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Beebology

Stefan Collini: What next for the BBC?, 21 April 2022

The BBC: A People’s History 
by David Hendy.
Profile, 638 pp., £25, January, 978 1 78125 525 4
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This Is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922-2022 
by Simon J. Potter.
Oxford, 288 pp., £20, April, 978 0 19 289852 4
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... Office agitated for foreign-language broadcasts to counter the propaganda of the Axis powers. John Reith, the director general, felt obliged to accept an arrangement that, as Potter puts it, ‘included agreeing that news editors would accept specific guidance from civil servants as to which items needed to be included in, or omitted from, different ...

Snap among the Witherlings

Michael Hofmann: Wallace Stevens, 22 September 2016

The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens 
by Paul Mariani.
Simon and Schuster, 512 pp., £23, May 2016, 978 1 4516 2437 3
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... thanks for the persimmons … Wild persimmons make one feel like a hungry man in the woods. As I ate them, I thought of opossums and birds, and the antique Japanese prints in black and white, in which monkeys are eating persimmons in bare trees.’ To his young Cuban poet friend José Rodríguez Feo, for whom, admittedly, he played down the ...

Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?

Andrew O’Hagan, 22 October 2015

... who look at life through the telescopic lens of a rifle, and that was the model for him, much as John Wayne was once a model for boys who thought cowboys put decency back into the world. On 20 July 2012, James Holmes, after dyeing his hair a kind of purple, went to a midnight screening of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises at the Century movie theatre in ...

El Casino Macabre

James Morone: Rebellion of the Rich, 21 June 2007

Wall Street: A Cultural History 
by Steve Fraser.
Faber, 656 pp., £12.99, April 2006, 0 571 21829 6
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Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors 
by Charles S. Maier.
Harvard, 373 pp., £18.95, May 2006, 0 674 02189 4
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... watershed: the Nixon administration’s decision, announced in 1971, to withdraw from the Bretton Woods agreement that had tied the dollar to gold and other currencies to the dollar. Nixon permitted the dollar to float in the currency markets, which eventually turned swift and treacherous. If the economy looked weak, the statecraft proved worse. The ...

Rinse it in dead champagne

Colm Tóibín: The women who invented beauty, 5 February 2004

War Paint: Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry 
by Lindy Woodhead.
Virago, 498 pp., £20, April 2003, 1 86049 974 0
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Diana Vreeland 
by Eleanor Dwight.
HarperCollins, 308 pp., £30, December 2002, 0 688 16738 1
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... had been applied to vulgar clay’. Two years earlier, W.B. Yeats had published In the Seven Woods, which was full of references to fashions changing and a woman ageing; it had ‘Adam’s Curse’ as its centrepiece, in which the ‘beautiful mild woman’, on hearing the poet outline the difficulty of creating verse, Replied, ‘To be born woman is to ...

Eat butterflies with me?

Patricia Lockwood, 5 November 2020

Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor 
by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy.
Penguin, 576 pp., £12.99, November, 978 0 14 139838 9
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... what he is, what he is going to be. Anything is possible. His mother has been all morning in the woods and parks of St Petersburg; she lets the bounty of him fall to the floor with an exaggerated pouf!Perhaps this is why Chapter 15 of Glory glows so among his writings. It is where he chooses, and his doppelgängers choose – even though, as he states in the ...

Not Even a Might-Have Been

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Chips’s Adventures, 19 January 2023

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1024 pp., £35, March 2021, 978 1 78633 181 6
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1120 pp., £35, September 2021, 978 1 78633 182 3
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1943-57 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1168 pp., £35, September 2022, 978 1 5291 5172 5
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... my wristwatch and cigarette case – all of which I had given him’.Channon was warned by John Gielgud that his liaison with Rattigan was all too public, while Nigel Birch, a clever, sarcastic Tory MP, teased him about the silk shirt he wore with the embroidered initials ‘TR’. Channon was acquainted with Lord Berners and ‘his crazier ...

