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Daniel Soar: The vexed issue of Labour Party funding, 19 October 2006

... members as there had been when Blair won the 1997 election, and nowhere near the million members John Prescott used to boast of as being the party’s achievable goal. People are leaving Labour in droves. To anyone outside the present administration the explanation is simple: New Labour lies, and is craven, and has failed. To senior party figures and ...

Rejoice in Your Legs

Jonathan Parry: Being Barbara Bodichon, 1 August 2024

Trailblazer: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, the First Feminist to Change Our World 
by Jane Robinson.
Doubleday, 397 pp., £25, February, 978 0 85752 777 6
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... Howitt. From 1853 she was friends with a second, unmarried couple of similar qualities: Marian Evans and G.H. Lewes. Both Bodichon and Evans found the other’s warmth, intensity and sincerity immensely sympathetic. On reading a review of Adam Bede in 1859, Bodichon intuited, brilliantly, that ‘George Eliot’ was ...

Can that woman sleep?

Bee Wilson: Bad Samaritan, 24 October 2024

Madame Restell: The Life, Death and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless and Infamous Abortionist 
by Jennifer Wright.
Hachette, 352 pp., £17.99, May, 978 0 306 82681 8
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... York earned just $1.12 a week, even lower than factory work.A pill compounder called Dr William Evans had premises on her street. Evans sold pills for everything from constipation to ‘low spirits’ to ‘hypochondriacism’ (this seems an especially clever wheeze). Evans has an air ...

With Gods on Their Side

Basil Davidson, 7 September 1995

The Church in Africa, 1450-1950 
by Adrian Hastings.
Oxford, 706 pp., £65, January 1995, 0 19 826921 8
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A History of Christianity in Africa from Antiquity to the Present 
by Elizabeth Isichei.
SPCK, 420 pp., £25, February 1995, 0 281 04764 2
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Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression 
edited by Thomas Blakely, Walter van Beek and Dennis Thomson.
Currey, 512 pp., £45, November 1994, 0 85255 206 8
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... from the thorns and thickets of ‘function’ and ‘structure’ only to find – here in Evans-Pritchard of 1959 – that for ‘the leading anthropologists of my own generation, religious faith is total illusion, a curious phenomenon soon to become extinct’, or a handy psychological gimmick which encouraged civic obedience and whatever might pass ...

Lady with the Iron Nose

Tom Shippey: Pagan Survival, 3 November 2022

Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe, an Investigation 
by Ronald Hutton.
Yale, 245 pp., £18.99, May, 978 0 300 26101 1
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... may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe ...

At the Hayward

Hal Foster: Ed Ruscha, 19 November 2009

... the early 1950s,’ he once remarked, ‘I was awakened by the photographs of Walker Evans and the movies of John Ford, especially Grapes of Wrath, where the poor “Okies” (mostly farmers whose land dried up) go to California with mattresses on their cars rather than stay in Oklahoma and starve.’ Even as ...

Unmistakable

Michael Rogin, 20 August 1998

Celebrity Caricature in America 
by Wendy Wick Reaves.
Yale, 320 pp., £29.95, April 1998, 0 300 07463 8
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... and a white-haired/eyebrowed/moustachioed, black-coated Supreme Court Chief Justice, Charles Evans Hughes. There’s Harpo again, this time with cotton-wool locks, alongside his brothers – Groucho’s moustache, glasses, cigar, wing-tipped head of hair, Chico’s sly open mouth and steel-wool hair identifying the ersatz Italian Jew. The three faces ...

The Waugh between the Diaries

Ian Hamilton, 5 December 1985

The Diaries of Auberon Waugh: A Turbulent Decade 1976-1985 
edited by Anna Galli-Pahlavi.
Private Eye/Deutsch, 207 pp., £4.95, September 1985, 0 233 97811 9
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... pensioner, or a half-Jew, or a young novelist, or a Negro, or an Anglican archbishop, or Harold Evans, or even the editor of an Arts Council-backed literary magazine, I suppose I would find some sections of this often amusing book offensive. Actually, more than offensive. I think I would want to do something pretty unpleasant to A. Waugh. But what? Go ...

