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Steaming like a Pie

Theo Tait: ‘Going Postal’, 4 December 2003

Mailman 
by J. Robert Lennon.
Granta, 483 pp., £15.99, October 2003, 1 86207 625 1
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... the USPS, Lennon picks up the low hum of the invisible republic. Like the eavesdropping couple in John Cheever’s ‘The Enormous Radio’, Mailman is a psychic receiver for the secrets of those around him. His precious archive of photocopied mail, built up over many years of invading his customers’ privacy, is the main reason for his emotional attachment ...

Short Cuts

Adam Shatz: The Four-Year Assault, 21 January 2021

... Luther King Jr had preached, and Jon Ossoff, who had interned with the Georgia civil rights hero, John Lewis, who died last July. (Warnock presided at Lewis’s funeral.) And on the morning of 6 January, both Warnock and Ossoff were declared victors in the Georgia run-offs, allowing the Democratic Party to take back the Senate.Warnock’s victory was ...

Two Americas and a Scotland

Nicholas Everett, 27 September 1990

Collected Poems, 1937-1971 
by John Berryman, edited by Charles Thornbury.
Faber, 348 pp., £17.50, February 1990, 0 571 14317 2
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The Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Faber, 427 pp., £17.50, February 1990, 0 571 14318 0
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Poems 1959-1979 
by Frederick Seidel.
Knopf, 112 pp., $19.95, November 1989, 0 394 58021 4
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These Days 
by Frederick Seidel.
Knopf, 50 pp., $18.95, October 1989, 0 394 58022 2
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A Scottish Assembly 
by Robert Crawford.
Chatto, 64 pp., £5.99, April 1990, 0 7011 3595 6
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... in the subject itself. A poet’s earliest efforts are usually marred by self-consciousness and John Berryman’s are no exception to the rule. For most poets, however, finding a distinct and convincing voice is, at least in part, a process of shedding unwanted affectations and exaggerated self-importance. For Berryman the process was reversed. He learnt to ...

Diary

Tom Nairn: The Australian elections, 13 December 2007

... when an unhealed wound remains? Not long before the vote, the point was cruelly rubbed in. John Howard’s Liberal-Coalition government made the unusual decision to invade its own country, by sending the Australian Defence Force into the Northern Territory. His aim was to deal decisively with concerns about child abuse and corruption among the mainly ...

Where the Apples Come From

T.C. Smout: What Makes an Oak Tree Grow, 29 November 2007

Woodlands 
by Oliver Rackham.
Collins, 609 pp., £25, September 2006, 0 00 720243 1
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Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees 
by Richard Mabey.
Chatto, 289 pp., £20, October 2007, 978 1 85619 733 5
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Wildwood: A Journey through Trees 
by Roger Deakin.
Hamish Hamilton, 391 pp., £20, May 2007, 978 0 241 14184 7
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The Wild Trees: What if the Last Wilderness Is above Our Heads? 
by Richard Preston.
Allen Lane, 294 pp., £20, August 2007, 978 1 84614 023 5
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... regenerate satisfactorily below closed canopies or those with small openings. Furthermore, Daniel Kelly has found that in Ireland young oaks in the open were worse affected by mildew than those under a canopy. Conversely, Rackham cites instances of regeneration in existing woods in the Middle Ages, but perhaps does not allow for the effect on the non-oak ...

Outfoxing Hangman

Thomas Jones: David Mitchell, 11 May 2006

Black Swan Green 
by David Mitchell.
Sceptre, 371 pp., £16.99, May 2006, 0 340 82279 1
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... The chain of gossip laid itself out link by link. I’d tell Moran. Moran’d tell his sister Kelly. Kelly’d tell Pete Redmarley’s sister Ruth. Ruth Redmarley’d tell Pete Redmarley. Pete Redmarley’d tell Nick Yew. Nick Yew’d tell Tom Yew. Tom Yew’d come round to my house this evening on his Suzuki 150cc, tie ...

