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Bangs and Stinks

James Buchan, 22 December 1994

Test of Greatness: Britain’s Struggle for the Atom Bomb 
by Brian Cathcart.
Murray, 301 pp., £19.99, September 1994, 0 7195 5225 7
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... high-powered grammar schools and industrial workbenches that produced men such as Penney and John Corner: at times, one feels transported to one of those Fifties films in which middle-aged young men in macs and hats and black spectacles are forever jumping into Daimlers and roaring down to Wallingford. The target of the British bomb, as has long been ...

I used to work for them myself

David Leigh, 4 August 1983

British Intelligence and Covert Action: Africa, the Middle East and Europe since 1945 
by Jonathan Bloch, Patrick Fitzgerald and Philip Agee.
Junction, 284 pp., £5.95, May 1983, 0 86245 113 2
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Through the Looking-Glass: British Foreign Policy in an Age of Illusions 
by Anthony Verrier.
Cape, 400 pp., £12.50, February 1983, 0 224 01979 1
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... list if you had known what to look for, just as you would have spotted his counterpart in MI5, Sir John Lewis Jones, in the honours list immediately prior to that). What, then, is the point of the fantastic governmental mumbo-jumbo with which the British ‘Secret Service’ surrounds itself? Although it is a rather youthful bureaucratic invention, only about ...

Spies and Secret Agents

Ken Follett, 19 June 1980

Conspiracy 
by Anthony Summers.
Gollancz, 639 pp., £9.95, May 1980, 0 575 02846 7
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The Man Who Kept the Secrets 
by Thomas Powers.
Weidenfeld, 393 pp., £10, April 1980, 0 297 77738 6
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... what they call ‘disinformation’, and it seems to me that Powers has adopted their line on all major questions. Anyway, the book is a defence of the CIA, and as such I think it fails. Powers thinks the CIA is controlled. The debate focuses on the Kennedy era – because it is assumed that if any American president genuinely wanted to control the CIA it was ...

Affability

Nicholas Penny, 19 November 1981

Moments of Vision 
by Kenneth Clark.
Murray, 191 pp., £9.50, October 1981, 0 7195 3860 2
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... less grave than the anachronistic and sentimental idea, entertained by the supposedly tough-minded John Berger in his television series, that Frans Hals intended his late group portraits to expose the true horror of bourgeois society. Civilisation certainly extends our sympathies; it may deepen our understanding of European history; but it avoids challenging ...

Bottom

Richard Jenkyns: George Grote’s ‘A History of Greece’, 9 August 2001

A History of Greece: From the Time of Solon to 403 BC 
by George Grote, edited by J.M. Mitchell and M.O.B. Caspari.
Routledge, 978 pp., £60, September 2000, 0 415 22369 5
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... 1840s the two most notable Greek histories in Britain, and indeed in Europe, were by the Scotsman John Gillies, who dedicated his work to George III with the assurance that it exemplified ‘the dangerous Turbulence of Democracy’, and the outspokenly Tory William Mitford. Macaulay noted Mitford’s liking for Sparta and dislike of Athens; Byron declared ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Five Easy Pieces’, 9 September 2010

Five Easy Pieces 
by Bob Raphelson.
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... seen by night and day, and amazing silhouettes of people, pumps and scaffolding. It’s as if John Ford had decided to start a western among the California oil rigs, and track his story up the West Coast to Puget Sound. The space around the people in this movie is so large and so unambiguously beautiful you have to wonder what story it is trying to ...

Prosecco Notwithstanding

Tobias Gregory: 21st-Century Noir, 3 July 2008

The Lemur 
by Benjamin Black.
Picador US, 144 pp., $13, June 2008, 978 0 312 42808 2
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... habits are hard to break, or because he thinks he can write a thriller that is also a work of art. John Banville, to his credit, understands that crime fiction is only crime fiction. The Lemur, his third book under the pen name Benjamin Black, is a slim, efficient novel, elegantly done as such things go, in which literary pretensions are largely resisted and ...

Whiggeries

J.H. Burns, 2 March 1989

Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought 
by J.W. Burrow.
Oxford, 159 pp., £17.50, March 1988, 0 19 820139 7
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... than the Whigs from the intolerable rectitude of the bien pensant. The austere righteousness of a John Stuart Mill, for example – the governess-figure of ‘Miss Mill’ in Judy’s Mid-Victorian caricatures – must have alienated many who clung to the belief that virtue need not debar one from all the cakes and ale of comfortable prejudices. Yet the very ...

