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Abolish the CIA!

Chalmers Johnson: ‘A classic study of blowback’, 21 October 2004

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to 10 September 2001 
by Steve Coll.
Penguin, 695 pp., $29.95, June 2004, 1 59420 007 6
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... American. William Casey, the CIA’s director from January 1981 to January 1987, was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion, called ‘Maryknoll’, on Long Island. He attended mass daily and urged Christianity on anyone who asked his advice. Once settled as CIA director under Reagan, he began to funnel ...

A Spanish girl is a volcano

John Pemble: Apostles in Gibraltar, 10 September 2015

John Kemble’s Gibraltar Journal: The Spanish Expedition of the Cambridge Apostles, 1830-31 
by Eric Nye.
Macmillan, 416 pp., £100, January 2015, 978 1 137 38446 1
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... the Bengal Army who’d put up most of the cash, hoping for a glamorous alternative to service in India as a grandee in Torrijos’s Spain. He was better treated, though, than Lorca would be. The Spanish government allowed the British consul to recover his body, and later he was reburied, together with Torrijos and the other rebels, in the Plaza de Riego in ...

Do you like him?

Ian Jack: Ken Livingstone, 10 May 2012

You Can’t Say That: Memoirs 
by Ken Livingstone.
Faber, 710 pp., £9.99, April 2012, 978 0 571 28041 4
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... had ever seen, though by then New York was larger than London and the empire had been shorn of India. You might wonder about this. Can it really be that in the early 1950s British children were taught that they lived in ‘the greatest empire the world has ever seen’? (I don’t remember that I was: it was something our parents told us that they had been ...

Attila the Hus

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 4 November 1982

Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896-1933 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 274 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 436 28849 4
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... She was 21 and sometimes described as ‘wild’; her father, Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, fearing what he called her ‘bolshevick’ tendencies, was relieved that she had chosen a reasonably promising young man whose family he knew. Mosley, Robert Cecil reported to Curzon, was ‘not in the first flight’ but had ‘a good future before ...

Champion of Words

John Sturrock, 15 October 1987

Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel 
by Michel Foucault, translated by Charles Ruas.
Athlone, 186 pp., £29.50, April 1987, 0 485 11336 8
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Raymond Roussel: Life, Death and Works. Essays and stories by various hands 
Atlas, 157 pp., £5.50, September 1987, 0 947757 14 7Show More
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... read The Three Musketeers to her. She bought a yacht and cruised, one story had it, all the way to India, where she would only look at the fabled shore through a telescope before ordering the captain to make an about-turn, for Cannes. (Her clothes for the voyage she stored in a coffin.) Either she really was eccentric or those who later reminisced about her ...

Simplicity

Marilyn Butler: What Jane Austen Read, 5 March 1998

Jane Austen: A Life 
by David Nokes.
Fourth Estate, 578 pp., £20, September 1997, 1 85702 419 2
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Jane Austen: A Life 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 341 pp., £20, October 1997, 0 670 86528 1
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... countryside and the great world. Eliza de Feuillide, née Hancock, brings in whiffs of British India and of France in the dying days of the Ancien Régime. Jane’s sailor-brother Captain Frank Austen reports in the Patrick O’Brian style on the high point of his naval career when, off St Domingo on 6 February 1806, his ship Canopus gave a French ...

Keep him as a curiosity

Steven Shapin: Botanic Macaroni, 13 August 2020

The Multifarious Mr Banks: From Botany Bay to Kew, the Natural Historian Who Shaped the World 
by Toby Musgrave.
Yale, 386 pp., £25, April 2020, 978 0 300 22383 5
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... baronetcy after securing the Royal Society presidency; in 1795, the king insisted that he become a knight of the Order of the Bath, the red sash of which he delighted in wearing when taking the Royal Society chair; and in 1797, he entered the inner circle of Crown advisers as a privy councillor.) He left behind a trail of acrimony over his despotic ...

Not Even a Might-Have Been

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Chips’s Adventures, 19 January 2023

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1024 pp., £35, March 2021, 978 1 78633 181 6
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1120 pp., £35, September 2021, 978 1 78633 182 3
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1943-57 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1168 pp., £35, September 2022, 978 1 5291 5172 5
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... gracious … this very good-looking lad, who seems even younger than his 33 years’. Coats was in India, and before long Channon was infatuated with Rattigan. Noël Coward told Channon that the ‘alliance’ was ‘one of the romances of the century’. After ‘our honeymoon’ in Brighton in January 1945, Channon showered Rattigan with gifts. His Diaries ...

