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Summer with Empson

Jonathan Raban: Learning to Read, 5 November 2009

... Five. By the early 1950s, I was tearing at speed through the middlebrow bestsellers of the time: John Creasey, Nevil Shute, the wartime adventures of British officers who’d escaped, or tried to escape, from German POW camps, like The Wooden Horse and The Colditz Story, along with a stream of books about fishing. The nearest I came to reading ...

Anglo-Egyptian Attitudes

Marina Warner, 5 January 2017

... with their animals. The picture I loved best showed a little Mameluke girl swathed from head to foot in bulky robes, gold-embroidered on pale crimson, over a blue tunic, her hands neatly clasped together, with the decorum of an adult. The towering scale of her enveloping coif, a wimple-like structure trailing behind her like a cloak, and her imperturbable ...

Why children’s books?

Katherine Rundell, 6 February 2025

... The text does not, alas, teach how to avoid being beheaded by a king.It wasn’t until 1744 that John Newbery published what is generally thought to be the first children’s book: A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, Intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly … The Use of which will infallibly make Tommy a good ...

Infisal! Infisal! Infisal!

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

... like Peter, Juba is an Eldorado: he earns three times more here than he could at home.Outside the John Garang mausoleum, a vast empty lot surrounded by a tall iron fence with gilded spikes, I suddenly find myself swallowed up in a swarming crowd. All along the fence, thousands of people are patiently waiting in line. In the street, among policemen and ...

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, ...

So Ordinary, So Glamorous

Thomas Jones: Eternal Bowie, 5 April 2012

Starman: David Bowie, the Definitive Biography 
by Paul Trynka.
Sphere, 440 pp., £9.99, March 2012, 978 0 7515 4293 6
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The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s 
by Peter Doggett.
Bodley Head, 424 pp., £20, September 2011, 978 1 84792 144 4
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... came across: much of Hunky Dory consists of pastiches of Bowie’s musical heroes of the 1960s – John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on ...

At the Skunk Works

R.W. Johnson, 23 February 1995

Fool’s Gold: The Story of North Sea Oil 
by Christopher Harvie.
Hamish Hamilton, 408 pp., £18.99, October 1994, 0 241 13352 1
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... seen. Not a few of the characters the boom brought with it were larger than life too: ex-Governor John Connally of Texas, for example, still scarred from the Kennedy shooting, hustling for oil companies and on the way down to the bankruptcy that broke him, and T. Boone Pickens, the greenmail king, so thrilled with his acquisition of the Mesa field (which he ...

Having it both ways

Peter Clarke, 27 January 1994

A.J.P. Taylor: A Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 468 pp., £18.99, January 1994, 1 85619 210 5
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A.J.P. Taylor: The Traitor within the Gates 
by Robert Cole.
Macmillan, 285 pp., £40, November 1993, 0 333 59273 5
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From Napoleon to the Second International: International Essays on the 19th Century 
by A.J.P. Taylor, edited by Chris Wrigley.
Hamish Hamilton, 426 pp., £25, November 1993, 0 241 13444 7
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... at Bootham School may have provoked an immediate countervailing effect in a cynical repudiation of John Bright; but in Birmingham Town Hall on 12 May 1958, exactly one hundred years after Bright had spoken there, Taylor concluded his own speech to a CND meeting by echoing Bright’s words (and shed his own tears with his old history master afterwards). What ...

Touching the music

Paul Driver, 4 January 1996

Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship 
by Robert Craft.
Vanderbilt, 588 pp., £35.95, October 1994, 0 8265 1258 5
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... Ingmar Bergman, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Giacometti, Graves, Isherwood, Heard, Huxley, St-John Perse, Gilbert Ryle, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh. Some, including Eliot and Huxley, are evoked at length; others come to rest in a marvellous single image. Edith Sitwell’s eyes are ‘heavily underpencilled in blue, like the woad ...

