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No Haute Cuisine in Africa

Ernest Gellner, 2 September 1982

Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology 
by Jack Goody.
Cambridge, 253 pp., £19.50, June 1982, 0 521 24455 2
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... but they are by now, all of them, in academic retirement. Of the cohort which follows them, Jack Goody is one of the leading figures. In Eastern Europe, there is a joke about the current generation of Communist leaders which says that its coming was predicted in the Bible: ‘Then came a generation which knew not Joseph.’ ...

Short Cuts

Izzy Finkel: In the Inflation Basket, 16 February 2023

... results so the rest of us can put a figure on how much richer we feel, or how much poorer.The price collectors’ task is to measure the cost of goods in the UK. Not the cost of living – a confusion that excites statisticians’ displeasure – but the cost of a defined basket of goods. The contents of the basket, updated each year by the Office of ...

Respectability

Mary Hawthorne, 23 June 1994

The Seduction of Morality 
by Tom Murphy.
Little, Brown, 224 pp., £15.99, June 1994, 0 316 91059 7
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A Goat’s Song 
by Dermot Healy.
Harvill, 408 pp., £14.99, April 1994, 0 00 271049 8
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... the family’s affections by making them eternally grateful to her?’) and of asking a nominal price: ‘£10,000? She had no right to it ... it could be seen as an act of selling herself out of the family. And that was the very last thing she wanted.’ Her siblings are meanwhile busy pilfering the hotel’s contents and tattling on one another by ...

Comprehensible Disorders

David Craig, 3 September 1987

Before the oil ran out: Britain 1977-86 
by Ian Jack.
Secker, 271 pp., £9.95, June 1987, 0 436 22020 2
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In a Distant Isle: The Orkney Background of Edwin Muir 
by George Marshall.
Scottish Academic Press, 184 pp., £12.50, May 1987, 0 7073 0469 5
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... The item which seems set to stay longest with me from Ian Jack’s alert and precisely-written record of British life in the Seventies and Eighties comes from the opening memoir of his father, which supplies a deeper soil, or subsoil, to the son’s coverage of more recent matters for the Sunday Times and (since Wapping) the Observer: Few of his workplaces survive ...

Lily and Lolly

Sarah Rigby, 18 July 1996

The Yeats Sisters: A Biography of Susan and Elizabeth Yeats 
by Joan Hardwick.
Pandora, 263 pp., £8.99, January 1996, 0 04 440924 9
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... see to things for their invalid mother – and all this while quite young girls ... They paid the price of having a father who did not earn enough. The letter had little effect on his son, who half-heartedly offered to change the offending word to ‘troubled’ when the piece, entitled ‘Four Years’, was published in book form, but it is an accurate ...

A Country Emptied

Ian Jack: The Highland Clearances, 7 March 2019

The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed 1600-1900 
by T.M. Devine.
Allen Lane, 464 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 0 241 30410 5
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... of improving shipboard conditions but in fact was intended to stall emigration by raising the price of the fare. In this way, migration was at first limited by poverty, and the introduction of the potato made it possible for the dispossessed to stay put. The victims of eviction crowded into already congested townships and the population was rearranged ...

Be mean and nasty

Jenny Diski: Shirley Porter’s Story, 25 May 2006

Nothing like a Dame: The Scandals of Shirley Porter 
by Andrew Hosken.
Granta, 372 pp., £20, March 2006, 1 86207 809 2
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... have change from a pound? Answer: the London Borough of Westminster. Boom boom. This makes the price of a pint of beer in 1986 slightly less than 85p. The cemeteries, in Hanwell, East Finchley and Mill Hill, whose upkeep was the responsibility of the Highways and Works Committee of Westminster City Council, were sold by the council for 5p each. Aside from ...

Four Poems

Donald Davie, 21 March 1985

... sang it well                    (‘Lest we forget’): With a hey, jolly Jack, with a hey. When the dead walked in Larkin’s heyday, and the living                    were made of cardboard. With a bang, with a whimper, the world ends, or with a yelp ... with a hey ... lion’s whelp wagging a flag: Burgess in the ...

No Crying in This House

Jackson Lears: The Kennedy Myth, 7 November 2013

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy 
by David Nasaw.
Allen Lane, 896 pp., £12.35, September 2013, 978 0 14 312407 8
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Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch 
by Barbara Perry.
Norton, 404 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 393 06895 5
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... and urged him to share ‘the beautiful women of Cape Cod’ with his recently married brother Jack. Indeed, Perry writes, Joe Sr ‘modelled the very sort of immoral behaviour that Jack and Teddy embraced’. By ‘immoral behaviour’ Perry means Joe’s legendary philandering, which Nasaw dismisses as conduct that ...

Chinese Leaps

Jon Elster, 25 April 1991

The Search for Modern China 
by Jonathan Spence.
Hutchinson, 876 pp., £19.95, May 1990, 0 09 174472 5
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Rebellions and Revolutions: China from the 1880s to the 1980s 
by Jack Gray.
Oxford, 456 pp., £35, April 1990, 0 19 913076 0
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... provide keys to otherwise puzzling patterns of behaviour. Among the persisting values discussed in Jack Gray’s Rebellions and Revolutions are those of collective responsibility, respect for the elderly, economic egalitarianism and outward conformity to the changing dictates of authority. Surprisingly, neither Spence nor Gray mentions how the traditional ...

Chasing Steel

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

... poor communities’. During the First World War the summer traffic more or less vanished and the price of fuel – steam coal was badly needed by the Royal Navy – rose steeply: facing large losses, the company begged for more money ‘otherwise the Mail services will automatically cease’. Soon there was talk of a government takeover, which was eventually ...

Murph & Me

August Kleinzahler, 20 February 2020

... I’m only 14!This plainly displeased him. You could say Murph was my unofficial guardian,The Jack Teagarden to my Stan Getz, sans horns, a somewhat unsavory coupling,And one not without implications down the road …But you can imagine how purgatorial, that rolling, rackety, fitful journey uptownAfter the 25 minutes pinned back in the death seat beside ...

Mirror Images

Jenny Diski: Piers Morgan, 31 March 2005

The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade 
by Piers Morgan.
Ebury, 484 pp., £17.99, March 2005, 0 09 190506 0
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... undemanding exemplars of legends. At one party he is quite near to someone who might just count: Jack Nicholson. He asks Fergie (the former Duchess of York) how he can get talking to the ‘superstar’. Don’t tell him you’re a journalist, says Fergie, better say you’re something interesting like a bank robber. Our compulsively cheeky ...

The Unmaking of the President

Benjamin Barber, 7 October 1982

The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power 
by Garry Wills.
Atlantic/Little, Brown, 310 pp., $14.95, February 1982, 0 316 94385 1
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... Madison’s caution, that ‘power is also opportunity, and to face danger with confidence is the price of its fulfilment.’ His polemical text, The American Presidency, concluded with a plea to give to the President ‘the power commensurate with the function he has to perform’. Only in this way could what he termed ‘the American adventure’ hope to ...

How does one talk to these people?

Andrew O’Hagan: David Storey in the Dark, 1 July 2021

A Stinging Delight: A Memoir 
by David Storey.
Faber, 407 pp., £20, June, 978 0 571 36031 4
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... shy, still standing at the edge of the party. But it was Storey who most powerfully understood the price of the journey, the dissociation, the consequences of leaving home when the scars were still raw, the family illness undiagnosed, to try to become a person. He attempted to hold on to his Yorkshire instincts, but they curdled at the Slade. (Rugby became ...

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