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Orwell and Biography

Bernard Crick, 7 October 1982

... hypothesis. Certainly in the Tribune columns he produced an ideal image of himself – the plain, blunt, free-speaking man of common sense and common decency, something that I call ‘Orwell-like’ in contrast to what ‘Orwellian’ meant after 1984: but this image was an extension of part of himself, not a mask. If he was role-playing a bit, it was with ...

Ah, that’s better

Colin Burrow: Orwell’s Anti-Radicalism, 5 October 2023

Orwell: The New Life 
by D.J. Taylor.
Constable, 597 pp., £30, May, 978 1 4721 3296 3
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George Orwell’s Perverse Humanity: Socialism and Free Speech 
by Glenn Burgess.
Bloomsbury, 270 pp., £21.99, May, 978 1 5013 9466 9
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Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life 
by Anna Funder.
Viking, 464 pp., £20, August, 978 0 241 48272 8
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... many publishers, including T.S. Eliot at Faber, refused to publish. Eliot’s rejection of it was blunt: ‘The positive point of view, which I take to be Trotskyist, is not convincing.’ But the overwhelmingly negative force of Orwell’s political position enabled him to produce the quintessence of the ‘Orwellian’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he ...

So Ordinary, So Glamorous

Thomas Jones: Eternal Bowie, 5 April 2012

Starman: David Bowie, the Definitive Biography 
by Paul Trynka.
Sphere, 440 pp., £9.99, March 2012, 978 0 7515 4293 6
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The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s 
by Peter Doggett.
Bodley Head, 424 pp., £20, September 2011, 978 1 84792 144 4
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... Dory consists of pastiches of Bowie’s musical heroes of the 1960s – John Lennon, Syd Barrett, Anthony Newley, Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground. Which would make Ziggy Stardust the beautiful butterfly that emerged from the chrysalis. Paul Trynka begins his biography with a description of Bowie’s performance of ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops on 5 July ...

Military to Military

Seymour M. Hersh, 7 January 2016

... the officials responsible for Syrian policy in the State Department and White House ‘get it’. Anthony Davis of IHS-Jane’s Defence Weekly estimated in October that as many as five thousand Uighur would-be fighters have arrived in Turkey since 2013, with perhaps two thousand moving on to Syria. Moustapha said he has information that ‘up to 860 Uighur ...

The Gatekeeper

Adam Tooze: Krugman’s Conversion, 22 April 2021

Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics and the Fight for a Better Future 
by Paul Krugman.
Norton, 444 pp., £13.99, February, 978 0 393 54132 8
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... majority in Congress the impetus has carried through to 2021. The mantra on everyone’s lips is a blunt statement of Krugman’s position. Do not repeat the mistakes of the early Obama administration. Go large. If the Republicans have now decided to be fiscal conservatives, ignore them. There has been no opposition from big business. What the Chamber of ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... that he was guilty, by the time it came to the closing speeches all inhibitions had been shed. Anthony Evans QC, for Donaldson, asked the jury: ‘Can anyone believe that Armstrong was not an active member of the IRA?’ He continued: We say to you that the innocent Patrick Armstrong does not exist. He is a media creation, a creation of the ...

Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
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The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
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... public, and a recognised ‘act’. In 1978, Berlin wrote a private letter to the psychiatrist Anthony Storr, wondering why he, a beloved only child, should still be visited with the feeling that his many attainments were ‘of very little or of no value’. This takes us some way beyond the pose of false modesty, but nowhere near as far as self-hatred.I ...

Red Pill, Blue Pill

James Meek, 22 October 2020

... seeking’, hence the group’s name, Truth Seekers UK. Polls suggest that most people feel the blunt instrument of lockdown works, in the sense that it stops hospitals being overwhelmed, but it would be a weak society where nobody challenged new restrictions on individual freedom. Some enforcement of the rules, like police drones tracking hikers on ...

Worse than a Defeat

James Meek: Shamed in Afghanistan, 18 December 2014

The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan 
by Jack Fairweather.
Cape, 488 pp., £20, December 2014, 978 0 224 09736 9
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Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War 
by Frank Ledwidge.
Yale, 287 pp., £10.99, July 2014, 978 0 300 20526 8
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British Generals in Blair’s Wars 
edited by Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan.
Ashgate, 404 pp., £19.95, August 2013, 978 1 4094 3736 9
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An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict 1978-2012 
by Mike Martin.
Hurst, 389 pp., £25, April 2014, 978 1 84904 336 6
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... to six British soldiers: Nigel Coupe of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment, and Jake Hartley, Anthony Frampton, Christopher Kershaw, Daniel Wade and Daniel Wilford of the Yorkshire Regiment. All except Coupe, a sergeant and father of two children, were aged between 19 and 21. They died in Afghanistan in March 2012, out on patrol in Helmand province, when ...

Festival of Punishment

Thomas Laqueur: On Death Row, 5 October 2000

Proximity to Death 
by William McFeely.
Norton, 206 pp., £17.95, January 2000, 0 393 04819 5
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Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment 
edited by Bonnie Bobit.
Bobit, 311 pp., $24.95, September 1999, 0 9624857 6 4
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... now facing the electric chair in Georgia. He had the good fortune to be represented on appeal by Anthony Amsterdam, a learned and rhetorically gifted Stanford law professor. His argument before the Supreme Court not only saved his client’s life but irrevocably changed the history of the death penalty in America, if not exactly as he might have ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... on the bed again, going over the day’s events while Sarah cut his hair with a pair of fairly blunt-looking scissors. Julian was critical of Robertson’s opening. ‘He failed to go for the heart before going for the head,’ Julian said. ‘And I wasn’t happy with him not using the words “beyond reasonable doubt” enough.’ Sarah opened a box of ...

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