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First Recourse for Rebels

Tom Stevenson: Financial Weaponry, 24 March 2022

The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War 
by Nicholas Mulder.
Yale, 434 pp., £25, March 2022, 978 0 300 25936 0
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... that of Iraq, which suffered from a decade of brutal traditional sanctions followed by outright conquest and civil war. In Iran’s case it’s difficult to disentangle the causes, since revolutionary politics had their own effects. But the Obama-era financial punishment of 2011-12 was responsible for an immediate drop in Iranian GDP, wiping out a third of ...

Hidden Consequences

John Mullan: Byron, 6 November 2003

Byron: Life and Legend 
by Fiona MacCarthy.
Faber, 674 pp., £9.99, November 2003, 0 571 17997 5
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... greatest womaniser was hiding something. ‘Byron liked the chase, the reassurance of heterosexual conquest.’ Yet she is sure that his ‘relations with boys’ were his true ‘emotional focus’. It was not just a phase. ‘Byron’s male loves seem to have deepened and flourished with the years.’ She is convinced that, in romantic recollection, he ...

Diary

Perry Anderson: Forget about Paris, 23 January 2014

... go back a long way. Full-blown feudalism was imposed in one fell swoop from above, by a Norman conquest that left a medieval monarchy structurally always more powerful than its Capetian rival, which slowly and painfully extended its reach, by piecemeal assemblage, beyond the Isle-de-France. Capitalism, in turn, arrived much earlier, in good measure because ...

Cape of Mad Hope

Neal Ascherson: The Darien disaster, 3 January 2008

The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union and the Wealth of Nations 
by Douglas Watt.
Luath, 312 pp., £8.99, January 2007, 978 1 906307 09 7
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... If, that is, they accepted the Union Treaty, in which the Equivalent figured as Article 15. When Robert Burns wrote ‘We’re bought and sold for English gold,’ he was probably thinking of those Scottish politicians who were directly bribed with cash and job offers, and who became despised and notorious. But the Equivalent was far more effective and far ...

Beast of a Nation

Andrew O’Hagan: Scotland’s Self-Pity, 31 October 2002

Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland 
by Neal Ascherson.
Granta, 305 pp., £16.99, September 2002, 1 86207 524 7
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... carted off by an English king in an act of plunder which was also intended to be a symbolic act of conquest. Not the Stone, but the presence of the Stone at Westminster served to define one of the underlying realities of the English-Scottish relationship, and it continued to do so even after the 1707 Treaty of Union fused the two kingdoms into one ‘Great ...

Like a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader

John Lloyd: Globalisation, 2 September 1999

The Lexus and the Olive Tree 
by Thomas Friedman.
HarperCollins, 394 pp., £19.99, May 1999, 0 00 257014 9
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Global Transformation 
by David Held and Anthony McGrew.
Polity, 515 pp., £59.50, March 1999, 0 7456 1498 1
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... Nato embarked in Kosovo, and which is quite inexplicable to those for whom war remains a matter of conquest or defence – most of the world, in terms of population. In the rich countries, the imperative of contentment has suppressed what remained of ‘security politics’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union; we live in what the German sociologist Ulrich ...

‘You can have patience or you can have carnage’

Charles Glass: In Afghanistan, 18 November 2004

... remnants of the fifth-century ramparts that failed to preserve decadent Hindu rule from Mughal conquest. Every private house and most public buildings are set inside mud and brick enclosures that give the city an unwelcoming air. Behind the walls, in gardens needing rain, lie separate huts for women, for cooking, for eating and for receiving guests. Only ...

All My Truth

Richard Poirier: Henry James Memoirs, 25 April 2002

A Small Boy and Others: Memoirs 
by Henry James.
Gibson Square, 217 pp., £9.99, August 2001, 1 903933 00 5
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... the writing of A Small Boy. Thus in his immensely useful compilation, A Henry James Encyclopedia, Robert Gale maintains that William is ‘the hero of James’s autobiography, especially its earlier parts’. James had himself indicated as much when he first discussed a ‘family book’ with William’s heirs during the months, stretching to nearly a ...

Who said Gaddafi had to go?

