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Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Did in 2015, 7 January 2016

“... the wardering was outsourced so the first casualty was the warders’ chairs, and the warders’ comfort. (I’ve a feeling that the warders at the Met in New York don’t get to sit down either.) This outsourcing is presumably a prelude to outsourcing the wardering altogether, with it being done by Serco or some similar organisation. Toynbee says the ...”

Modernity’s Undoing

Pankaj Mishra: ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’, 31 March 2011

A Visit from the Goon Squad 
by Jennifer Egan.
Corsair, 336 pp., £14.99, March 2011, 978 1 78033 028 0Show More
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“... biting irony at her fellow Americans and their insufficiently examined expectations of wealth, comfort, beauty and fame. In ‘Why China?’, a bond trader, fleeing potential disgrace at work, has dragged his reluctant family to China; there, he unexpectedly turns against his own daughters, ‘blonde, expensive-looking creatures’. He contrasts them with ...”

Diary

Colin Kidd: After the Referendum, 18 February 2016

“... voted for ‘enhanced devolution’ (‘devo-max’) in the three-option referendum desired by Alex Salmond, but were forced in the two-option referendum permitted by David Cameron to choose between the stark alternatives of Union or independence.* In the latter stages of the campaign, as Devine warns his readers, he lent his name to the ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... was emphatically against that. Two questions it would have to be. Strong rumour suggests that Alex Salmond would have preferred to go for devo-max – which would undoubtedly have been accepted by a massive majority of the Scottish electorate – and then, after bedding down the new powers, to go to the country again in a few years’ time on the final ...”

My songs mean as much to my audience as yours do to your congregation

J. Hoberman, 18 July 1996

Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot 
by Michael Rogin.
California, 320 pp., $24.95, May 1996, 0 520 20407 7Show More
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“... of America’s first indigenous theatrical form, the ‘mother song’ that had given sentimental comfort to three generations of pioneers – and imbued them with a ferocious vitality. Jolson’s avant-garde introduction of syncopated ‘coon shouting’ into the dying world of the minstrel show had the same explosive effect on audiences that Presley’s ...”

Do It and Die

Richard Horton, 20 April 1995

Soundings 
by Abraham Verghese.
Phoenix, 347 pp., £18.99, May 1994, 1 897580 26 6Show More
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“... cent, for the record). Tourism trades happily on this humiliating past. Henning, the birthplace of Alex Haley; the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, where Martin Luther King was assassinated on 3 April 1968; Dayton, where John Scopes was convicted in 1925 for teaching evolution to his biology class. Tennessee still stumbles under the burden of being a Civil War ...”

Chasing Steel

Ian Jack: Scotland’s Ferry Fiasco, 22 September 2022

“... million). He was on friendly terms with senior figures in the SNP such as John Swinney and Alex Salmond, who was still first minister when McColl’s interest in Ferguson’s began. Of course, orders would have to be won through open competition, but in a country with an enduring demand for small ships – as ferries and as service boats for the big ...”

The Pocahontas Exception

Thomas Laqueur: America’s Ancestor Obsession, 30 March 2023

A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in US History 
by Francesca Morgan.
North Carolina, 301 pp., £27.95, October 2021, 978 1 4696 6478 1Show More
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“... of the growth of genealogical practice in the United States (and by implication elsewhere) is Alex Haley’s spectacularly successful 1976 family history, Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Roots was a literary phenomenon: 46 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, 22 of them at number one. The ABC mini-series based on it was watched by 130 ...”

Claude Rawson considers the behaviour of reviewers and their response to Martin Amis’s novel ‘Other People’

Claude Rawson, 7 May 1981

“... elsewhere, which gives the game away. I found some of the heroine’s amnesiac talk too cute for comfort, but a lot of it very attractive. I came to the reviews with no expert knowledge of what John Sutherland calls ‘the fiction industry’ and ‘the reviewing establishment’. His two excellent books, Fiction and the Fiction Industry (1978) and the ...”

Good New Idea

John Lanchester: Universal Basic Income, 18 July 2019

“... idea has been the focus of attention for a great range of thinkers, including Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a moment.Guy Standing is a long-standing ...”

All in Slow Motion

Dani Garavelli: The Murder of Nikki Allan, 15 June 2023

“... picked on. While he was at primary school his parents split up, and his mother, Sue, moved in with Alex Heron. George got on with his new dad, but when he was nine Alex died of a heart attack, something that was said to have affected George profoundly. By the time he arrived at St Aidan’s, a boys’ secondary school run by ...”

What was it that drove him?

David Runciman: Gordon Brown, 4 January 2018

My Life, Our Times 
by Gordon Brown.
Bodley Head, 512 pp., £25, November 2017, 978 1 84792 497 1Show More
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“... Charlie Logan, Margaret Logan, Bert Lumsden, George Manclark, Derek Stubbs, Peter Young and also Alex Falconer’). As this shows, they didn’t all have to be men, but usually they were. There is no doubt that Brown tried to re-create these bonds with groups of personal allies throughout his political career, and he often succeeded. His closest colleagues ...”

Every Field, Every Yard

James Meek: Return to Kyiv, 10 August 2023

“... gnawed by guilt. An aspect of that defiance, and a source of guilt, is the refusal to renounce comfort or pleasure. The greatest source of resilience against the shock, anxiety and grief of invasion, Tatyana Li, a psychotherapist in Kyiv, told me, is the universal desire to live. She repeated this several times and laughed when I finally got what she was ...”

A New Kind of Being

Jenny Turner: Angela Carter, 3 November 2016

The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography 
by Edmund Gordon.
Chatto, 544 pp., £25, October 2016, 978 0 7011 8755 2Show More
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“... on people she knew from her local pub, so closely that her publisher required a letter of comfort from the man who supplied the model for the novel’s charismatic villain (whom the novel describes, at one point, as ‘ithyphallic’, the word cut, as Hill noticed, from ‘Unicorn’, to the poem’s advantage). Shadow Dance (1966) tells the story of ...”

Who holds the welding rod?

James Meek: Our Turbine Futures, 15 July 2021

“... uniforms, sleep in company dormitories or small single rooms, and eat at restaurants serving the comfort food of their regions. But Phu My’s time as a capitalist garrison town is giving way to a new phase. At the crossroads where an archway marks the entrance to the city’s first industrial zone, the old jumble of workers’ beer shops that used to be ...”

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