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The Interregnum

Martin Jacques: The Nation-state isn’t dead, 5 February 2004

Empire of Capital 
by Ellen Meiksins Wood.
Verso, 182 pp., £15, July 2003, 1 85984 502 9
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Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Vintage, 134 pp., £6.99, May 2003, 0 09 945543 9
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Global Civil Society? 
by John Keane.
Cambridge, 220 pp., £40, April 2003, 0 521 81543 6
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Global Civil Society: An Answer to War 
by Mary Kaldor.
Polity, 189 pp., £45, April 2003, 0 7456 2757 9
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... that although, for the first time in the history of the modern nation-state, the world’s major powers are not engaged in direct geopolitical and military rivalry, but solely in economic rivalry, ‘the United States has striven to become the most overwhelmingly dominant military power the world has ever seen.’ The presiding asymmetry of the present ...

The Monster Plot

Thomas Powers: James Angleton, Spymaster, 10 May 2018

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton 
by Jefferson Morley.
Scribe, 336 pp., £20, December 2017, 978 1 911344 73 5
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... Gown (1987), which describes his introduction to counterintelligence in London during the war, and Michael Holzman’s James Jesus Angleton: The CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence (2008). But Angleton laid out on the page is nothing like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for ...

Angry or Evil?

Michael Wood: Brecht’s Poems, 21 March 2019

The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht 
translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine.
Norton, 1286 pp., £35, December 2018, 978 0 87140 767 2
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... for great wars. They will not say: when the woman walked into the room But rather: when the great powers united against the workers. But they will not say: the times were dark But rather: why were their poets silent?There is something clunky and too correct about the party line here – the house painter was far more ecumenical in his trampling – but the ...

Rough Wooing

Michael Brown: Flodden, 23 January 2014

Fatal Rivalry: Flodden 1513 
by George Goodwin.
Weidenfeld, 288 pp., £20, July 2013, 978 0 297 86739 5
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... his children and his court, and on the period after 1530; diplomacy and war with the Continental powers have provided the broader setting. Scotland’s role is confined to the soap opera of Mary Queen of Scots and her more significant but much less glamorous son, James VI. Fatal Rivalry: Flodden 1513 provides a welcome antidote to the usual run of work on ...

Boom

Arthur Marwick, 18 October 1984

War and Society in Europe 1870-1970 
by Brian Bond.
Leicester University Press/Fontana, 256 pp., £12, December 1983, 0 7185 1227 8
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Wars and Welfare: Britain 1914-1945 
by Max Beloff.
Arnold, 281 pp., £18.95, April 1984, 0 7131 6163 9
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The Causes of Wars, and Other Essays 
by Michael Howard.
Counterpoint, 291 pp., £3.95, April 1984, 0 04 940073 8
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... by Denys Hay is taken), and in 1969 Angus Calder published The People’s War. In the meantime, Michael Howard and Brian Bond, at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, widened the dimensions of the military history taught there. In 1970 the ‘Fontana History of War and Society’ was launched (‘society’ meaning British or English ...

Mooching

Nicholas Spice: Dreaming of Vikram Seth, 29 April 1999

An Equal Music 
by Vikram Seth.
Phoenix House, 381 pp., £16.99, April 1999, 1 86159 117 9
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... I retreated to my thoughts.I felt sure that I had made Vikram Seth appear by thinking about him. Michael Holme, the narrator of An Equal Music, makes the love of his life appear by thinking about her. He’s sitting on a bus in Oxford Street when another bus draws alongside, and there she is: Julia McNicholl, or Julia Hansen as she now is, though ...

Eurochess

Michael Dummett, 24 January 1985

Chess: The History of a Game 
by Richard Eales.
Batsford, 240 pp., £12.50, December 1984, 0 7134 4607 2
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... to other forms of chess: and that is all. It would surely have been of interest to describe the powers of the Cannon, which introduces a radically new idea into chess: it has the same move as our Rook, but can capture only by leaping over one intervening piece (and can leap only when making a capture), giving check in the same manner. Japanese chess ...

Bliss

Michael Neve, 16 October 1980

My Guru and his Disciple 
by Christopher Isherwood.
Eyre Methuen, 338 pp., £8.50, July 1980, 0 413 46930 1
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... is only when you feel that you are not devoted that you are devoted.’ Not the least of the powers of My Guru and his Disciple is its opposition to the thing that all America now seems to want: rebirth. The dreadful desire to go through it all again is the reverse of the Eastern promise and purpose, which give Isherwood’s books a distinct ...

