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The scandal that never was

Paul Foot, 24 July 1986

Shootdown: The Verdict on KAL 007 
by R.W. Johnson.
Chatto, 335 pp., £10.95, May 1986, 0 7011 2983 2
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... He did not give a damn about anything except zapping Communists. Nor did his chief supporter, Richard Perle, nicknamed ‘Prince of Darkness’, for his single-minded obsession with avenging his ancestors for what the Russian Reds did to them. Perle’s high moral tone reached its zenith when he recommended arms ...

Downhill from Here

Ian Jack: The 1970s, 27 August 2009

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies 
by Andy Beckett.
Faber, 576 pp., £20, May 2009, 978 0 571 22136 3
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... Trade unions became an immovable fact of everyday life; they were, as Beckett writes, at their zenith. From friends on unsympathetic newspapers I learned the term of art for the front-page formula that ran a big headline next to a mugshot (‘The man who is stopping your trains tonight!’). They called it the ‘crucifixion layout’. It implied that ...

Take that, astrolabe

Tom Johnson: Medieval Time, 19 October 2023

Alle Thyng Hath Tyme: Time and Medieval Life 
by Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm.
Reaktion, 247 pp., £20, March, 978 1 78914 679 0
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... endles space of eternite’. Life was lived somewhere in-between. The Northamptonshire landowner Richard Hotot gives a sense of time’s fractured geometry, dating a book to ‘the 33rd year of King Henry [III] son of King John, which is 5448 years from the beginning of the world, 1249 from the birth of Christ, 1216 from Christ’s death, 544 from the ...

A Surfeit of Rank

Simon Akam, 10 March 2022

The Habit of Excellence: Why British Army Leadership Works 
by Langley Sharp.
Penguin, 320 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 0 241 50750 6
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... In​ August and September 1990, Richard Sale, a lieutenant colonel from the Light Infantry regiment of the British army, toured the UK and West Germany – then just months away from reunification – with a primitive Zenith Supersport laptop. Sale had commanded a company, some 120 men, in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s and later a battalion of 650 ...

Red Power

Thomas Meaney: Indigenous Political Strategies, 18 July 2024

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hämäläinen.
Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History 
by Ned Blackhawk.
Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
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Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance 
by Nick Estes.
Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
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... Confederacy; a thousand American troops were killed or wounded. In the periodisation laid out in Richard White’s Middle Ground (1991), the irreversible decline of Indigenous peoples only set in at the end of the War of 1812, when ‘they could no longer pose a major threat or be a major asset to an empire or a republic, and even their economic consequence ...

Attila the Hus

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 4 November 1982

Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896-1933 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 274 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 436 28849 4
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... several different versions of Mosley’s political career. Fellow politicians, Michael Foot and Richard Crossman among them, took the view that, like themselves, he was interested in power but that, unlike them, unlike Foot and Crossman at any rate, he was too impatient to wait his turn. For Skidelsky, though there are signs that he may now repent ...

The Age of EJH

Perry Anderson: Eric Hobsbawm’s Memoirs, 3 October 2002

Interesting Times: A 20th-Century Life 
by Eric Hobsbawm.
Allen Lane, 448 pp., £20, September 2002, 0 7139 9581 5
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... for more than flashes of self-revelation. More recently, we have the eccentric cameos of Richard Cobb and causeries of A.J.P. Taylor, of which he said they were evidence that he had run out of historical subjects. In all, in the genre for which it seems so well designed, the craft of the historian has yielded perhaps only two classics – Gibbon’s ...

Peace without Empire

Perry Anderson, 2 December 2021

Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union 
by Stella Ghervas.
Harvard, 528 pp., £31.95, March, 978 0 674 97526 2
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... today the University of St Petersburg at the age of sixteen in 1987, she became a student at the zenith of Gorbachev’s fame and popularity, and finished her degree soon after his fall. But although Russian was her primary language and intellectual world, she was from a borderland of the Soviet Union two-thirds of whose population spoke Romanian, much of ...

Blood for Oil?

Retort: The takeover of Iraq, 21 April 2005

... believes it is the other side of 2030; and the US Energy Information Administration places the zenith somewhere between 2021 and 2112. For the next half-century, according to the MIT economist Morris Adelman, ‘oil available to the markets is for all intents and purposes infinite.’ The entire question of company oil reserves is murky, and what figures ...

Forgive us our debts

Benjamin Kunkel: The History of Debt, 10 May 2012

Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order 
by Philip Coggan.
Allen Lane, 294 pp., £20, December 2011, 978 1 84614 510 0
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Debt: The First 5000 Years 
by David Graeber.
Melville House, 534 pp., £21.99, July 2011, 978 1 933633 86 2
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... communism rather than hierarchy, a possibility glimpsed, or anyway named, in the literary theorist Richard Dienst’s recent The Bonds of Debt, which at one point rather vaguely imagines a future ‘radical politics of indebtedness’ fulfilling the slogans of classical Marxism.*) But regular monetised exchanges – completed or incomplete – are a relative ...

A Man of Parts and Learning

Fara Dabhoiwala: Francis Williams Gets His Due, 21 November 2024

... by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar plantations worked by enslaved ...

Bloody Sunday Report

Murray Sayle: Back to Bloody Sunday, 11 July 2002

... a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... in the flats above and below don’t even know there’s been a fire. This was something else.’ Richard Welsh is a senior officer with the London Fire Brigade. His pager went off at 1.18 a.m. ‘Initially they had six machines there,’ he said. ‘Then they asked for eight, and then ten, and then 15, 20, and then 25. I’m hearing that on the way there, so ...

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