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Can’t you take a joke?

Jonathan Coe, 2 November 2023

Different Times: A History of British Comedy 
by David Stubbs.
Faber, 399 pp., £20, July, 978 0 571 35346 0
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... not first in cinema, but on the radio. Round about the time Ealing comedy was at its zenith, Spike Milligan (whose humour Stubbs admits to disliking) began meeting with old army friends at Grafton’s, a London pub, and planting the seeds of The Goon Show, which would mount a surreal full-frontal assault on British establishment mores. It was first ...

Saintly Outliers

Vadim Nikitin: Browder’s Fraud Story, 5 October 2023

Freezing Order: A True Story of Russian Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath 
by Bill Browder.
Simon and Schuster, 328 pp., £9.99, February, 978 1 3985 0610 7
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... February​ , after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the word ‘oligarch’ experienced a brief spike in Google searches, just as a volley of Western sanctions hit these Russian billionaire businessmen, who were deemed responsible for propping up the government of Vladimir Putin. The oligarchs are a diverse bunch, but they have certain characteristics in ...

More Pain, Better Sentences

Adam Mars-Jones: Satire and St Aubyn, 8 May 2014

Lost for Words 
by Edward St Aubyn.
Picador, 261 pp., £12.99, May 2014, 978 0 330 45422 3
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Books 
by Charlie Hill.
Tindal Street, 192 pp., £6.99, November 2013, 978 1 78125 163 8
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... chair of judges, a backbench MP called Malcolm Craig, shows no overlap with either Hermione Lee (2006) or Robert Macfarlane (2013). The Elysian judges for 2013 are Jo Cross, a columnist whose criterion for imaginative literature is its ‘relevance’; Penny Feathers, retired from the Foreign Office and attempting to write topical thrillers; Tobias ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: The Plutocrat Tour, 7 July 2022

... just money on display. In Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, she describes the overweening spike of Renzo Piano’s Shard as ‘a glass and concrete arrangement of the Qatar sovereign wealth fund’.* The loudest crimes are hidden in plain sight. Look around, you can’t miss them. The topography of complacent surrender. She has a special interest ...

King of Razz

Alfred Appel Jr: Homage to Fats Waller, 9 May 2002

... critical call) – rhyme scheme: ‘Mandy’, ‘handy’, ‘dandy’. Waller trills ‘Lalala-lee-lo’ quite sarcastically and scrambles the lyrics with an indescribable gurgling sound. ‘Mandy’ was featured in a new Eddie Cantor movie, Kid Millions, and the recording aimed to capitalise on this. Waller’s scornful attack is thus especially ...

What We’re about to Receive

Jeremy Harding: Food Insecurity, 13 May 2010

... the majority of their price rises in the same period were ten times that. Food prices may not spike again as they did between 2005 and 2008, but they’re unlikely to return to 2005 levels.The best short document about the way things go from here remains the Chatham House study, Food Futures. Hardin Tibbs, an independent strategic analyst drafted onto the ...

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