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Adam Shatz: The Four-Year Assault, 21 January 2021

... who turned out at his rallies, who made him feel like a populist leader, like a patriot, like a king, like a billionaire – like all the things he wasn’t, except in his imagination. ‘Very special’, he called them on 6 January, as they rioted in the Capitol. The Republicans, like his wives, were always temporary partners whom he’d used (just as ...

Active, Passive, or Dead?

Martin Loughlin: Sovereignty, 16 June 2016

The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy 
by Richard Tuck.
Cambridge, 295 pp., £17.99, February 2016, 978 1 107 57058 0
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... second thesis stem from his formulation of the first. He suggests that in the medieval era the king was sovereign and in the modern era the people are. But the transition to modernity didn’t amount simply to a transfer of sovereign power from king to people; it opened up new ways of conceiving the world. The ...

They called her Lady Di

James Buchan, 18 August 1994

Thinking Green! Essays on Environmentalism, Feminism and Non-Violence 
by Petra Kelly.
Parallax, 168 pp., £15, April 1994, 0 938077 62 7
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... had meekly lain in bed and been shot by a man! An advocate of non-violence, the disciple of Martin Luther King and Gandhi and Tolstoy and the Sermon on the Mount, had died by violence – ‘this way, by a gun!’ as Eleanor Mulloncy Lecain exclaims in one of the tributes to Ms Kelly that pad out this book. Not ...

Why do white people like what I write?

Pankaj Mishra: Ta-Nehisi Coates, 22 February 2018

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy 
by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Hamish Hamilton, 367 pp., £16.99, October 2017, 978 0 241 32523 0
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... as an unusually bold writer in the Nation pointed out, ‘one more courtier straining to get the king’s ear’. But the Bush administration didn’t need eggheads to euphemise pre-emptive war, torture, rendition and indefinite offshore detention. Bush’s own demotic – ‘We’ll smoke them out,’ ‘wanted dead or alive’, ‘Pretty soon, we’ll have ...

So Caucasian

Emily Wilson: ZZ Packer, 1 April 2004

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere 
by ZZ Packer.
Canongate, 238 pp., £9.99, February 2004, 1 84195 478 0
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... year 1962. Doris, our heroine, is the only black girl in her high school, but she knows all about Martin Luther King and the sit-ins around the country, in buses, restaurants and cafeterias. Doris finds herself unable to agree with her bullying pastor who asks her whether she really wants to join ...

Marginal Man

Stephen Fender, 7 December 1989

Paul Robeson 
by Martin Bauml Duberman.
Bodley Head, 804 pp., £20, April 1989, 0 370 30575 2
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... a concern that appears in the Declaration of Independence as one of the accusations against the King: ‘He has incited domestic insurrections amongst us.’ It is the old guilty fear that a foreign power would turn the natural resentment of the American black against his captors (in 1775 Lord Dunmore had threatened to free and arm the slaves ‘and reduce ...

Churchill has nothing to hide

Paul Addison, 7 May 1987

Road to Victory: Winston Churchill 1941-1945 
by Martin Gilbert.
Heinemann, 1417 pp., £20, September 1986, 0 434 29186 2
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... The latest volume of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill biography is the fifth he has published since taking up the task in 1968. This time he accompanies Churchill on the long march from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour to VE Day. The book has all the strengths and weaknesses of its predecessors. It is a superbly researched chronicle, almost wholly devoid of explicit historical interpretation ...

Stupid Questions

Laleh Khalili: Battlefield to Boardroom, 24 February 2022

Risk: A User’s Guide 
by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico.
Penguin, 343 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 0 241 48192 9
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... chapter of the Quran to explain the ‘miraculous’ US defeat. In Al-Fil, an Abyssinian king rides an army of elephants through the desert to conquer Mecca but is defeated when God sends vast flights of swallows to rain pebbles on the elephants.Galvanised by the spectacle of the Delta Force failure, and with experience as a Green Beret, paratrooper ...

