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Taking the Bosses Hostage

Joshua Kurlantzick: China goes into reverse, 26 March 2009

Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China 
by Leslie Chang.
Picador, 432 pp., £12.99, February 2009, 978 0 330 50670 0
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Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State 
by Yasheng Huang.
Cambridge, 366 pp., £15.99, November 2008, 978 0 521 89810 2
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... bargain with the US, in which China would essentially subsidise American consumption. According to Michael Pettis, an economist at Peking University, Until recently, excess US demand and excess Chinese supply were in a temporarily stable balance. As part of running a trade surplus, China necessarily accumulated dollars, which had to be exported to (invested ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2019, 2 January 2020

... am will be able to tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the Commons, he’s in a scruffy suede jacket and, according to the trolley attendant, sitting in standard class, where he is happy to have a ...

Life on Sark

Jonathan Parry: Life on Sark, 18 May 2023

... lamented that Rousseau had died before discovering his ideal island. Swinburne wanted to be its king and drink ‘rapture of rest’. Temperatures avoid extremes; camellias bloom at Christmas. The very competitive mathematician and ocean-wave expert Sir James Lighthill swam the ten miles around Sark five times; on his sixth attempt, in 1998, he ruptured a ...

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat

David Runciman: Thatcher’s Rise, 6 June 2013

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. Vol. I: Not for Turning 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 859 pp., £30, April 2013, 978 0 7139 9282 3
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... lined up to replace him included Jim Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland, Michael Foot and Denis Healey. It was, by any historical standards, an impressive cast list. The Parliamentary Labour Party made the right choice in plumping for Callaghan over the initial favourite, Healey, and the surprise early front-runner, Foot. Of all the ...

Le Roi Jean Quinze

Stefan Collini: Roy Jenkins and Labour, 5 June 2014

Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life 
by John Campbell.
Cape, 818 pp., £30, March 2014, 978 0 224 08750 6
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... decades after 1945. The first is the dream of the social-democratic equivalent of the philosopher-king. This expresses the hope that even in contemporary mass democracies a figure will emerge who can work the political machine and at the same time embody intellect, sensibility and liberal values, someone who can win power and then exercise it in the name of ...

Are we having fun yet?

John Lanchester: The Biggest Scandal of All, 4 July 2013

... credit crunch was: banks being too scared to lend to each other. In the very dry words of Mervyn King, the then governor of the Bank of England, Libor became ‘in many ways the rate at which banks do not lend to each other’. Euribor, the Eurozone version of Libor, is at the moment even worse, since in very many cases these banks would be more likely to ...

Negative Equivalent

Iain Sinclair: In the Super Sewer, 19 January 2023

... river near Vauxhall Bridge where the River Effra meets the Thames, Troia Nova became Trinovantum; King Lud, who legend has it is buried at Ludgate, renamed it Caer Ludein.’ Taylor is open and courteous. And we have twenty minutes to chat before our guide, Ignacio Tognaccini Sainz, the project manager, is free to take us inside. This is a friendly ...

Why are you still here?

James Meek: Who owns Grimsby?, 23 April 2015

... And what will the succession be?People tell you in Grimsby there was only one power: that fish was king, and that it didn’t abdicate, it was overthrown by foreigners. Once, the world’s largest ice factory would turn out gargantuan ice blocks to be crushed by the ton, carried on conveyors to the dockside and poured from chutes into the holds of the ...

Cute, My Arse

Seamus Perry: Geoffrey Hill, 12 September 2019

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 148 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 19 882952 2
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... what concentration, effort, agony he must have laboured on these marvellous poems!’ Michael Wharton exclaimed in a review in the Spectator, praise which was prominently reprinted on the jacket of the 1985 Collected Poems to sum up a whole school of regard. Wharton was best known for a column he wrote in the Telegraph under the name ‘Peter ...

A Tentative Idea for a Lamp

Tim Radford: Thomas Edison, 18 March 1999

Edison: A Life of Invention 
by Paul Israel.
Wiley, 552 pp., £19.50, November 1998, 0 471 52942 7
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... Edison survived to the age of 84 on meals weighing no more than four or five ounces.)Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, and others like them, had made science fashionable, popular and hugely exciting. Edison and his schoolfellows began experimenting with chemical reactions. At the age of 12, with the help of a friend, he built a half-mile-long telegraph line ...

Shakespeares

David Norbrook, 18 July 1985

Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism 
edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield.
Manchester, 244 pp., £19.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1752 1
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Alternative Shakespeares 
edited by John Drakakis.
Methuen, 252 pp., £10.50, July 1985, 0 416 36850 6
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Shakespeare and Others 
by S. Schoenbaum.
Scolar, 285 pp., £25, May 1985, 0 85967 691 9
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Illustrations of the English Stage 1580-1642 
by R.A. Foakes.
Scolar, 180 pp., £35, February 1985, 0 85967 684 6
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Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ 
by E.A.J. Honigmann.
Manchester, 172 pp., £17.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1743 2
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... questions. Sinfield quotes such choice examples as: ‘ “While we may hope for a happy ending to King Lear, Shakespeare’s conclusion is entirely fitting.” Discuss.’ Because the question is cast entirely in terms of demonstrating the exquisite fitness of every part of Shakespeare’s dramatic design, the apparently open discussion necessarily excludes ...

Follow the Science

James Butler, 16 April 2020

... shifting excuses for rejecting an offer to participate in EU purchase orders for ventilators. (Michael Gove maintains that they missed an email.) That will soon look like unforgiveable political vanity. But deeper continuities with the Brexit strategy remain: the treatment of every political issue primarily as a matter of image and narrative, with ...

Outside in the Bar

Patrick McGuinness: Ten Years in Sheerness, 21 October 2021

The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness 
by Patrick Wright.
Repeater, 751 pp., £20, June, 978 1 913462 58 1
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... Online vaunted its association with two local celebrities: ‘Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em star Michael Crawford revealed he visited the pub during filming forty years ago. And German literary star Uwe Johnson also had his own stool at the pub where he used to write about the people he met.’ Photos of Crawford and Johnson accompanied a picture of the ...

Like Colonel Sanders

Christopher Tayler: The Stan Lee Era, 2 December 2021

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee 
by Abraham Riesman.
Bantam, 320 pp., £20, February, 978 0 593 13571 6
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Stan Lee: A Life in Comics 
by Liel Leibovitz.
Yale, 192 pp., £16.99, June 2020, 978 0 300 23034 5
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... man ‘who began his memoir with the sentence: “In a land of moral imbeciles, I knew I could be king.”’ All the same, the final stretch of Lee’s life was quite sad, and in Riesman’s telling it becomes a kind of goofy parable about the dangers of attaching a single face to collaborative endeavours. There’s a theory that the modern notion of ...

I, Lowborn Cur

Colin Burrow: Literary Names, 22 November 2012

Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature 
by Alastair Fowler.
Oxford, 283 pp., £19.99, September 2012, 978 0 19 959222 7
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... was possible to give names with thinly veiled significance, such as Philanax (‘dear or friendly king’) and Euarchus (‘good ruler’), to characters in an Arcadian romance, as Sir Philip Sidney did. Or, like Edmund Spenser, whom Fowler sees as the great originator of English characteronyms, you might mingle popular pastoral names such as Colin in among ...

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