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Diary

Nick Richardson: Elves and Aliens, 2 August 2018

... of a different plane and a declassified report by another pilot, both of whom saw the UFO that day too. In the interview the pilot, David Fravor, explains that he was out on a routine training exercise when he was told that the exercise had been suspended, that he was being sent on a real mission instead, and that he was to fly to a point thirty miles ...

Making things happen

Ross McKibbin, 26 July 1990

Heroes and Villains: Selected Essays 
by R.W. Johnson.
Harvester, 347 pp., £25, July 1990, 9780745007359
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... much straight talking. How do they read now? The reader should probably start with ‘Tony Benn, Neil Kinnock and the Travails of Labour’ (a review of Benn’s 1963-67 diaries and Hilary Wainwright’s Labour: A Tale of Two Parties) and ‘Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson’. The first began, I imagine, simply as a critique of the Bennite Left and ended ...

Losing the War

Robert Dallek, 23 November 1989

A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam 
by Neil Sheehan.
Cape, 861 pp., £15.95, April 1989, 0 224 02648 8
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... In his compelling biographical and historical study of John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, Neil Sheehan focuses our attention on this sorry chapter in American foreign affairs. A prize-winning reporter in Saigon for United Press International and the New York Times, Sheehan also won distinction as the journalist who obtained the Pentagon Papers for the ...

Other Poems and Other Poets

Donald Davie, 20 September 1984

Notes from New York, and Other Poems 
by Charles Tomlinson.
Oxford, 64 pp., £4.50, March 1984, 0 19 211959 1
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The Cargo 
by Neil Rennie.
TNR Productions, 27 pp., January 1984
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Collected Poems 1943-1983 
by C.H. Sisson.
Carcanet, 383 pp., £14.95, April 1984, 0 85635 498 8
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... either person, still less the relationship between them. This happens, I’m afraid, with Neil Rennie’s The Cargo, 15 very short poems arranged so as to be ‘the first three parts’ of a supposedly longer work in progress. Rennie, I think, doesn’t mean to be a tease; his teasingness has less to do with a perverse poetics than with the fact that ...

What security is there against arbitrary government?

John Gardner: Securitania, 9 March 2006

Rhetoric and the Rule of Law: A Theory of Legal Reasoning 
by Neil MacCormick.
Oxford, 287 pp., £40, July 2005, 0 19 826878 5
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... through the ideology of lawyers, as an obstacle to the pursuit of progressive social policies. Neil MacCormick’s Rhetoric and the Rule of Law: A Theory of Legal Reasoning aims to moderate both poles in this debate: to temper the lawyer’s enthusiasm for legal certainty, while insisting on the very great importance of the rule of law as an ideal – for ...

Shaved, Rouged and Chignoned

Terry Eagleton: Fanny and Stella, 7 March 2013

Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England 
by Neil McKenna.
Faber, 396 pp., £16.99, February 2013, 978 0 571 23190 4
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... workers and the ‘gaggles of Mary-Anns waggling their scrawny arses up and down the street’, as Neil McKenna depicts them in his tiresomely spiced-up style, could be remarkably cordial. According to one Victorian writer, a ‘notorious and shameless poof’ married a street woman and fathered two sons with her, both of whom followed in their father’s ...

Hand and Foot

John Kerrigan: Seamus Heaney, 27 May 1999

Opened Ground: Poems 1966-96 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 478 pp., £20, September 1998, 0 571 19492 3
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The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study 
by Neil Corcoran.
Faber, 276 pp., £9.99, September 1998, 0 571 17747 6
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Seamus Heaney 
by Helen Vendler.
HarperCollins, 188 pp., £15.99, November 1998, 0 00 255856 4
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... is even more loaded than in ‘Act of Union’. To catch the undertones it is worth turning to Neil Corcoran’s The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: a revision of his admirable Seamus Heaney (1986) which brings the reader up to date on the recent verse and adds a perceptive chapter on the strengths and oracular blind-spots of Heaney’s own literary criticism. As ...