Nostalgia for the Vestry

James Buchan: Thatcherism, 30 November 2006

Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts 
by Simon Jenkins.
Allen Lane, 375 pp., £20, October 2006, 0 7139 9595 5
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... what you can, control what you can’t,’ has proved congenial for different reasons to John Major and Tony Blair, and to Blair’s heir apparent, Gordon Brown. These men are to Jenkins Thatcher’s political ‘sons’, with David Cameron trotting along behind as a ‘grandson’. (The book was completed before Cameron’s Conservatives abandoned ...

Diary

Jenny Turner: ‘T2 Trainspotting’, 16 February 2017

... nasty-tasting substance that gets put in household chemicals to stop children from drinking them. John Fletcher MacFarlan was an Edinburgh apothecary who started making laudanum in the early 19th century. T&H Smith moved its flourishing morphine works from the Canongate to Gorgie a century later, and went on to supply both painkillers and sterile dressings to ...

Marvellous Boys

Mark Ford, 9 September 1993

The Ern Malley Affair 
by Michael Heyward.
Faber, 278 pp., £15, August 1993, 0 571 16781 0
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... we are as the double almond concealed in one shell,’ he broods in ‘Colloquy with John Keats’, going on to predict his own equally untimely demise in harsh demotic terms – ‘Look! My number is up!’ After his cremation at Rookwood Cemetery Ethel opened his trunk and set about disposing of his pitiably meagre possessions; in the process ...

Why Do the Tories Always Have the Luck?

Peter Clarke, 23 February 1995

Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 
edited by Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball.
Oxford, 842 pp., £20, October 1994, 0 19 820238 5
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... riven with ideological dispute and internecine factionalism faces electoral disadvantages. As John Barnes brings out in his urbane essay on ideology and factions, Conservative ideology has rested in part on a scepticism about the adequacy of ideology itself. In this sense, neither the fervent Tariff Reformers of the early part of the century, nor the ...

Blame Robert Maxwell

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: How Public Inquiries Go Wrong, 17 March 2016

... into a wide range of matters of public interest, from the Aberfan disaster to the death of David Kelly, Profumo to tabloid phone hacking. On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war – to investigate, as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, put it, ‘the UK’s involvement in ...

Hare’s Blood

Peter Wollen: John Berger, 4 April 2002

The Selected Essays of John Berger 
edited by Geoff Dyer.
Bloomsbury, 599 pp., £25, November 2001, 0 7475 5419 6
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... John Berger’s selected essays run to nearly six hundred pages, yet that is just the tip of the iceberg if one looks at the totality of his published work: the essays and reviews about the visual arts – drawing, painting, photography, film – but also short stories, journals, screenplays, travel articles, letters, television scripts, translations, novels, poems, even a requiem in three parts which gives a wrenching account of the untimely deaths of three of Berger’s neighbours ...

Rules of Battle

Glen Bowersock: The Byzantine Army, 11 February 2010

The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire 
by Edward Luttwak.
Harvard, 498 pp., £25.95, November 2009, 978 0 674 03519 5
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... of major books in Italian (Giuseppe Zecchini), French (Michel Rouche) and English (Christopher Kelly). The shadow of contemporary foreign affairs looms over all these narratives, even if Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are manifestly not Attila. Luttwak’s insistence that avoidance of battle and cash up front is the right course of ...

Victory by Simile

Andrea Brady: Phillis Wheatley’s Evolution, 4 January 2024

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence 
by David Waldstreicher.
Farrar, Straus, 480 pp., £24, March 2023, 978 0 8090 9824 8
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... in Wheatley’s verse residues of African spiritual practices and memories of her birthplace. John Shields has argued that her elegies are compatible with African animist traditions, and proposes that her background was with the Fula people. Odell said Phillis described her mother pouring water ‘before the sun at his rising’, which has led some to ...

The Bayswater Grocer

Thomas Meaney: The Singapore Formula, 18 March 2021

Singapore: A Modern History 
by Michael Barr.
Bloomsbury, 296 pp., £17.99, December 2020, 978 1 350 18566 1
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... is enshrouded in seventy years of mythologising, but no less impressive for that. As John D. Kelly has emphasised, a Singaporean cultural identity was forged within a decade: Malays in Singapore went overnight from being the Bumiputera – the chosen sons of the soil – to a minority; Indians had to forget ...

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