Short Cuts: American Girls

Deborah Friedell, 8 March 2007

Edith Wharton’s characters are always getting into trouble at the theatre. In The Age of Innocence, it’s the place where Newland Archer first meets the disgraced Countess Olenska (and...

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If any of us has seen the places in the developing world that Mike Davis catalogues remorselessly in Planet of Slums, it was probably from an aeroplane. That doesn’t always mean 35,000...

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Tastes like Cancer: the Sweet'N Low dynasty

J. Robert Lennon, 8 March 2007

My mother and grandmother, when I was a child, were both fairly diet conscious, and I recall them using Sweet’N Low – the saccharin-based artificial sweetener – in their coffee...

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Leisure’s Epitaph: the Victorians

John Pemble, 8 March 2007

Will the history of the Victorian age ever be written? Lytton Strachey was emphatic that it wouldn’t. It will never be written, he declared in the preface to Eminent Victorians, because we...

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Suppose you believe that a central aim of public policy in a democratic society should be improving the welfare of its citizens. Even when resources are plentiful, this is a challenging task...

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Diary: At the Martyrs’ Museum

Roxanne Varzi, 8 March 2007

No one was guarding the gates to the grounds of the Imamzadeh Ali Akbar Cheezari in Tehran, where the son of the Imam Zayn al-Abedin is interred, the first time I visited, in 2000. The mausoleum...

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In Time of Famine: In Zimbabwe

R.W. Johnson, 22 February 2007

When I was in Harare recently I inquired about an old naturalist I’d known there. He knew he had cancer, had told his friends he’d finished his book, was all through and would like to...

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Short Cuts: malingering trolley dollies

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 February 2007

The art of throwing a sickie doesn’t get the recognition (or the funding) it deserves. Even the straitlaced and well-attending would admit that it takes panache to get away with it on a...

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At Quai Branly: Jacques Chirac’s museum

Jeremy Harding, 4 January 2007

Jacques Chirac’s museum on the quai Branly, opened last summer, continues to pull large crowds at weekends. Chirac, a long-time admirer of what used to be called ‘primitive’...

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Whose body is it? Transplants

Ian Hacking, 14 December 2006

Perhaps ‘medical anthropology’ has not yet become a household term. Although anthropologists still go to Papua New Guinea, Mayotte, or the headwaters of the Amazon, many now work...

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Like any self-respecting modern man I buy Ecover instead of Fairy Liquid. I recycle, I worry about my carbon footprint (must cut down on those Ryanair mini-breaks) and I’m about to buy my...

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If the authors of this book sound like a firm of estate agents, it’s because they have virtuously repressed their first names as a protest against gender stereotyping. But one wonders if...

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Getting Rich: in Shanghai

Pankaj Mishra, 30 November 2006

The ruins of Shanghai come as a surprise in a city so defiantly modern. Demolished low-rise houses lie in downtown streets next to luxury condominiums with names such as ‘Rich Gate’,...

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Angering and Agitating: Freud’s fan club

Christopher Turner, 30 November 2006

The Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, known for his three-volume hagiography of Freud, was also the author of a book on figure skating. The New York Psychoanalytic Institute owns a dusty copy,...

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Diary: The Friendly Spider Programme

Jenny Diski, 30 November 2006

Autumn looms darkly and terrible in my life. From midsummer I start to worry, and by late August I am filled with dread. My arachnophobia has ensured that the autumnal mating urge which causes...

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Short Cuts: a journey to citizenship

Andrew O’Hagan, 16 November 2006

‘Becoming a British citizen is a significant life event,’ the former home secretary David Blunkett writes. ‘The government intends to make gaining British citizenship meaningful...

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AmeriKKKa: Civil Rights v. Black Power

Thomas Sugrue, 5 October 2006

It is canonical in the American classroom, on television and in popular culture to celebrate the black civil rights movement as the triumph of American universalism, the vindication of the...

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Diary: in Colombia

Michael Taussig, 5 October 2006

‘All that is left of a person is their name,’ Olivia Mostacilla told me during my month in Colombia, the first time I’d been back in two years. She wasn’t referring to the...

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