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Tag Archives: Communism

Kreises of conscience

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner Canongate, £16.99, pp576 . In 1928, modest young blue-collar English lecturer Mildred Fish arrives in Berlin to begin her PhD in American Literature. In the febrile, polyglot atmosphere at the […]

NEWS AT A GLANCE

. Forty Popes have lived less than a year after their election. — The Nelson Evening Mail, Friday, January 18 1907 . Ethiopia has exported its first avocados by train. The Communist Party banned photocopiers. More geese than swans now live. In Brazil there is a butterfly that uses its legs for running. All Pakistani […]

Portrait of a ‘lady’ – Constance Markievicz, by Sarah Purser

Tonight, the Irish journalist Mary Kenny has a play on at the Irish Cultural Centre. Entitled Dearest Old Darling, it’s based on letters sent between the Dublin feminist, socialist, communist, Sinn Fein MP (elect, but never sitting) Constance Markievicz – née Gore-Booth – and her sister Eva. My great-great-great-aunt, Sarah Purser, portraitist, landscape artist, and […]

NEWS AT A GLANCE #3

A little bit more idiocy from around the global village. — For Queen Mob’s Tea House

NEWS AT A GLANCE

. The Queen won a first prize for bantams at the King’s Lynn Fur and Feather Society’s show. — The Nelson Evening Mail, January 6 1909 . In LA there is a chess set designed for the East India Company, featuring Sikh soldiers vs Afghans. Among a certain kind of people, being ‘passionate about Israel/Palestine’ […]

NEWS AT A GLANCE

. Only about three in every hundred amateur novel-writers find their way into print, except at their own expense. — The Nelson Evening Mail, January 22 1907 . The erection of a verandah is a useful way to extend one’s living quarters. Seven American states observe Abraham Lincoln’s birthday as a public holiday. There is only one […]

An unsigned note

Oldie readers will need no reminding that the heart of John le Carré’s ‘Circus’ – indeed, of his entire ouevre – is one George Smiley OBE. From Call for the Dead (in ’61) to the classic ‘Karla trilogy’, and on til (almost) the collapse of Communism, he battled foe and, sometimes, friend, quite often in […]

A Very British political drama

The Conservatives have been in power for years, the working man feels disenfranchised, unemployment is rife, and there’s really bad music on the radio. And then [cue: opening chords of Mozart’s Coronation Mass] Labour’s long-awaited electoral landslide, and all is right in the world! 1997? Not a bit of it. This is 1988 – at […]