In his autobiography, Something of Myself, Rudyard Kipling tells how he returned to Bombay from public school in England. He had been away for 11 years, but once again walking the streets of...

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Diary: Salad Days

James Lasdun, 9 February 2006

The alternative career fantasies of writers would make an interesting study: James Joyce dreaming of becoming the agent for Irish tweeds in Trieste, Thomas Mann musing that he would have made a...

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I don’t know whether I’m fat or thin. I suspect I might be ‘plump’. I do know that when I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I was skinny. I also know that I am not...

Read more about One Minute You’re Fine: At what point do you become fat?

On 25 January 1788, HMS Supply eased her way between the imposing sandstone cliffs that mark the entrance to Port Jackson and into a waterway that John White, the First Fleet’s surgeon,...

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Diary: The Je Ne Sais Quoi

Jenny Diski, 15 December 2005

It’s entirely possible that, apart from a little niggle at the back of our minds – a scent or a sound we can’t quite place – the ineffable will be a thing of the past and we will be able to rub...

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Short Cuts: Is it just me?

Thomas Jones, 1 December 2005

One of the better regular sketches on Spoons, the latest moderately funny formulaic comedy show to be broadcast by Channel 4 on Friday nights, involves a man reciting a remarkably long list of...

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Diary: in Dewsbury

Rose George, 17 November 2005

Dewsbury, a middle-sized mill town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was my home for 17 years. After I left I paid little attention to the town, though I’ve always come back to see my...

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Most of us, it seems, tend to think of the ‘hero’ as someone who never hesitates. As soon as he has made up his mind, he acts. But in Hesitant Heroes Theodore Ziolkowski identifies...

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Masquerade: self-impersonation

Gillian Bennett, 3 November 2005

In a show earlier this year on Channel 4, a downtrodden-looking woman was exhibited to members of the public who were asked to guess her age. When, as invariably they did, they overestimated it,...

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For students of the human sciences, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins is, with Clifford Geertz, one of the few Americans who has achieved the status of a name to conjure with alongside the...

Read more about Adrift from Locality: Captain Cook’s Mistake

The first rule when concocting a conspiracy theory is not to make any claims that can be proved not to be true. It won’t do, for example, to assert that John Kennedy was shot by Jackie...

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A key justification of the Bush administration’s purported strategy of ‘democratising’ the Middle East is the argument that democracies are pacific, and that Muslim democracies...

Read more about We do not deserve these people: America and its Army

Short Cuts: worst case scenarios

Paul Laity, 6 October 2005

If you’re feeling vulnerable in these cataclysmic times, stay clear of Lee Clarke, the Eeyore of American sociology and author of the forthcoming study of disaster, Worst Cases (Chicago,...

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A Journey in the South: in New Orleans

Andrew O’Hagan, 6 October 2005

The sky over North Carolina was showing red the night Sam and Terry decided to leave for the South. The red clouds travelled to Smithfield from the western hills, the high Appalachians and the...

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Naughty Children: Freud’s Free Clinics

Christopher Turner, 6 October 2005

In 1918, Sigmund Freud gave a speech at the Fifth International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Budapest. It was two months before the Armistice, but he looked to the future rather than dwelling on...

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Why do we want to read about murder? Most of us do not want to kill people, and most of us would feel a little squeamish if we discovered that one of our friends had done somebody in. Part of the...

Read more about You and Your Bow and the Gods: murder mysteries

Short Cuts: John Humphrys

Thomas Jones, 22 September 2005

It doesn’t take much to make John Humphrys angry. On the basis of his most recent book, Lost for Words: The Mangling and Manipulating of the English Language (Hodder, £7.99), it would...

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Diary: a poetry festival in Chengdu

Eliot Weinberger, 22 September 2005

I had vowed never to go to China until my friend, the exiled poet Bei Dao, was able to travel freely there, but when I received a sudden invitation to the Century City First International Poetry...

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