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New Man from Nowhere

James Davidson: Cicero, 4 February 2016

Dictator 
by Robert Harris.
Hutchinson, 299 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 0 09 175210 1
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... phylactery shouted out by Verres’ victims pleading for a stay of crucifixion), recycled by John F. Kennedy with unavoidable bathos as ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ This great and by no means guaranteed victory against the establishment, as well as the addition of an entire province to his list of clients, helped ease Cicero’s way. But as consul he was ...

Murder in Mayfair

Peter Pomerantsev, 31 March 2016

A Very Expensive Poison: The Definitive Story of the Murder of Litvinenko and Russia’s War with the West 
by Luke Harding.
Faber, 424 pp., £12.99, March 2016, 978 1 78335 093 3
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... the restaurant Sexy Fish, all lava-coloured couches, fountains streaming down the windows and a 13-foot Frank Gehry crocodile on the wall. Sexy Fish is the creation of Richard Caring, most famous for the Ivy, the restaurant in Soho that flaunts its exclusivity by being as apparently modest and downbeat as possible. That works for the posh English, but modern ...

Don’t Ask Henry

Alan Hollinghurst: Sissiness, 9 October 2008

Belchamber 
by Howard Sturgis.
NYRB, 345 pp., £8.99, May 2008, 978 1 59017 266 7
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... panics, his horse bolts, he faints and falls and breaks his hip. When the great surgeon (‘Sir John’) who tends him reluctantly confirms that he will never be able to ride again, Sainty ‘heaved a sigh of unmistakable relief. “Ah! well, that’s a comfort, anyhow,” he said.’ From now on, Sainty’s lameness will be the useful badge of his ...

Sneezing, Yawning, Falling

Charles Nicholl: The Da Vinci Codices, 16 December 2004

... volumes: the three Forster codices in the V&A (formerly owned by Dickens’s friend and biographer John Forster), for instance, actually contain five notebooks. The largest concentration of notebooks is in the Institut de France in Paris; they arrived in France en masse in the 1790s, Napoleonic booty expropriated from the Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Others are in ...

Rinse it in dead champagne

Colm Tóibín: The women who invented beauty, 5 February 2004

War Paint: Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry 
by Lindy Woodhead.
Virago, 498 pp., £20, April 2003, 1 86049 974 0
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Diana Vreeland 
by Eleanor Dwight.
HarperCollins, 308 pp., £30, December 2002, 0 688 16738 1
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... Years later, when much cream had been spread and rouge faded and money spent, figures such as John Richardson, Graham Sutherland and Bruce Chatwin would have dealings with Helena Rubinstein. Rubinstein trusted Richardson, in as much as she trusted anyone, because he told her that certain paintings in her vast art collection that she believed were ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Where I was in 1993, 16 December 1993

... too in that you’re not blitzed with information, exhibitions and outreach as soon as you set foot in the door. Here is Collingwood, Nelson’s admiral, and an 18th-century general in the Deccan Rifles, dead on the voyage out; surgeons and solicitors of the town, neat, kneeling Tudors, plump Augustan divines and an atmosphere of piety, property and Pledge ...

Beyond Borders

Adam Shatz: Adolfo Kaminsky’s Forgeries, 16 February 2023

... Jews to immigrate, but turned down repeated offers of a medal from Israel and refused ever to set foot there again.In the 1950s, Kaminsky established himself as a commercial photographer, with a studio on the rue des Jeûneurs. He took portraits, reproduced artworks and made film stills, collaborating with the set designer Alexandre Trauner on a film by ...

Atheist with a Wooden Leg

Edmund Gordon: Flannery O’Connor’s Judgments, 19 March 2026

Good Country People and Other Stories 
by Flannery O’Connor, edited by Lauren Groff.
Faber, 286 pp., £9.99, October 2025, 978 0 571 39633 7
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Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Why Do the Heathen Rage?’: A Behind the Scenes Look at a Work in Progress 
by Jessica Hooten Wilson.
Brazos, 192 pp., £19.99, March 2024, 978 1 58743 618 5
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... her’. The only snag is that General Sash isn’t actually a general: ‘He had probably been a foot soldier; he didn’t remember what he had been; in fact, he didn’t remember that war at all.’ He was given the uniform to wear at ‘the preemy’, where after being introduced to the crowd as General Tennessee Flintrock Sash of the Confederacy, he stood ...

Wriggling, Wriggling

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Ruthless Cecil Rhodes, 23 October 2025

The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes 
by William Kelleher Storey.
Oxford, 528 pp., £30.99, July, 978 0 19 981135 9
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... to the university to get a degree. Storey wonders if he might not have absorbed the teaching of John Ruskin, who had urged undergraduates to chivalric derring-do in the waste spaces of the earth. But he arrived too late to hear Ruskin’s famous lecture on the ‘imperial duty’ of founding colonies and the evidence for Ruskin’s impact on his thinking is ...

The Deaths Map

Jeremy Harding: At the Mexican Border, 20 October 2011

... by acting as mules, delivering packages to safehouses in the US. But the carrying capacity of a foot-slogger is no match for a commercial trailer, or the hydraulic arm of a towtruck, or a hidden compartment in an outsize SUV. The impressive quantities of narcotics confiscated along the US/Mexican border in 2009-10 (three million kilos of ...

Corncob Caesar

Murray Sayle, 6 February 1997

Old Soldiers Never Die: The Life of Douglas MacArthur 
by Geoffrey Perret.
Deutsch, 663 pp., £20, October 1996, 9780233990026
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... a thick turtleneck sweater, highly polished cavalry boots and, draped around his neck, a seven-foot puce muffler knitted by his mother. He refused to use a gas-mask and was twice lightly gassed, earning two of his 20 citations for wounds and decorations for bravery. It is hard to avoid the thought that he wanted bystanders, particularly the newsmen who ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... contemporaneously. But the three officers connected with these documents – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – had signed witness statements in December 1974 stating that the manuscript notes were contemporaneous, and they had repeated this on oath in the trial in 1975. If the rough typed notes were indeed a draft from which the ...

Travels with My Mom

Terry Castle: In Santa Fe, 16 August 2007

... along; my mother is still indignant. (‘I never liked her or her weird diet.’) Said PG was four-foot-ten and 90 pounds – a tiny, frail, somewhat eccentric Jewish-Canadian vegan with gluten allergies who wore rubberised Doc Martens and played the medieval viel. We once visited all the Cathar fortresses together. I miss her a lot sometimes – especially ...

Decent People

D.W. Harding, 2 August 1984

The Root and the Flower 
by L.H. Myers.
Secker, 583 pp., £8.95, March 1984, 0 436 29810 4
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... ran to Daniyal and rubbed itself against his leg, making him miss one of the balls. He puts his foot on its head and crushes it. At the sounds of the cracking bones, ‘the Prince’s eyes glanced for one smiling second into those of Gunevati.’ She faints. Daniyal saunters up to Amar as if to start a casual conversation, defying him to object to this ...

Big Boss in Fast Cars

Neal Ascherson: In Brezhnev’s Room, 24 February 2022

Brezhnev: The Making of a Statesman 
by Susanne Schattenberg, translated by John Heath.
I.B. Tauris, 484 pp., £30, November 2021, 978 1 83860 638 1
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... groups showing Leonid Ilyich solving engineering problems for an audience of awed scientists, six-foot Brezhnev pencils from the Karl Liebknecht Pencil Factory, Asian rugs embroidered with words of squirming servility, miniature machine tools presented with love from the working people of Krasnodar, a Vietnamese portrait of him wearing a real suit and with ...

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