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A Turn for the Woowoo

Theo Tait: David Mitchell, 4 December 2014

The Bone Clocks 
by David Mitchell.
Sceptre, 595 pp., £20, September 2014, 978 0 340 92160 9
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... David Mitchell​ is a career-long genre-bender. Only with his fourth book, Black Swan Green (2006), did he raid his own store of experience to write a first-novelish novel, a charming if low-key coming-of-age story, set in Worcestershire in 1982, full of references to Findus Crispy Pancakes, the Falklands War and playground slang ...

The First Hundred Years

James Buchan, 24 August 1995

John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier 
by Andrew Lownie.
Constable, 365 pp., £20, July 1995, 0 09 472500 4
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... that John Buchan belonged not, as the family piously hoped, in a Scots Valhalla with Scott and Stevenson (even if a long way downtable), but with two English writers of almost unbelievable crudity, ‘Sapper’ and Dornford Yates. Despite defences of John Buchan by Gertrude Himmelfarb in an essay in Encounter in 1960, and Janet Adam Smith in her biography ...

The Most Corrupt Idea of Modern Times

Tom Stevenson: Inspecting the Troops, 1 July 2021

The Changing of the Guard: The British Army since 9/11 
by Simon Akam.
Scribe, 704 pp., £25, March, 978 1 913348 48 9
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... by American generals who had directed major operations in Iraq. Both Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus considered themselves experts in counterinsurgency – the respectable term for trying to suppress domestic resistance to a military occupation. British soldiers were supposed to fall in line with American thinking and avoid making too many ...

At the Top Table

Tom Stevenson: The Defence Intelligentsia, 6 October 2022

Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine 
by Lawrence Freedman.
Allen Lane, 574 pp., £30, September 2022, 978 0 241 45699 6
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... and for all Freedman’s subtlety, his sympathy is often with British and American leaders. David Deptula, the architect of the American bombing campaign in Iraq in 1991, is thanked in his acknowledgments. Freedman claimed that one of the central themes of Michael Howard’s work was ‘urging Americans to keep a sense of proportion and use their power ...

Rubble from Bone

Tom Stevenson: Israel’s War, 8 February 2024

... in grave abuses’. But the British political establishment has shown firm support for Israel. David Cameron, now foreign secretary, said that there was no way Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza, because it is ‘a democracy’ and ‘a country with armed forces that are committed to obeying the rule of law’. On 14 December the UK’s chief of the ...

At Tate Britain

Frank Kermode: William Blake, 14 December 2000

... there, with informative if inaccessible commentary adjacent on the walls. The admirable Juliet Stevenson provides an audio commentary. And there are lots of educational backups, some, like lectures by Peter Ackroyd and Tom Paulin, now over, others, including various conferences and courses, still to come. The most visible, and in some ways the most ...

Auchnasaugh

Patrick Parrinder, 7 November 1991

King Cameron 
by David Craig.
Carcanet, 212 pp., £12.95, May 1991, 0 85635 917 3
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The Hungry Generations 
by David Gilmour.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 194 pp., £13.95, August 1991, 1 85619 069 2
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O Caledonia 
by Elspeth Barker.
Hamish Hamilton, 152 pp., £13.99, August 1991, 0 241 13146 4
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... David Craig has an unfashionable concern with truth-telling in fiction. In his earlier role as a literary critic, he wrote a book called The Real Foundations in which he showed how some of the most respected 19th and 20th-century novelists and poets had blatantly falsified social reality. If a work of realistic fiction is to be convincing in general, according to Craig, it ought to convince us in particulars ...

Comprehensible Disorders

David Craig, 3 September 1987

Before the oil ran out: Britain 1977-86 
by Ian Jack.
Secker, 271 pp., £9.95, June 1987, 0 436 22020 2
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In a Distant Isle: The Orkney Background of Edwin Muir 
by George Marshall.
Scottish Academic Press, 184 pp., £12.50, May 1987, 0 7073 0469 5
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... study of Edwin Muir’s native culture), although the individual choice is usually our own. As Stevenson wrote in The Silverado Squatters, ‘I do not know if I desire to live there, but let me hear in some far land a kindred voice sing out, “Oh why left I my hame?” and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise ...

