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Gloomy Pageant

Jeremy Harding: Britain Comma Now, 31 July 2014

Mammon’s Kingdom: An Essay on Britain, Now 
by David Marquand.
Allen Lane, 288 pp., £20, May 2014, 978 1 84614 672 5
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... last it was a very good show. No trace here of the Rosamund Tea Rooms in The Slaves of Solitude, Patrick Hamilton’s pitiless study of wartime Britain set in a provincial boarding house; no notion either that the 1945 election was anything but a unanimous call to extend the spirit of wartime solidarity, even though a fair number of the country’s ruling ...

The Coldest Place on Earth

Liam McIlvanney: Colm Tóibín’s ‘Brooklyn’, 25 June 2009

Brooklyn 
by Colm Tóibín.
Viking, 252 pp., £17.99, April 2009, 978 0 670 91812 6
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... events. In this sense, his new novel’s title carries the same air of knowing overstatement as Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Epic’. It may be that Tóibín’s most significant gift is a very basic and mysterious one: he creates fictional worlds in which readers find it easy to believe. The Spanish mountain village in The South, the Wexford coastal town in The ...

Diary

Adam Reiss: On a Dawn Raid, 18 November 2010

... would I mind, me name is Paddy.”’ Jim delivers this line in an oirish accent. ‘His name was Patrick,’ he explains, ‘and do you know what?’ Silence. ‘I had to fill out a form saying that I didn’t mind being called Tubby. True. It’s political correctness gone fucking mad.’ The team musters a laugh. Someone tries to move things on with a joke ...

We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go

Mohamad Bazzi: Bashar al-Assad, 2 June 2011

... line one after another, signing separate agreements with Israel out of weakness. As the journalist Patrick Seale writes in his biography of the Syrian leader, Assad: The Struggle for the Middle East, Assad had always been a patient man, able to take the long view in conflicts with Arab rivals and in the contest with Israel. Believing that time was on the ...

Toolkit for Tinkerers

Colin Burrow: The Sonnet, 24 June 2010

The Art of the Sonnet 
by Stephanie Burt and David Mikics.
Harvard, 451 pp., £25.95, May 2010, 978 0 674 04814 0
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... sonnetish trick of describing a small occasion in a way that suggests an obscured larger history. Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘Epic’ turns a boundary dispute between Irish farmers into a Homeric encounter. Geoffrey Hill, the modern master of the sonnet as vehicle for embedded history, reflects on the idea of England in one of the sonnets from ‘An Apology for ...

Rogering in Merryland

Thomas Keymer: The Unspeakable Edmund Curll, 13 December 2007

Edmund Curll, Bookseller 
by Paul Baines and Pat Rogers.
Oxford, 388 pp., £30, January 2007, 978 0 19 927898 5
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... began when one of Curll’s hackney authors, working his way through a geography textbook by Patrick Gordon, chanced on an inadvertent double entendre in Gordon’s survey of the Netherlands: ‘viz. “the Country lying very low, its Soil is naturally very wet and fenny.” Ha! said he, the same may be said of a **** as well as of Holland; this Whim ...

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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... daughter, Sally, died suddenly of polio, in Java, where she had been living with her husband, Patrick Kavanagh. Just as Lehmann had at first faced the loss of Day-Lewis with disbelief, so she refused to accept Sally’s death, taking refuge this time in spiritualism. She became convinced that she was regularly in contact with her daughter. Her friend and ...

A Place for Hype

Edward Tenner: Old Technology, 10 May 2007

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 
by David Edgerton.
Profile, 270 pp., £18.99, January 2007, 978 1 86197 296 5
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... usually dated from 1871 to 1914, originated in 1915 with the Scottish biologist and planner Patrick Geddes, was popularised by David Landes in The Unbound Prometheus in 1965, and was affirmed most recently, though with a different starting date, by Vaclav Smil.†) Highly developed craft skills, rapid growth in scientific and medical knowledge, and mass ...

