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The British Way

H.C.G. Matthew: Devolution, 5 March 1998

... except for its constitutional aspect: the Scottish Labour Party in a Scottish Parliament might be bold where the Labour Party in England was cautious. Conservatives could no longer argue against Home Rule on the grounds that any constitutional change was in itself dangerous to the UK, for it was they who signed the Treaty of Rome and it was their majority ...

Left with a Can Opener

Thomas Jones: Homer in Bijelo Polje, 7 October 2021

Hearing Homer’s Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry 
by Robert Kanigel.
Knopf, 320 pp., £28.95, April 2021, 978 0 525 52094 8
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... Berkeley in 1964. He was amazed to find that ‘the great discovery is there – firm, detailed, bold.’Throughout the long 19th century (the origins of the argument go back much further) the so-called Homeric Question – who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, and when – was fought over by two competing schools of thought, analysts and ...

The Greening of Mrs Donaldson

Alan Bennett: A Story, 9 September 2010

... The next day she felt less chastened, mildly excited even, the actress in her quite relishing the bold face she was going to have to put on. Yesterday she had felt robbed of her necessary armour but this morning as she hung her coat in the locker she remembered one of her presentations on stigma and a woman whose face had been disfigured in an accident. ‘I ...

Gloriosus

E.S. Turner, 4 September 1986

Monty: The Field-Marshal 1944-1976 
by Nigel Hamilton.
Hamish Hamilton, 996 pp., £15, June 1986, 0 241 11838 7
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... Even after Arnhem, with vital Channel ports still in German hands, Monty was all for a single bold thrust through North Germany, rather than Eisenhower’s laborious advance with 40 divisions along a 250-mile front. That made no military sense to the field-marshal, who denounced Eisenhower to the Chiefs of Staff as ‘completely and utterly ...

Utterly in Awe

Jenny Turner: Lynn Barber, 5 June 2014

A Curious Career 
by Lynn Barber.
Bloomsbury, 224 pp., £16.99, May 2014, 978 1 4088 3719 1
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... in British newspapers for more than thirty years. Her questions are inquisitive and extrovert, bold and clever. The ensuing write-ups are stylish and often surprising, gossipy on the surface, precise and controlled underneath. Precise, controlled, and of course ‘unsparing’ – her own word: ‘If anyone else tells me what a lovely lad Rafa Nadal is I ...

Milk and Lemon

Steven Shapin: The Excesses of Richard Feynman, 7 July 2005

Don’t You Have Time to Think? The Letters of Richard Feynman 
edited by Michelle Feynman.
Allen Lane, 486 pp., £20, June 2005, 0 7139 9847 4
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... sent the photographs and supplied the autographs; he commended the amateur physicists for their bold conjectures, which, unfortunately, he was obliged to refute; and he told the geeks and their parents not to worry. It was good to be an obsessive. Find your obsession and cultivate it. Don’t worry about what the other kids think, and don’t worry about ...

Don’t teach me

Gillian Darley: Ernö Goldfinger, 1 April 2004

Ernö Goldfinger: The Life of an Architect 
by Nigel Warburton.
Routledge, 197 pp., £30, November 2003, 0 415 25853 7
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... rise architectural attack on London. His wish to put the record straight made him, in the critic Alan Powers’s words, ‘an angry old man, not a grand old man’. After he finally closed his office, and to ensure that his claims would not be forgotten, he lodged five hundred boxes of his papers with the archive of the RIBA. Nigel Warburton is not an ...

Catch 28

John Lanchester, 3 March 1988

The Swimming-Pool Library 
by Alan Hollinghurst.
Chatto, 288 pp., £11.95, February 1988, 0 7011 3282 5
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The Beautiful Room is Empty 
by Edmund White.
Picador, 184 pp., £9.95, January 1988, 0 330 30394 5
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... of the book is a matter of detail and specificity, its cleverness has a lot to do with one bold technical stroke, which is summarisable by the fact that there are no women characters in The Swimming-Pool Library. The novel adheres rigidly to Will’s point of view, and that point of view is strictly circumscribed. His absolute immersion in London gay ...

