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How a desire for profit led to the invention of race

Eric Foner: Slavery, 4 February 1999

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America 
by Ira Berlin.
Harvard, 512 pp., £18.50, October 1998, 0 674 81092 9
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The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 
by Robin Blackburn.
Verso, 602 pp., £15, April 1998, 1 85984 890 7
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... In the movie, however, it provides the occasion for one of Hollywood’s happy endings, in which John Quincy Adams moves the Supreme Court to a recognition of human rights by eloquently invoking the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, this never happened. The justices did, indeed, send the Africans home, but their decision turned on maritime law and ...

A Particular Way of Looking

J. Hoberman: NeoRealismo, 21 November 2019

NeoRealismo: The New Image in Italy 1932-60 
edited by Enrica Viganò.
Prestel, 349 pp., £49.99, September 2018, 978 3 7913 5769 0
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... to critique Neorealist movies. Enrico Pasquali’s images of the bare-legged female mondine (rice workers) of the Po Valley having their lunch in the fields demystify the glamorous icon established by Silvana Mangano in De Santis’s hit Bitter Rice (1949).The fortnightly publication Cinema Nuovo was established in ...

What I Heard about Iraq

Eliot Weinberger: Watch and listen, 3 February 2005

... to reconstitute its weapons of mass destruction programmes.’ In July 2001, I heard Condoleezza Rice say: ‘We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.’ On 11 September 2001, six hours after the attacks, I heard that Donald Rumsfeld said that it might be an opportunity to ‘hit’ Iraq. I heard that he said: ‘Go ...

My Little Lollipop

Jenny Diski: Christine Keeler, 22 March 2001

The Truth at Last: My Story 
by Christine Keeler and Douglas Thompson.
Sidgwick, 279 pp., £16.99, February 2001, 0 283 07291 1
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... have been one of the most moral women of that particular, frenzied decade’. Her friend Mandy Rice-Davies was the ‘true tart’: ‘There was always shock on her face whenever she thought she might have to do more than lie on her back to make a living.’ Visiting the Twenty-One Room, ‘a glorified knocking shop with overpriced drinks and rooms to rent ...

Mud, Mud, Mud

Nathaniel Rich: New Orleans, 22 November 2012

The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans 
by Lawrence Powell.
Harvard, 422 pp., £22.95, March 2012, 978 0 674 05987 0
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... described, as early as 1720, as ‘flooded, unhealthy, impracticable; fit for nothing save growing rice’? It is the crucial question about New Orleans, considered by every historian of the region. The conclusion most often reached is a variation on the observation made in 1876 by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel: ‘New Orleans is just as poorly ...

Dreamtime with Whitlam

Michael Davie, 4 September 1986

The Whitlam Government 1972-1975 
by Gough Whitlam.
Viking, 788 pp., £17.95, July 1986, 0 670 80287 5
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... voters in 1945; or a better comparison might be with the United States in 1960, when the dazzling John F. Kennedy seemed to represent the beginning of a new age after what his supporters saw as the suffocating and mediocre years of President Eisenhower. The under-forties in particular, in Australia in 1972 as in the United States in 1960, suddenly felt ...

Diary

John Henry Jones: At Home with the Empsons, 17 August 1989

... boiling you skewered a piece of meat and immersed it until it was cooked, transferred it to your rice bowl and ate it. Then, when everyone had consumed all their meat, the liquor was served as a soup in the now empty rice-bowls.Unless the dinner were a very special affair, and sometimes even then, William would retire from ...

Terror Was Absolute

Chris Mullin: Vietnam, 18 July 2019

Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-75 
by Max Hastings.
Collins, 722 pp., £9.99, May 2019, 978 0 00 813301 6
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... onwards knew, even as they escalated the war, that Vietnam was a doomed cause. As early as 1964 John McNaughton, a Pentagon official, had written a memo that US objectives in Indochina were ‘70 per cent avoid a humiliating defeat … 20 per cent to keep South Vietnam (and the adjacent territory) from Chinese hands – 10 per cent to permit the people of ...

Maschler Pudding

John Bayley, 19 October 1995

À la Pym: The Barbara Pym Cookery Book 
by Hilary Pym and Honor Wyatt.
Prospect, 102 pp., £9.95, September 1995, 0 907325 61 0
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... it helps the would-be novelist to know from the inside, as it were, what his people are up to. As John Francis more elegantly puts it in his Introduction, ‘you feel Pym knew more about her characters than is necessary for us to know, but that these reserves are expended only if essential for her art.’ As Johnson observed to Boswell, you cannot know a ...

What I heard about Iraq in 2005

Eliot Weinberger: Iraq, 5 January 2006

... it did not conform with an otherwise cheerful tone. Within a week in January I heard Condoleezza Rice say there were 120,000 Iraqi troops trained to take over the security of the country; I heard Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat from Delaware, say that the number was closer to 4000; I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘The fact of the matter is that there are ...

Archaeology is Rubbish

Richard Fortey: The Last 20,000 Years, 18 December 2003

After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC 
by Steven Mithen.
Weidenfeld, 622 pp., £25, June 2003, 0 297 64318 5
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... in the face of hostile climates and scant diets; to eastern Asia, where the taming of wild rice gave the world its major food crop; finally back to Africa, from which the human species had originally emerged before its relentless and unparalleled march around the globe. To compile his narrative, he has trawled through a huge amount of literature. The ...

Higher Man

John Sutherland, 22 May 1997

The Turner Diaries 
by ‘Andrew Macdonald’.
National Vauguard Books, 211 pp., $12.95, May 1978, 0 937944 02 5
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... 1933, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was evidendy brought up in the South-West, and graduated BA from Rice in 1955. He spent the year 1955-6 at Caltech, as a graduate student in physics. This was the period when the recently formed John Birch Society was active in San Marino, a mile or two away from the Caltech campus. Pierce ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Kicking Dick Cheney, 2 August 2007

... of White House 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 ...

French Air

John Sutherland, 12 November 1987

The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the French Social Imagination 
by Alain Corbin, translated by Miriam Kochan.
Berg, 307 pp., £18, November 1986, 0 907582 47 8
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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer 
by Patrick Süskind, translated by John Woods.
Penguin, 263 pp., £3.95, September 1987, 0 14 009244 7
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The Double Bass 
by Patrick Süskind, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Hamish Hamilton, 57 pp., £8.95, September 1987, 9780241120392
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... of boiled cabbage and old rag mats,’ Victory Gin ‘gave off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice spirit’). There are other isolated moments of odour in the narrative, such as Winston’s orgasmic whiff of real coffee and Parsons’s diarrhoea in the Ministry of Love. But for all Orwell’s obsession with bad smells, 1984 is relatively thin on the ...

Holy Terrors

Penelope Fitzgerald, 4 December 1986

‘Elizabeth’: The Author of ‘Elizabeth and her German Garden’ 
by Karen Usborne.
Bodley Head, 341 pp., £15, October 1986, 0 370 30887 5
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Alison Uttley: The Life of a Country Child 
by Denis Judd.
Joseph, 264 pp., £15.95, October 1986, 0 7181 2449 9
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Richmal Crompton: The Woman behind William 
by Mary Cadogan.
Allen and Unwin, 169 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 04 928054 6
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... was found there the next day. After the suicide, Alison’s relationship with her schoolboy son John became closer and then too close: ‘one’, Denis Judd says, ‘of extraordinary, clinging love’. She interfered with his first engagement, and when he eventually married she fell foul (how could she help it?) of his wife, who believed that ‘...

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