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Daisy packs her bags

Zachary Leader: The Road to West Egg, 21 September 2000

Trimalchio: An Early Version of ‘The Great Gatsby’ 
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by James L.W. West III.
Cambridge, 192 pp., £30, April 2000, 0 521 40237 9
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... per story); over the whole of his writing career, roughly a twenty-year period, this number had risen to 160. In a comparable twenty-year period Hemingway wrote his ‘first forty-nine stories’, as Scribners described them when they were collected in a book in 1938. The genesis of The Great Gatsby, the work Fitzgerald hoped would bring him literary ...

Brideshead and the Tower Blocks

Patrick Wright, 2 June 1988

Home: A Short History of an Idea 
by Witold Rybczynski.
Heinemann, 256 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 434 14292 1
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... instincts of their own. By 1945 the number of large country houses in National Trust ownership had risen to 17, and a concerted defence was under way. Dornford Yates’s characters may have given up in disgust, but Victoria Sackville-West had dug in her heels and was busy re-establishing an ancestral home and garden at Sissinghurst. Sackville-West was a moving ...

The Monster Plot

Thomas Powers: James Angleton, Spymaster, 10 May 2018

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton 
by Jefferson Morley.
Scribe, 336 pp., £20, December 2017, 978 1 911344 73 5
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... James Angleton​ , chief of counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years, was not the ideal spy. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible ...

Mooching

Nicholas Spice: Dreaming of Vikram Seth, 29 April 1999

An Equal Music 
by Vikram Seth.
Phoenix House, 381 pp., £16.99, April 1999, 1 86159 117 9
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... Murmuring assent, I cast about for ways of developing this elegant theme, but the Minister had risen to speak, so I trailed off into silence and, with a polite smile at Seth, I retreated to my thoughts.I felt sure that I had made Vikram Seth appear by thinking about him. Michael Holme, the narrator of An Equal Music, makes the love of his life appear by ...
The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature 
by William Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews.
Oxford, 740 pp., £30, June 1986, 0 19 554233 9
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... a healthy reaction against overseas domination of our ideas. Nothing of native origin has so far risen to take its place. In passing, one may note the somewhat ironical fact that, while the entry on the Jindy-worobak movement itself is both full and accurate, the same cannot be said of that part of the long article on the aborigines which deals with the ...

Like Cutting a Cow

Adam Kuper: Ritual killings in southern Africa, 6 July 2006

Medicine Murder in Colonial Lesotho: The Anatomy of a Moral Crisis 
by Colin Murray and Peter Sanders.
Edinburgh, 493 pp., £50, May 2006, 0 7486 2284 5
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... and medicine murders in grisly detail but paid more attention to what it considered, like King James I, to be the real threat of witchcraft. Another anthropologist, Isak Niehaus, has since published a superb account of witch-hunts in the area, while taking a more sceptical view of witchcraft. Now Colin Murray, an anthropologist, and Peter Sanders, a ...

Diary

David Bromwich: Putin to the Rescue, 26 September 2013

... and the grammar delivered by Kerry, reported on 9 September that the absence of the signature of James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, from the Kerry document was a significant detail. Clapper evidently had refused to sign off because the data had been cherry-picked (as Colin Powell’s had been for his UN presentation in February ...

How to Serve Coffee

Rory Stewart: Aleppan Manners, 16 February 2017

Aleppo Observed: Ottoman Syria through the Eyes of Two Scottish Doctors, Alexander and Patrick Russell 
by Maurits H. van den Boogert.
Arcadian Library, 254 pp., £120, September 2015, 978 0 19 958856 5
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... preferring the ‘somewhat prolix’ monologues of these magnificent figures, who had risen from comparatively humble backgrounds, and fought in the most far-flung corners of the empire, to the literary quotations of the mullahs. Their relationships with politicians allowed them to observe how consistently the removal of a grand vizier led to ...

Puzzled Puss

John Lahr: Buster Keaton’s Star Turn, 19 January 2023

Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life 
by James Curtis.
Knopf, 810 pp., £30, February 2022, 978 0 385 35421 9
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... includes thirteen features and more than thirty shorts.) Keaton had been on the stage longest, risen the highest, fallen the furthest, and, thanks to the medium of film which preserved his artistry, left the most indelible legacy. ‘He was,’ Orson Welles said, ‘as we’re now beginning to realise, the greatest of all the clowns in the history of the ...

Like a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader

John Lloyd: Globalisation, 2 September 1999

The Lexus and the Olive Tree 
by Thomas Friedman.
HarperCollins, 394 pp., £19.99, May 1999, 0 00 257014 9
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Global Transformation 
by David Held and Anthony McGrew.
Polity, 515 pp., £59.50, March 1999, 0 7456 1498 1
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... in more ways than in any previous era in modern history’. Held & Co agree that the costs have risen, but in a fascinating chapter called ‘The Expanding Reach of Organised Violence’ show that they have not risen everywhere to the point where war has become unthinkable. For states on the periphery of the rich ...

The Past’s Past

Thomas Laqueur, 19 September 1996

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History 
by Jay Winter.
Cambridge, 310 pp., £12.95, September 1996, 0 521 49682 9
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... among a field of crosses receding without end to the horizon, forms the book’s dust-jacket.) The risen soldiers see how little their sacrifice has mattered to the living, who are, of course, terrified by the spectral army and mend their ways. The dead return to their graves; but the dreamer goes completely mad, accuses the sun of allowing the carnage to take ...
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology 
edited by T.F. Hoad.
Oxford, 552 pp., £12.95, May 1986, 9780198611820
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Dictionary of Changes in Meaning 
by Adrian Room.
Routledge, 292 pp., £14.95, May 1986, 0 7102 0341 1
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The Story of English 
by Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert McNeil.
Faber/BBC, 384 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 563 20247 5
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Dictionary of American Regional English. Vol. I: Introduction and A-C 
edited by Frederic Cassidy.
Harvard, 903 pp., $60, July 1985, 0 674 20511 1
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... called the front downstairs room of our terraced house the parlour, but former neighbours who had risen to semi-detached affluence on new estates preferred to say lounge.) Your usage is thus in part receptive, in part elective. You may – as Ben Jonson put it a long time ago – ‘boldly nominate a spade a spade’: but given the appropriate social claims ...

Starting over

Malise Ruthven, 9 July 1987

Cities on a Hill 
by Frances FitzGerald.
Picador, 414 pp., £4.50, March 1987, 0 330 29845 3
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... to Timothy – ‘Preach the Word.’ We have a message of redeeming grace through a crucified and risen Lord. This message is designed to go right to the heart of man and there meet his deep spiritual need. Nowhere are we commissioned to reform the externals. We are not told to wage war against bootleggers, liquor ...

The Great NBA Disaster

John Sutherland, 19 October 1995

... they knock 5p off the price of the Times. The NBA is buried, though not necessarily dead. It has risen from the grave before and will probably do so again. But as in the late 19th century, it may take some uncomfortable decades before the book trade rediscovers the virtues of self-restraint and the internal strength to reimpose it. What follows in the short ...

How to Solve the Puzzle

Donald MacKenzie: On Short Selling, 5 April 2018

... It was​ in the mid-1980s that the short seller James Chanos first realised he was being investigated. People were ‘going through my garbage’, he says. They didn’t find anything incriminating: Chanos lives a ‘nice quiet yuppie existence’, said one of the private investigators, whose report ended up in the hands of the Wall Street Journal ...

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