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Blame Robert Maxwell

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: How Public Inquiries Go Wrong, 17 March 2016

... Blair/Bush correspondence – it was claimed that disclosure could make future leaders chary of frank discussion – means the inquiry has been limited to ‘gists’, though Chilcot says these will be ‘sufficient to explain our conclusions’. There were further delays because of the need to declassify thousands of documents; this wasn’t completed ...

Mao meets Oakeshott

John Lanchester: Britain’s new class divide, 21 October 2004

Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain 
by Ferdinand Mount.
Short Books, 320 pp., £14.99, September 2004, 1 904095 94 1
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... mark of Victorian debate. Once class simplification was set up, however, something very close to class war did take place. Mount sees this process as being driven by middle-class dislike of the proles. He draws extensively on John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses to evince a widespread contempt for the working classes on the part of their ...

Meringue-utan

Rosemary Hill: Rosamund Lehmann’s Disappointments, 8 August 2002

Rosamond Lehmann 
by Selina Hastings.
Chatto, 476 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 7011 6542 1
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... divorced her way through the interwar years with gayer abandon than most. During one particularly frank sexual discussion at a party she was tapped on the shoulder by Virginia Woolf, who said, somewhat dampeningly, ‘Remember: we won this for you.’ Nearly twenty years younger than Woolf, on the threshold of adolescence in 1914, Lehmann was more ambivalent ...

When it is advisable to put on a fez

Richard Popkin: Adventures of a Messiah, 23 May 2002

The Lost Messiah: In Search of Sabbatai Sevi 
by John Freely.
Viking, 275 pp., £20, September 2001, 0 670 88675 0
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... a secret hand movement the Dönmeh used. He then told us of an explosive rumour that seems to lie close to the surface in modern Turkey, namely, that Kemal Atatürk was a Dönmeh. A few days later, we were in Jerusalem at Gershom Scholem’s 70th-birthday party. When I told him what had happened at my lunch he said he didn’t know any of the people but one ...

Now is your chance

Matthew Kelly: Irish Wartime Neutrality, 5 October 2006

The Emergency: Neutral Ireland 1939-45 
by Brian Girvin.
Macmillan, 385 pp., £25, March 2006, 1 4050 0010 4
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... the Irish and US governments revealed deepening divisions. In Washington to seek military support, Frank Aiken, de Valera’s defence secretary, asked Roosevelt if he was free to say that the US backed Ireland’s stand against foreign aggression. When Roosevelt specified German aggression, Aiken replied: ‘Or British.’ Roosevelt snapped: it was ‘absurd ...

Through Unending Halls

Wolfgang Streeck: Factories, 7 February 2019

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World 
by Joshua Freeman.
Norton, 448 pp., £12.99, March 2019, 978 0 393 35662 5
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... airplane engines and turbines, and the huge workshops with their avant-garde design, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax HQ in Racine, Wisconsin. A question that recurs at every turn in Freeman’s long story is whether workers’ suffering in the early years of industrialisation was really necessary. This debate begins with Adam Smith’s ...

Nuts about the Occult

Richard J. Evans: ‘Hitler’s Monsters’, 2 August 2018

Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich 
by Eric Kurlander.
Yale, 422 pp., £12.99, May 2018, 978 0 300 23454 1
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... of individuals who later had significant roles in the Nazi Party, including Rudolf Hess, Hans Frank and Alfred Rosenberg. After considering in more detail the Nazi Party’s use of demonising supernatural imagery to win over voters, the book moves in its second part to explore the Third Reich leadership’s relationship with magic and the occult and the ...

Oh you darling robot!

Thomas Jones: ‘Klara and the Sun’, 18 March 2021

Klara and the Sun 
by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Faber, 307 pp., £20, March, 978 0 571 36487 9
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... on him by the other characters, who are at once total strangers to him but also appear to be close family members. At last, about two-thirds of the way through the novel, he manages to find somewhere to practise, a ‘little wooden hut’ at the top of a hill with ‘an upright piano of somewhat grubby appearance’. But even here the irresistible ...

Bye-bye, NY

Ange Mlinko: Harry Mathews’s Fever Dream, 18 March 2021

Collected Poems: 1946-2016 
by Harry Mathews.
Sand Paper Press, 288 pp., $28, February 2020, 978 0 9843312 8 4
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... It ran for four issues and included the founders’ work alongside that of Barbara Guest, Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby and others. Locus Solus was like the intersection of New York, Paris and a Surrealist Arcady.Mathews credited Roussel with showing him that prose could be generated under similar constraints to those that apply to poetry, a discovery ...

Why Twice?

Rosemary Hill: Fire at the Mack, 24 October 2024

The Mack: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art 
by Robyne Calvert.
Yale, 208 pp., £35, April, 978 0 300 23985 0
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... tenements in which he grew up, with their high ceilings, bay windows and brightly tiled wally close (central stairwell).The school’s headmaster, Francis Newbery, was also an influence on the eventual design. His teaching methods emphasised that ‘students should be individualised as well as classified … the personality of the student should not be ...

Falling in love with Lucian

Colm Tóibín: Lucian Freud’s Outer Being, 10 October 2019

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922-68 
by William Feaver.
Bloomsbury, 680 pp., £35, September 2019, 978 1 4088 5093 0
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... friend called Jane all his life. ‘I don’t think he had the faintest idea what laundry was,’ Frank Auerbach said. ‘He put it into this basket and it came back from Jane immaculately laundered.’ After he left school, his father took a piece of sculpture – a sandstone horse, almost two feet high, ‘three legs serving convincingly as four’ – that ...

In the Potato Patch

Jenny Turner: Penelope Fitzgerald, 19 December 2013

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life 
by Hermione Lee.
Chatto, 508 pp., £25, November 2013, 978 0 7011 8495 7
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... the quest of her final book.) What other things made up Fitzgerald’s ‘burden’? Well, Frank Kermode was right early on, in this paper (22 November 1979), when he noticed the fascination with water, in its many forms and depredations: damp, flood, rain, drowning, ‘the dead man’s stench of river water’, the ‘long-awaited torrents’ that ...

Brecht’s New Age

Margot Heinemann, 1 March 1984

Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches 
by John Willett.
Methuen, 274 pp., £12.50, February 1984, 0 413 50410 7
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Brecht: A Biography 
by Ronald Hayman.
Weidenfeld, 423 pp., £18.50, September 1983, 0 297 78198 7
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... from diaries and letters on his early relationships with Paula Banholzer (who bore his first son, Frank, killed in the Wehrmacht in 1942) and Marianne Zoff (his first wife, mother of his actress daughter Hanne Hiob) shows him by no means the gay seducer happily loving and leaving them. His attitudes at this stage, not untypical of the sexually-emancipated of ...
... the crisis over the Zimbabwe report, only as a familiar Lonrho ploy. In private conversation with close associates Rowland speaks of Maxwell as ‘that four-to-five’: a version of the rhyming slang for Jew, ‘four-to-two’, which rates Maxwell’s assets at from four to five million. Not at all in Rowland’s league. Let’s look at the sequence of events ...

Self-Deceptions of Empire

David Bromwich: Reinhold Niebuhr, 23 October 2008

The Irony of American History 
by Reinhold Niebuhr.
Chicago, 174 pp., £8.50, June 2008, 978 0 226 58398 3
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... by which I donate my conscious will to a larger and unthinking not-me. The process, indeed, is close to the fictive transfer of properties that we come to know in allegories and in dreams; and there is no doubt, says Niebuhr, that this ‘combination of unselfishness and vicarious selfishness’ is the main element that goes to form the sentiment of ...

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