Fuentes the Memorious

John Sutherland, 19 June 1986

The Old Gringo 
translated by Margaret Sayers Peden and Carlos Fuentes, by Carlos Fuentes.
Deutsch, 199 pp., £8.95, May 1986, 0 233 97862 3
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Where the air is clear 
by Carlos Fuentes, translated by Sam Hileman.
Deutsch, 376 pp., £4.95, June 1986, 0 233 97937 9
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Farewell to the Sea 
by Reinaldo Arenas, translated by Andrew Hurley.
Viking, 412 pp., £12.95, May 1986, 0 670 52960 5
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Digging up the mountains 
by Neil Bissoondath.
Deutsch, 247 pp., £8.95, May 1986, 0 233 97851 8
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... is divided into two separately introspective sections. The first is made up of the wife’s day-by-day stream of consciousness. Each of the six mornings starts with a factual observation of the world around her, and ends with an apocalyptic reverie as she drifts into sleep. She has, apparently, ‘done with words for ...

Leading the Labour Party

Arthur Marwick, 5 November 1981

Michael Foot: A Portrait 
by Simon Hoggart and David Leigh.
Hodder, 216 pp., £8.95, September 1981, 0 340 27600 2
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... He wrote an academic work of distinction about the role of Jonathan Swift in the politics of his day, The Pen and the Sword. In the Fifties he became a top TV personality on, first, In the News and then Free Speech. In a passage which makes one cringe (for Foot, not for the authors) we read of how Beaverbrook ordered Foot to memorise the Sunday papers and ...

Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone

R.W. Johnson: Major and Lamont, 9 December 1999

The Autobiography 
by John Major.
HarperCollins, 774 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 00 257004 1
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In Office 
by Norman Lamont.
Little, Brown, 567 pp., £20, October 1999, 0 316 64707 1
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... was that the ERM was a fine thing (our entry was acclaimed by the whole of the press as well as by Neil Kinnock and John Smith): a view which held until, roughly, September 1992, when the conviction grew on all sides that it had been a colossal mistake. Few will argue with John Major’s asssumption that the 1997 election was lost on Black Wednesday. But when ...

Showboating

John Upton: George Carman, 9 May 2002

No Ordinary Man: A Life of George Carman 
by Dominic Carman.
Hodder, 331 pp., £18.99, January 2002, 0 340 82098 5
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... he was taken on by a Jewish set of chambers: he was rumbled when he failed to take note of the Day of Atonement. The melancholy theme of rejection by the establishment recurs all through his life, culminating in his failure to gain access to the ranks of the judiciary, the one great aim of his career. Much later, he was promised a Liberal Democrat peerage ...

It all gets worse

Ross McKibbin, 22 September 1994

The New Industrial Relations? 
by Neil Millward.
Policy Studies Institute, 170 pp., £15, February 1994, 0 85374 590 0
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... some kind of consultative committee has in fact fallen: from 24 per cent to 18 per cent. As Neil Millward, the author of the Survey, points out, single-union workforces are almost everywhere associated with union weakness. They are common in firms with low union density and highly segmented workforces – where the unions only represent, for ...

Where am I?

Greg Dening, 31 October 1996

Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas 
by Neil Rennie.
Oxford, 330 pp., £35, November 1995, 0 19 811975 5
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... good and evil effects of missions. The ‘literature’ of this theatre is the preoccupation of Neil Rennie’s Far-Fetched Facts. It takes him down awell-worn and, as he seesit, narrow path. Bernard Smith showed the way in two magnificent books, European Vision and the South Pacific, 1768-1850 (1960) and Imagining the Pacific (1992) – from some oversight ...

Target Practice

Tim Whitmarsh: Lucian, 25 February 2010

Lucian: A Selection 
edited by Neil Hopkinson.
Cambridge, 239 pp., £19.99, October 2008, 978 0 521 84200 6
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... and free-speaking opponent of flummery, as well as a brilliant stylist and outstanding wit. Neil Hopkinson’s new commentary on seven selections from Lucian’s huge corpus is testament to the victory, at least for now, of the northern Europeans. Hopkinson’s focus is on Lucian as littérateur, cynical debunker, author of bijou mash-ups of literary ...

A Damned Good Investment

Paul Foot, 25 February 1993

Studded with Diamonds and Paved with Gold: Miners, Mining Companies and Human Rights in South Africa 
by Laurie Flynn.
Bloomsbury, 358 pp., £20, September 1992, 0 7475 1155 1
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... And many once proud-quivered loins did melt In blood from stinging whip; with hollow eyes Many all day in dazzling river stood To take the rich-ored driftings of the flood. ‘Why were they proud. Why in the name of glory were they proud?’ Keats demanded of the dazzling trio. That it might be wrong that so many human beings should suffer in order that ...

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