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‘No, no,’ replied the fat man

Michael Davie, 3 December 1992

The Power of News: The History of Reuters 
by Donald Read.
Oxford, 330 pp., £20, October 1992, 0 19 821776 5
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... They have risen since then. It is a great story, featuring some rum characters. Donald Read is an emeritus professor of modern English history at the University of Kent. This is an authorised account, commissioned and copyrighted by Reuters, but ‘the text has been prepared with complete independence.’ The lists of acknowledgments are ...

Rivonia Days

R.W. Johnson: Remembering the trial, 16 August 2007

The State v. Nelson Mandela: The Trial That Changed South Africa 
by Joel Joffe.
Oneworld, 288 pp., £16.99, July 2007, 978 1 85168 500 4
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... stormtroopers’ greatest propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. Yet the trial was not completely unfair. Justice Quartus De Wet, who heard the case, had all the normal white South African prejudices, but Joffe believes he was his own man and not a politicians’ puppet. Certainly, De Wet saw right through Yutar and dismissed many of his gambits with contempt. It’s ...

My Americas

Donald Davie, 3 September 1981

... to be saying, is in no sense a romantic landscape, and it isn’t romantic arts that can do it justice. The central art is the dance: but a sort of dance that is, one gathers, hieratic and measured, in no way Dionysian. And Janet Lewis can be seen edging her language in that direction, so as to collaborate in what she perceives: At Santo Domingo on the ...

Short Cuts

Andrew O’Hagan: Scotland's hirsute folk hero, 17 August 2006

... husband’s hand: everything about her spoke about her faith in herself and her man’s view of justice. After giving her evidence, Mrs Sheridan was entitled to sit in court to hear the other witnesses. But she preferred to stand outside smoking menthol cigarettes and sipping Diet Coke. Sometimes she went shopping for an hour or two. Sheridan’s ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Kicking Dick Cheney, 2 August 2007

... lawyers, David Addington, Timothy Flanigan and Alberto Gonzales, with support from John Yoo at the Justice Department, who set about granting the president as many extraordinary powers as Cheney thought he needed. First up was intercepting, without a warrant, communications to and from the United States (an action forbidden under federal law since 1978), which ...

The Five Techniques

Sadakat Kadri: Who killed Baha Mousa?, 9 May 2013

A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa 
by A.T. Williams.
Cape, 298 pp., £16.99, October 2012, 978 0 224 09688 1
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... to answer at all. The only man who admitted being with Baha Mousa at the moment he died, Corporal Donald Payne, told investigators that the Iraqi fatally banged his head during an escape attempt, and was cleared of manslaughter. He went to jail for 12 months, but only because he had pleaded guilty before the trial to a charge of inhuman treatment. The effort ...

Farewell Sovereignty

Stephen Sedley: The Case for the Regicides, 9 February 2006

The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold 
by Geoffrey Robertson.
Chatto, 429 pp., £20, October 2005, 0 7011 7602 4
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... through this shield, placing the worst crimes of rulers against their people within the reach of justice and beyond impunity. It may have been, as Robertson says it was, the ruling of the House of Lords that Spain could extradite Pinochet on charges of torture which turned the tide of head-of-state immunity on which Pol Pot, Idi Amin and a good many other ...

Pound’s Friends

Donald Davie, 23 May 1985

Pound’s Cantos 
by Peter Makin.
Allen and Unwin, 349 pp., £20, March 1985, 0 04 811001 9
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To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound’s Cantos 
by Christine Froula.
Yale, 208 pp., £18.50, February 1985, 0 300 02512 2
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Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing 
by Peter Nicholls.
Macmillan, 263 pp., £25, September 1984, 0 333 36159 8
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... literary rhapsody’? That’s not clear; what is clear is that neither description does it justice. Keats’s sonnet includes history, just as The Cantos claim to do, and the history it includes is a sort of history The Cantos are much concerned with – the transmission of cultural values (from Homer via George Chapman to John Keats). The error about ...

