Link Salad the National Inquirer Edition
-- Diary - Elaine Mokhtefi, London Review of Books, Jun. 1, 2017
"Cleaver was on top of the world after receiving formal recognition. In May, he shipped his pregnant wife off to give birth in North Korea. The wonders of the Korean health system, it was thought, were unsurpassed, and the decision would strengthen the BPP’s ties with Pyongyang. Meanwhile Cleaver had met a gorgeous young Algerian called Malika Ziri who was constantly at his side. Attaching herself publicly to a black American at least 15 years older than her in a society where discretion was the rule would have required immense self-confidence. The Panthers were stars in Algiers, but their flamboyance was also looked on critically. They helped themselves to scarce resources - basic entitlements in American eyes - that other liberation movements didn’t have access to: houses, cars, media coverage, visiting celebrities. They openly dated attractive women, both Algerian and foreign. I can still picture Sekou Odinga, an exile from the New York branch of the Panthers, swooping along the rue Didouche in a shiny red convertible with the top down, a lovely auburn-haired American at the wheel."
-- Who’s the real cunt? - Andrew O'Hagan, London Review of Books, Jun. 1, 2017
"You might meet such an editor as Dacre in Trollope, men who go very low in their defence of principles that only pretend to be high. Like Mr Booker, the bald editor who holds his own in The Way We Live Now, ‘he had fallen into a routine of work in which it was very difficult to be scrupulous, and almost impossible to maintain the delicacies of a literary conscience.’ Mr Ferdinand Alf in the same novel knows England as only an Englishman can know it, and edits the Evening Pulpit. ‘This was effected,’ Trollope writes, ‘with an air of wonderful omniscience, and not unfrequently with an ignorance hardly surpassed by its arrogance … The facts, if not true, were well invented; the arguments, if not logical, were seductive.’ Dacre is a Victorian editor in several ways, not least in his exhibiting a conscience that is alive to nothing so much as his readers’ most vital prejudices. Addison’s book is lively and somewhat complicit, perhaps secretly impressed in the manner of many popular concordances of Fleet Street vice, but he ably captures the dark mania that appears to keep Dacre going. His paper is having a good, horrible year, but people overestimate the Mail’s influence: it sells less than a third of what the Express did at its height, and more than a decade of railing against Tony Blair had no effect on his electoral record. Yet there isn’t another newspaper editor in Britain who reads every word of his own paper. He is described in this book, mainly by present and former colleagues, as ‘a loner’, ‘awkward and clumsy’, ‘a comical character’, ‘sycophantic and revolting’, ‘uptight’, ‘insensitive’, ‘a strange bastard’, ‘rather absurd’, ‘prudish’, ‘insecure’ and ‘slightly scared’. The book can’t quite approach (perhaps nothing can) the question of where such a capacity for vileness comes from. In rare interviews, Dacre simply doesn’t see the creepiness in his pursuit of the weak. He appears to think he’s doing something for women by employing vitriolic columnists like Jan Moir and Amanda Platell to speak on their behalf, and ‘raising the question’ of whether mothers should work, i.e. characterising those who do as scheming, ambitious bitches and bad parents. He might read every word of it but he doesn’t look at his paper, because if he did he would see it is a deep opponent of the values it pretends to espouse. Pretending to love family, it offers daily titillation and sleaze. Pretending to stick up for Britain, it caricatures 80 per cent of the country’s citizens, those lazy, disloyal, terroristic paedophiles who want everything for nothing and probably read the Guardian."
"Cleaver was on top of the world after receiving formal recognition. In May, he shipped his pregnant wife off to give birth in North Korea. The wonders of the Korean health system, it was thought, were unsurpassed, and the decision would strengthen the BPP’s ties with Pyongyang. Meanwhile Cleaver had met a gorgeous young Algerian called Malika Ziri who was constantly at his side. Attaching herself publicly to a black American at least 15 years older than her in a society where discretion was the rule would have required immense self-confidence. The Panthers were stars in Algiers, but their flamboyance was also looked on critically. They helped themselves to scarce resources - basic entitlements in American eyes - that other liberation movements didn’t have access to: houses, cars, media coverage, visiting celebrities. They openly dated attractive women, both Algerian and foreign. I can still picture Sekou Odinga, an exile from the New York branch of the Panthers, swooping along the rue Didouche in a shiny red convertible with the top down, a lovely auburn-haired American at the wheel."
-- Who’s the real cunt? - Andrew O'Hagan, London Review of Books, Jun. 1, 2017
"You might meet such an editor as Dacre in Trollope, men who go very low in their defence of principles that only pretend to be high. Like Mr Booker, the bald editor who holds his own in The Way We Live Now, ‘he had fallen into a routine of work in which it was very difficult to be scrupulous, and almost impossible to maintain the delicacies of a literary conscience.’ Mr Ferdinand Alf in the same novel knows England as only an Englishman can know it, and edits the Evening Pulpit. ‘This was effected,’ Trollope writes, ‘with an air of wonderful omniscience, and not unfrequently with an ignorance hardly surpassed by its arrogance … The facts, if not true, were well invented; the arguments, if not logical, were seductive.’ Dacre is a Victorian editor in several ways, not least in his exhibiting a conscience that is alive to nothing so much as his readers’ most vital prejudices. Addison’s book is lively and somewhat complicit, perhaps secretly impressed in the manner of many popular concordances of Fleet Street vice, but he ably captures the dark mania that appears to keep Dacre going. His paper is having a good, horrible year, but people overestimate the Mail’s influence: it sells less than a third of what the Express did at its height, and more than a decade of railing against Tony Blair had no effect on his electoral record. Yet there isn’t another newspaper editor in Britain who reads every word of his own paper. He is described in this book, mainly by present and former colleagues, as ‘a loner’, ‘awkward and clumsy’, ‘a comical character’, ‘sycophantic and revolting’, ‘uptight’, ‘insensitive’, ‘a strange bastard’, ‘rather absurd’, ‘prudish’, ‘insecure’ and ‘slightly scared’. The book can’t quite approach (perhaps nothing can) the question of where such a capacity for vileness comes from. In rare interviews, Dacre simply doesn’t see the creepiness in his pursuit of the weak. He appears to think he’s doing something for women by employing vitriolic columnists like Jan Moir and Amanda Platell to speak on their behalf, and ‘raising the question’ of whether mothers should work, i.e. characterising those who do as scheming, ambitious bitches and bad parents. He might read every word of it but he doesn’t look at his paper, because if he did he would see it is a deep opponent of the values it pretends to espouse. Pretending to love family, it offers daily titillation and sleaze. Pretending to stick up for Britain, it caricatures 80 per cent of the country’s citizens, those lazy, disloyal, terroristic paedophiles who want everything for nothing and probably read the Guardian."