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Here was a plague

Tom Crewe, 27 September 2018

How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed Aids 
by David France.
Picador, 624 pp., £12.99, September 2017, 978 1 5098 3940 7
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Patient Zero and the Making of the Aids Epidemic 
by Richard A. McKay.
Chicago, 432 pp., £26.50, November 2017, 978 0 226 06395 9
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Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1989-90 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 314 pp., £9.99, May 2018, 978 1 78487 387 5
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Smiling in Slow Motion: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1991-94 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 388 pp., £9.99, August 2018, 978 1 78487 516 9
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The Ward 
by Gideon Mendel.
Trolley, 88 pp., £25, December 2017, 978 1 907112 56 0
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... considered an overseas ‘media import like Hill Street Blues’, in Garfield’s words. The gay charity Switchboard assured nervous callers that ‘sex is as safe as crossing the road.’ When Terrence Higgins collapsed at work and began inexplicably dying in a London hospital in July 1982, his boyfriend suggested to doctors that ‘maybe it was this ...

Good Fibs

Andrew O’Hagan: Truman Capote, 2 April 1998

Truman Capote: In which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career 
by George Plimpton.
Picador, 498 pp., £20, February 1998, 0 330 36871 0
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... their yellow-eyed mamas and idiot boys. But there is a patience in Capote’s novel, a surprising charity, a seamlessly variegated emotion, that would have made it quite remarkable in a very good writer double his age, which was 24. People tend to blame early success for all the horrors that follow. But that can only be partly true for Truman Capote. Success ...

More a Voyeur

Colm Tóibín: Elton Took Me Hostage, 19 December 2019

Me 
by Elton John.
Macmillan, 376 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 1 5098 5331 1
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... a-Bang’.) To make money, Elton began to work as a session musician, singing backing vocals for Tom Jones and playing piano with the Hollies. He also worked for a label called Marble Arch which knocked out versions of chart hits and sold the albums cheap in supermarkets. This, Elton points out, might sound sad, but it was in fact ‘screamingly, howlingly ...

Who to Be

Colm Tóibín: Beckett’s Letters, 6 August 2009

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-40 
edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck.
Cambridge, 782 pp., £30, February 2009, 978 0 521 86793 1
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... He’s a nice fellow the nephew of Cissie Sinclair [who had been a painter] … It would be a charity to ask him round one afternoon and show him a few pictures and drop all the conversational bombs you have handy without pretending anything. But the luck will be all on his side, he says very little, especially at first, and you might find him not ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2005, 5 January 2006

... place to shop and though there are one or two empty premises it hasn’t yet been given over to charity shops, which is the first symptom of a town dying. The spirit of the small shop still persists in Booth’s, the local supermarket. At the cheese counter I ask for some Parmesan, which might be thought a relative newcomer to this out of the way Craven ...

When Communism dissolves

Jon Elster, 25 January 1990

... potential of any encounter between two worlds that are normally insulated from each other. (Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities is built around a similar episode.) In Third World countries, such meetings can have a special poignancy. When my car stopped at an intersection in Mexico City, young boys came up to us to show their flame-eating ...

‘Everyone is terribly kind’

Deborah Friedell: Dorothy Thompson at War, 19 January 2023

The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler 
by Kathryn Olmsted.
Yale, 314 pp., £25, April 2022, 978 0 300 25642 0
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Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War 
by Deborah Cohen.
William Collins, 427 pp., £10.99, March, 978 0 00 830590 1
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... ruthless[ly] exploit you when they can, and especially exploit your feelings of sympathy and charity, and kick you all the harder in the teeth if you cease to be of use to them, or draw back a little on being exploited.’ There’s probably a lesson in that; her younger self would have made a column out of it. Deborah Friedell discusses Dorothy ...

Unintended Consequences

Rory Scothorne: Scotland’s Shift, 18 May 2023

Politics and the People: Scotland, 1945-79 
by Malcolm Petrie.
Edinburgh, 218 pp., £85, October 2022, 978 1 4744 5698 2
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... capitalist-ridden, landlord-ridden Scotland into a Scottish socialist commonwealth’. In 1968, Tom Nairn criticised the ‘common myth of Scottish left-ness’, arguing that although Scotland was ‘certainly a more egalitarian country than England’, its ‘gritty sense of equality derives from the old theocracy, not from Jacobinism or Bolshevism … the ...

Doris and Me

Jenny Diski, 8 January 2015

... Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, it was considered a marvel, and why Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones, charming though it was, failed because it was self-indulgent. Self-indulgence was very often the reason for a film or play to fail in the eyes of Doris and her friends. It seemed to be a trap waiting for every maker of every art, and I couldn’t ...

The Original Targets

James Meek: The Birth of al-Qaida, 8 February 2007

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaida’s Road to 9/11 
by Lawrence Wright.
Allen Lane, 470 pp., £25, August 2006, 9780713999730
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... United States had never heard of al-Qaida, the mission to Somalia was seen as a thankless act of charity, and Sudan was too inconsequential to worry about.’ Wright devotes much of the latter part of The Looming Tower to the story of John O’Neill, the senior FBI agent who saw the danger of bin Laden early, wanted to arrest him and put him on trial when ...

The Lady in the Van

Alan Bennett, 26 October 1989

... scatter of yellow drops on the kerb all that remains to mark its final parking place. January 1971 Charity in Gloucester Crescent takes refined forms. The publishers next door are bringing out some Classical volume and to celebrate the event last night held a Roman Dinner. This morning the au pair was to be seen knocking at the window of the van with a plate ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... He believes he can win her back through displays of wealth and manners, but she is now married to Tom Buchanan, an upper-class boor. Trump’s claim to have risen Gatsby-like is the opposite of Gatsby’s magical self-invention. Gatsby was careful to maintain the air of the gentleman he wished to be taken for. Trump is the uncouth son of privilege for ...

In Gratitude

Jenny Diski, 7 May 2015

... in the dead centre of some new version of the rake’s progress. In Tony Richardson’s movie Tom Jones, which came out in 1963, there were waifs galore, dependent on and resenting the goodwill of strangers. But what could I be resentful about? Being resentful was the wickedest thing I could imagine, though it sometimes felt like a get-out clause for my ...

This Concerns Everyone

James Butler: Crisis in Care, 2 March 2023

Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care 
by Madeleine Bunting.
Granta, 325 pp., £9.99, May 2021, 978 1 78278 381 7
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The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? 
by Emma Dowling.
Verso, 248 pp., £9.99, March 2022, 978 1 78663 035 3
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Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet 
by Nancy Fraser.
Verso, 190 pp., £20, September 2022, 978 1 83976 123 2
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... by the Wanless (2006) and Barker (2014) reports, both commissioned by the King’s Fund (a health charity); the government commissioned the 2011 Dilnot report into care and the 2013 Cavendish review of the care workforce. Each recommended a major overhaul in funding and provision. Andy Burnham, health secretary in the dying days of the Brown ...

Red Pill, Blue Pill

James Meek, 22 October 2020

... Ryan, the tough, smart, patriotic family man played by Harrison Ford in the movies based on the Tom Clancy novels, and the archangel Michael.There’s​ a danger that in writing about QAnon – a social phenomenon not just in the US but in Britain, Germany and many other countries, and endorsed by a number of Republican candidates – you make it sound ...

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