Wrecking Ball

Adam Shatz: Trump’s Racism, 7 September 2017

... extremism’ programme would be limited to Islamist radicals. White nationalists were exultant. ‘Donald Trump is setting us free,’ the Daily Stormer website crowed. Trump is so hollow a person, so impulsive a leader, that it’s easy to miss the great paradox of his presidency: that a cipher of a man has revealed the hidden depths, the ugly unmastered ...

Against Passion

James Meek: Passionate Politics, 30 November 2017

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics 
by Mark Lilla.
Harper, 160 pp., £19, August 2017, 978 0 06 269743 1
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The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction 
by Mark Lilla.
NYRB, 166 pp., £9.99, September 2016, 978 1 59017 902 4
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... narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn their rage on their own intellectual-political class. Lilla argues that the pursuit of identity politics by liberal graduates, brainwashed by their teachers into a self-centred world-view that ...

Gurney’s Flood

Donald Davie, 3 February 1983

Geoffrey Grigson: Collected Poems 1963-1980 
Allison and Busby, 256 pp., £9.95, November 1982, 0 85031 419 4Show More
The Cornish Dancer 
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Secker, 64 pp., £4.95, June 1982, 0 436 18805 8
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The Private Art: A Poetry Notebook 
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Allison and Busby, 231 pp., £9.95, November 1982, 0 85031 420 8
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Blessings, Kicks and Curses: A Critical Collection 
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Allison and Busby, £9.95, November 1982, 0 85031 437 2
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Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney 
edited by P.J. Kavanagh.
Oxford, 284 pp., £12, September 1982, 0 19 211940 0
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War Letters 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by R.K.R. Thornton.
Mid-Northumberland Arts Group/Carcanet, 271 pp., £12, February 1983, 0 85635 408 2
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... only if they are in exact metre, and Grigson hasn’t the patience for that. Is there not some justice to his reproaches? In Grigson’s career nothing is so honourable as his exertions on behalf of dead poets unjustly neglected: Smart, Clare, Christina Rossetti and (late, but significantly) Gurney. He has, I think, every right to complain that other men ...

All Those Arrows

Donald MacKenzie: A Major Cause of the Financial Crisis, 25 June 2009

Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe 
by Gillian Tett.
Little, Brown, 338 pp., £18.99, April 2009, 978 1 4087 0164 5
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... me a few weeks ago. Those with a background in mortgage-backed securities blame CDOs (with some justice) for being indiscriminate buyers of those securities, concerned only with their ratings and the spreads (increments over Libor) they offered. Two experienced industry observers, Mark Adelson and David Jacob, suggest that a fatal point was reached when ...

‘It was everything’

Eliot Weinberger: The Republican Convention, 11 August 2016

... Donald Trump​ vowed that the ‘convention in Cleveland will be amazing!’ It will probably be the only campaign promise he ever fulfils, but indeed, as watched on television, it was amazing, unlike any other, if not quite, as he later summed it up, ‘one of the most peaceful, one of the most beautiful, one of the most love-filled conventions in the history of conventions ...

Yanqui Imperialismo

Lucy Delap: Compañeras, 1 July 2021

Peace on Our Terms: The Global Battle for Women’s Rights after the First World War 
by Mona Siegel.
Columbia, 321 pp., £30, January 2020, 978 0 231 19510 2
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Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement 
by Katherine Marino.
North Carolina, 339 pp., £25.95, August 2020, 978 1 4696 6152 0
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... an end to impunity for harassers and abusers of women. The Women’s March was a response to Donald Trump’s comment about grabbing women ‘by the pussy’, but the protests weren’t confined by their Trumpian origins. Women marched in Bangalore as part of their own campaign against male sexual violence. Filipina women were protesting against sex ...

Mischief Wrought

Stephen Sedley: The Compensation Culture Myth, 4 March 2021

Fake Law: The Truth about Justice in an Age of Lies 
by the Secret Barrister.
Picador, 400 pp., £20, September 2020, 978 1 5290 0994 1
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... and angrily denounced the systematic (and, I would add, Treasury-driven) neglect of criminal justice and the dismantling of the legal aid system in the successive hands of Labour, coalition and Tory governments. This time SB is concerned with the mischief wrought and the harm done by false reporting of law and legal issues. The two topics are not ...

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