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Outfoxing Hangman

Thomas Jones: David Mitchell, 11 May 2006

Black Swan Green 
by David Mitchell.
Sceptre, 371 pp., £16.99, May 2006, 0 340 82279 1
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... Floyd Chaceley, Neal Brose, Pete Redmarley, Ross Wilcox, Gary Drake, ‘Squelch’, Grant Burch, Philip Phelps, Lee Biggs, the Tookey brothers, Ant Little, Darren Croome. There are too many to take in, but almost all of them feature more or less prominently later in the novel, and one of the difficulties of being a teenager, too often oversimplified in ...

Deny and Imply

J. Robert Lennon: Gary Shteyngart, 16 December 2010

Super Sad True Love Story 
by Gary Shteyngart.
Granta, 331 pp., £12.99, September 2010, 978 1 84708 103 2
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... get her back to New York to live with him. Eunice herself isn’t so smitten: ‘I met this old, gross guy at a party yesterday,’ she writes to a friend, ‘and we got really drunk and I sort of let him go down on me.’ This, then, becomes the novel’s structural conceit: Lenny’s old-school diaries sharing space with Eunice’s emails and texts. I ...

Mischief Wrought

Stephen Sedley: The Compensation Culture Myth, 4 March 2021

Fake Law: The Truth about Justice in an Age of Lies 
by the Secret Barrister.
Picador, 400 pp., £20, September 2020, 978 1 5290 0994 1
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... for Laspo (the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012) – ‘an act of gross constitutional vandalism’, ruinous not only to countless individuals to whom it has denied access to legal advice and representation but to the justice system itself. Yet again, she quotes dismissive journalism – here Leo McKinstry in the Express ...

Very Old Labour

Ross McKibbin, 3 April 1997

... Labour: the Labour Party under Mr Blair more closely resembles the party of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden than one kitted out for the Nineties. Inevitably, given its strategy, the most obvious characteristic it shares with Very Old Labour is timidity and a wish to be thought acceptable by the existing élites. One form of this is New Labour’s ready ...

Who whom?

Christopher Ricks, 6 June 1985

The English Language Today 
edited by Sidney Greenbaum.
Pergamon, 345 pp., £12.50, December 1984, 0 08 031078 8
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The English Language 
by Robert Burchfield.
Oxford, 194 pp., £9.50, January 1985, 9780192191731
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A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language 
by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik.
Longman, 1779 pp., £39.50, May 1985, 0 582 51734 6
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Words 
by John Silverlight.
Macmillan, 107 pp., £17.50, May 1985, 9780333380109
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Faux Amis and Key Words: A Dictionary-Guide to French Language, Culture and Society through Lookalikes and Confusables 
by Philip Thody, Howard Evans and Gwilym Rees.
Athlone, 224 pp., £16, February 1985, 0 485 11243 4
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Puns 
by Walter Redfern.
Blackwell, 234 pp., £14.95, October 1984, 0 631 13793 9
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Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism 
edited by D.J. Enright.
Oxford, 222 pp., £9.95, April 1985, 0 19 212236 3
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... All of this conversation is then enlivened by the regular appearance of Wittgenstein on wheels. Philip Thody and Howard Evans, in their bonhomous Faux Amis and Key Words, are happy to have Wittgenstein say, just like that, that the meaning of a word is its use. But Wittgenstein did not think the matter that simple. Burchfield prefers the more ample and ...

England prepares to leave the world

Neal Ascherson, 17 November 2016

... everyone knows they don’t believe in. Never mind the few genuine Brexiteers. Amber Rudd, Philip Hammond and Theresa May – among others in government – all tried to keep the UK in the European Union. Now they are trying to take it out again, apparently on the terms that will do their country most damage. There’s a kind explanation, a ...

Barrage Balloons of Fame

Christopher Tayler: We need to talk about Martin, 8 October 2020

Inside Story 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 521 pp., £20, September, 978 1 78733 275 1
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... subconscious. It’s possible, too, that his usual methods, which he describes as involving ‘gross exaggeration’ and a firm subordination of character to ‘general design’, weren’t much help with admired and already outsized figures like Bellow and Christopher Hitchens. Whatever the explanation, writing novels ‘about real men and women’, as ...

