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Religion, grrrr

Rachel Aviv: The Scientology Mythos, 26 January 2012

The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion 
by Hugh Urban.
Princeton, 268 pp., £19.95, September 2011, 978 0 691 14608 9
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... took the rejection badly. When his followers were arrested for practising medicine without a licence, he complained that the United States made it ‘illegal to heal or cure anything’. He began to reconsider the distinction he’d made between psychology and spiritual practice. In a 1953 newsletter he wrote that the process of uncovering repressed ...

The State with the Prettiest Name

Michael Hofmann: ‘Florida’, 24 May 2018

Florida 
by Lauren Groff.
Heinemann, 275 pp., £14.99, June 2018, 978 1 78515 188 0
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... doesn’t want to use the word stories here, or not always) are sometimes more fictionary (to use Tom Paulin’s word), sometimes less so; the wilder, more strenuous ones are usually the weaker, and end up merely irking the unflapped, flapped-at reader. Read here, in situ, it seems, in patches, an adorably local book. A selfie stick of a book. Our Thomas ...

Diary

Chris Mullin: A report from Westminster, 25 June 2009

... undoubtedly a gap in the market.  The Telegraph reports that I claimed for a black and white TV licence, the subject of much amusement among my colleagues. Today’s tabloids are particularly vicious. Not for them magnanimity in victory. ‘Arise Lord Gorbals’, the front page of the Mail sneers over a story focusing on the size of the Speaker’s ...

The Ostrich Defence

Azadeh Moaveni: Trafficking Antiquities, 5 October 2023

... document with redactions, gaps, errors and inconsistencies: two translations of an Egyptian export licence with conflicting dates, and two versions in Arabic, both missing the signature of the Egyptian antiquities authority and bearing a stamp of ‘A.R. Egypt’ for the Arab Republic of Egypt before it existed (from 1958 until September 1971, Egypt was known ...

On the Salieri Express

John Sutherland, 24 September 1992

Doctor Criminale 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Secker, 343 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 436 20115 1
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The Promise of Light 
by Paul Watkins.
Faber, 217 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 571 16715 2
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The Absolution Game 
by Paul Sayer.
Constable, 204 pp., £13.99, June 1992, 0 09 471460 6
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The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman 
by Louis de Bernières.
Secker, 388 pp., £14.99, August 1992, 0 436 20114 3
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Written on the Body 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Cape, 190 pp., £13.99, September 1992, 0 224 03587 8
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... entirely (the bag lady joke is not so funny as to be indispensable) or drawing on fictional licence and inventing a winner who in no respect (sex, age group, type of novel) could be construed as a slur on Ms Byatt – the jet-lagged Antipodean, for example? Bradbury can mount a number of defences and might well think the matter not worthy of ...

In America’s Blood

Deborah Friedell, 24 September 2020

The NRA: The Unauthorised History 
by Frank Smyth.
Flatiron, 295 pp., $28.99, March 2020, 978 1 250 21028 9
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... NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch said that he shouldn’t have moved his hands to get out his driving licence. ‘I’ve been pulled over while carrying and I had out my permit before the officer got to the car,’ she tweeted. ‘There is a reason they teach this in classes.’ When the police killed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy who was playing with a toy ...

This Concerns Everyone

James Butler: Crisis in Care, 2 March 2023

Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care 
by Madeleine Bunting.
Granta, 325 pp., £9.99, May 2021, 978 1 78278 381 7
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The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? 
by Emma Dowling.
Verso, 248 pp., £9.99, March 2022, 978 1 78663 035 3
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Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet 
by Nancy Fraser.
Verso, 190 pp., £20, September 2022, 978 1 83976 123 2
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... and that it pays tax in the UK. Its current CEO, James Tugendhat, cousin of the Tory politician Tom Tugendhat, says it’s important ‘to be seen as having a transparent structure’, perhaps because ‘we are the only major provider seeking to make local authority care the core of our operating model.’The residential care sector has an annual income of ...

Diary

Perry Anderson: On E.P. Thompson, 21 October 1993

... duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath. I was not alone in failing to see this. A few years earlier, Edward had published a review of Raymond Williams’s Long Revolution in NLR, which was more temperate in tone than his treatment of ...