The analyst is always right

Mark Ford: Tessimond and Spencer, 17 November 2011

Collected Poems with Translations from Jacques Prévert 
by A.S.J. Tessimond.
Bloodaxe, 188 pp., £10.95, November 2010, 978 1 85224 857 4
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Complete Poetry, Translations and Selected Prose 
by Bernard Spencer.
Bloodaxe, 351 pp., £15, February 2011, 978 1 85224 891 8
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... I am the echoing rock that sends you back Your own voice grown so bold that with surprise You murmur, ‘Ah, how sensible I am – The plain bluff man, the enemy of sham – How sane, how wise!’ I am the mirror where your image moves, Neat and obedient twin, until one day It moves before you move; and it is you Who have to ...

Degree of Famousness etc

Peter Howarth: Don Paterson, 21 March 2013

Selected Poems 
by Don Paterson.
Faber, 169 pp., £14.99, May 2012, 978 0 571 28178 7
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... or a poster campaign with the dumbest, shortest poem the committee can find, set in 50-point bold’. His T.S. Eliot Lecture that year widened the definition to include chicken-soup anthologisers, Harold Pinter’s righteously angry protest verse, and any poetic therapist who mistakes ‘the jargon of self-help’ for the tough process of writing. By ...

The Lady in the Back Seat

Thomas Jones: Robert Harris’s Alternative Realities, 15 November 2007

The Ghost 
by Robert Harris.
Hutchinson, 310 pp., £18.99, October 2007, 978 0 09 179626 6
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... Bletchley Park to enable the British to regain the upper hand in the cryptographic struggle is not Alan Turing, however, but a neurotic Cambridge mathematician who fancies girls: Tom Jericho’s heart has been broken by a cruel, icy blonde who has mysteriously gone missing from Bletchley. Investigating her disappearance, Jericho also finds time to solve the ...

Reproaches from the Past

Peter Clarke: Gordon Brown, 1 April 2004

The Prudence of Mr Gordon Brown 
by William Keegan.
Wiley, 356 pp., £18.99, October 2003, 0 470 84697 6
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... the ERM was currently splintering the Thatcher government, so a Labour commitment to join looked bold and convincing by contrast. Both reasons, it’s worth noting, were essentially political; they did not address the economic reality that, when Britain did belatedly sign up to the ERM in 1990, it was at an exchange rate of DM2.95 which, within two ...

Positively Spaced Out

Rosemary Hill: ‘The Building of England’, 6 September 2001

The Buildings of England: A Celebration Compiled to Mark 50 Years of the Pevsner Architectural Guides 
edited by Simon Bradley and Bridget Cherry.
Penguin Collectors’ Society, 128 pp., £9.99, July 2001, 0 9527401 3 3
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... uses any term or turn of phrase, that will convey the impression he is after, but though he is bold he is also accurate. When Ernest Proctor’s overblown altar of 1934 in St Mary’s, Penzance is described as ‘smacking a little of the Wurlitzer’, it is not only the cinema organ image that gets the effect: ‘smacking’, with its saucy seaside ...

The Laying on of Hands

Alan Bennett, 7 June 2001

... is first and foremost an audience. And I am the stand-up. I must win them over.’ It was another bold-seeming sentiment that had hit the spot, occasioning some laughter, it’s true, but also much sage nodding, though not, Father Jolliffe had noticed, from Canon Treacher, who was an archdeacon and not enthusiastic about congregations in the first ...

What are we telling the nation?

David Edgar: Thoughts about the BBC, 7 July 2005

Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC 
by Georgina Born.
Vintage, 352 pp., £10.99, August 2005, 0 09 942893 8
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Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a Digital World 
BBC, 135 pp.Show More
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... kept its reputation as a producer-led, oppositional space, not just for Edge of Darkness, but for Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (1981), Dennis Potter’s sexually provocative and formally challenging Singing Detective (1986) and Richard Eyre’s film of Charles Wood’s anti-Falklands Tumbledown (1988). When a newly aggressive ITV, freed from ...

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