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Un-Roman Ways

Michael Kulikowski: The Last Days of Rome, 24 September 2009

428 AD: An Ordinary Year at the End of the Roman Empire 
by Giusto Traina, translated by Allan Cameron.
Princeton, 203 pp., £16.95, May 2009, 978 0 691 13669 1
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... Just as today Turks, Kurds and Armenians glower at one another across mountains in which foreign powers meddle at their own risk, so for centuries had Rome and Persia (and earlier Parthia) wrangled over this uncompromising terrain. Left in the hands of more or less pliable client kings, Armenia prevented either side easy access to the other’s ...

Stony Ground

Peter D. McDonald: J.M. Coetzee, 20 October 2005

J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event 
by Derek Attridge.
Chicago, 225 pp., £13.50, May 2005, 0 226 03117 9
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Slow Man 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Secker, 265 pp., £16.99, September 2005, 0 436 20611 0
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... In a respectful but chary review of The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) in the New York Review of Books, Nadine Gordimer wrote about J.M. Coetzee’s ‘conscious choice’ of allegory as a literary mode in his first three novels. The reasons for this, she speculated, were temperamental: It seemed he did so out of a kind of opposing desire to hold himself clear of events and their daily, grubby, tragic consequences in which, like everyone else living in South Africa, he is up to the neck, and about which he had an inner compulsion to write ...

Every club in the bag

Michael Howard, 10 September 1992

The Chiefs: The Story of the United Kingdom Chiefs of Staff 
by Bill Jackson and Dwin Bramall.
Brassey, 508 pp., £29.95, April 1992, 0 08 040370 0
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... in Whitehall. The Chiefs were able to limit the damage by ensuring that Mountbatten’s own powers were not significantly increased, and his successors were careful to remain strictly within their briefs, but a new and yet more dangerous adversary now loomed: the Centre.Even during the period of his greatest weakness, the minister had had a central ...

The Great War Revisited

Michael Howard, 23 April 1987

The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War 1914-1918 
by Trevor Wilson.
Polity, 864 pp., £35, September 1986, 9780745600932
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British Strategy and War Aims 1914-1916 
by David French.
Allen and Unwin, 274 pp., £25, September 1986, 0 04 942197 2
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The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos 
by Peter Parker.
Constable, 319 pp., £15, March 1987, 0 09 466980 5
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... aimed at the rapid overthrow of the enemy armies in the field. The task was beyond their powers, and in 1915 all had to consider again, from first principles, how the war could be won. There were those – Haig in England, Ludendorff in Germany – who continued to believe that, given sufficient forces, they might still win the war with a single ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Let the Right One In’, 14 May 2009

Let the Right One In 
directed by Tomas Alfredson.
November 2008
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... father, her daytime sleeps in the covered bathtub, her helpless affection for him, her strange powers, her endless need to steal what sustains the life of others. Letting the right one in might be the opposite of finding the right name for the ...

The Battle of Manywells Spring

Bernard Rudden: Property and the Law, 19 June 2003

Private Property and Abuse of Rights in Victorian England: The Story of Edward Pickles and the Bradford Water Supply 
by Michael Taggart.
Oxford, 235 pp., £45, October 2002, 9780199256877
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... and we have forgotten the actual matter of the dispute. Now, however, we can relive the tale, for Michael Taggart has been back to the archives of West Yorkshire and the House of Lords to find the local and personal details, as well as the state of the law at the time of litigation. His readable book also sets the problem in the wider contexts of public ...

Ediepus

Michael Neve, 18 November 1982

Edie: An American Biography 
by Jean Stein and George Plimpton.
Cape, 455 pp., £9.95, October 1982, 0 224 02068 4
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Baby Driver: A Story About Myself 
by Jan Kerouac.
Deutsch, 208 pp., £7.95, August 1982, 0 233 97487 3
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... which is one of its numerous subjects. There are some striking photographs, which evoke ancestral powers or places, especially graveyards and ranches. Photographs, too, of Edie herself. These commemorate an androgynous beauty, the effects of drugs, many, many fucks. It is hard to tell quite where the history of a ‘family’ begins, which father or ...

