Can a King Have Friends?
Charles Brandon was one of a group of athletic courtiers employed to serve the leisure of Hooray Henry; they overlapped with, but can be distinguished from, the machiavels who served the policy of Horrid Henry, and the poets and priests employed to flatter the intellect and ease the conscience of Holy Henry. Henry came to the throne in 1509. Charles Brandon’s power as a court favourite endured till death removed him in 1545. A long run, on ground slippery with blood: how did Charles do it? More
Ted Hughes in His Cage
So much in the life and work of Ted Hughes was weird and transgressive that even now it is hard to feel confident that his actions and achievement can be judiciously assessed. For a start, he wrote and published at such a rate: Jonathan Bate’s bibliographic tally of Hughes’s books runs to more than seventy items, while the various Hughes archives contain nearly a hundred thousand pages. The vast Collected Poems edited by Paul Keegan and published in 2003 presents a poet who insistently ‘o’erflows the measure’. More
The Man Who Built New York
Robert Moses was a modernist pharaoh. Over the forty years from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, he became a virtual dictator of public works in all five boroughs of New York and much of its suburban surroundings. Almost singlehandedly, through chicanery, fraud and bullying, he created the modern infrastructure of the New York City area: expressways, tunnels and bridges, but also parks, beaches, swimming pools and high-rise housing projects. More
How Public Inquiries Go Wrong
On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war – to investigate, as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, put it, ‘the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned.’ Although oral hearings finished in early 2011, the inquiry won’t report until the middle of this year... More
Apartheid’s Last Stand
Angolans sustained immense losses in the fight to end apartheid. It was certainly heroic, but it was ruinous too: most of the dead and damaged were civilians, offered up for sacrifice by the party-state. Today’s poor Angolans – probably half the country – are scarcely more prosperous than their grandparents were, but the rich are decidedly richer. Angola’s future may look brighter once its old elites have been buried with honour and good riddance. More