Ask Anyone in Canada

Neal Ascherson: Max Beaverbrook’s Mediations, 24 October 2019

Max Beaverbrook: Not Quite a Gentleman 
by Charles Williams.
Biteback, 566 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 1 84954 746 8
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... to the cabinet as ‘a very wicked man … ask anyone in Canada’) but Aitken had been made a knight in the 1911 ‘coronation honours’, and was worth more than $5 million. He had first visited London in 1908 with his new wife, Gladys (‘I hope the experiment will be successful,’ he wrote in his diary on their wedding day). There he was introduced to ...

Puellilia

Pat Rogers, 7 August 1986

Mothers of the Novel: One Hundred Good Women Writers before Jane Austen 
by Dale Spender.
Pandora, 357 pp., £12.95, May 1986, 0 86358 081 5
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Scribbling Sisters 
by Dale Spender and Lynne Spender.
Camden Press, 188 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 948491 00 0
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A Woman of No Character: An Autobiography of Mrs Manley 
by Fidelis Morgan.
Faber, 176 pp., £9.95, June 1986, 0 571 13934 5
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Cecilia 
by Fanny Burney.
Virago, 919 pp., £6.95, May 1986, 0 86068 775 9
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Millenium Hall 
by Sarah Scott.
Virago, 207 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 86068 780 5
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Marriage 
by Susan Ferrier.
Virago, 513 pp., £4.50, February 1986, 0 86068 765 1
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Belinda 
by Maria Edgeworth.
Pandora, 434 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 86358 074 2
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Self-Control 
by Mary Brunton.
Pandora, 437 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 9780863580840
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The Female Quixote: The Adventures of Arabella 
by Charlotte Lennox.
Pandora, 423 pp., £4.95, May 1986, 0 86358 080 7
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... in the documentation of women’s lives’. But is the matter remedied by calling Ellis Cornelia Knight ‘Cornelius’? Or Helen Maria Williams ‘Helena’? Or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ‘Montague’? Or Cecilia ‘Cecelia’? Or Anne Ehrenpreis ‘Ehrenpries’? Or Patricia Köster ‘Koster’? Or Margarette Smith ‘Margaret’? Or Antonia Fraser ...

Does one flare or cling?

Alice Spawls, 5 May 2016

‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
by Robin Muir.
National Portrait Gallery, 304 pp., £40, February 2016, 978 1 85514 561 0
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‘Vogue’ 100: A Century of Style 
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... lead onto the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s as well as a small lightbox room with dayglo scenes by Nick Knight, but one really needs to go all the way in the opposite direction, through the 1980s and some unlikely in-between rooms (including a round-the-wall timeline that ought to be at the start) and then backwards through the 1960s, 1950s, 1940s, 1930s and ...

What’s the point of HS2?

Christian Wolmar, 17 April 2014

... now a chain of shops selling Indian sweets, opened in 1965, catering to the immigrants from India and Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) who had started moving into the Victorian terraces in the area. Their arrival galvanised a district long blighted by the noisy steam trains that thundered in and out of Euston; Drummond Street became the heart of the ...

The Hard Zone

Andrew O’Hagan: At the Republican National Convention, 1 August 2024

... the idea of the future and is obsessed with evil. His parents are ‘legal’ immigrants from India, and his own story of success in making multi-millions has convinced him that everywhere is set fair for brown and black people in modern America. (He fools himself in the same way as every one of the black politicians who were happy to mount the podium for ...

Where on Earth are you?

Frances Stonor Saunders, 3 March 2016

... little thought as one crosses the Meridian of Greenwich.’ Zweig himself travelled from Europe to India and America without ever having possessed or even seen a passport. Come the war, he continues, nationalism emerged to agitate the world … and the first visible phenomenon which this intellectual epidemic of our century brought about was ...

Prejudice Rules

LRB Contributors: After Roe v. Wade, 21 July 2022

... must be helped to be responsible, not encouraged to be irresponsible,’ the Conservative MP Jill Knight (who would later co-author the homophobic Section 28 legislation) said later in the same session.Roe v. Wade required that the pregnant person consult with a ‘responsible doctor’. In Britain, abortion remains unlawful unless two physicians agree that ...

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