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Why the bastards wouldn’t stand and fight

Murray Sayle: Mao in Vietnam, 21 February 2002

China and the Vietnam Wars 1950-75 
by Qiang Zhai.
North Carolina, 304 pp., $49.95, April 2000, 0 8078 4842 5
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None so Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam 
by George Allen.
Ivan Dee, 296 pp., $27.50, October 2001, 1 56663 387 7
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No Peace, No Honour: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam 
by Larry Berman.
Free Press, 334 pp., $27.50, November 2001, 0 684 84968 2
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... to forget. A rash of articles erupted, explaining how different they really were: Vietnam hot and green, Afghanistan cold and arid, the Taliban had no nearby sanctuary like China or North Vietnam, militant Islam lacks the patriotic strand in revolutionary Marxism, and so on. That Vietnam ended long ago does not explain these hasty disclaimers: World War ...

Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

... Or: ‘The floor of the chancel is set with encaustic tiles with designs in red, brown, pale green, white and rich Wedgwood blue.’ Mass was said in this sumptuous building in 1846 and work continued on the cathedral for the next few years.It seems incongruous now, barely possible that this wealth of detail was being incorporated into an Irish Catholic ...

The Darwin Show

Steven Shapin, 7 January 2010

... and its allied disciplines shut up shop and go home. So we have the evolutionary anthropologist Robert Foley: ‘For centuries, humans have wondered about why humans are the way they are, and they’ve turned to philosophy and to religion to answer that question.’ But humans should stop doing that: Darwin allowed us to set philosophy and religion aside ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2010, 16 December 2010

... is as kindly as ever and me as dull, three old(-ish) men having their lunch, next stop the bowling green. 10 March. To Durham where there are not many visitors this Wednesday morning and more guides than there are people to show round. See the line of Frosterley marble inset in the floor of the nave, the limit beyond which women were not allowed to approach ...

I’m always in the club

Christian Lorentzen: Peter Matthiessen in Paris, 5 February 2026

True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen 
by Lance Richardson.
Chatto, 709 pp., £30, October 2025, 978 1 78474 301 7
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... to write at fifteen:From varied scants of spring-waked life,Of rain-blown freshness, new-formed green,And hungry patter, woodland scene,Slides forth the subtle serpent lean,With wake of silence, writhing sheen,To edge of trees, to end of strife.At Yale he asked his parents to have his name taken out of the Social Register (they ignored the request, to his ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... post, next to a Union Jack, and ‘Live in London’, beside an emoji of a small house and a very green tree. She liked to imagine that one day she would live in a house like that with her husband, Hassan, and their two daughters. Hassan used to work at the mosque. Later on, when he was spending more time away, Rania would send him loving messages along with ...

Worse than a Defeat

James Meek: Shamed in Afghanistan, 18 December 2014

The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan 
by Jack Fairweather.
Cape, 488 pp., £20, December 2014, 978 0 224 09736 9
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Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Afghan War 
by Frank Ledwidge.
Yale, 287 pp., £10.99, July 2014, 978 0 300 20526 8
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British Generals in Blair’s Wars 
edited by Jonathan Bailey, Richard Iron and Hew Strachan.
Ashgate, 404 pp., £19.95, August 2013, 978 1 4094 3736 9
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An Intimate War: An Oral History of the Helmand Conflict 1978-2012 
by Mike Martin.
Hurst, 389 pp., £25, April 2014, 978 1 84904 336 6
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... Hill, ordered tardily for Afghanistan at a million pounds apiece, will be painted European green and dispersed to other barracks. David Cameron announced in December 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission had been accomplished. ‘The prime minister’s declaration of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to ...

If It Weren’t for Charlotte

Alice Spawls: The Brontës, 16 November 2017

... sent copies of poems they had been working on to famous poets, including the poet laureate Robert Southey. We don’t have Charlotte’s letter to Southey, or know which poems she sent, but parts of her letter are quoted in his and show her extravagant style of praise – she begs him to ‘stoop from his throne of light and glory’ – which he ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Swimming on the 52nd Floor, 24 September 2015

... sounds very simple: put up shacks and hideaways in places so obvious that nobody will notice them. Robert Macfarlane, who lodged in a black hut assembled by urban explorers wearing orange hi-viz overalls during the fuss of the London Marathon, called his windowless shelter an ‘urban bothy’. The crew survey the territory as thoroughly as the developers with ...

Buy birthday present, go to morgue

Colm Tóibín: Diane Arbus, 2 March 2017

Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer 
by Arthur Lubow.
Cape, 734 pp., £35, October 2016, 978 0 224 09770 3
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Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov 
by Alexander Nemerov.
Fraenkel Gallery, 106 pp., $30, March 2015, 978 1 881337 41 6
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... without even looking at the other asked: “What are you going to have?” Scott turned pea-green and, putting his hand to his mouth, rushed for the great outdoors.’ The twins were in the studio to work on a film called Freaks, made by Tod Browning, who had just directed Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of ...

Magic Beans, Baby

David Runciman, 7 January 2021

A Promised Land 
by Barack Obama.
Viking, 768 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 0 241 49151 5
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... who even managed his turn at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, on the night he green-lighted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. ‘Cool comedian and quiet commander,’ as Adam Gopnik described him then. The idea that his gifts could have taken him in many directions gives Obama a distinct sense of unease, the feeling that nothing is ...

War is noise

Jonathan Raban: Letters from My Father, 17 December 2020

... a thick, oily and malodorous fog that made it harder for German gunners to find their targets.As Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and other memoirists of the First World War made clear, there was always a radical division between ‘the line’ and ‘behind the line’. The line meant mud, blood, rats, inedible rations and the continuous, unbearable thunder ...
... lofty and the very small – as though in the novel they grew together, like the red rose and the green briar in the ballad. Besides, in the past, if the novelist’s mission to teach and improve inclined him to Mr Gradgrind’s side, his common sense – a highly necessary faculty for the novelist, which I have neglected to mention until now – and his ...

How can we live with it?

Thomas Jones: How to Survive Climate Change, 23 May 2013

The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong – and How to Fix It 
by Dieter Helm.
Yale, 273 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 0 300 18659 8
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Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering 
by Clive Hamilton.
Yale, 247 pp., £20, February 2013, 978 0 300 18667 3
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The City and the Coming Climate: Climate Change in the Places We Live 
by Brian Stone.
Cambridge, 187 pp., £19.99, July 2012, 978 1 107 60258 8
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... and greener-than-coal reputation of gas reducing or delaying incentives to develop genuinely green alternatives. But he shrugs them off, as lenient on them as he is unforgiving of the supposedly insurmountable difficulties with wind power. Other commentators (Bill McKibben is one) are less sanguine. And it is convenient, not to say suspicious, that Helm ...

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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... reveres are mostly the fallen – Swift, Blake, Clare, Isaac Rosenberg, Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Robert Desnos, Charles Péguy, Paul Celan, as well as people who are defined by their outsiderness, such as the young Berkeley and the mathematician Alan Turing – whose integrity is interwoven with their ruin. The poem is full of short studies of such ...

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