Hugh Roberts, 17 November 2011

... length and breadth of eastern Libya, and had distinguished itself in the resistance to the Italian conquest from 1911 onwards. But like the Hashemites Idris came to the throne as a protégé of the British, who fished him out of Cairo, where he had spent more than 20 years in exile, to make him king and thereby recast Libya as a monarchy in 1951 when the UN ...

All about Freud

J.P. Stern, 4 August 1988

Freud: A Life for Our Time: A Life in Our Time 
by Peter Gay.
Dent, 810 pp., £16.95, May 1988, 0 460 04761 2
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... a more generous view of Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1980), or indeed Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, might have yielded a more abundant answer. On the other hand, Freud’s warm if critical admiration of England (which, he shared, incidentally, with members of the Viennese Jockey Club), his remarkable command of ...

Thatcher’s Artists

Peter Wollen, 30 October 1997

Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection 
by Norman Rosenthal.
Thames and Hudson, 222 pp., £29.95, September 1997, 0 500 23752 2
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... such powerful images as these become assimilated, their impact diluted. Artists must continue the conquest of new territory and new taboos.’ In a way, I quite appreciate the stunning shamelessness of Rosenthal’s approach as he tries to fend off angry accusations that the work he is showing is obscene and distasteful by invoking the great shock-and-horror ...

Back to Runnymede

Ferdinand Mount: Magna Carta, 23 April 2015

Magna Carta 
by David Carpenter.
Penguin, 594 pp., £10.99, January 2015, 978 0 241 95337 2
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Magna Carta Uncovered 
by Anthony Arlidge and Igor Judge.
Hart, 222 pp., £25, October 2014, 978 1 84946 556 4
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Magna Carta 
by J.C. Holt.
Cambridge, 488 pp., £21.99, May 2015, 978 1 107 47157 3
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Magna Carta: The Foundation of Freedom 1215-2015 
by Nicholas Vincent.
Third Millennium, 192 pp., £44.95, January 2015, 978 1 908990 28 0
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Magna Carta: The Making and Legacy of the Great Charter 
by Dan Jones.
Head of Zeus, 192 pp., £14.99, December 2014, 978 1 78185 885 1
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... Edward Coke’s Institutes how well so ever he could plead.’ The royalist historian-physician Robert Brady remarks sourly that Coke ‘hath a fine fetch to play off the Great Charter and interpret it by his Modern-Law, that was not then known or heard of’. Such scepticism​ still appeals to our own knowing cast of mind. All the same, a closer ...

A Tiny Sun

Tom Stevenson: Getting the Bomb, 24 February 2022

The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War 
by Fred Kaplan.
Simon and Schuster, 384 pp., £15, April 2021, 978 1 9821 0729 1
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The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age 
by Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press.
Cornell, 180 pp., £23.99, June 2020, 978 1 5017 4929 2
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... has been no total war between major powers since 1945. The most prominent exponent of this view, Robert Jervis of Columbia University’s Institute of War and Peace Studies, argued that such wars can no longer occur if statesmen are rational. In The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution, Keir Lieber and Daryl Press suggest that these grand claims are ...

Memories We Get to Keep

James Meek: James Salter’s Apotheosis, 20 June 2013

All That Is 
by James Salter.
Picador, 290 pp., £18.99, May 2013, 978 1 4472 3824 9
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Collected Stories 
by James Salter.
Picador, 303 pp., £18.99, May 2013, 978 1 4472 3938 3
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... together for a movie. But the structure of hero and rival in neo-aristocratic competition for the conquest of the elemental returns in Salter’s later, more complex novels. Solo Faces was originally written as a screenplay, after Salter had seen a script realised in film, the skiing drama Downhill Racer, directed by Michael Ritchie and starring ...

A Rage for Abstraction

Jeremy Harding, 16 June 2016

The Other Paris: An Illustrated Journey through a City’s Poor and Bohemian Past 
by Luc Sante.
Faber, 306 pp., £25, November 2015, 978 0 571 24128 6
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How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People 
by Sudhir Hazareesingh.
Allen Lane, 427 pp., £20, June 2015, 978 1 84614 602 2
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... by Tamara de Lempicka from 1933 – and Yvonne George, a Belgian cabaret star who swept the poet Robert Desnos off his feet. Members of the Brigade des moeurs were biddable, and liked to get a slice of the action, whatever it happened to be. They didn’t have much in the way of convictions, in any sense, especially when it came to pornography and drugs. The ...

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