The Frighteners

Jeremy Harding, 20 March 1997

The Ends of the Earth 
by Robert Kaplan.
Macmillan, 476 pp., £10, January 1997, 0 333 64255 4
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... which in turn makes it easier for Kaplan to cling onto his craggy overview, with its prophetic foot-holds in demographics, criminality and the ruin of nations. The second lesson is that what didn’t happen to you, the foreigner, has already happened, or is about to happen, to one or more of the nationals. A half-hearted mortar attack on the head of ...
Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition 
by James Joyce, edited by Hans Walter Gabler, Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior.
Garland, 1919 pp., $200, May 1984, 0 8240 4375 8
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James Joyce 
by Richard Ellmann.
Oxford, 900 pp., £8.95, March 1984, 0 19 281465 6
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... legally in the United States, so there was no merit in doing heavy work on the text. When Judge John Woolsey lifted the ban on the book – 6 December 1933 – Bennett Cerf set about issuing a new edition. But the text he gave his printers was a copy of Samuel Roth’s facsimile pirated edition, printed in New York: its errors remained to corrupt Cerf’s ...

The New Lloyd’s

Peter Campbell, 24 July 1986

Richard Rogers 
by Bryan Appleyard.
Faber, 271 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 0 571 13976 0
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A Concrete Atlantis 
by Reyner Banham.
MIT, 265 pp., £16.50, June 1986, 0 262 02244 3
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William Richard Lethaby 
by Godfrey Rubens.
Architectural Press, 320 pp., £30, April 1986, 0 85139 350 0
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... them and nothing in the future, with Rogers thinking about living in the USA and his partner John Young looking into minicab driving, the RIBA asked them to submit material for consideration by an unnamed client. Lloyd’s were looking for an architect. They needed, not just space, but a plan which would allow business to go on while building ...
... equally common opposite, the bland, disembodiedly sensitive or namby-pamby verse that never puts a foot wrong, or right; both add, supererogatorily, to the stock of available unreality. The poetry of civility, passion and order is the true antithesis of both. Certainly there is plenty of boring verse around: there always has been. But it may be worth dwelling ...

Best Remain Seated

Jeremy Harding: Travel guides, 1 January 1998

Kenya 
by Hugh Finlay and Geoff Crowther.
Lonely Planet, 376 pp., £11.99, April 1997, 0 86442 460 4
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Borneo 
by Robert Pelton Young.
Fielding, 632 pp., £13.95, December 1995, 1 56952 026 7
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Asia's Top Dive Sites 
edited by Fiona Nichols and Michael Stachels.
Fielding, 228 pp., £13.95, December 1996, 1 56952 129 8
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South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland 
by Jon Murray et al.
Lonely Planet, 658 pp., £13.99, January 1998, 0 86442 508 2
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Southern Africa 
by Richard Cox.
Thornton Cox, 474 pp., £11.95, July 1995, 0 7818 0388 8
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The World's Most Dangerous Places 
by Robert Pelton Young.
Fielding, 1048 pp., £13.95, December 1997, 1 56952 104 2
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South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland 
by Barbara McCrea et al.
Rough Guides, 697 pp., £12.99, October 1997, 1 85828 238 1
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The Good Honeymoon Guide 
by Lucy Horne.
Trailblazer, 320 pp., £11.95, March 1997, 1 873756 12 7
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Amnesty International Report 1997 
Amnesty International, 378 pp., £18, June 1997, 0 86210 267 7Show More
Morocco 
by Barnaby Rogerson.
Cadogan, 596 pp., £12.99, December 1997, 1 86011 043 6
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... drank until my thirst was assuaged. After that I cut the shoe and tied its uppers on my foot with the rope off the well and bits of cloth.’ All this was before the days of Willis and Geiger and other suppliers of ‘strong shoes for walking’, but there’s a parable here for the modern hiker, to do with divesting yourself of the thing you hold ...

In real sound stupidity the English are unrivalled

Stefan Collini: ‘Cosmo’ for Capitalists, 6 February 2020

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the ‘Economist’ 
by Alexander Zevin.
Verso, 538 pp., £25, November 2019, 978 1 78168 624 9
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... agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law League, insisting that his paper ...

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