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Competition is for losers

David Runciman: Silicon Valley Vampire, 23 September 2021

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power 
by Max Chafkin.
Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 1 5266 1955 6
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... had been ‘brainwashed’ into believing in the dangers of climate change. Thiel then tried David Gelernter, an anti-PC warrior and author of America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats). Thiel tried to pitch Gelernter to Trump as a martyr for technology, because in 1993 he had been one of the victims of the ...

Is this the end of the UK?

David Runciman: The End of the UK?, 27 May 2010

... are bound to build. The Conservative Party, in theory, remains fully committed to the Union. David Cameron repeatedly and pointedly talks about having come into politics to serve ‘our country’, and by that he doesn’t mean England – he means the UK. Yet this election was meant to be the occasion when the Tories ...

Patria Potestas

David Allen, 19 April 1984

Dear Lord Rothschild: Birds, Butterflies and History 
by Miriam Rothschild.
Hutchinson, 398 pp., £14.95, November 1983, 0 09 153740 1
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... had much logic, inasmuch as entrepreneurial (or, for that matter, professional) skills are by no means a matter of upbringing or heredity. What the tradition in effect provided was a convenient myth to justify and to sustain paternal striving: for many a concern, the building-up or maintaining of something to pass on to one’s sons – or, in default of ...
Breaking the Mould 
by Ian Bradley.
Martin Robertson, 172 pp., £8.95, September 1981, 0 85520 469 9
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... Evan Luard’s Socialism Without the State, John Horam’s calls for ‘market socialism’ and David Owen’s evocation of the co-operative, decentralist element in the British socialist tradition exemplified a widespread mood, with which the old Right of the Labour Party had no more in common than had the Left. It was not as new a mood as he seems to ...

Short Cuts

David Kaiser: The Higgs Boson, 25 August 2011

... of its sweeping symmetries and exquisite mathematical structures. Brutish because the principal means of acquiring information about the subatomic realm is revving up tiny bits of matter to extraordinary energies and then smashing them together. Imagine trying to discern the hidden inner workings of a pocketwatch – carefully gauged springs and gears, all ...

In a Faraway Pond

David Runciman: The NGO, 29 November 2007

Non-Governmental Politics 
edited by Michel Feher.
Zone, 693 pp., £24.95, May 2007, 978 1 890951 74 0
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... On 24 July, in a speech to the Rwandan parliament, David Cameron said that the old ideological divisions concerning aid and trade – aid is ‘wasteful’, trade is ‘unfair’ – needed to be abandoned in favour of a commitment to what works. He talked about the importance of transparency and accountability at both governmental and non-governmental levels to ensure that resources were used efficiently and money reached its targets ...

Blake at work

David Bindman, 2 April 1981

William Blake, printmaker 
by Robert Essick.
Princeton, 304 pp., £27.50, August 1980, 0 691 03954 2
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... a number of questions unanswered. By using the available manuals, Essick is able to discuss what means were possible, and by a brilliant analysis of the existing plates he is able to prove beyond doubt that Blake etched his plates extremely shallowly. In so doing, Blake could exert a personal control over the inking, and thus achieve a spontaneity quite ...

My body is my own

David Miller, 31 October 1996

Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality 
by G.A. Cohen.
Cambridge, 277 pp., £40, October 1995, 0 521 47174 5
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... of a widening economic gap between an enlarging proletariat and a shrinking bourgeoisie – means that we can no longer hope to find a majority class with a compelling material interest in overthrowing that system. We can therefore no longer believe in the historical inevitability of socialism, but must instead regard it as a moral ideal which, if it is ...

Socialism in One County

David Runciman: True Blue Labour, 28 July 2011

The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox: The Oxford London Seminars 2010-11 
edited by Maurice Glasman, Jonathan Rutherford, Marc Stears and Stuart White.
www.soundings.org.uk, 155 pp., June 2011, 978 1 907103 36 0
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... any party, including the Labour Party of Tony Blair and the Conservative Party of Blair’s heir, David Cameron. Glasman has no fundamental problem with Cameron’s notion of the Big Society, which he takes very seriously. He absolutely is not one of those who think it’s just a fluffy cover story for an ideological programme of radical Tory cuts (which is ...

The Politics of Now

David Runciman: The Last World Cup, 21 June 2018

The Fall of the House of Fifa 
by David Conn.
Yellow Jersey, 336 pp., £9.99, June 2017, 978 0 224 10045 8
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... power, some moments now look like straws in the wind. In late November 2010 the English FA sent David Cameron, Prince William and David Beckham to Fifa headquarters in Zurich to lobby on its behalf before the vote for the right to host the 2018 World Cup. Two old Etonians and an alumnus of Chingford County High ...

Short Cuts

David Runciman: The Corbyn Surge, 27 August 2015

... options presented to them. But Trump’s case is also very different. The length of the US contest means there is plenty of time for the old rules to reassert themselves. And when that happens, Trump has the option of running as an independent, which is what a disruptor would do (though the likely consequence is that he would help usher Hillary into the White ...

Tortoises with Zips

David Craig: The Snow Geese by William Fiennes, 4 April 2002

The Snow Geese 
by William Fiennes.
Picador, 250 pp., £14.99, March 2002, 0 330 37578 4
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... William Fiennes has a deep-seated sense of home and what it means to be distant from it. Birth-house, parents, migrant birds: these fuse in his passage on swifts, for example, which ‘come back each year, in the last week of May’ to his old home somewhere in the south country – a fact which interested me, because I have recorded their arrival since the 1950s in Aberdeen on 11 May and in Cumbria on 6 May ...

A Little Bit of a Monster

David Trotter: On Andrea Arnold, 22 September 2022

... is evidently not well. Curiosity once meant the scrupulous exercise of care and attention; it now means their overuse, or inappropriate application. The short sequence reveals Arnold’s determination to restore its good name. But Jackie, too, will soon go ballistic. Identifying in the CCTV footage the man she holds responsible for the deaths of her husband ...

Notes on the Election

David Runciman, 5 March 2015

... and delivered without notes. What made it appear a triumph was the speech given the next day by David Davis, Cameron’s main rival for the Tory Party leadership and the man long considered the favourite to succeed Michael Howard. Davis flopped. He spoke woodenly from behind a lectern without any of Cameron’s natural ease, looking and sounding like ...

No Exit

David Runciman, 23 May 1996

The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain 
edited by S.J.D. Green and R.C. Whiting.
Cambridge, 403 pp., £40, February 1996, 0 521 45537 5
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... it does and does not belong in our lives – but we rarely stop to ask what the term actually means. Instead, we try to make sense of it in conjunction with words that may come with it, and which we can understand well enough on their own – words like ‘welfare’, ‘intervention’, ‘sanction’, ‘control’, ‘security’. During the Eighties ...

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