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Weirdo Possible Genius Child

Daniel Soar: Max Porter, 23 May 2019

Lanny 
by Max Porter.
Faber, 213 pp., £12.99, March 2019, 978 0 571 34028 6
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... of his lovely wife, remembering all the things he’ll never now do (‘And I will never shop for green Virago Classics for her birthday’). But they survive, thanks in part to the intervention of Crow, a figure or device which functions much like Toothwort in Lanny, feeding off and seeking out the extremes of emotion. ‘I care, deeply,’ Crow says, having ...

Loners Inc

Daniel Soar: Man versus Machine, 3 April 2003

Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion 
by Feng-hsiung Hsu.
Princeton, 300 pp., £19.95, November 2002, 0 691 09065 3
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... wrong, you’re facing more than just your opponent. In a match against Korchnoi, Spassky wore a green eyeshade and sat at a distance from the table in order to thwart Korchnoi’s mind-bending rays. During the Reykjavik match, the Russians dismantled Spassky’s chair to find out if it had been tampered with by the Americans. In chess mythology, the ...

The Ballad of Andy and Rebekah

Martin Hickman: The Phone Hackers, 17 July 2014

... 2003: Andy – one of our royal policemen (St James’s Palace) has obtained the brand new Green Book, the telephone directory with all the phone numbers of the royal family and their household staff. Incredibly useful … The standard price is £1000. So far so good. But I had a heck of a time getting cash creds signed off by Stuart [Kuttner] earlier ...

Israel’s Putinisation

Adam Shatz: Israel’s Putinisation, 18 February 2016

... long as it did, liberals in Tel Aviv could tell themselves that things weren’t so bad behind the Green Line, the border between Israel and the territory it captured in the 1967 war. Indeed, the resilience of Israel’s democratic institutions helped sustain the illusion that the Green Line was still a frontier, even as it ...

Defoe or the Devil

Pat Rogers, 2 March 1989

The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe 
by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens.
Yale, 210 pp., £20, February 1988, 0 300 04119 5
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The ‘Tatler’: Vols I-III 
edited by Donald Bond.
Oxford, 590 pp., £60, July 1987, 0 19 818614 2
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The ‘Spectator’: Vols I-V 
edited by Donald Bond.
Oxford, 512 pp., £55, October 1987, 9780198186106
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... reproachful, very English in its good-humoured and long-suffering manner, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe is in more ways than one a caution. The cautionary tale it tells concerns the unplanned growth of the canon of Defoe’s works, which has sprawled from a hundred items to something like six times that figure in the last two centuries. P.N. Furbank ...

Just like Rupert Brooke

Tessa Hadley: 1960s Oxford, 5 April 2012

The Horseman’s Word: A Memoir 
by Roger Garfitt.
Cape, 378 pp., £18.99, April 2011, 978 0 224 08986 9
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... inevitable as if they reach back into the ages. Novels bored him – ‘anything to lift me out of Daniel Deronda’ – and he restored himself by dipping into Agenda, George Barker. Studying poetry spilled over naturally into writing it: Garfitt went to informal workshops with John Wain and Peter Levi, heard Ted Hughes read at the Poetry Society. Coghill ...

Diary

D.A.N. Jones: In Baghdad , 5 July 1984

... the deaths of Iraqi soldiers in their war against Iran, and I was escorted by smart Arabs in olive-green uniforms, much like the ‘jungle green’ I wore, thirty years ago, as a National Serviceman dropping in on Aden and Port Said, on the way to the New Territories of China. This state occasion was alarming to me. I had ...

Diary

Ronan Bennett: Being Irish in New York, 6 April 1995

... a Saturday night’. I assumed this meant the place would be teeming with Irish people, hearty and green, enjoying a good night out. A vision leapt unbidden to mind, embarrassing in its insistence and sentimentality, of a prelapsarian Ireland, the Ireland of The Quiet Man, of fresh-faced cailins and freckle-faced lads, soft brogues, mischievous ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: At Bluewater, 3 January 2002

... anticipating more of the same. Customs paranoia. Worries about having left your passport, tickets, green forms, in the kitchen drawer. By instinct, we set off in search of duty-frees. It’s not England and it’s not France; it’s more like the US without the genetically modified mall addicts, the mutated burger herds. We don’t do things on that scale ...

The Hemingway Crush

Theo Tait: Kevin Powers, 3 January 2013

The Yellow Birds 
by Kevin Powers.
Sceptre, 230 pp., £14.99, September 2012, 978 1 4447 5612 8
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... ground up there. Gets real fucking heated sometimes’). He has a smaller, younger comrade, Daniel Murphy – Murph. Their sergeant, Sterling, is a semi-deranged martinet who excels in ‘death and brutality and domination’. We later learn that, during training, Sterling has identified Murph as someone in need of protection: ‘All right, little ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2014, 8 January 2015

... as an experiment I tried some yellow stain on a small patch and this turned the wall a vibrant green, too strong I’m sure for many people but for me ideal, so that’s how I did the whole room. The study next door I did differently using water-based stains and as the walls here were lime plaster too I painted them in a mixture of umber and orange, yellow ...

Ecological Leninism

Adam Tooze: Drill, baby, drill, 18 November 2021

... politics, the rhetoric of war and wartime mobilisation is commonplace. American advocates of the Green New Deal called for a repeat of the staggering industrial production achieved during the Second World War. In the UK, memories of the postwar welfare state persist. There is talk of the Marshall Plan.But isn’t this all rather too convenient? A ‘good ...

Call a kid a zebra

Daniel Smith: On the Spectrum, 19 May 2016

In a Different Key: The Story of Autism 
by John Donvan and Caren Zucker.
Allen Lane, 670 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 1 84614 566 7
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NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter about People Who Think Differently 
by Steve Silberman.
Allen and Unwin, 534 pp., £9.99, February 2016, 978 1 76011 364 3
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... they were open to social contact. A red badge meant: ‘Nobody should try to interact with me.’ Green meant: ‘I want to interact but am having trouble initiating, so please initiate an interaction with me.’ As a result of the prominence given to the Autism Wars, it took a long time for the autism-rights message to move from the fringes to the ...

Uplift

Nicholas Canny, 24 May 1990

The Emancipist: Daniel O’Connell, 1830-1847 
by Oliver Mac Donagh.
Weidenfeld, 372 pp., £20, October 1989, 0 297 79637 2
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... A full-scale biography of Daniel O’Connell deserves close attention, if only because the subject was such a colossus in his own time. This particular biography calls for even greater respect because its author, Oliver Mac Donagh, has established himself as the most incisive and (with the late F.S.L. Lyons) the most prolific Irish-born historian of his generation ...

‘I was such a lovely girl’

Barbara Newman: The Songs of the Medieval Troubadours, 25 May 2006

Lark in the Morning: The Verses of the Troubadours 
translated by Ezra Pound, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Kehew, edited by Robert Kehew.
Chicago, 280 pp., £35, May 2005, 0 226 42933 4
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Medieval Lyric: Middle English Lyrics, Ballads and Carols 
edited by John Hirsh.
Blackwell, 220 pp., £17.99, August 2004, 1 4051 1482 7
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An Anthology of Ancient and Medieval Woman’s Song 
edited by Anne Klinck.
Palgrave, 208 pp., £19.99, May 2004, 9781403963109
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... be true and clear, When I finally have filed them. Love glosses and gilds them . . . Arnaut Daniel, translated by Ezra Pound The history of culture affords few absolute beginnings, but the temptation to posit them can be irresistible. The notion that there might have been a first vernacular love song is counterintuitive, however: how could there ever ...

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