A Leg-Up for Oliver North

Richard Rorty, 20 October 1994

Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future 
by Richard Bernstein.
Knopf, 367 pp., $25, September 1994, 0 679 41156 9
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... be as a result of enduring affluence. In the meantime, it can only be mitigated by appealing, as Martin Luther King did, to the whites’ sense of justice to their fellow Americans. Teaching both black and white children what African-American men and women have done for their country makes such an appeal. Teaching them ...

Goodbye to the Comintern

Martin Kettle, 21 February 1991

About Turn. The Communist Party and the Outbreak of the Second World War: The Verbatim Record of the Central Committee Meetings 1939 
edited by Francis King and George Matthews.
Lawrence and Wishart, 318 pp., £34.95, November 1990, 9780853157267
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... and helplessness of leadership’. Most, however, fulfilled the role demanded of them by the demon king of this pantomime, Palme Dutt. Dutt dominates and controls these proceedings with a Catoesque monomania and a forensically inflexible vocabulary. As David Edgar has pointed out, Dutt is the one person in the whole drama who takes exactly the same line at the ...

Tarot Triumph

Edmund Leach, 4 September 1980

The Game of Tarot: from Ferrara to Salt Lake City 
by Michael Dummett.
Duckworth, 600 pp., £45, August 1980, 0 7156 1014 7
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Twelve Tarot Games 
by Michael Dummett.
Duckworth, 242 pp., £5.95, August 1980, 0 7156 1488 6
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... three months in the United States. It was a year of political disaster. Nixon became President; Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both assassinated. But for Dummett things were even worse at home. He was ‘deeply involved in work to combat that racism which has, over the past fifteen years, disfigured our ...

Viva Biba

Janet Watts, 8 December 1988

Very Heaven: Looking back at the 1960s 
edited by Sara Maitland.
Virago, 227 pp., £4.95, October 1988, 0 86068 958 1
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... The great events of the outside world equally eluded her: ‘I left Washington the day before Martin Luther King was shot, and arrived in Los Angeles a week after Robert Kennedy’s assassination.’ In spite of these omissions, Sara Maitland has found in her own fiction ‘a pride in the Sixties’, a regret for ‘a ...

Hot Dogs

Malcolm Bull, 14 June 1990

Mine eyes have seen the glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America 
by Randall Balmer.
Oxford, 246 pp., $19.95, September 1989, 0 19 505117 3
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In God’s Country: Travels in the Bible Belt, USA 
by Douglas Kennedy.
Unwin Hyman, 240 pp., £12.95, November 1989, 0 04 440423 9
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The Divine Supermarket 
by Malise Ruthven.
Chatto, 336 pp., £14.95, August 1989, 0 7011 3151 9
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The Democratisation of American Christianity 
by Nathan Hatch.
Yale, 312 pp., £22.50, November 1989, 0 300 44470 2
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Religion and 20th-Century American Intellectual Life 
edited by Michael Lacey.
Cambridge/Woodrow Wilson Centre for Scholars, 214 pp., £27.50, November 1989, 0 521 37560 6
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New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America 
by Mary Farrell Bednarowski.
Indiana, 175 pp., $25, November 1989, 0 253 31137 3
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... of Roger Williams (the founder of Providence, Rhode Island), takes in memorials to Brigham Young, Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton, and ends at the grave of Thomas Jefferson – has a distinctly antiquarian flavour. Ruthven believes that myths ‘become plausible when canonised by arts that penetrate the collective ...

Did he leap?

Mendez: ‘Harlem Shuffle’, 16 December 2021

Harlem Shuffle 
by Colson Whitehead.
Fleet, 320 pp., £16.99, September 2021, 978 0 7088 9944 1
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... at Dozier School for Boys: it tells the story of Elwood Curtis, a talented 16-year-old acolyte of Martin Luther King Jr, who has hope and promise snatched away by the torturous racial violence to which he’s subjected at a reform school in Florida in the early 1960s.Assured of another bestseller, Whitehead turned back to ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: A Quick Bout of Bardiness, 6 June 2002

... in the form of Shakespeare in a Box (Workman, £25). It comes in two flavours, tragic or comic (King Lear or The Taming of the Shrew), and has everything you need to put on a production in ‘45 minutes or less!’ King Lear’s box contains a Fool’s cap, a plastic retractable dagger, a couple of plastic ...

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