

Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers 
by Cheryl Misak.
Oxford, 500 pp., £25, February 2020, 978 0 19 875535 7
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... to Cambridge to work with Bertrand Russell. Together with the less technically minded G.E. Moore, they would be seen as the architects of ‘analytic philosophy’.That phrase creates some difficulties, partly as a result of the fractious conflict that developed between analytic and Continental philosophy, the latter epitomised by the likes of Martin ...

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