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Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat

David Runciman: Thatcher’s Rise, 6 June 2013

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. Vol. I: Not for Turning 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 859 pp., £30, April 2013, 978 0 7139 9282 3
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... Gear, were the only ones among her critics who got her remotely right. They included Chris Patten, John Patten, William Waldegrave and Tristan Garel-Jones, and were soon to be joined by John Major. In the pamphlet they used as an epigraph a line from Macmillan: ‘We have at least the most important thing of all at the head ...

You Are the Product

John Lanchester: It Zucks!, 17 August 2017

The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention Is Harvested and Sold 
by Tim Wu.
Atlantic, 416 pp., £20, January 2017, 978 1 78239 482 2
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Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine 
by Antonio García Martínez.
Ebury, 528 pp., £8.99, June 2017, 978 1 78503 455 8
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Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon have Cornered Culture and What It Means for All of Us 
by Jonathan Taplin.
Macmillan, 320 pp., £18.99, May 2017, 978 1 5098 4769 3
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... generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News and others.’ This doesn’t sound like a problem Facebook will be in any hurry to fix.The fact is that fraudulent content, and stolen content, are rife on Facebook, and the company doesn’t really mind, because it ...

Fat Man

Steven Shapin: Churchill’s Bomb, 26 September 2013

Churchill’s Bomb: A Hidden History of Science, War and Politics 
by Graham Farmelo.
Faber, 554 pp., £25, October 2013, 978 0 571 24978 7
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... with respect to the British Bomb was closely held. The key players were Churchill, Lindemann and John Anderson, a senior minister in the war cabinet. They were in turn dependent on the experts’ constantly changing, often conflicting views as to whether an atomic bomb was possible and, if so, what it would do and how it might be used, how much it would ...

Ranklings

Philip Horne, 30 August 1990

Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters 1900-1915 
edited by Lyall Powers.
Weidenfeld, 412 pp., £25, May 1990, 9780297810605
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... mostly American group made up by herself, Walter Berry, Howard Sturgis, Morton Fullerton, John Hugh Smith, Percy Lubbock and a few other initiates. She emphasises the man’s ‘quality of fun’, and her James is ‘the laughing, chaffing, jubilant yet malicious James’, not ‘the grave personage known to less intimate eyes’. Like the letters of ...

Lying abroad

Fred Halliday, 21 July 1994

Diplomacy 
by Henry Kissinger.
Simon and Schuster, 912 pp., £25, May 1994, 9780671659912
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True Brits: Inside the Foreign Office 
by Ruth Dudley Edwards.
BBC, 256 pp., £16.99, April 1994, 0 563 36955 8
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Mandarin: The Diaries of Nicholas Henderson 
by Nicholas Henderson.
Weidenfeld, 517 pp., £20, May 1994, 0 297 81433 8
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... confused policy on the former Yugoslavia and its pseudo-populist sneering about ‘abroad’ (take John Major’s especially silly remark that he would not choose to spend a weekend in any of the countries he has visited over the past few years – even though he spends summer holidays in Portugal). An additional element of seediness came with the revelations ...

That’s America

Stephen Greenblatt, 29 September 1988

‘Ronald Reagan’, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology 
by Michael Rogin.
California, 366 pp., £19.95, April 1987, 0 520 05937 9
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... Convention was a glamorous performance. But at one point, trying to reproach the Democrats with John Adams’s phrase ‘Facts are stubborn things,’ he slipped and declared instead: ‘Facts are stupid things.’ At the moment he wished to invoke an intransigent, incontrovertible reality which would supposedly confound his enemies and bear out the ...

Rogue’s Paradise

R.W. Johnson: The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova, 16 July 1998

The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War 
by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova.
Human and Rousseau/Combined Book Services, 287 pp., £17.99, June 1998, 0 7981 3804 1
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... style’, and whole new lines of children’s toys appeared glor-ifying the Boers and ridiculing John Bull. Even the pacifist Tolstoy was caught up in the wild enthusiasm for the war: ‘You know what point I’ve reached? Opening a paper every morning I passionately wish to read that the Boers have beaten the British.’ He knew that he ‘should not ...

