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Who holds the welding rod?

James Meek: Our Turbine Futures, 15 July 2021

... has travelled on wind power came at the Conservative Party Conference in 2020, when Boris Johnson announced an expansion of offshore wind farms, declared that he wanted Britain to become the ‘Saudi Arabia of wind’ and ridiculed the politician from his own party who had, seven years earlier, denounced wind power as a crackpot Labour idea that ...

What does she think she looks like?

Rosemary Hill: The Dress in Your Head, 5 April 2018

... about women and their clothes, how they wear them and also how they write about them, led me to Virginia Woolf and the term she coined: ‘frock consciousness’. On 6 January 1925, at the beginning of her diary for that year, she wrote: ‘I want to begin to describe my own sex.’ That thought recurs in the diary as the months go on and it is ...

Lucky Kim

Christopher Hitchens, 23 February 1995

The Philby Files. The Secret Life of the Master Spy: KGB Archives Revealed 
by Genrikh Borovik, edited by Phillip Knightley.
Little, Brown, 382 pp., £18.99, September 1994, 0 316 91015 5
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The Fifth Man 
by Roland Perry.
Sidgwick, 486 pp., £16.99, October 1994, 0 283 06216 9
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Treason in the Blood: H. St John Philby, Kim Philby and the Spy Case of the Century 
by Anthony Cave Brown.
Hale, 640 pp., £25, January 1995, 9780709055822
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My Five Cambridge Friends 
by Yuri Modin.
Headline, 328 pp., £17.99, October 1994, 0 7472 1280 5
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Looking for Mr Nobody: The Secret Life of Goronwy Rees 
by Jenny Rees.
Weidenfeld, 291 pp., £18.99, October 1994, 0 297 81430 3
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... in the dismemberment of Bosnia. Memorable example: Brezhnev’s intimate consultation with Lyndon Johnson in the days before the invasion of Czechoslovakia.)The Cold War was ostensibly ‘about’ some quite important differences, arising from the post-war Stalinisation of Eastern Europe and from the competition for nuclear superiority. But it also had ...

Disintegration

Frank Kermode, 27 January 1994

The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 
by T.S. Eliot, edited by Ronald Schuchard.
Faber, 343 pp., £25, November 1993, 0 571 14230 3
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... marital disaster and general ill-health, Eliot added to his Harvard commitment the University of Virginia lectures called After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, a topic that interested him more than his Harvard theme. These three lectures became a book, published at once but never subsequently reprinted. It is hardly surprising that he chose to meet ...

Use Use Use

Robert Baird: Robert Duncan’s Dream, 24 October 2013

Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus 
by Lisa Jarnot.
California, 509 pp., £27.95, August 2013, 978 0 520 23416 1
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... relationships as sexual opportunities cost Duncan not a few companions, including his old friend Virginia Admiral, who turned her back on him after he admitted to sleeping with her future husband, Robert De Niro père. In 1951 he exchanged wedding vows with a man, Jess Collins, but while this gave him a stable home and a partner for life, it didn’t do much ...

Obama v. Clinton: A Retrospective

Eliot Weinberger: A Tale of Two Candidates, 3 July 2008

... drawing an unspoken parallel, declaring that King may have been a great orator, but it was Lyndon Johnson who got the civil rights legislation passed. Certainly there are those who voted and will vote for or against Obama because of his race, but horizontal racism has largely disappeared in the US. These days, a white office worker generally has no problem ...

Flip-Flops and Kalashnikovs

Tom Stevenson: In Libya, 2 March 2017

... is a Gaddafi-era general turned CIA asset who reappeared in Libya after twenty years in exile in Virginia to take part in the revolt in 2011. He then returned to the US, but cropped up again in February 2014, when he delivered a traditional coup-style broadcast on national television, claiming to have seized power on behalf of the ‘Supreme Council of the ...

