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When Thieves Retire

Francis Gooding: Pirate Enlightenment, 30 March 2023

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia 
by David Graeber.
Allen Lane, 208 pp., £18.99, January, 978 0 241 61140 1
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... elsewhere on the island, or even as lieutenant to a completely different pirate ‘king’ called John Plantain. It’s a confusing picture. ‘What,’ Graeber asks, ‘is one to make of all this?’In Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia he tries to answer this question. As the title suggests, for Graeber there is more at stake here than one would ...

The Little Man’s Big Friends

Eric Foner: Freedom’s Dominion, 1 June 2023

Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power 
by Jefferson Cowie.
Basic, 497 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 1 5416 7280 2
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... amendments guaranteed the end of slavery, Black citizenship, the equal protection of the laws regardless of race and, for Black men, the right to vote. Each amendment ended with a clause empowering the federal government to enforce its provisions – a promise (or threat) of future national action. Unfortunately, as Sidney Andrews, a Northern ...

Too Big to Shut Down

Chal Ravens: Rave On, 7 March 2024

Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain 
by Ed Gillett.
Picador, 464 pp., £20, August 2023, 978 1 5290 7064 4
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... about raves that had to be stopped? Breaking into warehouses was illegal, but there were already laws for that. Ecstasy had been banned in the UK since 1977. And it couldn’t simply have been the power of the sound systems or the youth of the partygoers. Less than a month after Castlemorton, a huge licensed event called Fantazia was celebrated in the Daily ...

We’ll Never Know

Gabriel Dover, 3 August 1995

Signs of Life: The Language and Meanings of DNA 
by Robert Pollack.
Viking, 212 pp., £16, May 1994, 0 670 85121 3
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... but resides more in widely-held false notions of genetic determinism, and ‘universal laws’ that supposedly govern the biological processes of development, behaviour and evolution, than in any overt political agenda. Teasing out the essence of what it means to grow – irrationally, unpredictably and uncertainly – into an approximation of an ...

More Reconciliation than Truth

David Blackbourn: Germany’s Postwar Amnesties, 31 October 2002

Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration 
by Norbert Frei, translated by Joel Golb.
Columbia, 479 pp., £24.50, September 2002, 0 231 11882 1
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... some of the most weaselly words in a book that quotes many. The obfuscation at work in both laws makes it hard to determine how many Nazi criminals escaped punishment, but Frei estimates there were tens of thousands, including some who had committed manslaughter or murder. More widespread in its effects was the 1951 law on the Civil Service, which ...

Goose Girl

Josephine Quinn: Empress Theodora, 4 May 2017

Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint 
by David Potter.
Oxford, 277 pp., £17.99, January 2016, 978 0 19 974076 5
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... few cases more sober sources corroborate Procopius’ account: even Theodora’s fellow Miaphysite John of Ephesus said that she came ‘from the brothel’ (porneion), and Potter’s argument that the word could have referred simply to her past as an actress is too generous. There are other things Procopius could not possibly have known, and some he simply ...

Bye Bye Britain

Neal Ascherson, 24 September 2020

... union will never be the same again. A saucy genie of empowerment has escaped from the bottle. As John Curtice wrote in the Herald in July, ‘all the lives of everyone in Scotland have been affected by the devolved government in a way they’ve frankly not been in the previous 21 years of devolution.’ The Anglo-Scottish union was under new strain ...

Commencing Demagogues and Ending Tyrants

Colin Kidd: What’s wrong with the electoral college, 24 October 2024

How to Steal a Presidential Election 
by Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman.
Yale, 162 pp., £25, April, 978 0 300 27079 2
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... close elections, like the present one. In the event of a neck-and-neck contest in a state without laws preventing a faithless elector from casting a vote, Lessig and Seligman fear the consequences of fake news stories about voting irregularities. These stories might invite not only a swell of concern among Republicans but also outright intimidation by MAGA ...

