Towards the end of this tale of imperial intellectual expansion, Susan Sontag’s publicist goes to visit his shrink and, dealing with some appalling professional trauma or other, mentions her name. The psychiatrist bursts out laughing. The publicist asks what is so funny and is told: ‘You can’t imagine how many people have sat on that
Ultras (Italian football hooligans) initially evolved along the same lines as their more infamous English counterparts, emerging in the 1960s and becoming fully fledged in the 1970s. Their ritual, tribal aggression supplied an outlet for youthful male violence in the relatively peaceful second half of Europe’s most savage century. At first, the curve’s semi-circular ends,behind
This novel is strikingly brave in two ways: first, in the fortitude of its writer, the redoubtable Edna O’Brien, who, aged 88, travelled twice to northern Nigeria, her bra stuffed with thousands of dollars, in order to research this story. With some irony, she ended up staying in a convent with kindly nuns who helped
Frank Dikötter has written a very lively and concise analysis of the techniques and personalities of eight 20th-century dictators: Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Duvalier (Haiti), Ceausescu (Romania) and Mengistu (Ethiopia). As a comparative study of those individuals, it is enlightening and a good read. The title and parts of the foreword indicate
A boardful of company directors are summoned to explain themselves to a Whitehall select committee. The Bank of England has already had to bail out the company, the British economy has taken a hit in the fallout and parliament has now been recalled to discuss the company’s massive debts. In the committee room, the corporate
Probably this happens to every generation: the moment when you can’t believe what’s going on; when events seem too preposterous to be true. I never thought I’d witness government and parliament in this country tearing themselves to tatters and becoming so irrelevant that Westminster might as well be located on the dark side of Jupiter.
He would want to be remembered as the debonair war hero who delivered Indian independence and became the royal family’s elder statesman. But something went wrong for Lord Louis Mountbatten. Andrew Roberts anticipated many modern historians when he called him ‘a mendacious, intellectually limited hustler’. Field Marshal Gerald Templer told him to his face he
Doxology covers five decades and a spacious 400 pages, with all the subplots and digressions you would expect of a baggy monster realist novel. It moves from the subculture of straight edge punk to the backrooms of political powerbroking, and surveys ground from East Harlem to rural Ethiopia. There are at least half a dozen
It is to Peter Quennell in his memoir The Wanton Chase that D.J. Taylor owes his concept of wartime London’s ‘Lost Girls’: ‘adventurous young women who flitted around London, alighting briefly here and there, and making the best of any random perch on which they happened to descend’. They were courageous, living ‘without any thought
Those who think Essex is boring, or a human waste bin into which only the most meretricious people find themselves tipped, would require only one or two chapters of Gillian Darley’s widely researched book to tell them how wrong they are. Essex has experienced various types and degrees of civilisation since before the Romans arrived
The novelist and essayist James Meek’s confident new medieval romance is conducted in brief passages separated out by three icons, a rose, a sickle and a quill, emblematic of the three estates of the realm. The nobility play at courtly love; the commons can only evade their bondage by war service; and the clergy are
