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How Movies End

David Thomson: John Boorman’s Quiet Ending, 20 February 2020

Conclusions 
byJohn Boorman.
Faber, 237 pp., £20, February, 978 0 571 35379 8
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... fades into the darkness. What kind of movie is Point Blank? And what kind of book is this, written by the man who made it?It would be hard to deliver a brief biographical sketch of John Boorman that was tidy or plausible. Yet it would be harder still to leave a reader in any doubt about ...

Princes, Counts and Racists

David Blackbourn: Weimar, 19 May 2016

Weimar: From Enlightenment to the Present 
byMichael Kater.
Yale, 463 pp., £25, August 2014, 978 0 300 17056 6
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... the 18th century, this modestly sized town was home to Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland, but by the 1930s it had become a hotbed of the radical right. ‘The admixture of Hitlerism and Goethe affects one strangely,’ Mann wrote in ‘Meine Goethereise’. ‘Of course, Weimar is a centre of Hitlerdom. Everywhere you could see Hitler’s picture etc in ...

Operation Overstretch

David Ramsbotham: Unfair to the Army, 20 February 2003

... to which Harold Wilson declined to commit British troops. The Borneo campaign was won largely by our domination of the immediate area of the border with Indonesia. There were a series of operations across the border to attack Indonesian military bases and communications. None of these received any publicity, not least because no journalists could visit ...

Looking back at the rubble

David Simpson: War and the Built Environment, 25 May 2006

The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War 
byRobert Bevan.
Reaktion, 240 pp., £19.95, January 2006, 1 86189 205 5
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... Thucydides claimed that posterity should not judge the power and dignity of states by their architectural remains. The power of Sparta over much of the Peloponnese and beyond could not have been inferred from an inspection of its built culture – a collection of villages with no grandiose temples or monuments. Conversely, the importance of Athens would be overestimated by anyone in later times who based their opinion on the spectacle of its architectural remains ...

Twilight Approaches

David A. Bell: Salon Life in France, 11 May 2006

The Age of Conversation 
byBenedetta Craveri, translated byTeresa Waugh.
NYRB, 488 pp., £17.99, October 2005, 1 59017 141 1
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... as follows. Sometime in the 17th century, the country’s proud noble caste was humbled and tamed by imperious ministers and kings. Where once it had swayed the destinies of Europe, it was now confined to the gilded cage of the royal court, and the elegant salons of Paris. Others might have raged against this fate, but the French nobility adapted to it. Its ...

‘Monocled Baron Charged’

David Coward: Vichy’s commissioner for Jewish affairs, 8 June 2006

Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland 
byCarmen Callil.
Cape, 614 pp., £20, April 2006, 0 224 07810 0
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... stunning documentary of life in Clermont-Ferrand during World War Two. Her attention was caught by a clip showing Reinhard Heydrich, architect of the Final Solution and Himmler’s deputy, shaking hands in May 1942 with Darquier de Pellepoix, charged by the German occupiers and the Vichy government with delivering ...

Cosmic Inflation

David Kaiser: The Future of the Universe, 6 February 2014

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe 
byLee Smolin.
Allen Lane, 319 pp., £20, April 2013, 978 1 84614 299 4
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... Mach was still a child, it had been concluded on the strength of Newton’s laws that there must be an as yet unseen planet in the solar system, its presence deduced from subtle wobbles in the orbit of Uranus. In 1846, the discovery of Neptune was celebrated across Europe as one more victory for Newtonian physics. But Mach wasn’t satisfied. Portraits show ...

Diary

David Kaiser: Aliens, 8 July 2010

... and act on them, Hawking warned, might show up on our doorstep, and wouldn’t necessarily be friendly. ‘Such advanced aliens,’ Hawking said, might be ‘looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.’ In no time at all, the word spread from Hawking’s voice synthesiser to the world’s ...

Damnable Heresy

David Simpson: The Epic of Everest, 25 October 2012

Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest 
byWade Davis.
Vintage, 655 pp., £12.99, October 2012, 978 0 09 956383 9
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... and Some Explorers’. He distinguished between the provision of scientific facts, which could be of only limited interest, and the ‘drama of human endeavour’ embodied in the pursuit of a ‘militant geography’ larger and grander than the mere search for knowledge. Wade Davis’s book on the British Everest expeditions of 1921, 1922 and 1924 shows ...

The Greatest Warlord

David Blackbourn: Hitler, 22 March 2001

Hitler, 1936-45: Nemesis 
byIan Kershaw.
Allen Lane, 1115 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 7139 9229 8
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... the possibilities. It was an immediate and electrifying success.’ Others were equally impressed by the Department of Hitler Studies. ‘You’ve established a wonderful thing here with Hitler,’ says Gladney’s colleague Murray Siskind, visiting lecturer in living icons. ‘I marvel at the effort. It was masterful, shrewd and stunningly ...

Love is always young and happy

David Coward: Molière, 5 April 2001

Molière: A Theatrical Life 
byVirginia Scott.
Cambridge, 333 pp., £35, October 2000, 0 521 78281 3
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... about 1820, so the story goes, a peasant appeared at the Bibliothèque Nationale with a cart drawn by a mule. In the cart, he said, were ‘tous les papiers de Molière’ and they were for sale. But the Library was closed and the concierge told him to come back another day. He never did and ‘Molière’s papers’ were doubtless offloaded as wrapping for ...

The Prodigal Century

David Blackbourn: Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Centuryby John McNeill, 7 June 2001

Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Century 
byJohn McNeill.
Penguin, 448 pp., £8.99, August 2001, 0 14 029509 7
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... Nader, they would have voted overwhelmingly for Gore (or not at all). It was thus voting decisions by the most environmentally conscious part of the electorate that put one former oilman in the White House, made another Vice-President, and led to a Cabinet that generously represents the interests of mining, logging, chemicals and agribusiness. However true it ...

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 
byNorbert Frei, translated byJoel Golb.
Columbia, 479 pp., £24.50, September 2002, 0 231 11882 1
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... collective German repression of painful memories after 1945. Norbert Frei pursues the same theme by examining political debates in the early years of the Federal Republic. His book originally appeared in 1996 with the title Vergangenheitspolitik (the ‘politics of the past’, or ‘policy for the past’), a term that has since entered general use in ...

Is this how democracy ends?

David Runciman: A Failed State?, 1 December 2016

... lined up behind, ready to take up what daddy has to offer. Here he is back on Twitter, unshackled by victory, rounding on his opponents in the free press. His ten-year-old son is still too young to join in, but he was by his father’s side on election night, looking hardly less bemused than the rest of us, as Trump ...

I wanted to rule the world

David A. Bell: Napoleon’s Global War, 3 December 2020

The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History 
byAlexander Mikaberidze.
Oxford, 936 pp., £25.99, April 2020, 978 0 19 995106 2
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... military expedition to reassert full French control over the colony. The French forces, commanded by Napoleon’s brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, had some initial success. They captured Louverture, and shipped him back to France, where he died in captivity in 1803. But an epidemic of yellow fever killed many of the Europeans (Leclerc died of it) and opened ...

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