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Sudden Elevations of Mind

Colin Burrow: Dr Johnson, 17 February 2011

The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vols XXI-XXIII: The Lives of the Poets 
edited by John Middendorf.
Yale, 1696 pp., £180, July 2010, 978 0 300 12314 2
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... generations. He also scoured his bottom drawer for material. The longest of the lives, that of Richard Savage, was substantially a reprint of a monument to a feckless and garrulous friend that Johnson had published in 1744. Johnson’s critique of Pope’s epitaphs from 1756 was appended to his ‘Life of Pope’, even though it provides an incongruously ...

A City of Sand and Puddles

Julian Barnes: Paris, 22 April 2010

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris 
by Graham Robb.
Picador, 476 pp., £18.99, April 2010, 978 0 330 45244 1
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The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps 
by Eric Hazan, translated by David Fernbach.
Verso, 384 pp., £20, February 2010, 978 1 84467 411 4
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... rigour; but it lies discreetly behind a non-academic joyfulness. The French used to celebrate Richard Cobb as le grand Cobb; and perhaps it isn’t too early to hail his successor as le grand Robb. Of Robb’s 19 chapters, three are set in the late 18th century, six in the 19th, eight in the 20th and two in the 21st. They feature many of the best-known ...

Terms of Art

Conor Gearty: Human Rights Law, 11 March 2010

The Law of Human Rights 
by Richard Clayton and Hugh Tomlinson.
Oxford, 2443 pp., £295, March 2009, 978 0 19 926357 8
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Human Rights Law and Practice 
edited by Anthony Lester, David Pannick and Javan Herberg.
Lexis Nexis, 974 pp., £237, April 2009, 978 1 4057 3686 2
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Human Rights: Judicial Protection in the United Kingdom 
by Jack Beatson, Stephen Grosz, Tom Hickman, Rabinder Singh and Stephanie Palmer.
Sweet and Maxwell, 905 pp., £124, September 2008, 978 0 421 90250 3
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... an expansionist interpretation too close to the territory of the legislature. But there has been a price to pay – an explosion in human-rights-based litigation. This short act, containing 16 rights of a largely civil and political character, has generated the 2090 pages of Clayton and Tomlinson, the 889 pages of Lester, Pannick and Herberg and the 813 pages ...

From the Motorcoach

Stefan Collini: J.B. Priestley, 19 November 2009

English Journey 
by J.B. Priestley.
Great Northern Books, 351 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 1 905080 47 2
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... and the early years of the 20th century there were several related attempts, by writers such as Richard Jefferies and Edward Thomas, to identify ‘England’ with ‘the countryside’ (largely for an urban readership), while the interwar decades tended to throw up more quizzical searches for ‘the real England’, assumed to have been submerged by the ...

Miracle on Fleet Street

Martin Hickman: Operation Elveden, 7 January 2016

... Sun, which hadn’t even been under investigation. Among the first officials to be arrested were Richard Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie ...

A Misreading of the Law

Conor Gearty: Why didn’t Campbell sue?, 19 February 2004

Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly CMG 
by Lord Hutton.
Stationery Office, 740 pp., £70, January 2004, 0 10 292715 4
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... nobody responsible for the war or that death – not a single minister – has paid a political price. The contrast with the way Lord Hutton treats the BBC is brutal. The corporation’s central claim was that despite its mistakes there had been great public interest in the September 2002 dossier and serious issues of great public importance arose in ...

How messy it all is

David Runciman: Who benefits from equality?, 22 October 2009

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better 
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.
Allen Lane, 331 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 1 84614 039 6
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... public has learned to be more accepting of the idea that low growth and high public debt are the price of keeping people in their jobs. If anything, the experience of recession has served to make Japan a more equal society; it threatens to make Britain and the US less equal ones. Yet despite all this, The Spirit Level does contain a powerful political ...

Backlash Blues

John Lahr, 16 June 2016

What Happened, Miss Simone? A Biography 
by Alan Light.
Canongate, 309 pp., £20, March 2016, 978 1 78211 871 8
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... on which African Americans stood. ‘White people had Judy Garland. We had Nina,’ the comedian Richard Pryor said. Simone’s voice answered the radical call for a profound articulation of the Black Tradition and incidentally made her ‘the patron saint of rebellion’, according to Crouch. Her singing, an African-American critic wrote in the Philadelphia ...