Honey and Water

Michael Irwin, 7 August 1980

The Beekeepers 
by Peter Redgrove.
Routledge, 156 pp., £5.50, July 1980, 0 7100 0473 7
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F for Ferg 
by Ian Cochrane.
Gollancz, 117 pp., £5.95, July 1980, 0 575 02862 9
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Events Beyond the Heartlands 
by Robert Watson.
Heinemann, 241 pp., £6.50, July 1980, 0 434 84200 1
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... pretty obscure. To credit the intuitive writer, as Redgrove seems to, with intuitive physical powers seems both sentimental and negative. It is as though a poet were no more than a dowser or clairvoyant manqué. Guy claims that ‘we scatter our seed, and the Queens are fertilised’ – but what does the claim mean? Who are the Queens? What is involved ...

Bus Lane Strategy

Tristram Hunt: London Governments, 31 October 2002

Governing London 
by Ben Pimlott and Nirmala Rao.
Oxford, 208 pp., £15.99, May 2002, 0 19 924492 8
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... Act and praised the unelected and deeply corrupt Corporation. It possessed, he noted, the ‘full powers’ of local self-government, and had succeeded in ‘securing to every one of its citizens all the rights, and imposing all the obligations, of men free and equal before their fellow-men and before the law’. Toulmin Smith prevailed. In a fudge that ...

Family History

Miles Taylor: Tony Benn, 25 September 2003

Free at Last: Diaries 1991-2001 
by Tony Benn.
Hutchinson, 738 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 09 179352 1
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Free Radical: New Century Essays 
by Tony Benn.
Continuum, 246 pp., £9.95, May 2003, 9780826465962
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... a hair’s breadth of becoming deputy leader of the Party. Opinions differ, but a Party led by Michael Foot and Benn would probably have seen a mass defection of MPs to the SDP. As it was, Benn’s failure paved the way for Neil Kinnock’s purge of the Militant Left, as well as the crucial policy switch from renationalisation of key industries to ...

Fancy Patter

Theo Tait: Holmes and the Holocaust, 31 March 2005

The Final Solution 
by Michael Chabon.
Fourth Estate, 127 pp., £10, February 2005, 0 00 719602 4
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... gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London.’ These few lines supply the background to Michael Chabon’s novella, which begins thirty years later on the South Downs. The main character is an ‘old man’, once a famous detective, now devoted to his bees. He remains unnamed throughout, but given that he wears an Inverness cape and hunting cap, and ...

Complicated System of Traps

Michael Wood: Geoff Dyer’s ‘Zona’, 19 July 2012

Zona: A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room 
by Geoff Dyer.
Canongate, 228 pp., £16.99, February 2012, 978 0 85786 166 5
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... keeps a form of life going where everything else seems dead. There are also the telekinetic powers of their daughter, but we’ll return to those. The room is in the Zone, a post-industrial space of the kind we’ve just seen, which has been depopulated by a meteorite (or perhaps by an even more mysterious cause) and is the location of such strange ...

Raider of the Lost Ark

Richard Pankhurst: In Soho, 24 May 2001

The Pale Abyssinian: A Life of James Bruce, African Explorer and Adventurer 
by Miles Bredin.
Flamingo, 290 pp., £7.99, March 2001, 0 00 638740 3
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... Tigrinya] and did not speak more Arabic than I do, but had with him an interpreter named Michael’. The second critic was ‘Dofter Esther’, an elderly cleric, who observed that the traveller ‘did not speak the Tigr language nor much Amharic’. Bredin also follows Bruce in claiming that he was appointed commander of the royal ...

Airy-Fairy

Conor Gearty: Blunkett’s Folly, 29 November 2001

Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention 
by A.W.B. Simpson.
Oxford, 1176 pp., £40, June 2001, 0 19 826289 2
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... under the Convention was taken against the UK and involved an attack by Greece on the emergency powers in force in Cyprus, a matter to which Simpson devotes two chapters. His study ends in the 1960s and so does not cover the 1978 ruling of the European Court of Human Rights that the UK had engaged in inhuman and degrading treatment of internees in Northern ...

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