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Not in the Mood

Adam Shatz: Derrida’s Secrets, 22 November 2012

Derrida: A Biography 
by Benoît Peeters, translated by Andrew Brown.
Polity, 629 pp., £25, November 2012, 978 0 7456 5615 1
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... at least that the philosopher will be in a better mood for the second round.’ Once Jospin became prime minister, she tore into Derrida’s call for ‘unconditional hospitality’ for illegal immigrants, a swipe at her husband’s policies: ‘There is nothing more conditional than hospitality. The unconditional, in general, answers the longing of beautiful ...

Bourgeois Stew

Oliver Cussen: Alexis de Tocqueville, 16 November 2023

The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville 
by Olivier Zunz.
Princeton, 443 pp., £22, November, 978 0 691 25414 2
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Travels with Tocqueville beyond America 
by Jeremy Jennings.
Harvard, 544 pp., £34.95, March, 978 0 674 27560 7
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... court favour with powerful relatives (among them Louis-Mathieu Molé, a cousin who happened to be prime minister) and to an uninspiring campaign. People knew Tocqueville’s name but had no idea what he stood for: his self-definition as a ‘liberal of a new kind’, opposed to both ‘the friends of order’ and the ‘dirty democrats of our age’, did ...

Human Science

Marshall Sahlins, 9 May 2013

... who were no longer living from his sample: the fact that, as he himself noted, killers are ‘prime targets’ for revenge means that their reproductive careers are often cut short. In any event, his claim that the Yanomami exemplify the original condition of mankind is preposterous. The Yanomami mode of existence in settled communities practising a mixed ...

One of Those Extremists

Seth Anziska: Golda Meir, 13 July 2023

The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and Her Path to Power 
by Pnina Lahav.
Princeton, 376 pp., £28, November 2022, 978 0 691 20174 0
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... and Meir lost narrowly after the religious parties refused to back a woman (when she became prime minister she knew better, agreeing to their demands, such as the definition of Jewish identity by religion alone). In 1956 she became foreign minister, a position she held for close to a decade, under Ben-Gurion and then ...

Nothing he hasn’t done, nowhere he hasn’t been

Adam Shatz: Claude Lanzmann, 5 April 2012

The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir 
by Claude Lanzmann, translated by Frank Wynne.
Atlantic, 528 pp., £25, March 2012, 978 1 84887 360 5
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... withdrew funding after a few years, before a single reel was shot. Lanzmann turned to the new prime minister, Menachem Begin, who put him in touch with a former member of Mossad, a ‘secret man devoid of emotions’. He promised that Israel would sponsor the film so long as it ran no longer than two hours and was completed in 18 months. Lanzmann agreed ...

One day I’ll tell you what I think

Adam Shatz: Sartre in Cairo, 22 November 2018

No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre and Decolonisation 
by Yoav Di-Capua.
Chicago, 355 pp., £26, March 2018, 978 0 226 50350 9
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The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation in Egypt 
by Arwa Salih, translated by Samah Selim.
Seagull, 163 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 0 85742 483 9
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... had to carry him back to his hotel. They were ‘queers’, he shouted, and as such ‘the prime examples of how to resolve the conflict’. Al-Samman was shocked, but not Lanzmann.‘I have come to learn, not to teach,’ Sartre told his Egyptian interlocutors. In Kamshish, a village in the Egyptian delta, Sartre and Lutfi al-Khuli took part in a Q&A ...

The Fighting Family

Avi Shlaim, 9 May 1996

Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream: Power, Politics and Ideology from Begin to Netanyahu 
by Colin Shindler.
Tauris, 324 pp., £25, August 1995, 1 85043 969 9
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Summing Up: An Autobiography 
by Yitzhak Shamir.
Weidenfeld, 276 pp., £19.99, April 1994, 0 297 81337 4
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Broken Covenant: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis between the US and Israel 
by Moshe Arens.
Simon and Schuster, 320 pp., $25, February 1995, 0 671 86964 7
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A Zionist Stand 
by Ze’ev Begin.
Cass, 173 pp., £15, January 1993, 0 7146 4089 1
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Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism 
by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Farrar, Straus, 152 pp., $17, October 1995, 0 374 15492 9
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... Party). Gahal joined the Government for the first time during the crisis of May 1967, when Levi Eshkol was prime minister. Begin had the title of Minister without Portfolio. In July 1970 Begin and his colleagues left Golda Meir’s National Unity Government in protest against the Rogers Peace Plan which, they ...

