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Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... residence with stags’ heads in the hall. In the dining room there were laptops everywhere. Sarah Harrison, Assange’s personal assistant and girlfriend, was wearing a woolly jumper and kept scraping her ringlets off her face. Another girl, maybe Spanish or South American or Eastern European, came into the drawing room where the fire was blazing. I ...

Plan it mañana

Geoffrey Hawthorn: Albert O. Hirschman, 11 September 2014

Wordly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman 
by Jeremy Adelman.
Princeton, 740 pp., £27.95, April 2013, 978 0 691 15567 8
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The Essential Hirschman 
edited by Jeremy Adelman.
Princeton, 367 pp., £19.95, October 2013, 978 0 691 15990 4
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... on the first evening he spent with his future wife at the International House in Berkeley in 1941. Sarah Hirschman, as she soon became, was Russian by origin, and they conversed for years in French. Their many letters are among Adelman’s best sources. Hirschman thought he should join the American army. Not to fight perhaps; to do something useful in ...

Soothe and Scold

Helen McCarthy: Mothers, 12 September 2019

Mother: An Unconventional History 
by Sarah Knott.
Viking, 336 pp., £14.99, March 2019, 978 0 241 19860 5
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... feed, wash, soothe and scold an infant, and something like a history of mothering comes into view. Sarah Knott privileges anecdote in her account of mothering in Britain and North America over the past four centuries, partly because she wants to think about subjectivity and experience, but also because anecdote implies interruption, distraction and ...

The End

Angela Carter, 18 September 1986

A Land Apart: A South African Reader 
edited by André Brink and J.M. Coetzee.
Faber, 252 pp., £9.95, August 1986, 0 571 13933 7
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Where Sixpence lives 
by Norma Kitson.
Chatto, 352 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 0 7011 3085 7
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... then, was a little girl, she lived in a big house in Durban. The small son of her mother’s maid Sarah was allowed to come and stay for a few weeks every year; the Crankos used to call him ‘Sixpence’. The rest of the year, Sixpence lived miles away in Zululand with his brothers and sisters. Whenever Sarah lost her ...

Imagining the Suburbs

Stan Smith, 9 January 1992

Common Knowledge 
by John Burnside.
Secker, 62 pp., £6, April 1991, 0 436 20037 6
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The Son of the Duke of Nowhere 
by Philip Gross.
Faber, 57 pp., £4.99, April 1991, 0 571 16140 5
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Bridge Passages 
by George Szirtes.
Oxford, 63 pp., £5.99, March 1991, 0 19 282821 5
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Time Zones 
by Fleur Adcock.
Oxford, 54 pp., £5.99, March 1991, 0 19 282831 2
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Selected Poems 
by Fleur Adcock.
Oxford, 125 pp., £6.99, March 1991, 0 19 558100 8
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Spilt Milk 
by Sarah Maguire.
Secker, 50 pp., £6, April 1991, 0 436 27095 1
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The Sirocco Room 
by Jamie McKendrick.
Oxford, 56 pp., £5.99, March 1991, 0 19 282820 7
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Householder 
by Gerard Woodward.
Chatto, 80 pp., £5.99, April 1991, 0 7011 3758 4
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... pointlessly climbed a stick in the forest, pointlessly descend it. The Duke of Nowhere is also the grand old Duke of York. This motif is repeated on a human scale in the inconsequential narrative of ‘The End of the Line’ (the ‘line’ being both railway and story), where a nameless woman speculates about the only other passenger on the train to the ...

Keep me

Alison Jolly: Natural selection and females, 10 August 2000

Mother Nature: Natural Selection and the Female of the Species 
by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.
Chatto, 697 pp., £20, November 1999, 0 7011 6625 8
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... Sarah Hrdy is tough-minded about a tender subject. Motherhood, she says, is a minefield. Mothers love babies passionately – but not unconditionally. We have evolved as adept sociobiologists, able to calculate love. On the other side of the relationship, baby love is unconditional, indeed desperate. Babies want it all, every scrap of attention they can command, at least up to the point where the mother would be so exhausted that her failure would rebound on the baby itself ...

