Author Archives: Jonathan Beckman

Out Cold

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

‘It is falling on all creation,’ Eoghan Smith writes at the start of A Mind of Winter. ‘On the roof of the Lawlor cottage, and on the narrow track that leads through the garden … it is falling on the bare overhang of the ash and horse chestnut trees.’ Finally, the blizzard falls on the […]

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Freddy Quezada

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Nicaragua is in the international spotlight following a governmental crackdown on the Catholic Church. In recent years, president Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is the country’s vice-president, have targeted clerics for speaking out against their rule. On 10 February 2023, Rolando Alvarez, a prominent Catholic bishop, was sentenced to twenty-six years in […]

Tokyo’s Pensioner Hoods

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

‘As an investigative journalist, trouble is my business,’ Jake Adelstein, a reporter based in Tokyo, tells us in a typically Chandler-esque self-assessment. It’s one of many lines in The Last Yakuza that seem lifted from old Hollywood noir films. The Last Yakuza is the follow-up to Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice (2009), a memoir of his stint […]

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The End of the Long Lunch

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

In 1984, when I started working at the book trade journal The Bookseller, many of the most prominent publishers of the day were within walking distance of our office near New Oxford Street. Jonathan Cape, the Bodley Head, Michael Joseph and Hodder & Stoughton were in Bedford Square. André Deutsch, publisher of Updike, Naipaul and […]

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Sue Bridehead Revisited

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

The title of Paula Byrne’s Hardy Women is a pun on Thomas Hardy’s name and a gesture to the enthusiasm that greeted Hardy’s fictional women. Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess Durbeyfield in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure were new kinds of women, and Hardy’s fame, which was immense

Crape Expectations

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Judith Flanders has undertaken a mammoth task. The Victorian period is widely known for its excessive, sometimes scarcely believable interest in death and everything that surrounds it. There are so many set pieces involving death in the fiction of the era, particularly the scenes of children dying in Dickens’s writings. The demise of Little Nell

Why Some Are More Equal Than Others

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones tourists come for. But the most significant image is the least dramatic. Fourteen individuals gather closely together, watching a lone figure departing from the group

Tomorrow is Another Election

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

‘In the long run we are all dead,’ wrote John Maynard Keynes in his 1923 work A Tract on Monetary Reform. Very sharp, Mr Keynes, perhaps so sharp you’ll cut yourself. The remark is open to the riposte that although Keynes and his reader will be dead, future generations have a good chance of still […]

Reasons to Be Cheerful

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

At the end of every Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, exhausted negotiators invariably face criticism that their efforts have been insufficient to address the existential challenge that the world faces. Any victories that they have wrestled from the jaws of failure are frequently deemed by a […]

Sultans Old & New

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

The sometimes-fraught question ‘Where are you really from?’ raises no eyebrows in Istanbul. As Alexander Christie-Miller points out, almost everyone there is from somewhere else, and long has been. The Roman emperor who founded Constantinople in AD 330 was born in Serbia and proclaimed emperor in York. The Turks who seized the city more than […]

The Long Road to Emancipation

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

In the 1830s, as abolitionists celebrated the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies, the institution of chattel slavery was flourishing elsewhere in the American hemisphere. Driven by consumer demand for the staple crops of cotton, sugar and coffee, financed by banking houses who were content to accept the slaves themselves as collateral for […]

Hard Times on the Yangtze

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Price rises can be a sign of political end times. I remember being in the USSR (as it still was, just) in the summer of 1991 and becoming aware that a fistful of soiled rouble notes would buy very little compared to a few crisp green US dollars. A half-century previously, the Chinese who lived […]

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Better Dead Than Red

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Nasty, certainly, but little? The Western intervention in the Russian Civil War, intended to reverse the Bolshevik coup, to restore Russia as an ally in the closing years of the First World War and to create an orderly state harmless to the West and its empires, lasted for four years and extended across a sixth of the earth. While far fewer troops

The Drowned & the Saved

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Off the main hall of Vienna’s Westbahnhof there is a statue in bronze of a small Jewish boy sitting on a suitcase. He has a straight fringe and an anxious expression and one of his socks is falling down. Westbahnhof is the station from which Jewish children left on the Kindertransport for England between 1938 […]

The Full Maggie

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

The poet Andrew McMillan’s debut novel, Pity, is set in his hometown of Barnsley and is concerned with the plight of former mining towns like it. Such places are rarely mentioned in the media unless it is ‘for tragic or violent reasons’, we are told in one of the ‘fieldnotes’, passages of sociological research that […]

Priests with Pick Axes

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

The Spanish Empire was an improbable creation. Relatively poor, meagrely populated and only recently integrated, Spain nonetheless built the largest realm the world had seen. From a landlocked capital, the Spanish created an empire on four continents, its reach in America alone spreading from the upper Missouri to Tierra del Fuego. In How the Spanish […]

350 Years of Sodom

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

In January 1730, the authorities in Utrecht arrested a 52-year-old man and a nineteen-year-old man found in flagrante delicto in a tower of the city cathedral. It turned out to be a watershed moment. Interrogation of the older man revealed that he’d had many male sexual partners over the years, some of whom were in […]

Freak Shows, Peepshows & Sunday School

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Alwyn Turner has achieved the remarkable feat of shedding new light on the Edwardian era. Books galore have been devoted to the period between the Boer War and the First World War, but this is the first to examine it through the prism of popular culture, as reflected in an encyclopaedic range of contemporary newspapers […]

Anatomist of Evil

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

When Hannah Arendt looked at the man wearing an ill-fitting suit in the bulletproof dock inside a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, she saw something different from everybody else. The prosecution, writes Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘saw an ancient crime in modern garb, and portrayed Eichmann as the latest monster in the long history of anti-Semitism who had simply used novel methods to take hatred for Jews to a new level’. Arendt thought otherwise. Adolf Eichmann was on trial after being captured by Israeli agents in Argentina and brought to Israel to face charges of being a leading organiser of the Holocaust. Arendt was there to report on the trial for the New Yorker.

Postcolonial Pains

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

Posters went up in my part of London a few weeks ago advertising a talk on Frantz Fanon and decolonisation. As the war rages in Israel and Gaza, Fanon is once again invoked, as he has been many times since his death in 1961, for his insights into the plight of the colonised and the […]

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