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The Unrewarded End

V.G. Kiernan: Memories of the CP, 17 September 1998

The Death of Uncle Joe 
by Alison Macleod.
Merlin, 269 pp., £9.95, May 1997, 0 85036 467 1
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Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party 
by Francis Beckett.
Merlin, 253 pp., £9.95, August 1998, 0 85036 477 9
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... to, Monty Johnstone’s is a name that recurs, along with the philosopher Hyman (Hymie) Levy, Peter Fryer the journalist, and Brian Pearce, well known today as a translator of historical works from French and Russian. Levy she remembers as a very persuasive public speaker, whose Edinburgh accent ‘made everything sound reasonable’. Her observation post ...

Blackfell’s Scarlatti

August Kleinzahler: Basil Bunting, 21 January 1999

The Poet as Spy: The Life and Wild Times of Basil Bunting 
by Keith Alldritt.
Aurum, 221 pp., £19.95, October 1998, 1 85410 477 2
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... him, he was in his 78th year and had recently suffered a mild stroke, although he was still very keen. Something like a Schubert string quartet was being broadcast over BBC radio while he was upstairs doing washing one morning when all of a sudden he was at the top of the stairs screaming savagely at the players: ‘You’re playing it too bloody fast!’ A ...

Life and Work

Philip Horne, 8 May 1986

Falling apart 
by Nicholas Salaman.
Secker, 190 pp., £9.95, April 1986, 0 436 44087 3
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Memoirs of Many in One 
by Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, edited by Patrick White.
Cape, 192 pp., £8.95, April 1986, 0 224 02371 3
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Free Agents 
by Max Apple.
Faber, 197 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 0 571 13852 7
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... Another, more recent antecedent of which Salaman seems to be aware is that of the Australian Peter Carey’s very comparable Bliss (1981), whose ad-man hero Harry Joy revives at the start after being clinically dead for nine minutes, and returns, winded, to his former way of life, deprived of his former breezy ‘optimism’, even suspecting that he is ...

Here come the judges

Conor Gearty: The constitution, 4 June 1998

This Time: Our Constitutional Revolution 
by Anthony Barnett.
Vintage, 371 pp., £6.99, December 1997, 0 09 926858 2
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The Voice of the People: A Constitution for Tomorrow 
by Robert Alexander.
Weidenfeld, 214 pp., £17.99, September 1997, 0 297 84109 2
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The Making and Remaking of the British Constitution 
by Lord Nolan and Stephen Sedley.
Blackstone, 142 pp., £19.95, November 1997, 1 85431 704 0
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... about the need to revive local government and why he is mistrustful of devolution and keen on referenda only if a constitutional commission (‘consisting of senior members of both Houses of Parliament and possibly judges and influential people drawn from across the spectrum of society’) gets to make sure ‘the issue is put in the right ...

Secrets

Adam Phillips, 6 October 1994

The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi. Vol I: 1908-14 
edited by Eva Brabant, Ernst Falzeder and Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch, translated by Peter Hoffer.
Harvard, 584 pp., £27.50, March 1994, 0 674 17418 6
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... which might be called, say, inexplicable human powers – and that Freud, in his view, was too keen to disavow. If the aim of a system is to create an outside where you can put the things you don’t want, then we have to look at what a system (or a person) disposes of – its rubbish – to understand it; to get a picture of how it sees itself and wants ...

Death in Belgravia

Rosemary Hill, 5 February 2015

A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan 
by Laura Thompson.
Head of Zeus, 422 pp., £20, November 2014, 978 1 78185 536 2
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... King’s Road since the previous year; and while there were, as ever, socially ambitious people keen to meet aristocrats there were also, as the much discussed ‘Princess Margaret set’ demonstrated, members of the upper classes happy to meet at least the more talented and glamorous members of the lower orders. Yet Thompson fills in this background to ...

Boys and Girls

Andrew O’Hagan: With the Child Jihadis, 8 August 2013

... is no education and too little water. But ‘the political boys’, as the guards call them, are keen to point out the legality of their activities from their point of view. The Afghan government, for reasons nobody understands, aims to move the children to a new site near Sarposa prison, a Taliban-rich area where adult inmates once sewed up their mouths in ...

Too Much

Barbara Taylor: A history of masturbation, 6 May 2004

Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation 
by Thomas Laqueur.
Zone, 501 pp., £21.95, March 2003, 1 890951 32 3
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... well. While some increase in luxury was an inevitable concomitant of commercial progress, Dr Peter Kürn wrote in 1792, when the sum of sensual pleasures surpasses the sum of more noble and more useful pursuits, when natural needs can no longer be distinguished from the crowd of imagined and fantastic ones, when reason does not choose, but only ...

