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No Grand Strategy and No Ultimate Aim

Stephen Holmes: US policy in Iraq, 6 May 2004

Incoherent Empire 
by Michael Mann.
Verso, 278 pp., £15, October 2003, 1 85984 582 7
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... with volumes devoted to the American ‘empire’. But how appropriate is this evocative term? Michael Mann has been working for two decades as ‘a historical sociologist on the nature of power in human societies’. In this dense and lively volume, composed ‘at breakneck speed’, he analyses and evaluates the main strands of US global influence, with ...

Call me Ahab

Jeremy Harding: Moby-Dick, 31 October 2002

Moby-Dick, or, The Whale 
by Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker.
Northwestern, 573 pp., £14.95, September 2001, 0 8101 1911 0
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Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in 
by C.L.R. James.
New England, 245 pp., £17.95, July 2001, 9781584650942
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Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival 
by Clare Spark.
Kent State, 744 pp., £46.50, May 2001, 0 87338 674 4
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Lucchesi and the Whale 
by Frank Lentricchia.
Duke, 104 pp., £14.50, February 2001, 9780822326540
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... ends. Her tale of scholarly intrigue and Cold War defamation finds a useful counterpoint in Michael Rogin’s Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (1979). In this account, Moby-Dick is not about what 20th-century scholars thought America should become, but about what it became in any case. Ishmael warns us against ‘scouting at ...

Ask Anyone in Canada

Neal Ascherson: Max Beaverbrook’s Mediations, 24 October 2019

Max Beaverbrook: Not Quite a Gentleman 
by Charles Williams.
Biteback, 566 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 1 84954 746 8
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... campaign in 1945, and the abuse he received for it, even from young protégés like his beloved Michael Foot, was unnerving. His wartime colleague Clement Attlee called him ‘the man in public life who is most widely distrusted by decent men of all parties’. Beaverbrook’s career as a politician was over. With Labour in power, he had lost all his ...

A Peacock Called Mirabell

August Kleinzahler: James Merrill, 31 March 2016

James Merrill: Life and Art 
by Langdon Hammer.
Knopf, 913 pp., £27, April 2015, 978 0 375 41333 9
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... Broken Home’, written 32 years after ‘Looking at Mummy’: One afternoon, red, satyr-thighed Michael, the Irish setter, head Passionately lowered, led The child I was to a shut door. Inside, Blinds beat sun from the bed. The green-gold room throbbed like a bruise. Under a sheet, clad in taboos Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread, And of a ...

Bigness

Hal Foster: Rem Koolhaas, 29 November 2001

Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping 
by Rem Koolhaas et al.
Taschen, 800 pp., £30, December 2001, 3 8228 6047 6
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Great Leap Forward 
by Rem Koolhaas et al.
Taschen, 720 pp., £30, December 2001, 3 8228 6048 4
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... and the Lille plan looked back to urban models (such as the Broadacre City concept of Frank Lloyd Wright) that also ‘imagined nothingness’. Perhaps Koolhaas sensed that the new economy of media and communications might not abet a further dissolution of the city, its final death, as architectural futurists such as Paul Virilio had forecast, but ...

An Element of Unfairness

Ross McKibbin: The Great Education Disaster, 3 July 2008

... admissions practices hardly square with Labour’s policies of social inclusion. In a surprisingly frank statement to the House of Commons Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families in January, the education minister, Ed Balls, made it clear that it was ‘not the policy of the government . . . to promote more faith schools’. Communities, if they ...

Why stop at two?

Greg Grandin: Latin America Pulls Away, 22 October 2009

Leftovers: Tales of the Latin American Left 
edited by Jorge Castañeda and Marco Morales.
Routledge, 267 pp., £17.99, February 2008, 978 0 415 95671 0
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... America was now the laboratory for a more stringent form of modernisation. Samuel Huntington was frank: ‘democracy,’ he wrote in 1989, ‘is clearly compatible with inequality in both wealth and income, and, in some measure, it may be dependent on such inequality.’ By the time the Berlin Wall came down that November, almost every Latin American country ...
... Here is the customised red convertible Cadillac Eldorado that belonged to Chuck Berry; here too is Michael Jackson’s fedora, Lightnin’ Hopkins’s guitar, Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. There is a large temporary exhibition about Oprah Winfrey. ‘She has a place in the museum with a long line of women who did extraordinary things in their time – Harriet ...