My Stars

Graham Hough, 21 March 1985

The Magical Arts 
by Richard Cavendish.
Arkana, 375 pp., £4.95, October 1984, 1 85063 004 6
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Astrology and the Third Reich: A Historical Study of Astrological Beliefs in Western Europe since 1700 and in Hitler’s Germany 1933-45 
by Ellic Howe.
Aquarian, 253 pp., £5.95, October 1984, 0 85030 397 4
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The Astrology of Fate 
by Liz Greene.
Allen and Unwin, 370 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 04 133012 9
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Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities 
by Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty.
Chicago, 361 pp., £21.25, June 1984, 0 226 61854 4
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Fruits of the Moon Tree: The Medicine Wheel and Transpersonal Psychology 
by Alan Bleakley.
Gateway Books, 311 pp., £9.95, October 1984, 0 946551 08 1
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... that seem to include, however vaguely, a cosmology and a metaphysic. Alchemy and astrology are the prime examples. Cavendish is illuminating on both. Alchemy had a long run, from late Antiquity to the 18th century, but is now really extinct – unless we are to count Jung’s highly rarefied exploitation of one side of it as a genuine continuity. The peculiar ...

Enlightenment Erotica

David Nokes, 4 August 1988

Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America 
by Peter Wagner.
Secker, 498 pp., £30, March 1988, 0 436 56051 8
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’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorised Sexuality during the Enlightenment 
edited by Robert Purks Maccubin.
Cambridge, 260 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 521 34539 1
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The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature 
edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown.
Methuen, 320 pp., £28, February 1988, 0 416 01631 6
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... blooming lass of 18, her – is like silk itself, and bubbles as white as snow; she is just in her prime, and fit for business, she is broke in this spring, by a well-known gentleman of the turf. Her movements are regular, her pace elegant, and her action is good: and when you mount her, she begins to f—k away to the tune of the ‘Dandy O’. Her ...

The [ ] walked down the street

Michael Silverstein: Saussure, 8 November 2012

Saussure 
by John Joseph.
Oxford, 780 pp., £30, March 2012, 978 0 19 969565 2
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... understood and put to stunningly successful use at the age of 19: that human language is the prime abstract ‘semiological’ (we now say semiotic) structure on which the possibility of interpersonal communication depends. He died without ever getting close to writing his magnum opus – which nevertheless exists, an ‘as if’ work imaginatively ...

Israel’s Caesar

Naomi Shepherd, 26 November 1987

Sharon: An Israeli Caesar 
by Uzi Benziman.
Robson, 276 pp., £12.95, September 1987, 9780860514343
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Sands of Sorrow: Israel’s Journey from Independence 
by Milton Viorst.
Tauris, 328 pp., £16.50, September 1987, 1 85043 064 0
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... command remained flexible and open to new ideas, and that men with leadership potential, in their prime, were continually released into civilian life – not only politics but the universities and the national industries and business. The unfortunate aspect of this was that all the political parties were henceforth to compete for the services of ...

Riparian

Douglas Johnson, 15 July 1982

The Left Bank: Writers in Paris, from Popular Front to Cold War 
by Herbert Lottman.
Heinemann, 319 pp., £12.50, May 1982, 0 434 42943 0
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... lives in the Rue de Bièvre, just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain and the Quais; the former Prime Minister, the Gaullist Michel Debré, lives in the Rue Jacob, just off the Rue Bonaparte and St Germain des Près. Both live in the essential Left Bank. Pierre Mendès-France, the legendary hero of the rational, honest and dedicated Left, lives on the Right ...

An Outpost of Ashdod

Nicholas Spice, 1 August 1985

A Perfect Peace 
by Amos Oz, translated by Hillel Halkin.
Chatto, 374 pp., £9.95, July 1985, 9780701129590
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... from whom Yonatan hitches his first lift immediately makes a political statement, while Levi Eshkol, the Prime Minister, turns up on Kibbutz Granot with his shirt hanging out to adopt the Lifshitz family crisis as a matter of official concern. At a deeper level, political themes (a hatred of nationalism, a belief ...

In and Out of the Panthéon

Thomas Laqueur: Funerals, politics and memory in France, 20 September 2001

Funerals, Politics and Memory in Modern France 1789-1996 
by Avner Ben-Amos.
Oxford, 425 pp., £55, October 2000, 0 19 820328 4
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Monumental Intolerance: Jean Baffier, a Nationalist Sculptor in Fin-de-Siècle France 
by Neil McWilliam.
Pennsylvania State, 326 pp., £58.95, November 2000, 0 271 01965 4
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... demonstrators killed in the celebratory riots that followed the resignation of Guizot, the hated Prime Minister. The short-lived new regime did not have time to establish its own relationship to burial spaces and public funerals, but Napoleon III, who came to power in 1851, was quick to put his stamp on the machinery and geography of honoured death. Within ...

The Land East of the Asterisk

Wendy Doniger: The Indo-Europeans, 10 April 2008

Indo-European Poetry and Myth 
by M.L. West.
Oxford, 525 pp., £80, May 2007, 978 0 19 928075 9
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... The Husband’s Return (as in the Odyssey) is a story pattern ‘well known to folklorists … a prime example of the wandering folk-tale, diffused without regard to linguistic boundaries’, and hence not (merely) Indo-European. So, too, the story of the father who accidentally kills his son (or the son his father) might be ‘an inherited Indo-European ...

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