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Great Tradition

Robert Barnard, 18 December 1980

Plaster Sinners 
by Colin Watson.
Eyre Methuen, 160 pp., £5.95, September 1980, 0 413 39040 3
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Photo-Finish 
by Ngaio Marsh.
Collins, 262 pp., £5.95, September 1980, 0 00 231857 1
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The Predator 
by Russell Braddon.
Joseph, 192 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 7181 1958 4
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... is continuously entertaining. The title does not mean she is taking a trial canter round Dick Francis’s paddock. The demise in question is that of an operatic prima donna of Italian-American extraction, in conception (and in physique) somewhere between Callas and Caballé. The lady, who has been pursued for months by a malicious paparazzo, is found ...

The Academy of Lagado

Edward Said: The US Administration’s misguided war, 17 April 2003

... East experts identified long ago as having the most influence over American Middle East policy, Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami. Now in his late eighties, Lewis came to the US from the UK some thirty years ago to teach at Princeton. His fervent anti-Communism and disapproval of everything about contemporary Arabs and Islam pushed him to the forefront of the ...

Diary

Tam Dalyell: The Belgrano Affair, 7 February 1985

... about the Belgrano. I have no difficulty in imagining this scene. From 1964-70, I was the late Dick Crossman’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, and had a ringside seat which enabled me to witness how berserk Harold Wilson, as Prime Minister, would go about leaks. I suspect this is in the nature of prime ministers, particularly those who live in Number ...

Mirror Images

Christopher Andrew, 3 April 1986

World of Secrets: The Uses and Limits of Intelligence 
by Walter Laqueur.
Weidenfeld, 404 pp., £25, November 1985, 0 297 78745 4
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... unavowable, in Britain. At the height of the Westland saga the Prime Minister’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, found time to denounce publicly those journalists who had dared to print the name of the head of MI6, Christopher Curwen. The heads of the CIA and the KGB, William Casey and Victor Chebrikov, are of course public figures. But that, as Mr Ingham ...

Lost Empire

D.J. Enright, 16 October 1980

Earthly Powers 
by Anthony Burgess.
Hutchinson, 650 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 0 09 143910 8
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... you might call an ‘aide de camp’. (Less politely, ‘shonnary’: ‘I always leave the dick out.’) The Rilke joke – ‘“The last time I saw him was in a café in Trieste. He cried.” “He often cried. But nobody heard him among the angelic orders”’ – palls on the reprise. Far worse, much as one welcomes relief in that area, is the ...

First Puppet, Now Scapegoat

Inigo Thomas: Ass-Chewing in Washington, 30 November 2006

State of Denial: Bush at War 
by Bob Woodward.
Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., £18.99, October 2006, 0 7432 9566 8
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... do so.No one in Washington has indulged in this form of shame more fiercely than Rumsfeld, except Dick Cheney. In Bush at War, Rumsfeld is presented as a grouchy, beguiling politician. ‘In some respects,’ Woodward writes, he ‘was a walking example of what novelist Wallace Stegner calls “resilience under disappointment”, the persistence of ...

Light Entertainment

Andrew O’Hagan: Our Paedophile Culture, 8 November 2012

... a stalwart of light entertainment broadcasting in the 1950s. He once introduced a talk by George Bernard Shaw. ‘Young man,’ Shaw said, pointing to the microphone, ‘this is a devilish contraption. You can’t deceive it – so don’t try.’ Gamlin later said he remembered all his life the genial advice Shaw had given him. He didn’t want to deceive ...

Afloat with Static

Jenny Turner: Hey, Blondie!, 19 December 2019

Face It 
by Debbie Harry.
HarperCollins, 352 pp., £20, October 2019, 978 0 00 822942 9
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... and Angela became Deborah, with parents called Cathy and Richard Harry, also known as Caggie and Dick. Caggie’s family had once owned a bank in Ridgewood, New Jersey; Dick worked as a salesman for Alkan Silk Woven Labels in Paterson. A sister, Martha, arrived six years later. ‘My little accidental family’ gets ‘a ...

A Fue Respectable Friends

John Lloyd: British brass bands, 5 April 2001

The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History 
by Trevor Herbert.
Oxford, 381 pp., £48, June 2000, 0 19 816698 2
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... is no reason why Tom, who plays a cornet, should be in a lower social or musical grade than Dick, who plays the violin.’ But the harsh fact was that it took more time and money to become the solo performer of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto than to play a transcription for cornet of Va Pensiero: and that kind of time and money were not available to ...

Making a Break

Terry Eagleton: Fredric Jameson’s Futures, 9 March 2006

Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 431 pp., £20, September 2005, 1 84467 033 3
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... book has some supple, remarkably powerful readings to offer of Le Guin, Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick (‘the Shakespeare of science fiction’), A.E. Van Vogt, Kim Stanley Robinson and a range of others. Jameson has always been an energetic retriever of the neglected and maligned, and a brilliant salvage job here on Charles Fourier reflects this ...

Blowing Cigarette Smoke at Greenfly

E.S. Turner: The Beastliness of Saki, 24 August 2000

The Unrest-Cure and Other Beastly Tales 
by Saki.
Prion, 297 pp., £8.99, May 2000, 9781853753701
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... were Reginald and Clovis (not a name, as Samuel Goldwyn would have said, to be given to every Tom, Dick and Harry). Reginald believed that the religious system which had given us green Chartreuse would never really die. Here he is, showing off to a duchess at the Carlton: ‘There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they ...

A life, surely?

Jenny Diski: To Portobello on Angel Dust, 18 February 1999

The Ossie Clark Diaries 
edited by Henrietta Rous.
Bloomsbury, 402 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7475 3901 4
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... but with no detail at all. On 14 April 1975 it was: ‘dinner at the house of gallery-owner Claude Bernard with George Lawson (drunk) and Mick Jagger – excellent food but boring really.’ In vain you look for an account of the conversation that made the evening so tedious, or even a soupçon of insight into what made the food so good. Nothing. Not here, not ...

Liquidator

Neal Ascherson: Hugh Trevor-Roper, 19 August 2010

Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Weidenfeld, 598 pp., £25, July 2010, 978 0 297 85214 8
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... and lasting friendships including those with Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire, Guy Liddell and Dick White, who after the war became the head of MI5 and then MI6 – an invaluable contact. And Trevor-Roper enjoyed the company of Kim Philby, whom he found the most intelligent and sophisticated of his colleagues. After the war, he interrogated Nazi prisoners ...

The Hippest

Terry Eagleton, 7 March 1996

Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues 
edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen.
Routledge, 514 pp., £45, February 1996, 0 415 08803 8
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... Internet comes after the Somme. Hall may dislike trendy theories, but this is a bit like Jeffrey Bernard campaigning against drinking clubs. Whatever his reservations, he does stand for all the Right Things in the arena of cultural studies: impeccably anti-essentialist, anti-totalising, anti-reductionist, anti-naturalist and anti-teleological. In a furiously ...

The Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt: The Israel Lobby, 23 March 2006

... Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s ...

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