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Ill-Suited to Reality

Tom Stevenson: Nato’s Delusions, 1 August 2024

Nato: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance 
by Sten Rynning.
Yale, 345 pp., £20, March, 978 0 300 27011 2
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Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of Nato 
by Peter Apps.
Wildfire, 624 pp., £25, February, 978 1 0354 0575 6
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Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance since the Cold War 
edited by Grey Anderson.
Verso, 356 pp., £19.99, July 2023, 978 1 80429 237 2
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... which could destabilise Eastern Europe and resurrect Cold War hostilities. In 1998, John Lewis Gaddis bemoaned that the decision to admit Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic was taken with almost no public debate and that ‘with remarkably few exceptions’ historians saw it as ‘ill-conceived, ill-timed and above all ill-suited to the realities ...

Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
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The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
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... subplot, he also involved himself intimately in the quarrel between Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion over the project of a Jewish National Home, and in the attempts by both to play off the British against the Americans. And, though he showed himself able to take risks in leaking classified material that favoured the Zionist cause, he also found ...

I need money

Christian Lorentzen: Biden Tries Again, 10 September 2020

Yesterday’s Man: The Case against Joe Biden 
by Branko Marcetic.
Verso, 288 pp., £12.99, March 2020, 978 1 83976 028 0
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... got into the black. In What It Takes (1992), a breathless work of campaign stenography, Richard Ben Cramer described the confession Biden made to his aides before deciding to run: ‘The debts – he went through his finances whole, the mortgages, the credit cards. He was into Visa, Amex for thousands.’The letter to his tenants appears in Biden’s 2007 ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1999, 20 January 2000

... apropos of this whether hunting the spies would have taken the same turn if it had not been for Lewis Namier. His work on the 18th-century Parliament pioneered the study of friendship and connection as the building blocks of 18th-century Parliamentary politics, a method that was quickly taken up and adapted for other periods, the 14th and 15th centuries ...

Open in a Scream

Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021

Francis Bacon: Revelations 
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January, 978 0 00 729841 9
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... studio. (‘Interesting, yes,’ Clark said. ‘What extraordinary times we live in.’) In 1945, Ben Nicholson pulled out of a planned six-artist show and Sutherland proposed that Bacon, who was quite unknown, should replace him: ‘I should really prefer Francis Bacon for whose work you know I have a really profound admiration … his recent things, while ...

Slow Waltz

Daniel Trilling: Trouble with the Troubles Act, 6 June 2024

... profit from the pain of those seeking answers about what happened to their loved ones,’ Brandon Lewis, then Northern Ireland secretary, wrote as he shepherded the bill through Parliament. ‘This feeds a pernicious and distorted view of the past, promoted and peddled by those with a vested interest in presenting the British state as the aggressor … We ...

What We’re about to Receive

Jeremy Harding: Food Insecurity, 13 May 2010

... into one of his stores in Kendal (30 tubs of English Lakes ice cream are sold for every one of Ben & Jerry’s). He’s committed to the model of competitive retail, and defends his corner of the industry: it isn’t just the supermarkets driving hard bargains with producers; a handful of ‘intermediaries’ – big wholesalers and food processing giants ...

A Djinn speaks

Colm Tóibín: What about George Yeats?, 20 February 2003

Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W.B. Yeats 
by Ann Saddlemyer.
Oxford, 808 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 19 811232 7
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... work’. When Iseult began to share a flat with the highly unsuitable mistress of Wyndham Lewis, both Yeats and George arrived from Dublin and swooped on the place, as though they were her parents, and removed Iseult, Josephine her maid, her cat, her birds and her furniture to more decent quarters. George was less than two years older than her. Taking ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... sleeper agent, groomed to assassinate the presidential nominee at the convention. But Major Ben Marco, a former member of his army unit, breaks through his brainwashing and so instead of murdering the nominee, Shaw shoots his mother, who had been controlling him throughout, along with his idiotic stepfather. Decades later, Condon explained the ...

Carnival of Self-Harm

Tom Crewe: Good Riddance to the Tories, 20 June 2024

Haywire: A Political History of Britain since 2000 
by Andrew Hindmoor.
Allen Lane, 628 pp., £35, June, 978 0 241 65171 1
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No Way Out: Brexit from the Backstop to Boris 
by Tim Shipman.
William Collins, 698 pp., £26, April, 978 0 00 830894 0
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The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life 
by Theresa May.
Headline, 368 pp., £12.99, May, 978 1 0354 0991 4
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The Conservative Party after Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 368 pp., £25, March 2023, 978 1 5095 4601 5
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Johnson at 10: The Inside Story 
by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell.
Atlantic, 640 pp., £12.99, April, 978 1 83895 804 6
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The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson 
by Nadine Dorries.
HarperCollins, 336 pp., £25, November 2023, 978 0 00 862342 5
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Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within 
by Rory Stewart.
Vintage, 454 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 5299 2286 8
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Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room 
by Liz Truss.
Biteback, 311 pp., £20, April, 978 1 78590 857 6
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Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party 
by Samuel Earle.
Simon & Schuster, 294 pp., £10.99, February, 978 1 3985 1853 7
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... break it, but only ‘in a specific and limited way’, as the Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, assured Parliament. This strengthened the impression of the party’s newfound scepticism about domestic law (when the Supreme Court declared the 2019 prorogation illegal, Kwasi Kwarteng, a member of cabinet, announced on TV: ‘I’m not saying this, but ...

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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... soldiers with bulldozers. Both people and livestock were coming, I was told, from a village called Ben Suc, a long-time VC stronghold which had just been taken by the US 1st/26th Infantry, airlifted into action in sixty helicopters. The people were leaving because their village was to be burned down. The day passed in a blur, jump-cutting from scene to ...

Chasing Steel

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

... were sailing regularly from the Clyde to Oban and Fort William and the islands of Mull, Skye, Lewis and Staffa, where Fingal’s Cave had been attracting visitors by sailing boat since the mid-18th century: the list included Joseph Banks, Samuel Johnson and John Keats. Mendelssohn was an early visitor by steamboat (‘He is on better terms with the sea as ...

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