Diary

Rupert Wilkinson: Harvard '61, 20 November 1986

... puzzling about this, I received a phone call from Tony Lanyi, one-time Harvard room-mate, now a Washington economist, and a close friend. He had called to persuade me to go, if that was needed. He said he had just been back to a class reunion at his high school in Oberlin, Ohio. Working-class and college graduate, it had been quite a mix, though he guessed ...

Ethnic Cleansers

Stephen Smith, 8 October 1992

Four Hours in My Lai: A War Crime and its Aftermath 
by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim.
Viking, 430 pp., £17.99, May 1992, 0 670 83233 2
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Tiger Balm: Travels in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia 
by Lucretia Stewart.
Chatto, 261 pp., £10.99, June 1992, 0 7011 3892 0
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... to perhaps 55,000 Americans. The economy was crippled, and the years of an embargo imposed by Washington have hamstrung recovery. An official of the Foreign Ministry told me in Hanoi last year: ‘We have changed our attitude. The Americans dropped so many bombs – as we say, enough for everyone to have a crater on each shoulder. But now we want ...

Booze and Fags

Christopher Hitchens, 12 March 1992

Tobacco: A History 
by V.G. Kiernan.
Radius, 249 pp., £18.99, December 1991, 0 09 174216 1
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The Faber Book of Drink, Drinkers and Drinking 
edited by Simon Rae.
Faber, 554 pp., £15.99, November 1991, 0 571 16229 0
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... telephoned by President Kennedy and asked to calculate how many Cuban cigars there were in all of Washington. He replied that he didn’t know, but could discover how many cigar stores there were. ‘Well, go to all of them, Pierre, and buy every Havana they’ve got.’ The mystified underling completed his task, and only learned its meaning later that ...

Jobs and Sprees and Sorrows

William Fiennes, 16 April 1998

Joe Gould's Secret 
by Joseph Mitchell.
Cape, 200 pp., £9.99, October 1997, 0 224 05107 5
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... of papers and a bag of the breadcrumbs with which he feeds a particular flock of pigeons in Washington Square. He knows the birds by name: Big Bosom, Lady Astor, St John the Baptist, Polly Adler, Fiorello. He wanders from saloon to saloon cadging beers, sandwiches and cash. Most important, he adds to his ...

Hopscotch on a Mondrian

Bridget Alsdorf: Florine Stettheimer’s Wit, 3 November 2022

Florine Stettheimer: A Biography 
by Barbara Bloemink.
Hirmer, 435 pp., £25, January, 978 3 7774 3834 4
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... complete set of original furnishings, crystal flowers, cellophane curtains and a shrine to George Washington (‘He is the only man I collect’). Like much of her work, her interior design was grand in concept and technically complex but didn’t take itself too seriously. She conjured a European aristocratic past out of flashy, ersatz materials and ...

A Skeleton My Cat

Norma Clarke: ‘Poor Goldsmith’, 21 February 2019

The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith 
edited by Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy.
Cambridge, 232 pp., £64.99, July 2018, 978 1 107 09353 9
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... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly ...

Just Had To

R.W. Johnson: LBJ, 20 March 2003

The Years of Lyndon Johnson. Vol III: Master of the Senate 
by Robert A. Caro.
Cape, 1102 pp., £30, August 2002, 0 394 52836 0
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... awe at the force of nature they served. He was struck by the fact that the pinnacles of power in Washington were occupied by old and often lonely men: the single, childless House Speaker, Sam Rayburn (Texas); many of the old Southern bulls who ruled the Senate, especially Richard Russell (Georgia), their unchallenged chief; even the President. Eleanor ...

Neo-Catastrophism

Eric Klinenberg: Sinful Cities?, 9 October 2003

The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea 
by Thomas Bender.
New Press, 287 pp., $30, September 2002, 1 56584 736 9
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Dead Cities: and Other Tales 
by Mike Davis.
New Press, 448 pp., $16.95, October 2003, 1 56584 844 6
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... generations of artists, architects and scholars have represented the city. Bender begins in Washington Square, reminding us that the vibrant public park of today’s Greenwich Village ‘was born in death’, serving as a potter’s field for the indigent and criminal classes between the cholera epidemic of 1798 and 1828, when the Square officially ...

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