The Suitcase: Part Three

Frances Stonor Saunders, 10 September 2020

... I see his loving gaze falling on the objects in it: a conch shell on a side table, a painting by John Piper (a wedding gift). Home is never a neutral place, it is a very specific context, an animated expression of the presence it contains. Why can’t it be loved?‘You can’t love an inanimate object.’ I don’t know where he got the sentence from. My ...

Astral Projection

Alison Light: The Case of the Croydon Poltergeist, 17 December 2020

The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story 
by Kate Summerscale.
Bloomsbury, 345 pp., £18.99, October, 978 1 4088 9545 0
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... Institute for Psychical Research, arrives after his sidekick, the ‘personable’ Laurie Evans, who wants to work in the movies, has confirmed his own sightings. Another reporter – this time from the Croydon Advertiser – stays overnight; he is playing darts downstairs when a heavy wardrobe lands on top of the empty bed in his room. Dr Gerald ...

Do Anything, Say Anything

James Meek: On the New TV, 4 January 2024

Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television 
by Peter Biskind.
Allen Lane, 383 pp., £25, November, 978 0 241 44390 3
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... be married and a film born.The back office deity of that era was the seven-times-married Robert Evans, who ran production at Paramount for a decade from 1966, when the studio made The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. The ghost of Evans haunts Pandora’s Box, which covers the time some ...

The Last Romantic

John Bayley, 5 May 1983

Philip Larkin 
by Andrew Motion.
Methuen, 96 pp., £1.95, October 1982, 0 416 32270 0
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... and his own diagnosis of Larkin’s virtues. Long ago, the Poet Laureate referred to him as ‘the John Clare of the building estates’, a decidedly quaint though no doubt a heartfelt compliment, in line with Eric Homberger’s later summing-up of Larkin as ‘the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket’, or the more magisterial pronouncement that his ...

You could scream

Jenny Diski, 20 October 1994

Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me 
by Marlon Brando and Robert Lindsey.
Century, 468 pp., £17.99, September 1994, 0 7126 6012 7
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Greta & Cecil 
by Diana Souhami.
Cape, 272 pp., £18.99, September 1994, 0 224 03719 6
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... failure of imagination. But there was, after all, a selfless, literary motive behind it all: Harry Evans of Random House told Brando ‘that if his company published a book about a movie star, the profits would enable him to publish books by talented unpublished authors that might not make money.’ Perhaps Harry Evans will ...

On my way to the Couch

E.S. Turner, 30 March 1989

On my way to the Club 
by Ludovic Kennedy.
Collins, 429 pp., £15, January 1989, 0 00 217617 3
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... End. On the strength of it, he was later asked by Truth to review a book about the case of Timothy Evans, hanged after his wife and baby daughter had been found murdered at 10 Rillington Place, West London, an address later notorious as the home of the mass murderer John Christie. The same Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, by ...

Who whom?

Christopher Ricks, 6 June 1985

The English Language Today 
edited by Sidney Greenbaum.
Pergamon, 345 pp., £12.50, December 1984, 0 08 031078 8
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The English Language 
by Robert Burchfield.
Oxford, 194 pp., £9.50, January 1985, 9780192191731
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A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language 
by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik.
Longman, 1779 pp., £39.50, May 1985, 0 582 51734 6
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Words 
by John Silverlight.
Macmillan, 107 pp., £17.50, May 1985, 9780333380109
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Faux Amis and Key Words: A Dictionary-Guide to French Language, Culture and Society through Lookalikes and Confusables 
by Philip Thody, Howard Evans and Gwilym Rees.
Athlone, 224 pp., £16, February 1985, 0 485 11243 4
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Puns 
by Walter Redfern.
Blackwell, 234 pp., £14.95, October 1984, 0 631 13793 9
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Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism 
edited by D.J. Enright.
Oxford, 222 pp., £9.95, April 1985, 0 19 212236 3
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... of its good and bad angels, the authoritative and the authoritarian. Linguistic conservatives like John Simon, who sometimes seem not only not to mind being disliked but to thrive on it, do not shrink from such acts of authority as will promptly be branded authoritarian – a word wielded in Sidney Greenbaum’s tour de task-force The English Language ...

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