Yak Sandwiches

Christopher Burns, 31 March 1988

Pleasure 
by John Murray.
Aidan Ellis, 233 pp., £10.50, October 1987, 0 85628 167 0
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Absurd Courage 
by Nobuko Albery.
Century, 254 pp., £11.95, October 1987, 0 7126 1149 5
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Laing 
by Ann Schlee.
Macmillan, 302 pp., £10.95, November 1987, 0 333 45633 5
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The Part of Fortune 
by Laurel Goldman.
Faber, 249 pp., £10.95, November 1987, 0 571 14921 9
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In the Fertile Land 
by Gabriel Josipovici.
Carcanet, 212 pp., £10.95, November 1987, 0 85635 716 2
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... John Murray’s fiction has always seemed to arise directly from the circumstances of his own life. At first, his work concentrated on his childhood and adolescence among the tiny, depressed communities that straggle along the English side of the Solway Firth. He then broke with his working-class background and read Sanskrit and Avestan at Oxford, later studying classical Indian medicine ...

Diary

Edna Longley: Ireland by Others, 17 September 1987

... Ulster or the Six Counties. Not a linguistic inch. At a higher level, where languages meet, John Hewitt’s poetry favours the word ‘stubborn’, Seamus Heaney’s the word ‘obstinate’. It follows that rhetorical exclusion is potentially territorial exclusion. Ms Belfrage grasps the point that, in Republican theory, ‘the Protestants don’t fit ...

I am the Watchman

Linda Colley: William Cobbett, forerunner of the Sun, 20 November 2003

William Cobbett: Selected Writings 
edited by Leonora Nattrass.
Pickering & Chatto, 2312 pp., £495, December 1998, 1 85196 375 8
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Rural rides 
by William Cobbett, edited by Ian Dyck.
Penguin, 576 pp., £9.99, September 2001, 0 14 043579 4
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... saw as ‘dull and heavy’, Cobbett could seem to an almost eerie degree a living embodiment of John Bull. This was how James Gillray represented him at the time; and it was also how he enjoyed representing himself. He was ‘an Englishman’, he boasted in 1795, ‘a calf of John Bull’, and the older he got, the more ...

Somebody reading

Barbara Everett, 21 June 1984

The Odes of Keats 
by Helen Vendler.
Harvard, 330 pp., £15.70, February 1984, 0 674 63075 0
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... lived separate from them in the house of their guardian, but was faithfully kept in touch with by John: who here writes cheerfully promising to get his sister anything she would like, barring ‘livestock’ – always better and more kindly left in its natural environment: – though I must confess even now a partiality for a handsome Globe of gold-fish ...

White Power

Thomas Meaney, 1 August 2019

Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America 
by Kathleen Belew.
Harvard, 330 pp., £23.95, April 2018, 978 0 674 28607 8
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Revolutionaries for the Right Anti-Communist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War 
by Kyle Burke.
North Carolina, 337 pp., June 2018, 978 1 4696 4073 0
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... which led some to gravitate toward the fringes of American society both left and right. John Rambo, for his part, did both. In First Blood (1982), Sylvester Stallone’s character is a ‘half-German, half-Indian’ veteran, traumatised by the war, who arrives in a small town to pay his respects to a black comrade killed by exposure to Agent ...

The Excitement of the Stuff

Terry Eagleton: On Fredric Jameson, 10 October 2024

The Years of Theory: Postwar French Thought to the Present 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 458 pp., £20, October, 978 1 80429 589 2
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... studies to bear on the novel.Where did this current spring from? Since three of Derrida’s major works appeared in 1967, an obvious answer would be the political turmoil of the late 1960s, in which – unusually for such mass protests – the function of academic knowledge and the fate of the humanities were among the issues at stake. For the most ...

Modern Brecht

Margot Heinemann, 5 August 1982

Bertolt Brecht in America 
by James Lyon.
Princeton, 408 pp., £11, January 1981, 0 691 06443 1
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Bertolt Brecht: Political Theory and Literary Practice 
edited by Betty Webber and Hubert Heinen.
Manchester, 208 pp., £15, February 1981, 0 7190 0806 9
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Brecht 
by Jan Needle and Peter Thomson.
Blackwell, 235 pp., £9, February 1981, 0 631 19610 2
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... Brecht’s work in its setting (sacrilege can come later), the starting-point still has to be John Willett’s The New Sobriety 1917-33: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period.1 This marvellously illustrated book takes us through all the bitter political and cultural history, from the aborted revolt of the returning soldiers in 1918, the killing of ...

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