Flub-Dub

Thomas Powers: Stephen Crane, 17 July 2014

Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire 
by Paul Sorrentino.
Harvard, 476 pp., £25, June 2014, 978 0 674 04953 6
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... widely used by writers as different as Salinger in ‘For Esmé – with Love and Squalor’ and Michael Herr writing about Vietnam in Dispatches. During the months he lingered in Havana, Crane frequented a number of bars, cafés and cantinas, listening to the talk, smoking incessantly and nursing a beer or two into the evening hours, when he went home to ...

Maggie’s Hobby

Nicholas Hiley, 11 December 1997

New cloak, Old dagger: How Britain’s Spies Came in from the Cold 
by Michael Smith.
Gollancz, 338 pp., £20, November 1996, 0 575 06150 2
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Intelligence Power in Peace and War 
by Michael Herman.
Cambridge, 436 pp., £50, October 1996, 0 521 56231 7
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UK Eyes Alpha 
by Mark Urban.
Faber, 320 pp., £16.99, September 1996, 0 571 17689 5
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... the creation of an unacknowledged arm of the state, carefully protected from democratic view, with powers to act against nations that were technically friendly, and against members of the public who had not broken the law, seems less than benevolent. The SSB was effectively buttressed against democracy, and quickly became a refuge for those disillusioned by ...

Past Its Peak

Michael Klare: The Oil Crisis, 14 August 2008

... most of the major developing-world producers were at one time or another ruled by the imperial powers and continue to bear the scars. Some, like Iraq, have borders that were devised by the imperial powers to meet their own needs and bear little relation to ethnic, religious or linguistic realities. Such regions are ...

Aitch or haitch

Clare Bucknell: Louise Kennedy’s ‘Trespasses’, 23 June 2022

Trespasses 
by Louise Kennedy.
Bloomsbury, 311 pp., £14.99, April, 978 1 5266 2332 4
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... and the specialist vocabulary it inculcates. ‘Rubber bullets. Saracen. Internment. The Special Powers Act.’ But the headmaster refuses to drop it, on the grounds that it encourages his pupils ‘to be aware of the world around them’ – as if they weren’t already.News is a structuring motif in Trespasses: public events shadow private lives, transform ...

Finding an Enemy

Conor Gearty: Sixty Years of Anti-Terrorist Legislation, 15 April 1999

Legislation against Terrorism: A Consultation Paper. CM 4178. 
by Home Office and Northern Ireland Office.
70 pp., £9.95, December 1998, 0 10 141782 9
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... Hoare, referring to recent acts of violence, claimed to have ‘been told that if we had had these powers two days ago it is very likely that we might have forestalled one or other ... of those outrages’. In the first two months after the Act was passed, 113 expulsion orders, 25 registration orders and ten prohibition orders were made, and by the end of May ...

Paper or Plastic?

John Sutherland: Richard Powers, 10 August 2000

Gain 
by Richard Powers.
Heinemann, 355 pp., £15.99, March 2000, 0 434 00862 1
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... the author of his major works. The Foundation nonetheless took a big punt on the genius of Richard Powers, who was awarded his MacArthur in 1989, aged only 32. I haven’t checked, but he is probably the youngest novelist ever to win a fellowship. Generally unknown in 1989, and temperamentally reticent, he has lately divulged something of his personal ...

Oque?

John Bayley, 30 November 1995

Byrne 
by Anthony Burgess.
Hutchinson, 150 pp., £14.99, October 1995, 0 09 179204 5
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... causing it to lose any of the immediacy and gaiety which makes it an ephemeral form. When Earthly Powers was passed over for the Booker Prize in favour of the first volume of William Golding’s seafaring trilogy, the choice was between a ‘serious’ work, which time may or may not agree to be a masterpiece, and a light novel on a heroic scale, which seems ...

How Not to Invade

Patrick Cockburn: Lebanon, 5 August 2010

Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East 
by David Hirst.
Faber, 480 pp., £20, March 2010, 978 0 571 23741 8
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The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle 
by Michael Young.
Simon and Schuster, 295 pp., £17.99, July 2010, 978 1 4165 9862 6
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... transforming Lebanon, one of the ‘small’ states of the Middle East, into one of its ‘great powers’. But he has no doubt that Israel, having gone to war to re-establish its own power, ended up undermining it. It is scarcely news that small states are more dangerous than they look. Hirst takes his title from Mikhail Bakunin, who told a friend in 1870 ...

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