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The Obdurate Knoll

Colin Kidd: The Obdurate Knoll, 1 December 2011

Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan 
by Jeff Greenfield.
Putnam, 434 pp., £20.25, March 2011, 978 0 399 15706 6
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11.22.63 
by Stephen King.
Hodder, 740 pp., £19.99, November 2011, 978 1 4447 2729 6
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... as well as satirise the paranoia which was exacerbated by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King in 1968 and seemed to find its justification in the Watergate revelations. Richard Condon’s novel The Manchurian Candidate – an eerie anticipation published in 1959 and then turned into a Hollywood film which appeared during the Cuban ...

Maids

Philip Horne, 1 April 1983

The Slow Train to Milan 
by Lisa St Aubin de Teran.
Cape, 254 pp., £7.95, March 1983, 0 224 02077 3
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Holy Pictures 
by Clare Boylan.
Hamish Hamilton, 201 pp., £7.95, February 1983, 0 241 10926 4
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Pilgermann 
by Russell Hoban.
Cape, 240 pp., £7.95, March 1983, 0 224 02072 2
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September Castle: A Tale of Love 
by Simon Raven.
Blond and Briggs, 261 pp., £7.95, February 1983, 0 85634 123 1
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The Watcher 
by Charles Maclean.
Allen Lane, 343 pp., £7.95, March 1983, 0 7139 1559 5
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The Little Drummer Girl 
by John le Carré.
Hodder, 433 pp., £8.95, March 1983, 0 340 32847 9
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... us by this telling of losses and gains. In Russell Hoban’s previous, much-admired novel, Riddley Walker, the narrator, ‘connection man’ for a Kent settlement far in the future which lies beyond some obscure cataclysm, agonises in his residual English about the problem of writing. ‘I dont have nothing only words to put down on paper. Its so hard. Some ...

Wrong Trowsers

E.S. Turner, 21 July 1994

A History of Men’s Fashion 
by Farid Chenoune, translated by Deke Dusinberre.
Flammarion/Thames & Hudson, 336 pp., £50, October 1993, 2 08 013536 8
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The Englishman’s Suit 
by Hardy Amies.
Quartet, 116 pp., £12, June 1994, 9780704370760
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... is problematical. This book packs some of the nastiest shocks since Richard Walker in The Savile Row Story (1988) disinterred a Lloyd’s Weekly News headline on a sweatshop exposure of 1892: ‘The Duke of York’s Trowsers Made in a Fever Room.’ Chenoune is a French fashion journalist whose book was supported by the Fédération des ...

Losers

Ross McKibbin, 23 October 1986

The Politics of the UCS Work-In: Class Alliances and the Right to Work 
by John Foster and Charles Woolfson.
Lawrence and Wishart, 446 pp., £9.95, July 1986, 0 85315 663 8
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A Lost Left: Three Studies in Socialism and Nationalism 
by David Howell.
Manchester, 351 pp., £29.95, July 1986, 0 7190 1959 1
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The Miners’ Strike 1984-5: Loss without Limit 
by Martin Adeney and John Lloyd.
Routledge, 319 pp., £14.95, October 1986, 0 7102 0694 1
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Red Hill: A Mining Community 
by Tony Parker.
Heinemann, 196 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 434 57771 5
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Strike Free: New Industrial Relations in Britain 
by Philip Bassett.
Macmillan, 197 pp., £10.95, August 1986, 9780333418000
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... to Ireland was so suppressed as to be historically impossible. It is one of the many merits of Martin Adeney and John Lloyd’s excellent The Miners’ Strike that it, too, has a strong sense of history. As it needs to, since so many of the actors in the 1984-85 miners’ strike were all too conscious of their historical role: Mrs Thatcher and the ...

Charles and Alfred

J.I.M. Stewart, 17 December 1981

Studies in Tennyson 
edited by Hallam Tennyson.
Macmillan, 229 pp., £15, October 1981, 0 333 27884 4
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... the moving vehicle at the foot of the Gallery steps. Up to the age of 95 he remained a tireless walker, maintaining correctly that there was no law of trespass in the English judicial system, and always furnished with the prescriptive sixpence to tender to some indignant landed proprietor in full satisfaction of damage if any. In this alert longevity the ...

A Turn for the Woowoo

Theo Tait: David Mitchell, 4 December 2014

The Bone Clocks 
by David Mitchell.
Sceptre, 595 pp., £20, September 2014, 978 0 340 92160 9
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... Everything in Cloud Atlas seems nicked: the post-apocalyptic world from Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, the political ideas from Naomi Klein and George Monbiot. As a result it’s far too cartoonish and second-hand to have any real bite: it’s like looking into a snowglobe for a deep moral message. Like Cloud Atlas, Mitchell’s sixth novel is a ...

Nae new ideas, nae worries!

