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Fear in Those Blue Eyes

David Runciman: Thatcher in Her Bubble, 3 December 2015

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. II: Everything She Wants 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 821 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 7139 9288 5
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... party of government. And in this case the party members were in tune with the leadership: Neil Kinnock, who had spent the past few years painstakingly trying to distance himself from the militant elements of his movement, was nonetheless unwilling or unable to give up his personal commitment to unilateralism (he later said that even if he had wanted ...

Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

... to have heard as a child that he was shot accidentally – ‘by his own guns’. But my uncle Neil, her only brother, can’t believe ‘they would have told the family that.’ Newton was said to be artistic: two dusty little green-grey daubs – both of them Derbyshire landscapes – are among his surviving effects. There are two photographs of him in ...

This Singing Thing

Malin Hay: On Barbra Streisand, 12 September 2024

My Name Is Barbra 
by Barbra Streisand.
Century, 992 pp., £35, November 2023, 978 1 5291 3689 0
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... sitting at the next table. She rushed over and did the Heimlich manoeuvre and saved his life. Next day the headline read: Barbra Streisand Takes the Food Right Out of a Person’s Mouth.’ Streisand repeats the joke in her autobiography, My Name Is Barbra, to explain why she felt a ‘certain kinship’ with Bill Clinton during his presidency. ‘People can ...

‘What is your nation if I may ask?’

Colm Tóibín: Jews in Ireland, 30 September 1999

Jews in 20th-century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust 
by Dermot Keogh.
Cork, 336 pp., £45, March 1998, 9781859181492
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... ringing in my ears, and sends a cold shiver through my body. Today, Monday, the chief business day, Jews were attacked right and left. I myself witnessed one scene where a Jew was actually running for his life, and as he passed through one crowd he was actually hemmed in by another till the police came on the scene. Father Creagh’s first sermon was on ...

More a Voyeur

Colm Tóibín: Elton Took Me Hostage, 19 December 2019

Me 
by Elton John.
Macmillan, 376 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 1 5098 5331 1
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... when I say John taught me how to be debauched.’ He got to meet all sorts of people, including Neil Young – who performed his forthcoming album, Harvest, at a party in John’s house – and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who, when Elton went to see him, sang the chorus of ‘Your Song’ (‘I hope you don’t mind/I hope you don’t mind’) over and ...

What was it that drove him?

David Runciman: Gordon Brown, 4 January 2018

My Life, Our Times 
by Gordon Brown.
Bodley Head, 512 pp., £25, November 2017, 978 1 84792 497 1
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... to go bust and to ask what the government planned to do about it. ‘It was going to be a bad day,’ Darling says with dry understatement. Brown adopts a different approach. His starting point is Friday, 8 May 2009. He picks it because it was an ordinary day in the life of a prime minister, and he wants us to know how ...

This beats me

Stephen Sedley: The Drafter’s Contract, 2 April 1998

Statutory Interpretation 
by Francis Bennion.
Butterworth, 1092 pp., £187, December 1997, 0 406 02126 0
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Law and Interpretation 
edited by Andrei Marmor.
Oxford, 463 pp., £18.99, October 1997, 0 19 826487 9
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Equality before the Law: Deaf People’s Access to Justice 
by Mary Brennan and Richard Brown.
Deaf Studies Research Unit, University of Durham, 189 pp., £17.50, October 1997, 0 9531779 0 4
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... established in 1869 introduced, Bennion says, ‘a uniform technique ... which to the present day has steadily improved in exactness and precision’. This is a dangerous claim. The early 19th-century draftsmen who set out to provide for every conceivable contingency at interminable length had an almost indefeasible claim to exactness and precision ...

It was going to be huge

David Runciman: What Remained of Trump, 12 August 2021

Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency 
by Michael Wolff.
Bridge Street, 336 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 1 4087 1464 5
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... his case to the courts, and ultimately to the Supreme Court, where Trump’s three appointees (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett) would be sure to tip the balance in his favour. That there was no case – at least no case that could get a serious hearing – didn’t matter. What mattered was to keep up the pressure until the other side ...

