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Serious Mayhem

Simon Reynolds: The McLaren Strand, 10 March 2022

The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren: The Biography 
by Paul Gorman.
Constable, 855 pp., £14.99, November 2021, 978 1 4721 2111 0
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... way. We didn’t know the song had originally been written and performed by the light entertainer Max Bygraves, but intuited that McLaren’s version was an assault on the middle-aged and middle of the road. Elsewhere on the record, Sid Vicious too defiled showbiz with his punk take on ‘My Way’, twisting Sinatra’s swagger into psychopathic ...

The Ostrich Defence

Azadeh Moaveni: Trafficking Antiquities, 5 October 2023

... context, but also fuelled more serious crime. ‘That means violence, bribery, depravity, black market, dirty money.’The Louvre’s director at the time, Jean-Luc Martinez, seems to have done nothing with these findings. According to a report by the Office Central de Lutte contre le Trafic des Biens Culturels, quoted in Libération, Martinez was ...

Alan Bennett chooses four paintings for schools

Alan Bennett: Studying the Form, 2 April 1998

... and Gossaert has painted his own name below it (and again on the neck ornament of Balthazar’s black servant). On the right, Melchior is waiting with his presentation, rather precariously balanced in his limp hand. The detail is such that one can distinguish the hairs on the mole on Caspar’s cheek. Above the scene, and in another order of things, the ...

Is Michael Neve paranoid?

Michael Neve, 2 June 1983

... for insanity and the ‘insane act’. As for the extremely influential degenerationist writing of Max Nordau, it surely must be seen in its own terms – as an example of paranoia as a wish, even a dream, come true. In Degeneration, dedicated to the criminologist and psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, Nordau sees the 20th century as a death rattle, not for ...

We came, we saw, he died

Jackson Lears: Clinton’s Creed, 5 February 2015

Hard Choices 
by Hillary Clinton.
Simon and Schuster, 635 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 1 4711 3150 9
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HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton 
by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes.
Hutchinson, 440 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 0 09 195448 2
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... However empty his promises proved to be, Americans can congratulate themselves on having elected a black man; now, in the feel-good world of identity politics, it’s time to elect a woman. Who else but Hillary Clinton? Clinton’s Hard Choices is the quintessential candidate’s memoir, a 600-page doorstopper detailing her four years as secretary of state ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Did in 2015, 7 January 2016

... soon flags and nobody seems to mind if I say the same thing three times over with three minutes max per interview. It’s all very jolly, some of them shake hands and there are occasional selfies, but even when we’ve been at it an hour we haven’t reached the end of the line. Then we are called inside to be shepherded with Maggie Smith through the foyer ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Allelujah!, 3 January 2019

... Bridget has given us a cow creamer she has made. Unglazed, it is chunky and solid and striped black and white like a bovine zebra. It’s a delightful object, a convict cow, and could she be bothered to make more and market them I’m sure they would sell for a substantial price. As it is, it stands on the kitchen table waiting to find its – or her ...

Where be your jibes now?

Patricia Lockwood: David Foster Wallace, 13 July 2023

Something to Do with Paying Attention 
by David Foster Wallace.
McNally Editions, 136 pp., $18, April 2022, 978 1 946022 27 1
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... known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into colour. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.’ He did not feel that, maybe, but he could make a man who did. ‘I don’t remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards,’ Fogle ...

Half-Fox

Seamus Perry: Ted Hughes, 29 August 2013

Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar 
edited by Keith Sagar.
British Library, 340 pp., £25, May 2013, 978 0 7123 5862 0
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Ted and I: A Brother’s Memoir 
by Gerald Hughes.
Robson, 240 pp., £16.99, October 2012, 978 1 84954 389 7
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... to make the theft secure’. Not that this does him any good: Ungrateful man! But vain thy black design, Th’attempt, and not the deed, thy hand defiled; Preserved by his own charms and spells divine, Safely the gentle Shakespeare slept and smiled. Shakespeare remains untouchable, serenely away with the fairies, an outcome rigged from the start: the ...

Failed Vocation

James Butler: The Corbyn Project, 3 December 2020

Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn 
by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire.
Bodley Head, 376 pp., £18.99, September, 978 1 84792 645 6
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This Land: The Story of a Movement 
by Owen Jones.
Allen Lane, 336 pp., £20, September, 978 0 241 47094 7
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... Politics,​ Max Weber wrote, is a ‘slow, strong drilling through hard boards, with a combination of passion and a sense of judgment’. The maxim, from his lecture ‘Politics as a Vocation’, is now usually deployed to chide a left impatient for social transformation, but Weber’s account of political leadership deserves more than this ...

Germs: A Memoir

Richard Wollheim, 15 April 2004

... the stage, a Pomeranian, and another, a Pekingese, and myself. We also had a parlourmaid who was black, which was a rarity in those days, and she was called – to her face, I believe – ‘Black Mary’. It was not till some two or three years after we moved that my father found it necessary to have a chauffeur, and then ...

Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Perry Anderson, 7 February 2019

... the jurisdiction of the state from which the first mid-level culprit to be caught, the doleiro (black market money-changer) Alberto Youssef, hailed: the atypically middle-class provincial society of Paraná, in the south of Brazil. Moro, a native son who had cut his teeth as an assistant in the mensalão trial, was the presiding judge in its capital ...

England’s Isaiah

Perry Anderson, 20 December 1990

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas 
by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy.
Murray, 276 pp., £18.95, October 1990, 9780719547898
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... The difference is very clear if we compare him with the great theorist of modern polytheism, Max Weber. In Weber, the gods that have risen from their graves in a disenchanted world are truly warring – there is no common standard of value, no conceivable truce, among them, any more than in the world of the great powers. The hope of a eudaimonist ...

Upper and Lower Cases

Tom Nairn, 24 August 1995

A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707 
edited by John Robertson.
Cambridge, 368 pp., £40, April 1995, 0 521 43113 1
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The Autonomy of Modern Scotland 
by Lindsay Paterson.
Edinburgh, 218 pp., £30, September 1994, 0 7486 0525 8
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... SNP’s open-door citizenship policy which would, for example, allow the illegitimate offspring of black American GIs stationed in Scotland to be as Scottish as ... well, Sir Nicholas himself. Vote Tory to preserve the Scot-Brit race. This eccentric addendum to the Unionist creed was not openly endorsed by Fairbairn’s successor as Tory candidate, a generally ...

What They Did to Our Women

Azadeh Moaveni: Women in Wartime, 9 May 2024

... political fringes in the West, refused to believe the rape allegations. The Grayzone journalists Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté tweeted about ‘fabricated atrocity tales’ and accused the Patten report of ‘laundering’ the ‘Hamas mass rape hoax’. Their denialism galvanised Israel’s defenders. The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said that he ...

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