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I blame the British

Charles Glass: A report from Lake Dokan, 17 April 2003

... remain so bitter. The United States abandoned the South to its fate in 1991, while General Norman Schwarzkopf was only miles away. Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam’s Reinhard Heydrich, oversaw the ruin of the rebellious Shiites’ homes and the torture of their children. Unlike the Kurds, the southern Shiites have remained under Saddam’s rule since ...

Coldbath Fields

Simon Bradley: In Praise of Peabody, 21 June 2007

London in the 19th Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’ 
by Jerry White.
Cape, 624 pp., £20, January 2007, 978 0 224 06272 5
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... Bodley, were on the Victoria Embankment, where they were joined by New Scotland Yard, designed by Norman Shaw. Both buildings were masterpieces of the red-brick, post-Gothic styles generally grouped under the label Queen Anne, which White identifies as the predominant expression of up-to-date London after 1870. Meanwhile, the culture, morals, living standards ...

The Party in Government

Conor Gearty, 9 March 1995

... soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious an advocate of anti-German feeling; and Mrs Edwina Currie (‘most of the ...

Rapture in Southend

Stefan Collini: H.G. Wells’s​ Egotism, 27 January 2022

The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 256 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 0 241 23997 1
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... made him famous. He quickly came to command large advances. Here’s a sample – taken from Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie’s Life of H.G. Wells: The Time Traveller (1973) – of his subsequent dealings with publishers, in this case from 1899 to 1901: ‘For When the Sleeper Wakes he had £700 for the serial rights and £500 on account from Harper for the ...

How to Be Tudor

Hilary Mantel: Can a King Have Friends?, 17 March 2016

Charles Brandon: Henry VIII’s Closest Friend 
by Steven Gunn.
Amberley, 304 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 1 4456 4184 3
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... waned but he saw out five of Henry’s queens and any number of ministers and favourites. In Mary Rose, his book about Brandon’s third wife, David Loades says: ‘He was present everywhere, but it is hard to pinpoint what he actually did.’ Throughout his career Charles accumulated grand-sounding titles, which confused outsiders into overestimating his ...

Flickering Star

Robert Crawford: Iain Crichton Smith, 21 January 1999

The Leaf and the Marble 
by Iain Crichton Smith.
Carcanet, 80 pp., £6.95, October 1998, 1 85754 400 5
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... gives us a picture of the world he came from. His deployment of a fishing-boat name, The Golden Rose, suggests a milieu with its own sense of splendour, offsetting rigid Presbyterianism. The poem ends with the beauty of ‘A moon/hard and high/above a marsh.’ This combination of absurdity, sparkle, implied hurt and grace was characteristic of Iain ...

Short Cuts

Ferdinand Mount: Untilled Fields, 1 July 2021

... and binding machinery that solved the nagging labour shortage in the Midwest. Grain imports rose from only 2 per cent of Britain’s total supply in the 1830s to 45 per cent in the 1880s (65 per cent for wheat) and went on rising remorselessly. Already by 1900, wheatfields covered only half the acreage of 1872. The First World War and German U-boats ...

Smiles Better

Andrew O’Hagan: Glasgow v. Edinburgh, 23 May 2013

On Glasgow and Edinburgh 
by Robert Crawford.
Harvard, 345 pp., £20, February 2013, 978 0 674 04888 1
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... love cities the way Frank O’Hara loved New York. Crawford, like his nearest literary forebear Norman MacCaig, loves places both rural and urban: in his work, he can throw his voice ‘deep down the larynx of Glen Esk’, and he can marry Iona, or bring the reader into close contact with his ‘Inner Glasgow’, a place of abolished pit bings and empty ...

His Generation

Keith Gessen: A Sad Old Literary Man, 19 June 2008

Alfred Kazin: A Biography 
by Richard Cook.
Yale, 452 pp., £25, March 2008, 978 0 300 11505 5
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... walked around for days exhilarated by the change in the literary weather.’ He was encouraging of Norman Mailer without puffing him up, and he was also worried for him: ‘Mailer’s performance here’ – in Advertisements for Myself – ‘reminds me of the brilliant talker who impresses the hell out of you at a cocktail party but who, when he turns his ...

A Company of Merchants

Jamie Martin: The Bank of England, 24 January 2019

Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694-2013 
by David Kynaston.
Bloomsbury, 879 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 1 4088 6856 0
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... would bring fewer bills to cash, since they would be worth less. In this way, as discount rates rose, credit got tighter, and less money would be put into the economy. This would cause prices to fall, making local goods cheaper to foreign buyers and the cost of foreign goods more expensive. Again, exports would rise, imports would fall, and gold would flow ...

A Little Holiday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Ben Hecht’s Cause, 23 September 2021

A Child of the Century 
by Ben Hecht.
Yale, 654 pp., £16, April 2020, 978 0 300 25179 1
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Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures 
by Adina Hoffman.
Yale, 245 pp., £10.99, April 2020, 978 0 300 25181 4
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... Shima’s House of All Nations. Reliable newspapermen had kept the score.’ Maybe so, although Norman Mailer said that Hecht was ‘never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose’. In her new biography, Adina Hoffman claims he was ‘as voracious for words as he was for girls – which was saying a very great deal’. In ...

A Lazarus beside Me

Avies Platt: An Encounter with Yeats, 27 August 2015

... persons. The president was Dr – or, as he prefers, for he is proud of being a surgeon – Mr Norman Haire. Avies Platt Norman Haire, even to progressives, is an extraordinary, I might even say an incalculable being. He considered himself, and probably was, the only really qualified, practising sexologist in ...

Only More So

Rosemary Hill: 1950s Women, 19 December 2013

Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties 
by Rachel Cooke.
Virago, 368 pp., £18.99, October 2013, 978 1 84408 740 2
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... 16 respectively their mother took them with her on a trip to Italy, following in the footsteps of Norman Douglas and accompanied by her admirer and mentor Irving Davis. When Davis’s stepdaughter joined them she objected to the children’s presence and so unworried was Gray about them that she gave them £20 and told them to hitchhike back to London. It ...

Soldier, Saint

Stuart Airlie, 19 February 1987

William Marshal: The Flower of Chivalry 
by Georges Duby, translated by Richard Howard.
Faber, 156 pp., £9.95, August 1986, 0 571 13745 8
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Thomas Becket 
by Frank Barlow.
Weidenfeld, 334 pp., £14.95, July 1986, 0 297 78908 2
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... and therefore could not expect to inherit, made a name and a living by his knightly prowess. He rose in the service of the Angevin kings and died in 1219 as Regent of England. His career spans the history of the Angevin Empire and can be used to cast light on its political history. Indeed it was so used by Sidney Painter in his fine William Marshal ...

Walking among ghosts

Paul Fussell, 18 September 1980

The Private Diaries of Sir H. Rider Haggard, 1914-1925 
edited by D.S. Higgins.
Cassell, 299 pp., £14.95, May 1980, 0 304 30611 8
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... facts which hitherto it has been the fashion to ignore ... How often have I been vituperated by rose-water critics because I have written of fighting and tried to inculcate elementary lessons, such as that it is a man’s duty to defend his country, and that only those who are prepared for war can protect themselves and such as are dear to ...

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