‘No Bullshit’ Bullshit

Stefan Collini: Christopher Hitchens, Englishman, 23 January 2003

Orwell's Victory 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Allen Lane, 150 pp., £9.99, June 2002, 9780713995848
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... integrity in expressing them, mastery of the relevant sources and a forceful, readable style. Car licence-plates in New Hampshire bear (rather threateningly, it always seems to me, as big SUVs speed by) the state motto ‘Live free or die.’ In this spirit, the maxim on Hitchens’s crest has to be ‘Get it right or die.’ In the early part of his writing ...

I just hate the big guy

Christopher Tayler: Reacher, 4 February 2016

Make Me 
by Lee Child.
Bantam, 425 pp., £20, September 2015, 978 0 593 07388 9
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Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of ‘Make Me’ 
by Andy Martin.
Bantam, 303 pp., £18.99, November 2015, 978 0 593 07663 7
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... of his character as a drifter, with no home, job, dependents, living relatives, car or driving licence. His only possessions are a folding toothbrush – plus, after 9/11, a passport and a bank card – and the clothes he stands up in; every few days he buys a new outfit and throws the old one in a bin. He’s been on the road since 1997, when he left the ...

Light Entertainment

Andrew O’Hagan: Our Paedophile Culture, 8 November 2012

... of the not-permitted. And so, not long before we had Orton and Entertaining Mr Sloane, we had Mr Tom Sloan of BBC Light Entertainment threatening to drop Marty Wilde from the fledgling pop show Six-Five Special on account of his ‘Presley-type belly-swinging’. Fame was a new kind of licence. And presenters at the BBC ...

Joe, Jerry and Bomber Blair

Owen Hatherley: Jonathan Meades, 7 March 2013

Museum without Walls 
by Jonathan Meades.
Unbound, 446 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 908717 18 4
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... Meades list: ‘docks, cranes, tars, locks, heavy industrial plant, gaunt maritime buildings, a licence to distil gin (So’ton and Plymouth only), ozonic breeze, prisons, estuarine reek, gulls built by Supermarine, piercing light’. Meades’s work is so generous, so rich and so obviously contentious that to mount a critique of it seems churlish. No ...

Little Englander Histories

Linda Colley: Little Englandism, 22 July 2010

A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 
by Boyd Hilton.
Oxford, 757 pp., £21, June 2008, 978 0 19 921891 2
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Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1780-1939 
by James Belich.
Oxford, 573 pp., £25, June 2009, 978 0 19 929727 6
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... treatment of more radical and deviant players, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Jeremy Bentham and Tom Paine, is noticeably sharper and less evocative, and this points to the main limitation of his analysis. Any survey of such a crowded period of history has to be selective: but here selectivity and boisterous epigrams result, on occasions, in reducing ...
London Reviews 
edited by Nicholas Spice.
Chatto, 222 pp., £5.95, October 1985, 0 7011 2988 3
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The New Review Anthology 
edited by Ian Hamilton.
Heinemann, 320 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 434 31330 0
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Night and Day 
edited by Christopher Hawtree, by Graham Greene.
Chatto, 277 pp., £12.95, November 1985, 0 07 011296 7
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Lilliput goes to war 
edited by Kaye Webb.
Hutchinson, 288 pp., £10.95, September 1985, 9780091617608
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Penguin New Writing: 1940-1950 
edited by John Lehmann and Roy Fuller.
Penguin, 496 pp., September 1985, 0 14 007484 8
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... mettle rather than up on stilts. Here again, the editor’s personality is decisive. He gives the licence to be quirky. The contributor is encouraged to speak for the paper only in his cogency of argument. Otherwise he speaks for himself. The assumption is that a communal effort can be brought about only by individuals. The individual style is consequently ...

Prussian Blues

Fredric Jameson, 17 October 1996

Ein weites Feld 
by Günter Grass.
Steidl, 784 pp., DM 49.80, August 1995, 3 88243 366 3
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... well find this second section episodic, and something of an indulgence on Grass’s part, his own licence to comment on a variety of topical events, from television culture to the assassination of the Treuhand chief Rohwedder: repetitive as well, since we tend to get everything in multiple forms, recapitulated by Fonty’s own letters on these subjects and ...

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