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Salt Spray

Ferdinand Mount: When Britannia Ruled the Waves, 5 December 2024

The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1815-1945 
by N.A.M. Rodger.
Allen Lane, 934 pp., £40, October 2024, 978 0 7139 9412 4
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... of near misses, such as when Louis, the French Dauphin, was offered the English throne after King John’s death and was cheered through the streets of London before being defeated in the Battle of Lincoln in May 1217 and then the Battle of Sandwich in August, perhaps the first ever battle fought by sailing ships in the open sea.Even the fiasco of the last ...

Life Pushed Aside

Clair Wills: The Last Asylums, 18 November 2021

... or rather J.J. Beegan did. When I turned to the Irish census records I could quite easily find John Beegan, who was born in 1868, the eldest child of John and Jane Beegan. In 1901 they were living together with the younger Beegans, Mary and Thomas, at 23 Dunlo Hill in Ballinasloe. On the census form, ...

Six French Frizeurs

David A. Bell, 10 December 1998

The Perfidy of Albion: French Perceptions of England during the French Revolution 
by Norman Hampson.
Macmillan, 210 pp., £40, June 1998, 0 333 73148 4
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Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders 
by Don Herzog.
Princeton, 472 pp., £18, September 1998, 0 691 04831 2
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... defeated the British, and forced their cocky commander – a 22-year-old Virginian named George Washington – to sign an embarrassing confession that nearly brought his promising military career to an end. War was on with a vengeance, and French propagandists exploited the incidents for all they were worth, pummelling the English as ‘barbarians’ whose ...

Daisy Chains

Emma Hogan: Sappho 1900, 20 May 2021

No Modernism without Lesbians 
by Diana Souhami.
Head of Zeus, 464 pp., £9.99, February, 978 1 78669 487 4
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... daisy chain’, as Capote called it.Barney arrived in Paris in 1899, on a trip from Washington with her mother. She was 23 and already knew that she fancied girls. Six years earlier she had met the ‘mother of her desires’, Eva Palmer, on holiday in Maine. They were lovers for a decade, during which they sent each other around a thousand ...

Communiste et Rastignac

Christopher Caldwell: Bernard Kouchner, 9 July 2009

Le Monde selon K. 
by Pierre Péan.
Fayard, 331 pp., €19, February 2009, 978 2 213 64372 4
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... he told France 2, ‘you’ll have a lot on your plate.’ True enough. That week he was in Washington visiting Hillary Clinton, who has herself been accused of profiting from her political connections. ‘It’s the fourth book against me,’ he said. ‘She told me she’d had 25 of them.’ Péan is a rough, tough writer. His methods are ad ...

The Fastidious President

David Bromwich: The Matter with Obama, 18 November 2010

... to think when they placed those two statements side by side? I recently listened to some of John Kennedy’s press conferences, and was struck, not by his charm and easy control of the press, the usual traits that people bring up, but rather by his quickness and conversational rhythm. Kennedy’s answers are detailed and matter of fact, and though he ...

How worried should we be?

Steven Shapin: How Not to Handle Nukes, 23 January 2014

Command and Control 
by Eric Schlosser.
Penguin, 632 pp., £25, September 2013, 978 1 84614 148 5
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... you can’t bring yourself to love it. It’s a position that has its advocates. A few years ago, John Mueller’s Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to al-Qaida urged a relaxed attitude: far more has been spent on nuclear weapons than can be justified by any sensible political strategy; they aren’t of much military use; their proliferation ...

Comedy is murder

Thomas Powers: Joseph Heller, 8 March 2012

Just One Catch: The Passionate Life of Joseph Heller 
by Tracy Daugherty.
Robson, 548 pp., £25, September 2011, 978 1 84954 172 5
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Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller was Dad and Life was a Catch-22 
by Erica Heller.
Vintage, 272 pp., £8.99, October 2011, 978 0 09 957008 0
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... say. It was the success of the competition that brought him up short. First had come The Gallery, John Horne Burns’s novel about the Allied occupation of Naples, which Heller admired. That gave him pause. Then Norman Mailer’s huge war novel, The Naked and the Dead, stopped him cold. Heller realised immediately that any war novel he was then likely to ...

A Misreading of the Law

Conor Gearty: Why didn’t Campbell sue?, 19 February 2004

Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly CMG 
by Lord Hutton.
Stationery Office, 740 pp., £70, January 2004, 0 10 292715 4
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... community needed to be ‘100 per cent happy’ with the content, but in the same message to John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, he made clear that ‘the judgment as to whether a single person should be appointed to write the final version’ had yet to be made.20 On his best behaviour, Scarlett made a final seizure of control ...

Downhill from Here

Ian Jack: The 1970s, 27 August 2009

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies 
by Andy Beckett.
Faber, 576 pp., £20, May 2009, 978 0 571 22136 3
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... commentary on Britain . . . And it shifted in tone; from the anxious to the apocalyptic. In John Fowles’s novel Daniel Martin, published in 1977, the expatriate narrator says of his homeland: ‘England is already a thing in a museum, a dying animal in a zoo.’ Beckett pulls many other examples (Lessing, Drabble, Spark) from what he calls the ...

A Company of Merchants

Jamie Martin: The Bank of England, 24 January 2019

Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694-2013 
by David Kynaston.
Bloomsbury, 879 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 1 4088 6856 0
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... bank was a very profitable business, though it sometimes placed them in awkward positions: George Washington, for example, was a stockholder when the bank was financing the war to put down his rebellion. For the state, having easy access to a huge pool of private capital allowed it to outspend and ultimately defeat France, even though it was larger and more ...

Loafing with the Sissies

Colm Tóibín: The Trials of Andy Warhol, 10 September 2020

Warhol: A Life as Art 
by Blake Gopnik.
Allen Lane, 931 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 00338 1
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... lore had Warhol moving into bed with his mother while his father slept upstairs with Paul and John [Warhol’s siblings],’ Gopnik writes. When Julia moved to New York to live with her son, people ‘thought she was stupid’, a friend said, ‘but she was brilliant beyond belief … and much smarter than Andy.’In high school, Warhol was not known for ...

What I Heard about Iraq

Eliot Weinberger: Watch and listen, 3 February 2005

... the sandbag from his head and checked his pulse. I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘If you are in Washington DC, you can’t know what’s going on in the midnight shift in one of those many prisons around the world.’ * I heard that the Red Cross had to close its offices because it was too dangerous. I heard that General Electric and the Siemens Corporation ...

On Writing a Memoir

Edward Said: Living by the Clock, 29 April 1999

... I ran away.’ I was never able to, and never even considered it. One day my mother announced that John Gielgud was coming to Cairo to perform Hamlet at the Opera House. ‘We must go,’ she said with infectious resolve, and indeed the visit was duly set up, although of course I had no idea who John Gielgud was. I was nine ...

Nothing Fits

Nick Richardson: Amanda Knox, 24 October 2013

Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir 
by Amanda Knox.
Harper, 463 pp., £28.99, April 2013, 978 0 06 221720 2
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Meredith: Our Daughter’s Murder and the Heartbreaking Quest for the Truth 
by John Kercher.
Hodder, 291 pp., £8.99, April 2013, 978 1 4447 4278 7
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... skimps on some important details, and leaves others out entirely. For these, you can consult John Kercher’s book, Meredith, a memoir of his daughter and a passionate indictment of Knox and Sollecito. Kercher tells us that when Sollecito was first questioned about the knife with Meredith’s DNA on it, he said that it must have been left there after ...

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