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Short Cuts

David Bromwich: Mueller Time, 18 April 2019

... tie Trump’s actions to either activity.The second main finding concerned obstruction of justice; but here Mueller suspended judgment. His report elected not to issue a traditional directive of the sort that constitutes either a move to prosecute or a decision not to prosecute. Again in his own words: ‘while this report does not conclude that the ...

On with the Pooling and Merging

Neal Ascherson: The Incomparable Tom Nairn, 17 February 2000

After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland 
by Tom Nairn.
Granta, 336 pp., £15.99, January 2000, 1 86207 293 0
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... has its allure too. It seems very good and native to me that the Chief Minister of Scotland, Donald Dewar, thought it natural to review Nairn’s book in a newspaper. Not that he liked it much. Nairn has no time for New Labour or Tony Blair, and – which vexes Donald Dewar – no gratitude either for the bold gift of ...

Short Cuts

David Bromwich: Springtime for Donald, 20 February 2020

... Watching​ Donald Trump’s State of the Union address on 4 February, I felt that we had crossed a line. This president was setting up as the benevolent ruler of – it wasn’t clear what. Not a constitutional democracy. A different kind of country. He had brought along, as guests, individuals who were given honourable mentions in his speech, people who looked up in gratitude as he scattered his gifts ...

How to Solve the Puzzle

Donald MacKenzie: On Short Selling, 5 April 2018

... covered by Ljungqvist and Qian’s paper ended up being investigated by the US Department of Justice or the Securities and Exchange Commission. Indeed, if you are British, it’s hard not to feel envious of the US when reading Ljungqvist and Qian’s study. ‘Angry directors … could go for you,’ a UK-based short seller says, and publishing in the UK ...

Zero Is a Clenched Fist

Donald MacKenzie: Trading from the Pit, 1 November 2007

Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London 
by Caitlin Zaloom.
Chicago, 224 pp., £18.50, November 2006, 0 226 97813 3
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... trading, but they didn’t. Out trades were typically settled quickly and efficiently on a rough-justice, split-the-difference basis, and opportunism was very rare. Perpetrators would be frozen out from subsequent trading: who would catch the eye of a known opportunist? Chicago’s pits were places of repeated interaction between people who knew each ...

Better and Worse Worsts

Sadakat Kadri: American Trials, 24 May 2007

The Trial in American Life 
by Robert Ferguson.
Chicago, 400 pp., £18.50, March 2007, 978 0 226 24325 2
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... he might be the prophet that he resembled. Executions had been the primary spectacle of criminal justice in the Western world for hundreds of years, but during the quarter century before 1859 more than a dozen northern states enacted laws to conceal their hangings behind prison walls. The courtroom drama was replacing the gallows ritual in the public ...

Enormities

C.H. Sisson, 27 September 1990

Collected Poems 
by Donald Davie.
Carcanet, 475 pp., £25, September 1990, 0 85635 875 4
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... What sort of a poet is Donald Davie? The factual answer, as with all poets, is to be found only in a volume such as the Collected Poems which he now lays before the public, but Davie himself appears to have worried more than most practitioners about what kind of poetry he was writing and – if one can put it that way – about the politics of style ...

Lyrics and Ironies

Christopher Ricks, 4 December 1986

The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony 
by D.J. Enright.
Oxford, 178 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 19 212253 3
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Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric 
by Donald Davie.
Cambridge, 76 pp., £15, September 1986, 0 521 32264 2
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... By one of those coincidences which one is minded mindlessly to call ironical, both arms of Donald Davie’s Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric are also embraced in Enright’s book. Enright has a section on ‘Milosz and the Case Against’, a respectful wary circling which becomes incautious only at the moment when, with rhetorical ...

Who am I prepared to kill?

William Davies: The Politics of Like and Dislike, 30 July 2020

... 1930s is that we can all now potentially act as the pollster. Here’s my dog: like or dislike? Donald Trump is a fascist: agree or disagree? This is not the idealised classical or liberal public sphere of argument and deliberation, but a society of perpetual referendums. The perennial question, when it comes to so much up-voting and down-voting, is who can ...

The Mask It Wears

Pankaj Mishra: The Wrong Human Rights, 21 June 2018

The People v. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It 
by Yascha Mounk.
Harvard, 400 pp., £21.95, March 2018, 978 0 674 97682 5
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Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World 
by Samuel Moyn.
Harvard, 277 pp., £21.95, April 2018, 978 0 674 73756 3
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... Trump ordered strikes on Syria in April last year, Fareed Zakaria hailed the ‘big moment’: ‘Donald Trump,’ he said, ‘became president of the United States last night.’ As Trump dispatched his ‘shiny and new’ missiles to Syria a year later, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former Obama apparatchik and president of the New America Foundation, tweeted ...

Neurotic Health

Michael Shepherd, 17 December 1981

Becoming Psychiatrists 
by Donald Light.
Norton, 429 pp., £10.95, June 1981, 0 393 01168 2
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... them the departments of psychiatry in the medical schools. How this was effected is the subject of Donald Light’s book. Light is a medical sociologist who sets out to examine ‘what kinds of people choose to become psychiatrists, how their training experience alters their sense of illness, treatment and responsibility, how they cope with suicidal ...

Great Man

David Blackbourn: Humboldt, 16 June 2011

Nature’s Interpreter: The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt 
by Donald McCrory.
Lutterworth, 242 pp., £23, November 2010, 978 0 7188 9231 9
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... a stylish comedy that gently mocks Humboldt’s belief in an ordered and interconnected universe. Donald McCrory’s new biography, pious in tone and lumpishly written, could hardly be more different. Humboldt was part of a great flowering of German intellectual life in the decades either side of 1800, the period when Germaine de Staël called Germany the ...

Diary

Christian Lorentzen: The Democratic Convention, 11 August 2016

... My​ father voted for Bernie Sanders in the spring and says he’ll vote for Donald Trump in November. This places him in a magical category of voters who some believe will determine the election, but because he lives in Massachusetts his vote is unlikely to put Trump in the White House. He thinks of Hillary Clinton as a corporate shill, a politician ‘who’s never had a job in her life’, part of a dynasty that shouldn’t exist in America ...

Green Pastel Redness

Colin Kidd: The Supreme Court Coup, 24 March 2022

Dissent: The Radicalisation of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Supreme Court 
by Jackie Calmes.
Twelve, 478 pp., £25, July 2021, 978 1 5387 0079 2
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Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months that Transformed the Supreme Court 
by Linda Greenhouse.
Random House, 300 pp., £22.50, November 2021, 978 0 593 44793 2
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... 2021, the United States experienced a less obtrusive coup d’état: the hustled retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, the oldest of the three remaining liberals on the Supreme Court. The prematurely leaked announcement in late January took Breyer himself by surprise. But the leak wasn’t any more of a breach of constitutional decorum than the insistent ...

Short Cuts

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: Plainly Unconstitutional, 21 October 2021

... but not only them – to follow its decisions. (When, early in the court’s history, the chief justice reached a decision that President Andrew Jackson disliked, Jackson is said to have remarked: ‘John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.’) If the court’s decisions are not seen as legitimate, its power could fade.Stephen Breyer, a ...

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