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Diary

Stephen Smith: What about Somalia?, 11 February 1993

... MREs when they discovered that Moslem extremists in Somalia were backed by Sudan, which itself had close ties with Iran. Other rumours suggest that the White House was galvanised by Washington lobbying. Last November, Fred Cuny, styled as the Red Adair of the relief business, persuaded Paul Wolfowitz, the head of the Defence Department’s policy ...

Diary

Nick McDonell: A Friendly Fighting Force, 5 March 2020

... Theory of Proxy Warfare’, Major Amos Fox argued that the US doesn’t talk about its proxies in frank enough terms. ‘Phrases such as security force assistance, training and advising, partnered force and by, with and through are all misleading and meant to soften or hide the coarseness of proxy warfare.’ The italicised phrases (his) will be grimly ...

Antigone on Your Knee

Terry Eagleton, 6 February 2020

A Cultural History of Tragedy: Vols I-VI 
edited by Rebecca Bushnell.
Bloomsbury Academic, 1302 pp., £395, November 2019, 978 1 4742 8814 9
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... works of one canonical name to another, though the second and third categories are slightly too close for comfort, as are the last two. In any case, while families are certainly central to some types of tragedy, they are rather less conspicuous in 20th-century theatre, and there are other subjects which are at least as important – martyrdom, for ...

Learning to Say ‘Cat’

Edmund Gordon: ‘Lean Fall Stand’, 17 June 2021

Lean Fall Stand 
by Jon McGregor.
Fourth Estate, 288 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 00 820490 7
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... wrong thing to say.’Compared to its predecessors, Lean Fall Stand – written in a conventional close third person – is technically unassuming. There are points when the subject matter calls for something more inventive, however, as in the series of diminishing paragraphs that depict Doc’s stroke: the first runs for six and a half pages, the last ...

Terror Was Absolute

Chris Mullin: Vietnam, 18 July 2019

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-75 
by Max Hastings.
Collins, 722 pp., £9.99, May 2019, 978 0 00 813301 6
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... He was an eyewitness to many of the key events in the country’s post-1945 history and was on close terms with senior members of Hanoi’s ruling elite. In September 1990, disillusioned by the corruption and incompetence of the government, he went into exile in Paris. His memoir, Following Ho Chi Minh (1994), as well as a series of interviews he gave to ...
A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein 
by John Kerr.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 608 pp., £25, February 1994, 1 85619 249 0
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... sexual wishes in his patients’ dreams and was given his marching orders), Eugen Bleuler, (Miss) Frank Miller (altruistically given to analysing her own poems), Otto Weininger (a suicide), Johann Jakob Honegger Jr (a suicide), Krafft-Ebing, Goethe, Nietzsche, Leopold Löwenfeld, Wilhelm Stekel, James Jackson Putnam, Karl Abraham, Otto Rank, Otto Gross ...

Blimey

Gillian Darley: James Stirling, 7 September 2000

Big Jim: The Life and Work of James Stirling 
by Mark Girouard.
Pimlico, 323 pp., £14, March 2000, 9780712664226
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... Sandy Wilson, the designer of the British Library, who met him soon afterwards and became a close friend, had ‘never met anyone who was so deeply convinced of his own significance’. Despite the dead-end jobs and unsuccessful competition entries, Stirling embarked on adult life in the voracious fashion in which he would continue to live: food, drink ...

Not a desire to have him, but to be like him

Slavoj Žižek: Highsmith is the One, 21 August 2003

Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith 
by Andrew Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 534 pp., £25, June 2003, 0 7475 6314 4
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... Roman Empire’ – on which she based her decision to make her home in ‘old Europe’. As Frank Rich put it, she ‘made a life’s work of her ostracisation from the American mainstream and her own subsequent self-reinvention’. Wilson’s book provides a lot of material for what Freud called ‘wild analysis’. We learn, for example, that five ...

I-need-to-work!

Lizzy Davies: ‘The Night Cleaner’, 3 November 2011

The Night Cleaner 
by Florence Aubenas, translated by Andrew Brown.
Polity, 184 pp., £14.99, 0 7456 5199 2
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... that brings tourists to Normandy. She split shifts and worked nights, earning at a rate perilously close to the minimum wage, at that time €8.71 an hour (it went up to €9 in January). The Night Cleaner records her time among those for whom the job of supermarket cashier is ‘prestigious’ and a refuse collector is ‘well paid’. When she arrived in ...

‘I worry a bit, Joanne’

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘The Casual Vacancy’, 25 October 2012

The Casual Vacancy 
by J.K. Rowling.
Little, Brown, 503 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 4087 0420 2
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... It sounds a bit too much like a fairy tale, just the area Rowling is leaving behind with her frank descriptions of drug-taking and grotty sex. Perhaps that’s why she adds in a fourth use of the cyber-curse, to break the pattern, though this last one is slightly different and the rule-of-three seems to persist. A character who pops up for just long ...

Diary

Tariq Ali: On the North-West Frontier, 23 July 2009

... is present so that they can determine the pecking order of flattery.Patterson can be disarmingly frank. Earlier this year, she offered a mid-term assessment to a visiting Euro-intelligence chief. While Musharraf had been unreliable, saying one thing in Washington and doing its opposite back home, Zardari was perfect: ‘He does everything we ask.’ What is ...

Princess Jasmine strips

Deborah Baker: Saleem Haddad, 16 February 2017

Guapa 
by Saleem Haddad.
Europa Editions, 304 pp., £10.99, October 2016, 978 1 60945 413 5
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... me in the eye. ‘Do you believe in God?’ He asks. His cold eyes bore into me, demanding a frank answer … ‘I’ll believe in what you want me to believe in.’ The novel’s short middle section is an extended fugue, separating the hectic events of Rasa’s day from the dreaded wedding that evening. Here there are more expansive flashbacks to ...

Seething

Colin McGinn, 21 March 1996

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Cambridge Letters 
edited by Brian McGuinness and Georg Henrik von Wright.
Blackwell, 349 pp., £45, November 1995, 0 631 19015 5
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... you imagined I might be some day). This thought was very disagreeable to me.Wittgenstein to Frank Ramsey:A thing which is of much greater importance to me & was so on Saturday evening, is, that I still can’t understand how, being my supervisor & even – as I thought – to some extent my friend, having been very good to me you couldn’t care two ...

Karl Miller Remembered

Neal Ascherson, John Lanchester and Andrew O’Hagan, 23 October 2014

... Henry Mackenzie and Walter Scott had been before him. There Karl became favourite pupil and close friend of Hector MacIver, that incomparable teacher of literature, who recognised his gifts and took him with his other clever boys down the Calton Hill to Rose Street. In those days, a sort of café society still flourished in Edinburgh. You knew which set ...

The Importance of Aunts

Colm Tóibín, 17 March 2011

... younger brothers – Henry, said to have been her favourite, who lived in London, and the sailor Frank, who reported to her from various war fronts … The sisters made good aunts and friends to the next generation.’ Austen cared for some of her nieces and nephews after their mothers died, and seems to have been remembered fondly by all of them. When one ...

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