Old Literature and its Enemies

Claude Rawson, 25 April 1991

The Death of Literature 
by Alvin Kernan.
Yale, 230 pp., £18.95, October 1990, 0 300 04783 5
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Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy and Tradition 
by Alasdair MacIntyre.
Duckworth, 241 pp., £12.95, August 1990, 0 7156 2337 0
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Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man 
by David Lehman.
Poseidon, 318 pp., $21.95, February 1991, 0 671 68239 3
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... of literature in our time. Its two predecessors, The Imaginary Library (1982) and Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print (first published in 1987 as Printing Technology, Letters and Samuel Johnson), which were issued by a different publisher, were less sourly jokey and less apocalyptic. The first in particular ...

The Spoils of Humanitarianism

Karl Maier: Feeding off Famine, 19 February 1998

Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa 
by Alex de Waal.
James Currey/Indiana, 238 pp., £40, October 1997, 0 85255 811 2
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The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity 
by Michael Maren.
Free Press, 302 pp., $25, January 1997, 0 684 82800 6
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... the South in 1996 and the remains of a label from a can of beef distributed by the Mennonites of Virginia were found on board, the Clinton Administration suppressed the information. Others have also been guilty of distortion. World Vision US’s vice-president Andrew Natsios warned in September that ‘at least half a million people have died, probably ...

The Fastidious President

David Bromwich: The Matter with Obama, 18 November 2010

... and opportunistic. Unhappily the president Obama seems gradually coming to resemble is Lyndon Johnson. Large social programmes have been spun out to unite the country at home, by a grand vision of a society with a new standard of generous conduct, while, in the background, the president and his generals dutifully prosecute an inherited war which the ...

The Shape of Absence

Hilary Mantel: The Bondwoman’s Narrative, 8 August 2002

The Bondwoman’s Narrative: A Novel 
by Hannah Crafts, edited by Henry Louis Gates.
Virago, 338 pp., £10.99, May 2002, 1 86049 013 1
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... you what . . . You won’t find a nicer bit of woman’s flesh to be bought for that money in old Virginia. Don’t you see what a foot she has, so dainty and delicate, and what an ankle.’ But the trader is put off, because he suspects Hannah is ‘skittish’. Women turn skittish, he remarks, when they are parted from their children, though that is not ...

Ill-Suited to Reality

Tom Stevenson: Nato’s Delusions, 1 August 2024

Nato: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance 
by Sten Rynning.
Yale, 345 pp., £20, March, 978 0 300 27011 2
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Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of Nato 
by Peter Apps.
Wildfire, 624 pp., £25, February, 978 1 0354 0575 6
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Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance since the Cold War 
edited by Grey Anderson.
Verso, 356 pp., £19.99, July 2023, 978 1 80429 237 2
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... congresses were held in Delos rather than Athens. Nato has two strategic commands: one based in Virginia, the other in Mons, Belgium. But since 1949 every holder of its senior military office, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), has been a US general or admiral. Applications for membership of the alliance must be submitted to the US ...
... eccentric and once-off usages of a different cultural stratum, those of writers like T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas and James Joyce (except for most of Finnegans Wake); though virtually no recognition is offered of the problem of using literary sources as evidence for current usage. Unfortunately, the Supplement is not beyond reproach ...

Who was David Peterley?

Michael Holroyd, 15 November 1984

... and which it is the aim of the official biography to conceal’. This is very similar to Virginia Woolf’s view of traditional life-writing which she parodied in her fantasy-biography Orlando: ‘Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore ... all these ...

The Reviewer’s Song

Andrew O’Hagan: Mailer’s Last Punch, 7 November 2013

Norman Mailer: A Double Life 
by J. Michael Lennon.
Simon and Schuster, 947 pp., £30, November 2013, 978 1 84737 672 5
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... of Lennon’s ample and very loyal biography may have something to do with that: the sense – Virginia Woolf’s sense, as well as Robert Louis Stevenson’s, and Dostoevsky’s – that nobody is simply one thing. Some people write biographies, you suspect, as a way of not writing about themselves. Lennon’s book is good in that way, in the ...

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