The Precautionary Principle

David Runciman: Taking a Chance on War, 1 April 2004

... warmongers. The precautionary principle is championed by all sorts of people who were not at all keen on the war in Iraq. For example, it’s often used to urge much stronger interventionist action to deal with the threat of global warming. Even if some of the science is uncertain, it is argued, the balance of risk requires acting as though the gloomiest ...

God bless Italy

Christopher Clark: Rome, Vienna, 1848, 10 May 2018

The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe 
by David I. Kertzer.
Oxford, 474 pp., £25, May 2018, 978 0 19 882749 8
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... that no one would suspect that the pope had left the building. At the church of SS Marcellin and Peter, the pope’s coach was met by the Bavarian ambassador, Count Karl von Spaur, who was clutching a pistol in his right hand, in case they were challenged. The fugitive was bustled into a small open carriage and driven out of the city, his face obscured by ...

Multiplying Marys

Marina Warner: On Mary Magdalene, 22 February 2024

Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History 
by Philip C. Almond.
Cambridge, 347 pp., £30, December 2022, 978 1 009 22169 6
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Mary Magdalene: A Visual History 
by Diane Apostolos-Cappadona.
T&T Clark, 154 pp., £17.99, February 2023, 978 0 567 70574 7
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... Christ is a portrait of none other than Ernest Renan, Apostolos-Cappadona writes. She shows a keen interest in depictions of Mary Magdalene by women artists, but they rarely diverge from conventional iconography (indeed Artemisia Gentileschi surpasses her male counterparts in swooning ecstasy). This changes only in the present day: Kiki Smith’s hirsute ...

You Are the Product

John Lanchester: It Zucks!, 17 August 2017

The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention Is Harvested and Sold 
by Tim Wu.
Atlantic, 416 pp., £20, January 2017, 978 1 78239 482 2
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Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine 
by Antonio García Martínez.
Ebury, 528 pp., £8.99, June 2017, 978 1 78503 455 8
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Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon have Cornered Culture and What It Means for All of Us 
by Jonathan Taplin.
Macmillan, 320 pp., £18.99, May 2017, 978 1 5098 4769 3
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... had dealings with both companies. ‘YouTube knows they have lots of dirty things going on and are keen to try and do some good to alleviate it,’ he told me. I asked what he meant by ‘dirty’. ‘Terrorist and extremist content, stolen content, copyright violations. That kind of thing. But Google in my experience knows that there are ambiguities, moral ...

Heroes of Our Time

Karl Miller, 19 May 1988

The Monument 
by T. Behrens.
Cape, 258 pp., £11.95, May 1988, 0 224 02510 4
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The Passion of John Aspinall 
by Brian Masters.
Cape, 360 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 0 224 02353 5
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... a poor thing if I thank them here alphabetically. They include Mr Gerald Albertini, The Rt Hon. Peter Archer MP, Miss Amanda Aspinall, Dr Robert Aspinall, The Duke of Atholl, Miss Julie Battersea, Mr Tom Begg, Dr Kurt Benirschke, Mr Robin Birley, Mr Anthony Blond, Mr Robert Boutwood, Mr Claus von Bülow, Mr Timothy Cassel, The Hon. Mr Alan Clark, Sir David ...

St Marilyn

Andrew O’Hagan: The Girl and Me, 6 January 2000

The Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe 
Christie’s, 415 pp., $85, September 1999, 0 903432 64 1Show More
The Complete Marilyn Monroe 
by Adam Victor.
Thames and Hudson, 339 pp., £29.95, November 1999, 0 500 01978 9
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Marilyn Monroe 
by Barbara Leaming.
Orion, 474 pp., £8.99, October 1999, 0 7528 2692 1
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... up an alternative life, and to develop her vital allure reading movie magazines. Norma Jeane had a keen sense of how to conquer people’s affections – especially those of men. She wore lipstick. She wore short skirts. She told a sad story of her upbringing. And after a spell modelling and flirting and screwing and practising her walk, waiting in line with ...

True Bromance

Philip Clark: Ravi Shankar’s Ragas, 15 July 2021

Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar 
by Oliver Craske.
Faber, 672 pp., £12.99, June, 978 0 571 35086 5
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... Records, in which jazz took its place alongside what would be called world music. Avakian was keen for Shankar to tour with Brubeck, a plan that foundered on Shankar’s reluctance to involve himself too deeply with contemporary jazz. The jazz that spoke to him – Armstrong, Basie, Ellington – had, he said, ‘innocence, life and soul in it. Their ...

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