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So-so Skinny Latte

James Francken: Giles Foden’s Zanzibar, 19 September 2002

Zanzibar 
by Giles Foden.
Faber, 389 pp., £12.99, September 2002, 0 571 20512 7
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... returns to her job at the Embassy. A crisis gathers after the bombing, clues are discovered and Jack Queller, a scapegrace CIA agent, is put on the scent. Queller was a big player way back when, ‘the guy who trained bin Laden’ and supplied his mujahids with missiles. After the Russian retreat from Afghanistan, bin Laden betrayed Queller, putting a ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Ronnie Kray bows out, 8 June 1995

... a Cockney mum and never harm one hair of a dog’s head. Even wrong ’uns like Cornell and Jack McVitie didn’t go that far. They cheated, popped pills, blasted pub ceilings, did damage for cash, but they loved their families and patted Alsatians for luck. They were cursed for another reason entirely: they cost the Twins their lives. ‘It’s because ...

A Swap for Zanzibar

Neal Ascherson: The Unusual History of Heligoland, 17 August 2017

Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea 
by Jan Rüger.
Oxford, 370 pp., £25, January 2017, 978 0 19 967246 2
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... it back, and – the Danes and Prussians making no great fuss – they kept it.Under the Union Jack, the colonial governors tolerated and even encouraged German tourism. Hotels and restaurants appeared, and soon a Spielbank gambling casino (the Colonial Office strongly disapproved, but successive governors pleaded that it was something German visitors ...

Diary

Ben Anderson: In Afghanistan, 3 January 2008

... larger unit of the fledgling ANA. Sitting around a wooden table, Mac, Shadders, Dave Wilkinson and Jack Mizon described how much of an ask that is. They started politely and diplomatically by describing the ANA as ‘below average’ but were encouraged by the general laughter to give me the whole story. By the time they had finished I had an image of the ANA ...

Having Fun

David Coward: Alexandre Dumas, 17 April 2003

Viva Garibaldi! Une Odyssée en 1860 
by Alexandre Dumas.
Fayard, 610 pp., €23, February 2002, 2 213 61230 7
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... and the public was finding new gods to worship. In 1836, two Paris dailies halved their cover price by accepting advertisements. Newspaper proprietors then discovered that running novels in instalments boosted circulation and that the words ‘To be continued’ were an infallible recipe for brand loyalty. The roman feuilleton offered huge rewards to ...

Like a boll weevil to a cotton bud

A. Craig Copetas, 18 November 1993

New York Days 
by Willie Morris.
Little, Brown, 400 pp., £19.45, September 1993, 0 316 58421 5
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... just how those dreams had been deferred. Yet tonight the cemetery of hope and idealism is empty. Jack Kennedy is alive. Martin Luther King is alive. Bobby Kennedy is alive. James Baldwin is alive. Janis Joplin is alive. Jack Kerouac is alive. Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim ...

A Tall Stranger in Hoxton

John Bossy, 3 July 1997

The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605 
by Antonia Fraser.
Weidenfeld, 347 pp., £20, August 1996, 9780297813484
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... Strand, the lodgings of his cousin and the disciple, Thomas Wintour. Three other men were invited: Jack Wright, a swordsman friend of Catesby’s; Thomas Percy, Wright’s brother-in-law and man of business to his kinsman, the magnate and Councillor the Earl of Northumberland; and Guido Fawkes, a phlegmatic and reliable soldier brought over from Catholic ...

Diary

Frank Kermode: American Books, 1 April 1983

... is likely to be badly printed on ephemeral paper, with no usable margins, at maybe ten times the price you would have paid in the Sixties. Publishers blame the cost of paper and warehousing, and the decline of the reading public. The public blames the publishers for selling out to profit-hungry conglomerates. Bookshops disappear, and the range of titles in ...

Pinhookers and Pets

Jackson Lears: Inventing the Non-Smoker, 18 February 2021

The Cigarette: A Political History 
by Sarah Milov.
Harvard, 395 pp., £28.95, October 2019, 978 0 674 24121 3
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... approved FDR’s revised version of the AAA. It allowed farmers to vote in an annual referendum on price supports, which would maintain a minimum price for tobacco. They responded by voting against the subsidy programme and returning to overproduction – until demand dived the following year, when the start of the Second ...