Dazed and Confused

Paul Laity: Are the English human?, 28 November 2002

Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 
by Richard Weight.
Macmillan, 866 pp., £25, May 2002, 0 333 73462 9
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Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom 
by Tom Nairn.
Verso, 176 pp., £13, September 2002, 1 85984 657 2
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Identity of England 
by Robert Colls.
Oxford, 422 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 19 924519 3
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Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, October 2002, 1 85619 716 6
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... for the next attempt to regenerate national pride. The early omens weren’t good. Weight picks up John O’Farrell’s story about her election as Conservative Party leader in 1976, when she appeared in front of the cameras and gave a ‘V’ for victory sign the wrong way round. ‘She was smiling and telling the British people to fuck off at the same ...

I wasn’t just a brain in a jar

Christian Lorentzen: Edward Snowden, 26 September 2019

Permanent Record 
by Edward Snowden.
Macmillan, 339 pp., £20, September 2019, 978 1 5290 3565 0
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... marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John Alden, whom she chose over the colony’s military supremo, Commander Myles Standish – an episode that became the subject of a poem by Longfellow. The maternal line included heroes of the War of Independence and cousins who fought on opposing sides in the ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2014, 8 January 2015

... with him his teenage son plus a bottle of wine, hoping that Sue would take the young man into the woods and initiate him into the arts of love. None of them had any doubt that this was a woman of the world whereas Sue was actually quite shy and couldn’t see that she had given them any cause to think otherwise. She hadn’t; she just looked like a Scarlet ...

Self-Management

Seamus Perry: Southey’s Genius for Repression, 26 January 2006

Robert Southey: Poetical Works 1793-1810 
edited by Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts.
Pickering & Chatto, 2624 pp., £450, May 2004, 1 85196 731 1
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... his eye could reach Fair structures, rain bow-hued, arose; And rich pavilions thro’ the opening woods Gleamed from their waving curtains sunny gold; And winding thro’ the verdant vale Flowed streams of liquid light; And fluted cypresses reared up Their living obelisks Such enchanted topographies are further glimpses of the Susquehannah life that never ...

Indigo, Cyanine, Beryl

Helen Vendler: Jorie Graham’s Daring, 23 January 2003

Never 
by Jorie Graham.
Carcanet, 112 pp., £9.95, September 2002, 1 85754 621 0
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... sketches of her personal past, and historical events such as the Shoah, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the perpetual alert of B-52s in the American prairie, or the Kyoto Accords. Still, her most shocking alteration of former habits occurred in Swarm (2000), in which her sentences disintegrated utterly. Her chief thematic preoccupation in Swarm is ...

Like a Bar of Soap

Bee Wilson: Work, don’t play, 15 December 2022

The Child Is the Teacher: A Life of Maria Montessori 
by Cristina de Stefano, translated by Gregory Conti.
Other Press, 368 pp., £27.99, May 2022, 978 1 63542 084 5
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... famous educational experiments in history. Itard had taken into his care a young boy found in the woods of the Aveyron. The boy had been without human contact for so long that he seemed almost an animal. Itard named him Victor and invented many exercises with the aim of turning him into an educated French child, although he ultimately conceded defeat and took ...

Baudelairean

Mary Hawthorne: The Luck of Walker Evans, 5 February 2004

Walker Evans 
by James Mellow.
Perseus, 654 pp., £15.99, February 2002, 1 903985 13 7
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... work of an obscure photographer she had discovered in Paris (Atget), Ralph Steiner, Paul Grotz, John Cheever, Ben Shahn and, most important of all, Lincoln Kirstein.Evans always acknowledged the role luck played in his life, and nothing could have been luckier than the friendship he formed with Kirstein, whose influence on his career was so profound that ...

Life Pushed Aside

Clair Wills: The Last Asylums, 18 November 2021

... or rather J.J. Beegan did. When I turned to the Irish census records I could quite easily find John Beegan, who was born in 1868, the eldest child of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, ...

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