The Playboy of West 29th Street

Colm Tóibín: Yeats’s Father in Exile, 25 January 2018

... many suggestions he made that evening was that, when I was in Dublin again, I should go and see Michael Yeats, the son of the poet, who might be glad to meet someone who was interested in his grandfather as much as his father – and to spend time with someone who was brought up, as I was, in a Fianna Fáil family (Fianna Fáil being at the time the main ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Didn’t Do in 2007, 3 January 2008

... with swallows skimming low over the tops and it feels like a scene from the 1940s. It could be a Michael Powell film or a page from the diaries of Denton Welch. This isn’t wholly imagination either, as it turns out that there was a camp here during the war for American airborne troops, which makes the survival of these wonderfully elaborate pillars, still ...

Madnesses

John Kerr, 23 March 1995

The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement 
by Richard Noll.
Princeton, 387 pp., £19.95, January 1995, 0 691 03724 8
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... these issues, Noll provides historical footholds for those such as the prominent Jungian analyst Michael Fordham who have raised serious questions as to what is really going on in a treatment that ultimately encourages the patient into active imagination with the promise that he or she will experience ‘the union of the opposites’. Or that urges patients ...

Darkness Audible

Nicholas Spice, 11 February 1993

Benjamin Britten 
by Humphrey Carpenter.
Faber, 680 pp., £20, September 1992, 0 571 14324 5
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... of the music into the life which is most damaging to the music. Hence, Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge reflects ‘all the conflicting states of mind Britten was experiencing while he composed it’, even down to his ‘delight in discovering the Suffolk countryside’ ‘Peter Grimes becomes Britten’s dream of what he might be like if he abandoned ...

Reach-Me-Down Romantic

Terry Eagleton: For and Against Orwell, 19 June 2003

George Orwell 
by Gordon Bowker.
Little, Brown, 495 pp., £20, May 2003, 0 316 86115 4
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Orwell: The Life 
by D.J. Taylor.
Chatto, 448 pp., £20, June 2003, 0 7011 6919 2
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Orwell: Life and Times 
by Scott Lucas.
Haus, 180 pp., £8.99, April 2003, 1 904341 33 0
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... executioners claim to believe in it too, any more than you find Morocco unpleasant just because Michael Portillo drops in on the place occasionally. In Orwell’s view, it was the Stalinist Left that had betrayed the common people, not democratic socialists like himself. Orwell first encountered Stalinism in the squalid betrayals of the Spanish Civil ...

Liquidator

Neal Ascherson: Hugh Trevor-Roper, 19 August 2010

Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Weidenfeld, 598 pp., £25, July 2010, 978 0 297 85214 8
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... because they assumed he was a semi-Fascist ultra like themselves. But, as the Cambridge historian Michael Postan put it, ‘They are such fools: they thought they were electing a Tory and never realised that they were electing a Whig.’ Mrs Thatcher imagined that the scholar who had written The Last Days of Hitler would share her hostility to a reunified ...

Call a kid a zebra

Daniel Smith: On the Spectrum, 19 May 2016

In a Different Key: The Story of Autism 
by John Donvan and Caren Zucker.
Allen Lane, 670 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 1 84614 566 7
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NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter about People Who Think Differently 
by Steve Silberman.
Allen and Unwin, 534 pp., £9.99, February 2016, 978 1 76011 364 3
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... open. Steve Silberman, the author of NeuroTribes, describes DSM-IV as the diagnostic equivalent of Michael Jackson’s Thriller: an unprecedented international hit. The manual and its many tie-ins – including study guides, casebooks, videotapes and software – earned $100 million for the American Psychiatric Association. This once obscure 42-year-old ...

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