Martinique in Burbank

David Thomson: Bogart and Bacall, 19 October 2023

Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair 
by William J. Mann.
HarperCollins, 634 pp., £35, August, 978 0 06 302639 1
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... these awkward years and the way Bacall became enamoured with other famous men. She adored Adlai Stevenson and followed him around. Nothing definite happened there that we know of, but Mann concedes the likelihood that it did between her and Frank Sinatra (to Bogart’s deepening sourness). Bacall became a fringe member of the Rat Pack, and if that ...

His Greatest Pretend

Dinah Birch: The man behind Pan, 1 September 2005

Hide-and-Seek with Angels: A Life of J.M. Barrie 
by Lisa Chaney.
Hutchinson, 402 pp., £20, June 2005, 0 09 179539 7
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... James was a puny child, distinguished by neither athletic nor academic prowess. His brother David was his mother’s favourite. Tall, handsome, destined for university and eventually the ministry, he was killed in a skating accident shortly before his 14th birthday. He was not the only child that Margaret had lost. But this time she was ...

He speaks too loud

David Blackbourn: Brecht, 3 July 2014

Bertolt Brecht: A Literary Life 
by Stephen Parker.
Bloomsbury, 704 pp., £30, February 2014, 978 1 4081 5562 2
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... brother Walter. He now immersed himself in British and American literature: Robert Louis Stevenson, Melville, above all Kipling. He became the leading figure in a bohemian gang who wrote and sang songs together, drank, chased girls and shocked respectable burghers. He narrowly avoided being expelled from school: a teacher argued in his defence that ...

Prize Poems

Donald Davie, 1 July 1982

Arvon Foundation Poetry Competion: 1980 Anthology 
by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.
Kilnhurst Publishing Company, 173 pp., £3, April 1982, 9780950807805
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Burn this 
by Tom Disch.
Hutchinson, 63 pp., £7.50, April 1982, 0 09 146960 0
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... similarly accomplished essay in the Dantesque); from Pauline Rainford, Monica Ditmas, Anne Stevenson (two) and John Whitworth; from Aidan Carl Mathews (another besides ‘Severances’); from Thomas Shapcott (who may be Australian – we aren’t told) and from Peter Bland (probably, by the same token, a New Zealander); and from U. A. Fanthorpe ...

Lying doggo

Christopher Reid, 14 June 1990

Becoming a poet 
by David Kalstone, edited by Robert Hemenway.
Hogarth, 299 pp., £20, May 1990, 0 7012 0900 3
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... and inspiration. Significantly, the poets got there first; and later it was a younger poet, Anne Stevenson, who wrote the first book about Bishop. One wonders if this helped or hindered the advancement of her reputation where such things are decided. To have been taken up by Jarrell, crying with such operatic hauteur in the wilderness and making no secret of ...

Where are the space arks?

Tom Stevenson: Space Forces, 4 March 2021

War in Space 
by Bleddyn Bowen.
Edinburgh, 356 pp., £85, July 2020, 978 1 4744 5048 5
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Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics and the Ends of Humanity 
by Daniel Deudney.
Oxford, 443 pp., £22.99, June 2020, 978 0 19 090334 3
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... Boeing X-37 robotic spacecraft. When asked about this, the second in command of the space force, David Thompson, said: ‘We don’t need to tell the world everything we’re doing.’ The US hasn’t yet made what aerospace analysts call the transition from ‘space operators to space warfighters’. But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of ...

Buchan’s Pathological Vitality

T.J. Binyon, 18 December 1980

The Best Short Stories of John Buchan 
edited by David Daniell.
Joseph, 224 pp., £7.50, May 1980, 0 7181 1906 1
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... David Daniell is also the author of the only full-length critical study of Buchan’s work – The Interpreter’s House (1975). Both there and here, in the introduction to this collection of 12 of Buchan’s stories, he is concerned to defend the writer against the usual accusations of anti-semitism, racism and blatant imperialism; to protest against the way he is automatically ranked with Sapper, Dornford Yates and similar figures; and to assert that he is not only worth reading (which the general public has never forgotten), but also worth reading seriously ...

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