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Stamford Hill to Aldgate

Daniel Trilling, 16 November 2023

Chapters of Accidents: A Writer’s Memoir 
by Alexander Baron.
Vallentine Mitchell, 363 pp., £16.96, September 2022, 978 1 80371 029 7
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... otherwise is, as Harryboy Boas says in Alexander Baron’s novel The Lowlife (1963), ‘the mark of the outsider’. Rather, Hackney is the first step out, geographically and socially, ‘a Victorian-Edwardian suburb swallowed up by London, broad streets, little villas and big tradesmen’s houses; and now, among these, little factories and workshops ...

Ruin it your own way

Susan Pedersen, 4 June 2020

Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution 
by Selina Todd.
Chatto, 304 pp., £18.99, August 2019, 978 1 78474 082 5
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A Taste of Honey 
by Shelagh Delaney.
Methuen, 112 pp., £14.44, November 2019, 978 1 350 13495 9
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... Todd’s careful reconstruction of Delaney’s background and childhood shows just how wide of the mark this is. Yes, Delaney was solidly working class, born in Salford in 1938 to Joseph Delaney, a bus driver of Irish extraction, and his wife, Elsie Twemlow, the daughter of millworkers. Yes, they moved around: Shelagh, her mother and her grandmother to a flat ...

Too Proud to Fight

David Reynolds: The ‘Lusitania’ Effect, 28 November 2002

Wilful Murder: The Sinking of the ‘Lusitania’ 
by Diana Preston.
Doubleday, 543 pp., £18.99, May 2002, 0 385 60173 5
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Lusitania: Saga and Myth 
by David Ramsay.
Chatham, 319 pp., £20, September 2001, 1 86176 170 8
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Woodrow Wilson 
by John Thompson.
Longman, 288 pp., £15.99, August 2002, 0 582 24737 3
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... transferred excessive loads to the remaining columns. As these loads became unsustainable, one storey collapsed on the next in a ‘pancake’ effect. The towers were designed to cope with the obvious threats, such as earth tremors and strong winds, but, like the Lusitania, were almost defenceless against something novel. To focus on the technology of ...

Screaming in the Castle: The Case of Beatrice Cenci

Charles Nicholl: The story of Beatrice Cenci, 2 July 1998

... used as a refuse tip. It appeared he had fallen from the wooden balcony that ran around the upper storey of the castle. There was a drop of six canne (about thirteen metres) into the warren. Part of the balcony had collapsed: one could see splintered wood, though the gap looked small for the bulky Count to have fallen through. Ladders were fetched. Three or ...

Grandma at home

Lorna Sage, 4 November 1993

... all around you were either slaving away or – worse – out of work would have been sufficient to mark you out as a ‘lady’. What could be grander than lounging around upstairs, nibbling at the stock when the fancy took you, brushing out your curls? She and Katie would still spend hour upon hour getting ready to go out – to Cardiff, or to Pontypridd, to ...

‘A Being full of Witching’

Charles Nicholl: The ‘poor half-harlot’ of Hazlitt’s affections, 18 May 2000

... had closed and a rash of new housing was spreading across the area. No. 65 was a typical three-storey house of sooty grey London brick, with a thin garden out back and a pub nearby on the corner (the Giraffe, named after a popular attraction at the Surrey Gardens Zoo). The railway passed close to the back of the house: the busy London-Dover line. Here ...

Blast Effects

James Meek: In Mykolaiv, 18 August 2022

... not much younger than the city itself – two centuries – and reaching to the top of the nine-storey regional administration building. In March, a Russian missile punched a seven-storey hole through the building, killing 37 and wounding 34. Visiting journalists are taken to marvel at the hole, a memorial to something ...

In Whose Interest?

Thomas Meaney: Truman’s Plan, 6 December 2018

The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months that Changed the World 
by A.J. Baime.
Doubleday, 431 pp., £20, February 2018, 978 0 85752 366 2
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The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War 
by Benn Steil.
Oxford, 606 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 0 19 875791 7
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... the city. Tom Pendergast, the cunning, sickly boss of the Goats, ran his operations out of a two-storey building on Main Street, where the thugs of his Ready-Mixed Cement Corporation were dispatched to buy votes, steal ballot boxes, kidnap candidates or gun down whomever, to keep him kingmaker. The Goats’ capture of local tax revenue partly depended on the ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2013, 9 January 2014

... I reflect that there isn’t much swearing in my plays. I imagine the characters in a play by Mark Ravenhill, say, get through more ‘fucks’ in the first five minutes than there are in my entire oeuvre. The first time I wrote ‘fuck’ in a script was in my second play, Getting On, and Kenneth More, who was the star (and swore all the time ...

Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... of new private homes built each year didn’t go up. It barely budged from the 150,000 a year mark. The market failed. There was increasing demand without increasing supply. Mid-boom, as the imbalance between the number of people chasing a house and the supply of new homes reached a tipping point, average house prices took off like a rocket, trebling ...

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

Rebecca Solnit: Losing San Francisco, 8 February 2024

... vacated Salesforce East, which stands next to yet another new high-rise, the mostly residential 58-storey Millennium Tower, which opened in 2009. The marketing brochure for Millennium Tower called it the first ‘ultra-luxury high-rise … a sophisticated oasis in the heart of SoMa’s tech capital’, though by 2015 its faulty construction had led to tilting ...

Not Much Tolerance, Not Much Water

Lynne Mastnak: The last nine months in Kosovo, 30 March 2000

... from a small valley and turned off to have a look. The smoke was coming from a haystack. The two-storey house next to it had a wooden balcony and Serb Radical Party insignia painted on the gate-post. Half its contents were lying on the ground; across the path lay a dead pig and a pile of photos. On the balcony of the next farmhouse there were stacks of ...

Out of the Hadhramaut

Michael Gilsenan: Being ‘Arab’, 20 March 2003

... after making the Pilgrimage. They have small albums of photographs of three, four, five and six-storey adobe, and make shocked comments about low economic development, poor hygiene and the living conditions of the cousins who still live in the ancestral village. Some have sent a son back to the Hadhramaut to be raised there and taught in a prestigious ...

Somerdale to Skarbimierz

James Meek, 20 April 2017

... to manufacturing the base product, in 1831, with the help of a steam engine, in a rented four-storey building in a back alley in Birmingham. In the early years his cocoa got a warrant from Queen Victoria but by 1861, when his sons George and Richard took over the factory, now in different premises, the business was on the brink. A new product the Cadburys ...

Delirium

Jeremy Harding: Arthur Rimbaud, 30 July 1998

Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91 
by Charles Nicholl.
Vintage, 336 pp., £7.99, May 1998, 0 09 976771 6
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A Season in Hell and Illuminations 
by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Mark Treharne.
Dent, 167 pp., £18.99, June 1998, 0 460 87958 8
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... as Baudelaire. And more fashionably, they deny the poet any tenure at the centre of the poem. Mark Treharne’s superb English versions of the Illuminations catch these shifts and transections exactly. In his rendering of ‘Les Ponts’, we can also follow the poem as it shears away into an analogical city of music, returns briefly to a moment in ...

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