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Is this what life is like?

Nicole Flattery: ‘My Phantoms’, 9 September 2021

My Phantoms 
by Gwendoline Riley.
Granta, 199 pp., £12.99, April, 978 1 78378 326 7
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... perseverance.’In both First Love and My Phantoms, the mother has a full social calendar, every day something on, which she describes cheerfully as ‘Hysteria and desperation!’ Helen Grant can be found at recordings of Radio 4 panel shows, at film screenings at FACT. When festivals come to the city, she buys a ticket for every event. What she is ...

Why We Should Preserve the Spotted Owl

Amartya Sen: Sustainability, 5 February 2004

... without making any serious attempt to bring the environmental case into public discussion. As Barry Holden puts it, in Democracy and Global Warming: ‘This is not to say that the environmental case would necessarily have won the day,’ but ‘it is to suggest that it may have done so, had it been put.’3 There is ...

Very Pointed

Dinah Birch: Pugin, 20 September 2007

God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain 
by Rosemary Hill.
Allen Lane, 602 pp., August 2007, 978 0 7139 9499 5
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... of work he undertook for the Palace of Westminster was a constant drain on his energy. Charles Barry exploited his productivity without scruple, providing a meagre return in money or recognition for the drawings that his younger collaborator turned out in staggering abundance. Pugin was vulnerable to such machinations, for he took little interest in ...

Feeling Right

Will Woodward: The Iowa Straw Poll, 16 September 1999

... But when he asks, ‘Will you go to the caucus with me?’ she says yes, and blushes. That same day, at the Holiday Inn near Des Moines airport, the Republican Presidential candidate Gary Bauer holds a meeting organised by the Iowa Family Policy Centre, a conservative Christian group claiming 4300 members. Chuck Hanley, its president, leads prayers before ...

Diary

James Meek: Bobos for Boris?, 26 April 2012

... at the back, his hand clasping the chrome strut like a mariner gripping the rigging. The next day new buses, authorised by the then mayor Ken Livingstone, ran the route. They were nicknamed ‘bendy buses’, after the concertina joint in the middle that enabled them to twist their 18-metre length around corners. On paper they were an improvement on the ...

Not a leaf moves here

Malcolm Coad, 22 September 1994

Soldiers in a Narrow Land: The Pinochet Regime in Chile 
by Mary Helen Spooner.
California, 316 pp., £23.50, June 1994, 0 520 08083 1
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... of Chile’s pension system as the ‘obligatory model’ for their own. In May, General Barry McCaffrey, chief of the US Army Southern Command (with which, contrary to legend, Pinochet’s relations were not warm), visited the ex-dictator in Santiago, and described him afterwards as ‘a man of historic vision and stature’. Pinochet has visited ...

Australia strikes back

Les Murray, 13 October 1988

Snakecharmers in Texas 
by Clive James.
Cape, 373 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 224 02571 6
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... an agenda. The disaster has come on gradually, like the staining of a vast crystal lattice. From day to day, it is hard to know what bastions have fallen, what streets have become no-go areas. Festivals became impossible in the early Seventies: the unapproved writer is snubbed and harassed constantly at those. Four years ...

Bombes, Cribs and Colossi

R.O. Gandy, 26 May 1994

Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park 
edited by F.H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp.
Oxford, 321 pp., £17.95, August 1993, 0 19 820327 6
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... for enciphering the text setting which the Germans abandoned in April 1940.) Stuart Milner-Barry comments on the sad and mysterious fact that after the fall of France the Polish group was not brought to Bletchley. I have used the phrase ‘supposedly random’ because Jack Good emphasises here the difference between ‘random’ and ‘humanly ...

Wanting and Not Getting, Getting and Not Wanting

Rosemary Dinnage, 21 February 1980

My Life 
by George Sand, translated and adapted by Dan Hofstadter.
Gollancz, 246 pp., £7.95, September 1980, 0 575 02682 0
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George Sand in her Own Words 
edited and translated by Joseph Barry.
Quartet, 475 pp., £7.50, November 1980, 0 7043 2235 8
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... one imaginary lover succeeding another, infidelity following on spectral infidelity: Each new day saw me unfaithful to the one I had loved the night before. Soon one love of this kind was not sufficient to fill my always hungry, insatiable soul, and I would embrace several phantoms at the same time… Squandered in this way, my heart finally died: I ...

Poor Devils

Peter France, 2 December 1982

The Literary Underground of the Old Regime 
by Robert Darnton.
Harvard, 258 pp., £11.55, November 1982, 0 674 53656 8
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... or Rousseau) and the ubiquitous libelles against the ruling few (Anecdotes Secrètes sur Madame du Barry). Unlike the contents of the alternative bookshop, however, all of this went to a quite respectable readership. Darnton lays particular stress on the libelles. There is nothing new about such scurrilous pamphlets (one may recall the flood of mazarinades ...

The Dignity of Merchants

Landeg White, 10 August 2000

In Search of Africa 
by Manthia Diawara.
Harvard, 288 pp., £17.50, December 1998, 0 674 44611 9
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... infamous prison, from which no one had ever come out alive. Kaman Diaby, Kéita Fodéba, Barry Alpha Oumar, Ansoumane Traoré, Diallo Telli, and countless others had been killed here ... It was said that the guards had been demonic and perverted, happy to torture men whose wealth and position they envied. The guards of Camp Boiro had hated to see ...

Karel Reisz Remembered

LRB Contributors, 12 December 2002

... their leisure time and he asked me to do the commentary. So next minute we were down the pit for a day, crawling on our bellies a thousand feet below ground and we saw how the poor buggers lived. It took a lot of tea to get the dust out of our throats. The filming was good. We were all just first-timers doing our thing. He had such an analytical brain – I ...

Poetry is a horrible waste of time

Frances Wilson: Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 28 October 1999

Thomas Lovell Beddoes: Selected Poetry 
edited by Judith Higgens and Michael Bradshaw.
Carcanet, 116 pp., £8.95, June 1999, 1 85754 408 0
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... in a letter to Thomas Kelsall, that he had not yet replied to one from B.W. Procter (alias Barry Cornwall) received nine years before, although it had been on his mind to do so. Beddoes became a doctor to protect the world from his writing. He also had to cure himself of his strange affliction: of an urge to destroy what he wrote which was as strong as ...

Howard’s End

John Sutherland, 18 September 1986

Redback 
by Howard Jacobson.
Bantam, 314 pp., £10.95, September 1986, 0 593 01212 7
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Coming from behind 
by Howard Jacobson.
Black Swan, 250 pp., £2.95, April 1984, 0 552 99063 9
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Peeping Tom 
by Howard Jacobson.
Black Swan, 351 pp., £2.95, October 1985, 0 552 99141 4
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... lecturer at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands, is discovered begowned (it being graduation day) screwing a begowned finalist on his office floor. It is not a joyous coupling. Sefton’s mind is not on the job, but on his office door which he fears may be unlocked. His mind slips back to an earlier occasion when he was teaching at the University of ...

Those bastards, we’ve got to cut them back

Daniel S. Greenberg: Bush’s Scientists, 22 September 2005

The Republican War on Science 
by Chris Mooney.
Basic Books, 288 pp., £14.99, October 2005, 0 465 04675 4
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... politics, but that was long ago, and few remember. In 1964, the Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, grabbed the attention of scientists by vowing to lob a missile into the men’s room of the Kremlin if the Soviets misbehaved. Goldwater, a major-general in the air force reserve, aroused widespread alarm, especially among alumni of the Manhattan ...

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