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Diary

James Meek: In Athens, 1 December 2011

... in two whopping instalments of hundreds of euros each. And it comes as part of the electricity bill. If Greeks don’t pay it, the government says, their power will be cut. Just as Britons used the phrase ‘poll tax’ rather than the government’s preferred ‘council tax’, Greeks have started referring to their new burden by the same name as the ...

Freddie Gray

Adam Shatz, 21 May 2015

... his ground’; Eric Garner, a 44-year-old in Staten Island killed in a police chokehold; Michael Brown, an 18-year-old shot dead by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri; Walter Scott, a 50-year-old father of four in North Charleston, South Carolina, who was Tasered and then killed by a police officer who had stopped him for a nonfunctioning brake ...

Diary

Duncan McLean: Frank Sargeson, 7 June 2018

... novella That Summer (1943), the culmination of his early development, a young farm worker called Bill moves to the city at the depths of the Depression. He stays afloat in his emotional life, first with Ted, a ‘nuggety’ youth he swims naked and ‘fools about’ with, then with an older man, Terry, whom he chums to the races, and the pub, and ...

The Hemingway Crush

Theo Tait: Kevin Powers, 3 January 2013

The Yellow Birds 
by Kevin Powers.
Sceptre, 230 pp., £14.99, September 2012, 978 1 4447 5612 8
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... lyrical, wistful moments with eruptions of extreme violence: A yellow bird With a yellow bill Was perched upon My windowsill I lured him in With a piece of bread And then I smashed His fucking head … The plot is simple but momentous, told as a series of fragmented episodes, foreshadowing the pivotal tragedy, or exploring its traumatic ...

Diary

Eli Silberman: The Victory Day Parade, 22 March 2018

... Mr Zank​ was quite short, maybe five three with a wide waist for his size, somewhat wavy brown hair, about fifty, looked directly at you when he spoke with soft remnants of a Polish accent. He worked in the Garment Center, took the BMT subway into Manhattan every day and at weekends had a part-time job at a boardwalk hot dog spot two blocks from where we lived in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn ...

Four Moptop Yobbos

Ian Penman, 17 June 2021

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 642 pp., £9.99, March, 978 0 00 834003 2
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The Beatles and Sixties Britain 
by Marcus Collins.
Cambridge, 382 pp., £90, March 2020, 978 1 108 47724 6
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The Beatles in Context 
edited by Kenneth Womack.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £74.99, January 2020, 978 1 108 41911 6
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... houses had been.Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from KensingtonOn​ the opening page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are loud, foul-mouthed, almost ...

Rabbit Resartus

Edward Pearce, 8 November 1990

Rabbit at Rest 
by John Updike.
Deutsch, 505 pp., £14.99, October 1990, 0 233 98622 7
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... Too sceptical to make anything as crass as an indictment, he has nevertheless delivered a true bill, and it is a bill of mortality. This grave purpose alone, never mind the art of the writing, should wipe out jibes about soap opera. To make a comparison with another long, many-volumed family chronicle, we should try ...

Different under the Quill

Tom Johnson: On Paper, 12 May 2022

Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fictions 
by Orietta Da Rold.
Cambridge, 270 pp., £75, October 2020, 978 1 108 84057 6
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... at the port of London: a page for every person in England. Most of it was probably low-quality brown paper used as a packing material to protect foodstuffs and ceramics as they juddered along cartways into the city. A small amount, some 3500 sheets, was the ornamental paper used for decorations at feasts and known as papiri depicti (Chaucer refers to ...

Fog has no memory

Jonathan Meades: Postwar Colour(lessness), 19 July 2018

The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Postwar Britain 
by Lynda Nead.
Yale, 416 pp., £35, October 2017, 978 0 300 21460 4
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... colour’ she assigns to the period – 1945-60 – is a foggy sort of greyish brown. Dickens’s monumental fog in Bleak House is perhaps correctly reckoned by Nead to be metaphorical. She doesn’t state what it’s a metaphor for. Presumably the torpid, sclerotic chaos of Chancery. But the impasto fog and smog (a coinage not made till ...

The Greatest Geek

Richard Barnett: Nikola Tesla, 5 February 2015

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age 
by W. Bernard Carlson.
Princeton, 520 pp., £19.95, April 2015, 978 0 691 05776 7
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... humour.’ After spending the harsh winter of 1885 digging ditches, Tesla met two men – Alfred Brown, a senior official in the Western Union telegraph company, and the lawyer Charles Peck – who helped him to become a major force in the War of the Currents. Impressed by his capability and charisma, Brown and Peck went ...

Hooted from the Stage

Susan Eilenberg: Living with Keats, 25 January 2024

Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph 
by Lucasta Miller.
Vintage, 357 pp., £12.99, April 2023, 978 1 5291 1090 6
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Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse 
by Anahid Nersessian.
Verso, 136 pp., £12.99, November 2022, 978 1 80429 034 7
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... America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been sharing with Keats since Tom’s death nearly two years before. No one would come with Keats to the warm climate his doctors prescribed. Keats’s friends had urgent ...

The wind comes up out of nowhere

Charles Nicholl: The Disappearance of Arthur Cravan, 9 March 2006

... being mainly bound up with emotional and poetic concerns. The other is a little-known book by Bob Brown, a New York journalist who celebrated the life of the ‘slackers’ – as the drop-outs and draft-dodgers of the day were known – in a fictionalised memoir called You Gotta Live, published in 1932. In this, Cravan appears as Rex Johns and Loy as ...

Nora Barnacle: Pictor Ignotus

Sean O’Faolain, 2 August 1984

... of Hunt. The Irish Times.’ Lennox wearily levered his torso forward to look down at Hunty’s brown and punctured shoe tops. As slowly he lowered himself backward to look strabismally into Hunty’s boyish face. Hunty, his quarry at last in sight, could not but offer to refresh the balloon glass. On the nod he brought back two doubles, sat, notebook ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: London’s Lost Cinemas, 6 November 2014

... The Manchurian Candidate), slid ticketless into the Texas Theatre in Dallas, for a double bill that would otherwise have drifted beyond record: Cry of Battle, set in the Philippines, and War is Hell!, a Korean War quickie narrated by the much decorated Audie Murphy. Oswald fixed his time and period just as the bank robber John Dillinger confirmed both ...

Plain English

Denis Donoghue, 20 December 1984

Nineteen Eighty-Four: Facsimile Edition 
by George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison.
Secker, 291 pp., £25, July 1984, 9780436350221
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Nineteen Eighty-Four 
by George Orwell, edited by Bernard Crick.
Oxford, 460 pp., £17.50, March 1984, 0 19 818521 9
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Inside the Myth. Orwell: Views from the Left 
edited by Christopher Norris.
Lawrence and Wishart, 287 pp., £12.50, November 1984, 0 85315 599 2
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The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell 
by George Woodcock.
Fourth Estate, 287 pp., £5.95, November 1984, 0 947795 05 7
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Orwell’s London 
by John Thompson.
Fourth Estate, 119 pp., £9.95, November 1984, 0 947795 00 6
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... of essays, mostly attacks on Orwell from the Left. The militants are Malcolm Evans, Alan Brown, Alaric Jacob, Bill Alexander, Robert Stradling, Beatrix Campbell, Deirdre Beddoe, Stephen Sedley, Lynette Hunter, Andy Croft, Stuart Hall, Antony Easthope and Christopher Norris. The attacks are now commonplace. Raymond ...

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