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Life at the Pastry Board

Stefan Collini: V.S. Pritchett, 4 November 2004

V.S. Pritchett: A Working Life 
by Jeremy Treglown.
Chatto, 308 pp., £25, October 2004, 9780701173227
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... allowance might have to be made for the senses in which Cyril Connolly was ‘influential’ or George Orwell a ‘man of letters’. But I would be surprised if any serious contender for that title between about 1930 and 1980 were more prolific than VSP. Gore Vidal, always a master of understated hyperbole, praised Pritchett’s criticism by saying ‘it ...

Keys to the World

Tom Stevenson: Sea Power, 8 September 2022

The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans 
by David Bosco.
Oxford, 320 pp., £22.99, April, 978 0 19 026564 9
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Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order In World War Two 
by Paul Kennedy.
Yale, 521 pp., £25, May, 978 0 300 21917 3
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... they fly. As a result companies found it useful to register their ships in Liberia, Panama or the Marshall Islands: anywhere with open registries. Panama was attractive to US shipowners because of the convenience of the canal and because its currency was pegged to the dollar, but especially because its safety regulations were lax. By 1970 flags of convenience ...

‘Disgusting’

Frank Kermode: Remembering William Empson, 16 November 2006

William Empson. Vol. II: Against the Christians 
by John Haffenden.
Oxford, 797 pp., £30, November 2006, 0 19 927660 9
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... even if they did not encourage him in his deviant designs. Among his colleagues at the BBC were George Orwell and Louis MacNeice, both of whom he greatly admired; and there were others, their names by now probably forgotten, who brought conviction and real knowledge to Empson’s side of the fight. One such, Ralf Bonwit, a formidable, dedicated Japanese ...

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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... itself to be ‘cruel and unusual’. In Furman’s case only William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, the Court’s one black member, voted to strike down nearly all existing capital statutes on the grounds that they were intrinsically in violation of human rights or communal dignity. As Marshall put it in another ...

Peace without Empire

Perry Anderson, 2 December 2021

Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union 
by Stella Ghervas.
Harvard, 528 pp., £31.95, March, 978 0 674 97526 2
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... were the creation of Nato as a bulwark against Soviet aggression, and the provision of Marshall Aid that put postwar Europe back on its feet.Ghervas’s​ chapter on the postwar order , however, is not titled ‘The Spirit of DC’. Truman’s creations were Atlanticist institutions, not European ones. Something different, which was American ...

Cronyism and Kickbacks

Ed Harriman: The economics of reconstruction in Iraq, 26 January 2006

US General Accountability Office 
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US Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction 
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International Advisory and Monitoring Board 
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... of the inspector general’. In his just published memoirs, Bremer dwells on infighting within George Bush’s cabinet and his claim that he tried and failed to get the number of US troops in Iraq increased. Bremer also says that he ‘realised there would be corruption at many levels of Iraqi society in the months and years to come. But I also hoped that ...

Where are all the people?

Owen Hatherley: Jane Jacobs, 27 July 2017

Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs 
by Robert Kanigel.
Knopf, 512 pp., £34, September 2016, 978 0 307 96190 7
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Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs 
edited by Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring.
Random House, 544 pp., £16.99, October 2016, 978 0 399 58960 7
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... of East Harlem, whereby the population was moved into large, spacious high-rise flats like the George Washington Houses; the ‘middle-income’ towers (what would now be called ‘luxury flats’) of Stuyvesant Town in Lower Manhattan; and the cultural ‘ghetto’ of the Lincoln Center, itself adjacent to a dense concentration of housing projects. These ...

I thought you were incredible

Bee Wilson: Elizabeth Taylor’s Magic, 16 November 2023

Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit and Glamour of an Icon 
by Kate Andersen Brower.
HarperCollins, 495 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 0 00 843582 0
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... had understood of Taylor’s screen appeal was A Place in the Sun, a 1951 noirish film directed by George Stevens and co-starring Montgomery Clift. It tells the story of George Eastman (Clift), the poor relation of a wealthy family who is torn between two women: Shelley Winters as Alice, who works in the same factory and to ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Didn’t Do in 2007, 3 January 2008

... Edwardian countryside, red brick villas behind high beech hedges, looking for Hamstead Marshall. An ancient buttressed wall with a stone panel dated 1665 suggests we are not far off. And here is the church above the road, the tower with an 18th-century look to it and a medieval chapel behind. But it’s locked and no one about who could open it ...

Aloha, aloha

Ian Hacking, 7 September 1995

What ‘Natives’ Think: About Captain Cook, For Example 
by Marshall Sahlins.
Chicago, 316 pp., £19.95, July 1995, 0 226 73368 8
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... who hails first shall ask, What ship’s that? then he that is hailed shall answer King George then he who hailed first shall answer Queen Charlotte, and the other shall answer God Preserve.’ If the crews really got out of touch they were to leave messages in bottles at pre-assigned beaches or map readings. It helps also, in reading not Cook but ...

Seeing Stars

Alan Bennett: Film actors, 3 January 2002

... twice a week and we generally went on a Monday and a Saturday. Comedies were best, particularly George Formby, but we took what was on offer, never knowing whether a film had any special merit. Some came with more of a reputation than others, Mrs Miniver for instance with Greer Garson, Dangerous Moonlight (with the Warsaw Concerto) and Now, Voyager with the ...

The Party in Government

Conor Gearty, 9 March 1995

... for the two or three days work a month that was involved. In due course he became Lord Lawson. George Younger had reportedly not formally disclosed that he was to leave his post as Secretary of State for Defence before it was announced that he was to join the Royal Bank of Scotland and Murray Johnston Trusts. Having been Mrs Thatcher’s staunchest ...

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Adam Shatz: Mass Incarceration, 4 May 2017

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America 
by James Forman.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp., £21.98, April 2017, 978 0 374 18997 6
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... better options, such as an infusion of jobs and investment in the inner cities: the domestic Marshall Plan many black politicians had long championed. Worse, the ‘politics of respectability’, a prim, middle-class tradition of black protest, had led civil rights leaders to turn away in shame and embarrassment from convicts, the ‘most stigmatised ...

Blood for Oil?

Retort: The takeover of Iraq, 21 April 2005

... of the US state’s political interests, it was a system and a strategy intended to shore up the Marshall Plan, to exercise ‘veto power’ over Japanese imports, and to help control the spread of Communism in Asia. The oil system, unstable and rickety at best, needed constant fine-tuning. When in 1968 the British announced their intention to withdraw ...

Emily of Fire & Violence

Paul Keegan: Eliot’s Letters, 22 October 2020

... days. Reading Keats’s letters in the latter part of 1931, he encountered the journal-letters to George and Georgiana on the Western frontier of the United States. Eliot earmarked Keats’s strategies: ‘These are trifles – but I require nothing so much of you as that you will give me a like description of yourselves, however it may be when you are ...

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