Just like Mother

Theo Tait: Richard Yates, 6 February 2003

Collected Stories 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 474 pp., £17.99, January 2002, 0 413 77125 3
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Revolutionary Road 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 346 pp., £6.99, February 2001, 0 413 75710 2
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The Easter Parade 
by Richard Yates.
Methuen, 226 pp., £10, January 2003, 0 413 77202 0
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... too much; she flirts, most inappropriately, with married acquaintances; she deludes herself on a grand scale, and rounds shrieking on anyone who attempts to disillusion her. If necessary, she will fake a fit to make a point. In one memorable incarnation, she gets drunk at a party and deposits a ‘slick mouthful of puke’ on her son’s pillow. On two ...

Rare, Obsolete, New, Peculiar

Daisy Hay: Dictionary People, 19 October 2023

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary 
by Sarah Ogilvie.
Chatto, 384 pp., £22, September, 978 1 78474 493 9
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... definitions and differences in sense. The stories of these volunteers form the backbone of Sarah Ogilvie’s book.Murray edited the OED from his grandly named ‘Scriptorium’, which was in fact a large corrugated iron shed, built first in the grounds of Mill Hill School, where he taught, and then in his garden at 78 Banbury Road. He began working on ...

Beyond the Cringe

John Barrell: British Art, 2 June 2016

Art in Britain 1660-1815 
by David Solkin.
Yale, 367 pp., £55, October 2015, 978 0 300 21556 4
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... as the mothers of children, but still with something of the look of a court ‘beauty’, as Sarah Churchill appears in John Closterman’s group portrait of the Marlborough family at Blenheim: an aristocratic lady with an authority that comes in part from her willingness to adopt something of the more responsible values of the middling class. Once the ...

Fear among the Teacups

Dinah Birch: Ellen Wood, 8 February 2001

East Lynne 
by Ellen Wood, edited by Andrew Maunder.
Broadview, 779 pp., £7.95, October 2000, 1 55111 234 5
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... them – through steady toil. His second wife, the trying and triumphant Barbara Hare, is less grand than Isabel, but she has more common sense. Her devoted ordinariness is what fits her for marriage with the up-and-coming Carlyle. Isabel is doomed from the moment she enters the novel, gleaming with pearls and lace – ‘as one from a fairer world than ...

Badger Claws

Julian Barnes: Poil de Carotte, 30 June 2011

Nature Stories 
by Jules Renard, translated by Douglas Parmée.
NYRB, 165 pp., £8.99, March 2011, 978 1 59017 364 0
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... the Parisian Renard had a wide sweep of artistic and political friendships, from Rodin and Sarah Bernhardt to Gide and Valéry to Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum. His politics were socialist and Dreyfusard; he also moved in the circle around the Revue blanche. The first three editions of Histoires naturelles were illustrated by Félix ...

Diary

Rebecca Solnit: After the Oil Spill, 5 August 2010

... VOCs in most oils are benzene toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene.When I went out on the sea from Grand Isle, which is hardly more than a great sandbar at the end of the watery land south of the city, 109 miles from it by car, the taste was much stronger, and one of my companions on the boat had run into far worse. Drew Wheelan, a birdwatcher from the ...

Steamy, Seamy

David Margolick: The Mob’s Cuban Kleptocracy, 20 March 2008

The Havana Mob: Gangsters, Gamblers, Showgirls and Revolutionaries in 1950s Cuba 
by T.J. English.
Mainstream, 400 pp., £17.99, September 2007, 978 1 84596 192 3
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... ingenuity and powered by Russian engines and other improvised innards. But on the Malecón, the grand boulevard along the Caribbean at the city’s northern edge, stands a row of other remnants from that era: battered off-white hulks like a mouthful of decayed, cigar-stained teeth. We recognise them from photographs taken in the 1950s, usually showing men ...

On the Dickman Brothers

Stephanie Burt, 2 February 2017

... in hardened clay, back from the planet you discovered but never had time to name.If Michael risks grand whines, Matthew risks producing regular-guy monologues, like any number of affable poets from America’s 1990s (Campbell McGrath, for example). Matthew aspires To walk barefoot on the cold stone and know that the woman you love is also walking barefoot on ...

Subjects

Craig Raine, 6 October 1983

Peter Porter: Collected Poems 
Oxford, 335 pp., £12.50, March 1983, 0 19 211948 6Show More
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... is richer in eccentricity and event than that of Harrison? Where Lowell can boast a Great Aunt Sarah thundering ‘on the keyboard of her dummy piano’ and ‘risen like the phoenix / from her bed of trouble-some snacks and Tauchnitz classics’, Harrison’s relations are more familiar figures, bickering on Blackpool’s Golden Mile or locked into their ...

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