Agent Bait

Christopher Tayler: Nell Zink, 2 March 2017

Nicotine 
by Nell Zink.
Fourth Estate, 288 pp., £14.99, October 2016, 978 0 00 817917 5
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Private Novelist 
by Nell Zink.
Ecco, 336 pp., $15.99, October 2016, 978 0 06 245830 8
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... Mystery surrounds the fate of Norm’s first wife, the mother of Penny’s older half-brothers – Patrick, a gentle semi-dropout, and Matt, an angry waste-disposal entrepreneur who’s projected, from the get-go, as a sexually threatening figure. He’s first seen, in a flashback, forcefully bundling the adolescent Penny into her bed, brushing her thigh with ...

Strawberries in December

Paul Laity: She Radicals, 30 March 2017

Rebel Crossings: New Women, Free Lovers and Radicals in Britain and the United States 
by Sheila Rowbotham.
Verso, 512 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 1 78478 588 8
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... he’d slept with the wife of one of his professors. He was also an acolyte of the sociologist Patrick Geddes, who had just published The Evolution of Sex, which served as an ‘ethical endorsement of desire’ and defended the use of contraception. Daniell, whom Rowbotham variously describes as brilliant, imperious and quivering with ‘excessive ...

Beyond the Ballot Box

Tim Barker: Occupy and Bernie, 8 September 2016

Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt 
by Sarah Jaffe.
Nation, 352 pp., £20, August 2016, 978 1 56858 536 9
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... in Seattle in 1999. In 2000, protesters injured 23 police officers at the funeral in Brooklyn of Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed Haitian-American killed by an undercover cop. Were these anticipations of the current moment? Is it different this time around? Leftists once took comfort in the idea that every generation of radicals is doomed to fail, except the ...

I don’t even get bananas

Madeleine Schwartz: Christina Stead, 2 November 2017

The Man Who Loved Children 
by Christina Stead.
Apollo, 528 pp., £10, April 2016, 978 1 78497 148 9
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Letty Fox: Her Luck 
by Christina Stead.
Apollo, 592 pp., £14, May 2017, 978 1 78669 139 2
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... a knack for arousing hostility’, according to her biographer Hazel Rowley. Rowley describes Patrick White inviting Stead to lunch. White had championed her in her old age, loudly praised her work and supported her with cash transfers masked as prizes. Stead, at this point a heavy drinker, ‘arrived in a taxi, with a bag of empty bottles which she asked ...

Name the days

Marina Warner: Holy Spirits, 4 February 2021

Angels & Saints 
by Eliot Weinberger.
Norton, 159 pp., £21.99, September 2020, 978 0 8112 2986 9
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... of those angels – both as a cognisant individual and a celestial radio. Rilke goes on to ask, in Patrick Bridgwater’s translation:Oh, to whom can we thenturn in our need? Not to angels or men,and the knowing animals knowwe are not very securely at homein our interpreted world.Weinberger has made an infidel’s Book of Hours in an attempt to reinterpret a ...

Diary

Luke de Noronha: At the Deportation Tribunal, 19 January 2023

... used to criminalise young black men. In a study published in 2016, the criminologists Patrick Williams and Becky Clarke wrote that while only a fraction of ‘serious youth violence’ offences in London and Manchester were committed by black people (27 per cent and 6 per cent respectively), most of those on the gang matrices in both cities were ...

Ghosting

Hal Foster: Dead to the World, 29 July 2021

Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons 
by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Zone, 320 pp., £28, April 2021, 978 1 942130 47 5
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... of me, even as I might have been.’ My favourite in this neo-Gothic genre is ‘The Smell’ by Patrick McGrath, whose first-person hero is haunted by a stench that is intimate but unlocatable (a Lacanian would call it ‘extimate’). The last lines read: ‘For I was indeed the source, I the smell, I the thing that dripped and stank … like a dirty cork ...

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