Jonathan Coe: Alasdair Gray, 20 November 2008

Old Men in Love: John Tunnock’s Posthumous Papers 
by Alasdair Gray.
Bloomsbury, 311 pp., £20, October 2007, 978 0 7475 9353 9
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Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography 
by Rodge Glass.
Bloomsbury, 341 pp., £25, September 2008, 978 0 7475 9015 6
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... made a decent living writing plays for BBC television and radio. (The first, The Fall of Kelvin Walker, starred Corin Redgrave, bizarrely feminised by Glass as ‘Corinne’ in his text and ‘Connie’ in his index.) In this way, Gray began slowly to build up a reputation in his home country, while the leaking of fragments of Lanark to literary magazines ...

2000 AD

Anne Sofer, 2 August 1984

The British General Election of 1983 
by David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh.
Macmillan, 388 pp., £25, May 1984, 0 333 34578 9
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Militant 
by Michael Crick.
Faber, 242 pp., £3.95, June 1984, 0 571 13256 1
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... House of Commons were in revolt, and early in 1986 she was forced to resign in favour of Mr Peter Walker. Traditional “one nation” Toryism reasserted itself.’ The third. ‘The second Thatcher Government set about establishing a police state and mounted savage attacks on socialist local authorities and militant unions like the mine-workers. The ...

Diary

Patrick Mauriès: Halfway between France and Britain, 3 November 1983

... them. One must acknowledge, however, that Richard Cobb is not Frank Kermode, nor Angus Wilson D.P. Walker. I had come knowing what Britain’s preconceived ideas were: her pragmatism and refusal of abstraction, her solitary traditions and diehard taste for erudition and travail honnête, however ungratifying; knowing, too, that my stock of clichés would ...

Super-Striking

Jenny Turner, 24 September 1992

High Cotton 
by Darryl Pinckney.
Faber, 295 pp., £14.99, August 1992, 0 571 16491 9
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... in New York’s Newsday, Pinckney has been scathing about ‘blackwomanist’ heroine Alice Walker, calling her much-loved depictions of black folks discovering themselves through social engagement ‘terrible ... mindless reformulations of clichés’. Provocative of him. However, it is one thing to criticise what one sees as poor art or bad behaviour ...

Particularly Anodyne

Richard Norton-Taylor: One bomb in London, 15 July 2021

The Intelligence War against the IRA 
by Thomas Leahy.
Cambridge, 356 pp., £18.99, March 2020, 978 1 108 72040 3
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... secret back-channel talks with Catholic priests, the Derry businessman Brendan Duddy, and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin. After Mountbatten’s murder in August 1979 and the killing, hours later, of 18 soldiers at Warrenpoint – the army’s heaviest single loss in Northern Ireland – Thatcher asked Maurice Oldfield, the recently retired head of ...

A Common Playhouse

Charles Nicholl: The Globe Theatre, 8 January 2015

Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle That Gave Birth to the Globe 
by Chris Laoutaris.
Fig Tree, 528 pp., £20, April 2015, 978 1 905490 96 7
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... said to have ‘secret passages towards the water’. Shakespeare bought it for £140 from Henry Walker, ‘citizen and minstrel of London’. The deed of sale is dated 10 March 1613: he put down £80 and the following day signed a mortgage agreement with Walker for the remaining £60. Whether Shakespeare ever lived in ...

What she wasn’t

Joanna Biggs: ‘The Vanishing Half’, 13 August 2020

The Vanishing Half 
by Brit Bennett.
Dialogue, 343 pp., £14.99, June, 978 0 349 70146 2
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... George Floyd was choked to death on a Minneapolis sidewalk; the novel itself begins weeks after Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, and concerns twin girls who saw their own father lynched. ‘I wanted to write a book that was not just about Black pain,’ Bennett continued, ‘but also about Black love.’ Her novel, which has been at the ...

Gray’s Elegy

Jonathan Coe, 8 October 1992

Poor Things 
by Alasdair Gray.
Bloomsbury, 317 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 7475 1246 9
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... Scottish Literature From Galt To Gunn.’A book published at around this time, The Fall Of Kelvin Walker, had the appearance of a new novel but was in fact adapted from a television play broadcast by the BBC as long ago as 1968. Like all of Gray’s work, it was witty and subversive and had a deadly political accuracy, but there was something lacking: after ...

Not Mackintosh

Chris Miele, 6 April 1995

‘Greek’ Thomson 
edited by Gavin Stamp and Sam McKinstry.
Edinburgh, 249 pp., £35, September 1994, 0 7486 0480 4
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... greatly weakened. The sources of Thomson’s style are well documented by Charles McKean, David Walker and David Watkin. It is clear that he looked closely at the works of the vigorous school of northern Classicism, and he admitted to having certain favourites. In an 1866 pamphlet attacking Scott’s Gothic designs for the University of Glasgow, Thomson ...

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