Little Goldbug

Iain Bamforth: Tomi Ungerer, 19 July 2001

... he earned a living from the advertising agencies on Madison Avenue and shared an apartment with Philip Roth. In 1964 he designed the poster for Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. His pacifism and his posters against the war in Vietnam brought him to the attention of the FBI; he was blacklisted until 1993. He campaigned, too, on behalf of the civil rights ...

The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency

Mahmood Mamdani: Iraq and Darfur, 8 March 2007

... The worst violence came from the Janjawiid, but the insurgent movements were also accused of gross violations. Anyone wanting to end the spiralling violence would have to bring about power-sharing at the state level and resource-sharing at the community level, land being the key resource. Since its onset, two official verdicts have been delivered on the ...

Homage to Braudel

Geoffrey Parker, 4 September 1980

Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe – XVIIIe siécle 
by Fernand Braudel.
Armand Colin, 544 pp.
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... of Braudel’s other book, the celebrated Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.1 In both works, the chronological account of what happened is left until last, coming almost as an anti-climax after a prolonged analysis of the parameters, preconditions and pressures which (according to Braudel) determined that particular ...

Putting on the Plum

Christopher Tayler: Richard Flanagan, 31 October 2002

Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish 
by Richard Flanagan.
Atlantic, 404 pp., £16.99, June 2002, 1 84354 021 5
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... remains end up among his own gruesome samples, and London experts catalogue them as evidence of gross degeneracy – the same fate, incidentally, as that of an analogous character in Matthew Kneale’s novel English Passengers. Gould, meanwhile, is accused of the doctor’s murder and sent to the prison in which he begins to write his manuscript. Before he ...

Bonkers about Boys

James Davidson: Alexander the Great, 1 November 2001

Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction 
edited by A.B. Bosworth and E.J. Baynham.
Oxford, 370 pp., £35, September 2000, 0 19 815287 6
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... made them laugh. His bodily contours, his fat suggested something alien, animal, Babylonian, gross. So the mob made merry, barracking the enemy barracks-style, so clumsy in manner, so inimical to the eye. Very pertinently, Dionysius puts this alongside Homer’s description of Achilles dragging the dead Hector’s body round Troy. Is there any ...

Supermax

John Bayley, 8 December 1988

The Letters of Max Beerbohm 1892-1956 
edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Murray, 244 pp., £16.95, August 1988, 0 7195 4537 4
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The Faber Book of Letters 
edited by Felix Pryor.
Faber, 319 pp., £12.95, October 1988, 0 571 15269 4
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... stood by Oscar, but he was not deceived about him. He saw that success had made him arrogant: ‘gross not in body only – he did become that – but in his relations with people. He brushed people aside’ – and his later comments on Wilde are tolerant but penetrating. Wilde wrote that ‘absolute humility’ was the one thing left for him, and Max ...

England’s End

Peter Campbell, 7 June 1984

English Journey 
by J.B. Priestley.
Heinemann, 320 pp., £12.95, March 1984, 0 434 60371 6
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English Journey, or The Road to Milton Keynes 
by Beryl Bainbridge.
Duckworth/BBC, 158 pp., £7.95, March 1984, 0 563 20299 8
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Crisis and Conservation: Conflict in the British Countryside 
by Charlie Pye-Smith and Chris Rose.
Penguin, 213 pp., £3.95, March 1984, 0 14 022437 8
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Invisible Country: A Journey through Scotland 
by James Campbell.
Weidenfeld, 164 pp., £8.95, April 1984, 0 297 78371 8
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Literary Britain 
by Bill Brandt.
Victoria and Albert Museum in association with Hurtwood Press, 184 pp., £8.95, March 1984, 0 905209 66 4
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... engineers, who improve returns by exploiting economies of scale. The effects seem most gross when a tax dodge or an EEC subsidy are their principal justification, most insidious when the intentions of the bodies administering them are altruistic. In either case, the anxiety which is felt encourages alternative readings of the landscape. A ...

Diary

James Meek: Real Murderers!, 8 October 2015

... was, though, eager to have real physicists doing real work at the Institute, so he persuaded David Gross, who won the Nobel prize for physics in 2004, along with other prominent scientists like Shing-Tung Yau, Carlo Rovelli and Nikita Nekrasov, to take working residencies in Kharkiv. The science they did, while real enough, and while done in period ...

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