Marxismo

Jon Elster, 18 March 1982

Marx’s Politics 
by Alan Gilbert.
Martin Robertson, 326 pp., £16.50, August 1981, 0 85520 441 9
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The History of Marxism. Vol. 1: Marxism in Marx’s Day 
edited by Eric Hobsbawm.
Harvester, 349 pp., £30, January 1982, 0 7108 0054 1
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Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism 
by Russell Jacoby.
Cambridge, 202 pp., £15.80, January 1982, 9780521239158
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Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory 
by John Roemer.
Cambridge, 230 pp., £19.50, August 1981, 0 521 23047 0
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Karl Marx: The Arguments of the Philosophers 
by Allen Wood.
Routledge, 304 pp., £13.50, January 1981, 0 7100 0672 1
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... in such phrases as ‘determination in the long run’, ‘relative autonomy’, ‘tendential laws’ and the like. To withhold charity even from interpretation has, of course, been the symmetric error of anti-Marxist writings, often perpetrated by ex-Marxist writers such as Karl Wittfogel. Marxist scholarship, however, does not consist only of books on ...

The Race-Neutral Delusion

Randall Kennedy, 10 August 2023

... coveted on the right. The court’s thinking is detailed in a majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, concurring opinions by Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and dissents by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.* Roberts held that the admissions programmes at Harvard and UNC ran afoul of the equal protection clause of the ...
Possible Dreams: A Personal History of the British Christian Socialists 
by Chris Bryant.
Hodder, 351 pp., £25, July 1996, 0 340 64201 7
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... John Smith was ‘one of them’. Tony Blair is ‘one of them’. And so are Chris Smith and Jack Straw and half the Shadow Cabinet and many more on the backbenches including Frank Field, that one-man think-tank of the Labour Right. ‘They’ are the Christian socialists, architects of New Labour, ready to provide the movement with the ethical foundations which seem sorely missing ...

Whose Body?

Charles Glass: ‘Operation Mincemeat’, 22 July 2010

Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War Two 
by Ben Macintyre.
Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £16.99, January 2010, 978 0 7475 9868 8
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... a stormy night with the discovery of a dead man in a barn, carrying papers that identify him as “John Whitaker”,’ Macintyre writes. ‘By dint of some distinctly plodding detective work, Inspector Richardson discovers that every document in the pockets of the dead man has been ingeniously forged: his visiting cards, his bills, and even his passport, on ...

Mighty Merry

E.S. Turner, 25 May 1995

The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Eleven Volumes, including Companion and Index 
edited by R.C. Latham and W. Matthews.
HarperCollins, 267 pp., £8.99, February 1995, 0 00 499021 8
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... in a Boat in the same form, will have a mild idea of the task which faced the Cambridge graduate John Smith (a sizar, married with one child) when in 1819 he was hired to decipher the six volumes of Samuel Pepys’s diary on which Magdalene College had sat for over a century. Smith did not know the system of shorthand the diarist had used, but he was a ...

Lunch Pumphrey, Skeets Benvenuti and a Gang of Other Vicious Tush Hogs

Christopher Tayler: Daniel Woodrell, 10 June 1999

Tomato Red 
by Daniel Woodrell.
No Exit, 225 pp., £10, March 1999, 0 19 019822 2
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... Powerlessness, his 1980 study of quiescence and rebellion among Appalachian ‘mountaineers’, John Gaventa noted that where ‘a positive self-image is not portrayed for a particular group, that group may develop a sense of inadequacy about itself, reinforced by how other groups project their media stereotypes on them’ – and he isn’t talking about ...

High Time for Reform

Rosalind Mitchison, 1 May 1980

The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice, 1817-1841 
by William Thomas.
Oxford, 491 pp., £15, December 1979, 0 19 822490 7
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... others only to learn.’ He does not take the analogy further, but it is worth remembering that John Stuart Mill, precociously crammed with learning which he had to dispense to his brothers, achieved philosophy and personal maturity only at the cost of successive mental breakdowns. John Mill’s progression from the ...

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