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Lacking in style

Keith Kyle, 25 February 1993

Divided we stand: Britain, the US and the Suez Crisis 
by W. Scott Lucas.
Hodder, 399 pp., £25, September 1991, 0 340 53666 7
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Blind Loyalty: Australia and the Suez Crisis 
by W.J. Hudson.
Melbourne, 157 pp., £12.50, November 1991, 0 522 84394 8
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... very level-headed on this question: he notes the mistakes made on both sides, some of which – as Richard Neustadt was the first to point out in his 1970 study Alliance Politics – actually arose from the intimate nature of the exchanges between the two governments and the false conclusions which this assumed intimacy was liable sometimes to promote. But he ...

Mohocks

Liam McIlvanney: The House of Blackwood, 5 June 2003

The House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era 
by David Finkelstein.
Pennsylvania State, 199 pp., £44.95, April 2002, 0 271 02179 9
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... the stuff out in heroic bouts of scribbling that tested his physical strength as much as his powers of invention. Wilson’s detractors – and these have not been wanting, either in his own time or since – might be inclined to argue that his talents were mainly physical. At Oxford he made his name as a boxer. He studied in hectic bursts in the lulls ...

Don’t talk to pigeons

Ben Jackson: MI5 in WW1, 22 January 2015

MI5 in the Great War 
edited by Nigel West.
Biteback, 434 pp., £25, July 2014, 978 1 84954 670 6
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... at its end as well as at its beginning.’ Britain’s relationship with the other European powers came under scrutiny: what chance victory against Russia or the rising German Empire when Britain had made such heavy weather of defeating ‘a tiny rabble of untrained peasants’ in the Boer War? The question was troubling Parliament, and pressure was put ...

Oh, the Irony

Thomas Jones: Ian McEwan, 25 March 2010

Solar 
by Ian McEwan.
Cape, 285 pp., £18.99, 0 224 09049 6
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... Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in his fifties. But it’s been thirty years since Richard Feynman hailed Beard’s research as ‘magic’ at the 1972 Solvay Conference, and the Beard-Einstein Conflation – the details of which are for obvious reasons left vague, though it has something to do with ‘the interaction of light with ...

Diary

Owen Bennett-Jones: In the North-West Frontier Province, 25 September 2008

... huge databases and techniques for identifying suspicious accounts and transfers, officials such as Richard Barrett, who heads the UN’s Taliban and al-Qaida Monitoring Team, admit that if al-Qaida mounted another 9/11, the financing would probably not register on the watchdogs’ computer screens. Despite this, in May, the CIA director, Michael ...

All of a Tremble

David Trotter: Kafka at the pictures, 4 March 2004

Kafka Goes to the Movies 
by Hanns Zischler, translated by Susan Gillespie.
Chicago, 143 pp., £21, January 2003, 0 226 98671 3
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... himself in the film, he may become aware of the utter futility of exerting all his considerable powers and – I am not exaggerating my sense of compassion – he grows older, weaker, gets pushed aside in his armchair and vanishes somewhere into the mists of time. Kafka quickly dismisses the thought as the product of his own sense of futility. ‘Even ...

Bransonism

Paul Davis: Networking in 18th-century London, 17 March 2005

Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector 1685-1750 
by Christine Gerrard.
Oxford, 267 pp., £50, August 2003, 0 19 818388 7
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... the critic John Dennis, John Dyer (the author of the loco-descriptive smash-hit Grongar Hill), Richard Savage, Nahum Tate (the Poet Laureate) and Edward Young (Night Thoughts). For a while, early in his career, Hill acted as secretary to Lord Peterborough, the future honorary Scriblerian; he was also later distantly linked with Bolingbroke, to whom he ...

The Savage Life

Frank Kermode: The Adventures of William Empson, 19 May 2005

William Empson: Vol. I: Among the Mandarins 
by John Haffenden.
Oxford, 695 pp., £30, April 2005, 0 19 927659 5
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... offers detailed information about life at Winchester, where Empson’s companions included Richard Crossman, William Hayter, John Sparrow and other future grandees. It was, as he later remarked, ‘a ripping education’, a first-class ticket for life. The next stop was Cambridge, by means of a scholarship to Magdalene. At this optimum moment of ...

Lacan’s Ghost

Wendy Doniger: The mirror, 3 January 2002

The Mirror: A History 
by Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, translated by Katharine Jewett.
Routledge, 308 pp., £16.99, January 2001, 0 415 92447 2
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... Gnostic tradition, which maintained that Eve used her reflection to protect herself when the evil powers tried to rape her; they fell for the reflection, while Eve herself escaped. In other Gnostic texts, it is Adam who loses his celestial nature as a result of falling in love with his own image glimpsed in the mirror of water. (These myths may be derived ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: At NatCon London, 1 June 2023

... Kruger outlined his vision in the New Statesman. Britain, he asserted, is ruled by faceless ‘powers that be’ who are ‘not on the side of the British people, but instead serve the abstractions of “human rights”, “international law”, or other signals of middle-class virtue’. Kruger, an evangelical Christian, warned of ‘a new religion’ in ...

Exquisite Americana

Tom Stevenson, 5 December 2024

... W. Bush’s national security team, including Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Robert Blackwill and Richard Haass – a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment. This has led to some barrel-scraping on the part of the Republicans. For director of the CIA, Trump has chosen John Ratcliffe, his final director of national intelligence in his first term, who ...

Shoe-Contemplative

David Bromwich: Hazlitt, 18 June 1998

The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt’s Radical Style 
by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 382 pp., £22.50, June 1998, 0 571 17421 3
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... with regret, and never gives up the hope of reform, but nowhere does he write as if he agreed with Richard Price, the hero of his father’s generation, about the perfectibility of social man through sheer enlightenment. Rather, he speaks of Price and Joseph Fawcett and others with a tender veneration, as great and good men, perhaps too good for the world. The ...

I am the fifth dimension!

Bee Wilson, 27 July 2017

Gef! The Strange Tale of an Extra Special Talking Mongoose 
by Christopher Josiffe.
Strange Attractor, 404 pp., £15.99, April 2017, 978 1 907222 48 1
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... the Irving house, to meet the remarkable talking animal. In 1936 he reached the High Court when Richard Lambert, the editor of the Listener, brought an action against Sir Cecil (Lord) Levita, who was reported to have said that Lambert was ‘cracked’ and ‘off his head’ for publicly stating a belief in a mongoose with ...

Free-Marketeering

Stephen Holmes: Naomi Klein, 8 May 2008

The Shock Doctrine 
by Naomi Klein.
Penguin, 558 pp., £8.99, June 2008, 978 0 14 102453 0
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... labour force, and all productive assets in private hands. ‘Fervent believers in the redemptive powers of shock’, the planners wanted to ‘redeem’ Iraq and to create the kind of ‘truly free market imagined in Chicago classes’. According to Klein, Paul Bremer was dispatched to Iraq precisely ‘to prepare the ground for the introduction of ...

Dining at the White House

Susan Pedersen: Ralph Bunche, 29 June 2023

The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations and the Fight to End Empire 
by Kal Raustiala.
Oxford, 661 pp., £26.99, March, 978 0 19 760223 2
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... from Non-Self-Governing Territories – a body that would become a gadfly and goad to the imperial powers as the UN expanded.Bunche was put to other uses, too – including, in 1947, that wretched job of dealing with Palestine. Since Britain was determined to withdraw and threw the problem at the UN, Lie established a Special Committee on Palestine, staffed by ...

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