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Uneasy Listening

Paul Laity: ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, 8 July 2004

Germany Calling: A Personal Biography of William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ 
by Mary Kenny.
New Island, 300 pp., £17.99, November 2003, 1 902602 78 1
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Lord Haw-Haw: The English Voice of Nazi Germany 
by Peter Martland.
National Archives, 309 pp., £19.99, March 2003, 1 903365 17 1
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... became a catchphrase. By Christmas 1939, a comedy revue had opened at the Holborn Empire starring Max Miller and called, simply, Haw-Haw; there were dozens of stage acts, impersonators and songs (‘And yet in the winter it’s rather pathetic/ He’s frozen to death, ‘cause his pants are synthetic/Lord Haw-Haw, the Humburg of Hamburg,/The comic of eau de ...

Tummy-Talkers

Jonathan Rée: Ventriloquists, 10 May 2001

Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism 
by Steven Connor.
Oxford, 449 pp., £25, November 2000, 0 19 818433 6
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... Brough and showered him with childish insults. But he was able to bring on a troop of co-stars – Max Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie Jacques, not to mention the pre-teen Julie Andrews – without ever being upstaged. In performance he would ...

The Case of Agatha Christie

John Lanchester, 20 December 2018

... you off their books. I came across another example of the broken containment field in the work of Arthur Upfield, who wrote a series of novels in the 1930s and onwards featuring an indigenous Australian detective, Bony, short for Napoleon Bonaparte. Upfield’s masterpiece, The Sands of Windee, is a well-realised and vivid book, and teaches you a lot about ...

A Djinn speaks

Colm Tóibín: What about George Yeats?, 20 February 2003

Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats 
by Ann Saddlemyer.
Oxford, 808 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 19 811232 7
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... millions turned to the spiritualist movement, searching for messages from their lost men.’ Arthur Conan Doyle wrote: ‘I seemed suddenly to see that it was really something tremendous, a breakdown of walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest ...

The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
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... man who is writing the review!’). Out went Frank Swinnerton, Edmund Blunden, L.A.G. Strong and Arthur Bryant; in came A.L. Rowse, Maurice Richardson, Peter Quennell and Nancy Mitford. More important, it was Connolly who introduced Astor to Orwell, who became his friend and mentor, and whose literary style he so admired that new arrivals on the paper were ...

Good New Idea

John Lanchester: Universal Basic Income, 18 July 2019

... the importance of unpaid work, most of it done by women. Guy Standing cites the economist Arthur Cecil Pigou and his thought experiment about women and work: ‘If he hired a housekeeper, national income went up, economic growth increased, employment rose and unemployment fell. If he subsequently married her, and she continued to do precisely the same ...

Why do white people like what I write?

Pankaj Mishra: Ta-Nehisi Coates, 22 February 2018

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy 
by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Hamish Hamilton, 367 pp., £16.99, October 2017, 978 0 241 32523 0
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... George W. Bush of an intercontinental ‘axis of evil’, now locates evil in the White House. Max Boot, self-declared ‘neo-imperialist’ and exponent of ‘savage wars’, recently claimed to have become aware of his ‘white privilege’. Ignatieff, advocate of empire-lite and torture-lite, is presently embattled on behalf of the open society in ...

War is noise

Jonathan Raban: Letters from My Father, 17 December 2020

... of Naples and a considerable journey, by road then sea, to Anzio. Clark kept two fast PT-boats (max speed forty knots) on hand to make the trip, which, under ideal conditions, with even a smooth sea feeling as hard as reinforced concrete beneath one’s spine as the souped-up torpedo boats planed across the water, would still take the best part of two ...

The Laying on of Hands

Alan Bennett, 7 June 2001

... was Clive,’ he was saying, ‘we’ – his wife sitting beside him smiled – ‘we called him Max, a name I came to feel suited him well. It’s not entirely a nice name, not plain certainly or wholesome. In fact Max, really, is the name of a charmer, implying a degree of sophistication, a veneer of social ...

Fiction and E.M. Forster

Frank Kermode: At the Cost of Life, 10 May 2007

... novelist contemporaries. It is true that Gide and Wells and James and Bennett, of course, and also Max Beerbohm, Samuel Butler, Galsworthy, David Garnett, Hardy, Robert Hichens, W.H. Hudson, Lubbock, H. de Vere Stacpoole are mentioned, also Forster’s close friend G.L. Dickinson. Of another, highly gifted friend, Virginia Woolf, he has very little to ...

The Politics of Good Intentions

David Runciman: Blair’s Masochism, 8 May 2003

... historical account of the role of intention in justifying political action is the one given by Max Weber in his lecture ‘Politik als Beruf’ (usually translated as ‘Politics as a Vocation’). It was delivered on 28 January 1919 to a group of students in Munich, and Weber used it to warn them, among other things, against politicians who come flaunting ...

Ten Bullets to One, Twenty to Another

Thomas Meaney: Sri Lanka, 2 February 2017

Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World 
by Steven Kemper.
Chicago, 480 pp., £31.50, January 2015, 978 0 226 19907 8
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Tamil: A Biography 
by David Shulman.
Harvard, 416 pp., £25, September 2016, 978 0 674 05992 4
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The Seasons of Trouble: Life amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War 
by Rohini Mohan.
Verso, 368 pp., £16.99, October 2015, 978 1 78168 883 0
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... identity and nationalism caught the imagination. From reading the German racial theorist Max Müller, he learned to consecrate Sinhala blood as ‘Aryan’; in Buddhism he found a religion that could unite the people better than Hinduism could with its local gods. He began to preach against the British to the new Buddhist intelligentsia in small ...

The Ostrich Defence

Azadeh Moaveni: Trafficking Antiquities, 5 October 2023

... the Epic of Gilgamesh – to Iraq and Egypt. Individual billionaire collectors in the tradition of Arthur Sackler, most of them based in New York (where by far the greatest share of wealth in the antiquities market is exchanged), continued to buy.Remarkably little has changed in the global political economy of antiquities extraction since the mid-19th ...

Travels with My Mom

Terry Castle: In Santa Fe, 16 August 2007

... I’m fairly good at working around my limitations. Like numerous five and six-year-olds – or Max Ernst and Hannah Höch, as we ‘creatives’ prefer to say – I do collage. Rubber stamps, along with scissors and glue and glossy pages ripped out from The World of Interiors, are an essential part of my praxis. (I have the art-world jargon down ...

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