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Gaelic Gloom

Colm Tóibín: Brian Moore, 10 August 2000

Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist 
by Denis Sampson.
Marino, 344 pp., IR£20, October 1998, 1 86023 078 4
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... was concealing something.’ Moore shared the dream of many adolescents worldwide: he wanted to blow his homeplace sky-high. The difference was that his homeplace already had its explosive elements. Moore said that he ‘reacted against all that nationalistic fervour’, because he saw that his father’s and uncle’s ‘dislike of Britain extended to ...

Infisal! Infisal! Infisal!

Jonathan Littell: A Journey in South Sudan, 30 June 2011

... chanting in unison and brandishing sticks. They form a circle and begin a frenzied dance; some blow into their hollow sticks, which end in a plastic bottle with its bottom cut out, while others make huge leaps. Half a dozen white journalists, crouching in the centre of the circle, film or photograph them. It’s beautiful: the jet-black skin of the dancers ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... and profiles. While not stinting on explications and contextualisations of the books and the blow-ups, Sontag: Her Life provides everything we look for in our melodramatic accounts of sacred monsters: humble origins, early stirrings; an absent father, an emotionally neglectful, alcoholic mother (whose last words to Susan on her hospital deathbed ...

In Farageland

James Meek, 9 October 2014

... long time. Another part of the constituency, Sandwich, is still trying to pick itself up from the blow inflicted three years ago by the US drugs group Pfizer when it closed down most of its vast research lab, leaving only six hundred scientists where there had been 2500. The most promising development site in Ramsgate, the one-time Pleasurama amusement park ...

The Strange Death of Municipal England

Tom Crewe: Assault on Local Government, 15 December 2016

... income by 2020. In Taking Power Back, his 2015 book calling for a renewal of local democracy, Simon Parker describes the consequences as ‘perhaps the biggest shift in the role of the British state since 1945’. There is currently a very real risk that Brexit will distract from austerity – no longer the disaster du jour – which will nonetheless ...

‘That’s my tank on fire’

James Meek: Video War, 13 April 2023

... the conflict have a design where the turret sits on top of a carousel of ammunition, and when they blow up, the results can be, in both the viral video and the Guy Debord sense, spectacular. It doesn’t help when English-speaking OSInt geeks outside Ukraine, reposting clips lifted from Telegram of Russian tanks being blown up, snigger about ‘turret-throwing ...

Stuck on the Flypaper

Frances Stonor Saunders: The Hobsbawm File, 9 April 2015

... dry feeling of contraction, as when you stand before a man ready to punch you, waiting for the blow.’ The KPD polled 13 per cent of the vote, and was promptly proscribed by Hitler’s ascendant party. Less than a month after this, in early April, an uncle arrived in Berlin to remove Hobsbawm to the safety of London, where his paternal grandfather had ...

Bitchy Little Spinster

Joanne O’Leary: Queens of Amherst, 3 June 2021

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet 
by Julie Dobrow.
Norton, 448 pp., £13.99, January 2020, 978 0 393 35749 3
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... magnificent teeth’, who was then working in Washington alongside the distinguished astronomer Simon Newcombe. Her parents had reservations when the couple got engaged in 1878: he had no notable ancestors, save Jonathan Edwards (who was only a distant relation); his means were modest and there was a family history of mental illness. Mabel, however, found ...

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