Nora Barnacle: Pictor Ignotus

Sean O’Faolain, 2 August 1984

... growl ‘Basilisks!’ He has seen changes and revolutions, castles falling, dunghills rising, Jack as good as his master. In private how bitterly he mocks them, shivering slaves who always finish up their gossipy tales with a wheedling ‘Mind you, I said nothing!’ Not that anybody would ever be so tactless as to press him about some gossip that he has ...

Seventeen Million Words

Richard Poirier, 7 November 1985

The Inman Diary: A Public and Private Confession 
edited by Daniel Aaron.
Harvard, 1661 pp., £35.95, March 1986, 0 674 45445 6
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... On 5 December 1963, the day Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, a man in Boston named Arthur Inman, having made several earlier attempts on his own life, managed to put a bullet through his head. A variety of chronic ailments and complaints had made him an invalid for nearly all of his 68 years, and except for brief excursions in his ancient chauffeur-driven Cadillac, he had since 1919 confined himself to an apartment building in downtown Boston named Garrison Hall ...

England’s End

Peter Campbell, 7 June 1984

English Journey 
by J.B. Priestley.
Heinemann, 320 pp., £12.95, March 1984, 0 434 60371 6
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English Journey, or The Road to Milton Keynes 
by Beryl Bainbridge.
Duckworth/BBC, 158 pp., £7.95, March 1984, 0 563 20299 8
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Crisis and Conservation: Conflict in the British Countryside 
by Charlie Pye-Smith and Chris Rose.
Penguin, 213 pp., £3.95, March 1984, 0 14 022437 8
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Invisible Country: A Journey through Scotland 
by James Campbell.
Weidenfeld, 164 pp., £8.95, April 1984, 0 297 78371 8
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Literary Britain 
by Bill Brandt.
Victoria and Albert Museum in association with Hurtwood Press, 184 pp., £8.95, March 1984, 0 905209 66 4
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... the Sunday papers. These novelists make comments which only need to have ‘Beryl mused’ or ‘Jack protested’ tacked on here and there to make the narrators products of their own imaginations. ‘Whoever said that England can’t produce enough food for her own consumption? All the way to Birmingham the land was heavy with apple orchards and fields of ...

The analyst is always right

Mark Ford: Tessimond and Spencer, 17 November 2011

Collected Poems with Translations from Jacques Prévert 
by A.S.J. Tessimond.
Bloodaxe, 188 pp., £10.95, November 2010, 978 1 85224 857 4
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Complete Poetry, Translations and Selected Prose 
by Bernard Spencer.
Bloodaxe, 351 pp., £15, February 2011, 978 1 85224 891 8
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... When he was 23, A.S.J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John, Jack to his family, but known as John in later life) wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, If you were in the least familiar with my work you wd ...

Wholly Allergic

Lidija Haas: Georgette Heyer, 30 August 2012

Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller 
by Jennifer Kloester.
Heinemann, 448 pp., £20, October 2011, 978 0 434 02071 3
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... and when one of them was recovering from an illness, she entertained him by making up the story of Jack Carstares, the glamorous son of an earl, who is exiled for supposedly cheating at cards but secretly returns to England disguised as a highwayman. She wrote it out as The Black Moth and sent it to Constable, who offered her a £100 advance. She asked the ...

Pop, Crackle and Bang

Malcolm Gaskill: Fireworks!, 7 November 2024

A History of Fireworks: From Their Origins to the Present Day 
by John Withington.
Reaktion, 331 pp., £25, August, 978 1 78914 935 7
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... shapes in comic-book colours, with daring names like Volcano, Spitfire, Chrysanthemum Fountain and Jack in the Box.After an eternity of waiting, the big night arrived. We gathered at the end of the garden, Dad with a torch stomping about in his duffel coat, arranging things. The small bonfire was lit, and we gazed into the flames licking round the Guy like a ...

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