I figured what the heck

Jackson Lears: Seymour Hersh, 27 September 2018

Reporter 
by Seymour M. Hersh.
Allen Lane, 355 pp., £20, June 2018, 978 0 241 35952 5
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... stage in Hersh’s sustained investigation of Kissinger, which appeared in full as Kissinger: The Price of Power, a book that detailed Kissinger’s disdain for truth and provoked the ire of his acolytes. During Nixon’s decline and fall, in 1973 and 1974, Hersh mainly worked on what he calls ‘The Big One’, detailing illegal CIA spying at home. The Times ...

In Clover

Laleh Khalili: What does McKinsey do?, 15 December 2022

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm 
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe.
Bodley Head, 354 pp., £20, October 2022, 978 1 84792 625 8
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... I hooked up with another Andersen consultant in Atlanta, I moved there and got a similar job at Price Waterhouse (which later merged with Coopers & Lybrand to become PricewaterhouseCoopers or PwC). I was assigned to projects designing customer service software for the local mobile phone company; circulation and advertising systems for mid-sized newspapers ...

A Degenerate Assemblage

Anthony Grafton: Bibliomania, 13 April 2023

Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America 
by Denise Gigante.
Yale, 378 pp., £25, January 2023, 978 0 300 24848 7
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... one of the owners sold me a 17th-century Latin book on Druids that I couldn’t afford at half-price (‘rainy day special’, he explained). Higher-end bookshops offered incunabula and Aldines, first editions of Gibbon and Austen to discriminating buyers who had real money.If you didn’t, you could explore the riches available in public collections. New ...

Worse than a Defeat

James Meek: Shamed in Afghanistan, 18 December 2014

The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan 
by Jack Fairweather.
Cape, 488 pp., £20, December 2014, 978 0 224 09736 9
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Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War 
by Frank Ledwidge.
Yale, 287 pp., £10.99, July 2014, 978 0 300 20526 8
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British Generals in Blair’s Wars 
edited by Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan.
Ashgate, 404 pp., £19.95, August 2013, 978 1 4094 3736 9
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An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict 1978-2012 
by Mike Martin.
Hurst, 389 pp., £25, April 2014, 978 1 84904 336 6
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... diesel and kerosene trucked in from Central Asia or Pakistan; one US estimate calculated that the price of fuel increased by 14,000 per cent in its journey from the refinery to the Afghan front line. In firefights, British troops used Javelin missiles costing £70,000 each to destroy houses made of mud. In December 2013, when they were packing up to ...

We Are Conquerors

Adam Shatz: Ben-Gurion’s Obsession, 24 October 2019

A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion 
by Tom Segev.
Head of Zeus, 804 pp., £30, August 2019, 978 1 78954 462 6
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... always present in Zionist ideology, would assume growing prominence in his thinking. The ‘price of Zionism’, as Segev puts it, was permanent conflict, which could be managed but never resolved. His wish to counter the rising force of Arab nationalism was tempered only by his partnership with the British, who had been given mandatory control over ...

Sisyphus at the Selectric

James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021

Philip Roth: The Biography 
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5
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Philip Roth: A Counterlife 
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8
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Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth 
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2
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... hate-bursts Roth could handle, employing his rhetorical ninja skills. Such Sturm und Drang was the price of breaking the sound barrier that separated Promising Upstart from Major League Sensation, and there was way more money in the bigs. What was flummoxing for Roth was finding his name and his protagonist turned into punchline material. He didn’t share the ...

Vertiginous

Nicholas Penny, 12 December 1996

Grands Décors français 1650-1800 
by Bruno Pons.
Faton, 439 pp., £130, June 1995, 2 87844 023 4
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The Rococo Interior 
by Katie Scott.
Yale, 342 pp., £39.95, November 1995, 0 300 04582 4
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Chardin 
by Marianne Roland Michel, translated by Eithne McCarthy.
Thames and Hudson, 293 pp., £60, March 1996, 0 500 09259 1
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... is a salutary emphasis on the loss of friends and family and on the secret surgery which was the price of survival. Furniture is of course more easily moved than panelling, but it comes as a shock all the same to discover that so little of the finest French furniture remains in the setting for which it was made. In the creation of the rococo interior ...

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