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When Thieves Retire

Francis Gooding: Pirate Enlightenment, 30 March 2023

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia 
by David Graeber.
Allen Lane, 208 pp., £18.99, January, 978 0 241 61140 1
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... when he rose to power. As a child he had visited England, most likely with his father (‘Captain Tom’), receiving at least a partial education. In the conventional accounts he is presented as an enlightened visionary who sought to bring contemporary science and letters to a new nation modelled on the states of Europe. But it seems that his confederation ...

Diary

David Thomson: ‘Vertigo’ after Weinstein, 21 June 2018

... is a classmate who has far excelled Scottie in life. He’s American, but the actor playing him, Tom Helmore, is English and makes no attempt to hide it. In a tweed jacket, with a moustache and cool good manners, he could be a stand-in for Ronald Colman. He’s made it, he’s settled; he has a wife, Madeleine, who lives down the peninsula. But she’s a ...

Riot, Revolt, Revolution

Mike Jay: The Despards, 18 July 2019

Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Culture, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class and of Kate and Ned Despard 
by Peter Linebaugh.
California, 408 pp., £27, March 2019, 978 0 520 29946 7
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... an anomaly: a curious postscript to the 1790s radicalism inspired by the French revolution and Tom Paine, or an early harbinger of the next generation’s struggle for political reform. Despard’s cause was illuminated from a new direction by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of ...

Diary

Thomas Laqueur: Memories in German, 4 December 2003

... in New York. My mother’s brother – my Onkel Otto – and his wife lived in Manhattan near Fort Tryon Park, in the middle of a German-Jewish ghetto. Later, when we had settled in West Virginia, my mother visited them periodically and came back complaining how insular their world was. I think I understand what she meant: one couldn’t forget that one ...

A Moustache Too Far

Danny Karlin: Melville goes under, 8 May 2003

Herman Melville: A Biography. Vol. II: 1851-91 
by Hershel Parker.
Johns Hopkins, 997 pp., £31, May 2002, 0 8018 6892 0
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... 1773, Peter for withstanding a British siege in 1777 (after which he was known as ‘the Hero of Fort Stanwyx’). Besides these republican credentials, the Gansevoorts and Melvills both laid claim to aristocratic and colonial distinction. As Melville noted sardonically in Pierre, ‘the great genealogical and real-estate dignity of some families in ...

Gotcha, Pat!

Terry Castle: Highsmith in My Head, 4 March 2021

Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith 
by Richard Bradford.
Bloomsbury, 258 pp., £20, January 2021, 978 1 4482 1790 8
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... used by her murderous anti-heroes to kill the clueless people they are in love with: witness Tom Ripley’s brain-splatter of an assault – with an oar – on the pate of pretty Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley. In Jill Dawson’s vastly entertaining novelistic riff on Highsmith, The Crime Writer (2016), set in the early 1960s, when Highsmith ...

Humans

Richard Poirier, 24 January 1985

Slow Learner 
by Thomas Pynchon.
Cape, 204 pp., £8.50, January 1985, 0 224 02283 0
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... There he introduces army specialist third class Nathan ‘Lardass’ Levine lying in his bunk in Fort Roach, Louisiana. Like Callisto in ‘Entropy’, Levine is ‘drowsy’, ‘motionless’, ‘inert’. He is then moved as part of his unit to a college campus, the staging area for an operation in a nearby town all of whose inhabitants have been killed in ...

Double V

Eric Foner: Military Racism, 2 March 2023

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War Two at Home and Abroad 
by Matthew F. Delmont.
Viking, 374 pp., £25.69, October 2022, 978 1 9848 8039 0
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An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era 
by Beth Bailey.
North Carolina, 360 pp., £36.95, May, 978 1 4696 7326 4
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... popular memory, the Second World War remains the ‘good war’, fought, to borrow the title of Tom Brokaw’s 1998 book, by the ‘greatest generation’. It is remembered as a time of national unity that not only destroyed tyrannies overseas but assimilated young men from all regions and ethnic backgrounds into a shared American identity. The war in ...

Wrath of the Centurions

Max Hastings: My Lai, 25 January 2018

My Lai: Vietnam, 1968 and the Descent into Darkness 
by Howard Jones.
Oxford, 504 pp., £22.99, June 2017, 978 0 19 539360 6
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... that he had heard described in vivid detail by those who had participated in them. Private Tom Glen, a 21-year-old from Tucson, who served in another brigade of the Americal, wrote a brave letter to the US army’s commander-in-chief, Creighton Abrams, describing the dreadful deeds that he had been told other units in his division had committed. In ...

Not Rocket Science

Alexander Nehamas, 22 June 2000

On Beauty and Being Just 
by Elaine Scarry.
Princeton, 134 pp., $15.95, September 1999, 0 691 04875 4
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Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy 
by Dave Hickey.
Art Issues, 216 pp., £15.95, September 1998, 0 9637264 5 5
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... Village Voice. He has written songs for a company in Nashville, art criticism for a newspaper in Fort Worth and has published a collection of short stories. He contributes a regular column to Art issues, but also, in order to get health insurance, he recently joined the faculty of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, an institution he loathes in a city he ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Bennett’s Dissection, 1 January 2009

... Feldene I had to be put on the acid-suppressant pills that I’ve been on ever since. 14 January. Tom Stoppard rings my agent Rosalind Chatto to tell her that when in last year’s LRB diary I quote an old lady in New York as saying ‘I zigged when I should have zagged’ the original remark came from the American sports reporter Red Butler, who reported it ...

What are you willing to do?

James Meek, 26 May 2022

How Civil Wars Start – And How to Stop Them 
by Barbara F. Walter.
Viking, 289 pp., £18.99, January 2022, 978 0 241 42975 4
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... seems reluctant to enter, where Albany or Sacramento audition as the future Richmond, and a future Fort Sumter must be triggered by liberals, or not at all. It’s not unreasonable for Walter and many others to see a future civil war in America taking the form of a smouldering, uncoordinated insurgency by pro-Trump conspiracists against a liberal reigning ...

Chasing Steel

Ian Jack: Scotland’s Ferry Fiasco, 22 September 2022

... routes for the Comet – and found them in 1819 when the ship began a new service from Glasgow to Fort William in the West Highlands, avoiding the treacherous Mull of Kintyre by using the Crinan Canal, which opened in 1801, to cross the Kintyre peninsula. No steamboat had ventured west and north of Kintyre before: the population was small, impoverished and ...

Women on the Brink

Azadeh Moaveni, 12 May 2022

... for it’. Many profiles used the same line: ‘You will be safe with me.’ A man calling himself Tom posted that he was ‘sleeping in a warehouse full of supplies but would much rather spend the night in your bed’. Sean from Maine said he had travelled to volunteer in Poland but had contracted Covid and was ‘looking for a lady to spend time with who has ...

Putting Religion in Its Place

Colm Tóibín: Marilynne Robinson, 23 October 2014

Lila 
by Marilynne Robinson.
Virago, 261 pp., £16.99, October 2014, 978 1 84408 880 5
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... conversion to Christianity: I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with poor dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was really shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene ...

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