Hard Eggs and Radishes

Thomas Jones: Shelley at Sea, 21 July 2022

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Vol. VII 
edited by Nora Crook.
Johns Hopkins, 931 pp., £103.50, May 2021, 978 1 4214 3783 5
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... of Shelley’s complete poetry, edited by Crook. The first three volumes, edited by Donald Reiman, Neil Fraistat, Crook and others, appeared in 2000, 2005 and 2012. As Crook explains, Reiman died in 2019 ‘after a long illness that had caused him to retire from his editorial role’. The publication sequence was disrupted; volumes four, five, six and eight ...

Tiny Little Lars

Joanna Kavenna: Von Trier’s Provocations, 15 April 2004

Trier on von Trier 
edited by Stig Björkman, translated by Neil Smith.
Faber, 288 pp., £16.99, February 2004, 0 571 20707 3
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Dogville 
directed by Lars von Trier.
May 2003
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... story is likely to take. Oblivious of her future degradation, Grace – who has ‘never worked a day in her life’ – follows Tom’s instructions: she collects tasteless figurines from the local shop; she tends the gooseberry bushes planted by Ma Ginger (played with immaculate unpleasantness by Lauren Bacall); she listens to the blind Jack McKay (Ben ...

I need money

Christian Lorentzen: Biden Tries Again, 10 September 2020

Yesterday’s Man: The Case against Joe Biden 
by Branko Marcetic.
Verso, 288 pp., £12.99, March 2020, 978 1 83976 028 0
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... best captured in a line I knew from a sonnet by John Milton: “I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.”’Biden became the tragic young man of the Senate, uncertain whether he should resign to look after his surviving children. But in his account the Senate’s old guard welcomed him and gave him unexpected responsibility in the form ...

To Monopolise Our Ears

Daniel Cohen: What Spotify Wants, 4 May 2023

The Spotify Play: How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance 
by Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud.
Diversion, 295 pp., £15.99, January 2021, 978 1 63576 744 5
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Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation 
by Nick Seaver.
Chicago, 203 pp., £16, November 2022, 978 0 226 82297 6
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... what a given user likes.’But a Spotify user will like different things depending on the time of day, their mood, whether they’re cooking or running or filing their taxes. As Tom, a product manager at Whisper, tells Seaver, ‘One listener is really many listeners.’ Someone might enjoy listening to techno, and jazz, and R&B. But that doesn’t mean they ...

The Angry Men

Jean McNicol: Harriet Harman, 14 December 2017

A Woman’s Work 
by Harriet Harman.
Allen Lane, 405 pp., £20, February 2017, 978 0 241 27494 1
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The Women Who Shaped Politics 
by Sophy Ridge.
Coronet, 295 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 4736 3876 1
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... they’re proper mothers: she made a cake every Friday, picked her children up from school one day a week, tried to make friends with the stay-at-home mothers who networked in the playground (she always turned up, she says, in tracksuit and trainers, to show she was ‘focused’ on the children), and tried not to cancel outings. One half-term she’d ...

Literary Friction

Jenny Turner: Kathy Acker’s Ashes, 19 October 2017

After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography 
by Chris Kraus.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 1 63590 006 4
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... bed, writing or having sex or sleeping: she could sleep, Kraus reports, for as many as 16 hours a day. Why did she sleep so much? Youngsters do of course, but also a lot of the time Acker was ill. Within weeks of her return to New York, she was diagnosed with pelvic inflammatory disease, a trouble usually caused by a sexually transmitted infection. This being ...

On the Salieri Express

John Sutherland, 24 September 1992

Doctor Criminale 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Secker, 343 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 436 20115 1
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The Promise of Light 
by Paul Watkins.
Faber, 217 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 571 16715 2
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The Absolution Game 
by Paul Sayer.
Constable, 204 pp., £13.99, June 1992, 0 09 471460 6
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The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman 
by Louis de Bernières.
Secker, 388 pp., £14.99, August 1992, 0 436 20114 3
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Written on the Body 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Cape, 190 pp., £13.99, September 1992, 0 224 03587 8
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... 1990. On a number of occasions Bradbury even has his journalising hero give us the precise day of the month so as to synchronise the story with such public events as the fall of Mrs Thatcher on the 22nd. Doctor Criminale’s extended prelude is a description of the Booker ceremony in the autumn of this same year, at the Guildhall. The big night is ...

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