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Good Housekeeping

Steven Shapin: William Petty, 20 January 2011

William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic 
by Ted McCormick.
Oxford, 347 pp., £63, September 2010, 978 0 19 954789 0
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... soon looked up. According to one estimate, he came to own 50,000 acres in County Kerry alone. John Aubrey estimated his rental income at its height at £18,000 a year – perhaps £27 million in today’s money. In a nice closing of the causal circle, Irish land capitalised the rest of Petty’s career, including the projects in political arithmetic that ...

Who Won’t Be Voting for Trump

Eliot Weinberger: Anyone for Trump?, 20 October 2016

... the man told reporters that it was actually a copy of a Purple Heart.Vietnam Veterans Trump (on John McCain): ‘He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured, OK? I hate to tell you. He’s a war hero because he was captured, OK?’ (McCain has since endorsed Trump.)Scientists Trump (tweet): ‘The ...

Educating the Utopians

Jonathan Parry: Parliament’s Hour, 18 April 2019

The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800-2000 
edited by David Brown, Robert Crowcroft and Gordon Pentland.
Oxford, 626 pp., £95, April 2018, 978 0 19 871489 7
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... The historical role of Parliament is as a brake on precipitate action, a mechanism for delaying laws and change until they seem likely to command consent and benefit the polity. Delay was also thought to minimise the risk of subsequent repeal. In 1864 Gladstone claimed that was why ‘we always progress, never retrace our steps.’This was a conservative ...

Blips on the Screen

Andrew Cockburn: Risk-Free Assassinations, 3 December 2020

The Drone Age: How Drone Technology Will Change War and Peace 
by Michael Boyle.
Oxford, 336 pp., £22.99, September 2020, 978 0 19 063586 2
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Drone Art: The Everywhere War as Medium 
by Thomas Stubblefield.
California, 218 pp., £70, February 2020, 978 0 520 33961 3
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Hellfire from Paradise Ranch: On the Front Lines of Drone Warfare 
by Joseba Zulaika.
California, 289 pp., £25, June 2020, 978 0 520 32974 4
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The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare 
by Christian Brose.
Hachette, 288 pp., £21, April 2020, 978 0 316 53353 9
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... video can’t have been of much help to government agencies, however malign their intentions. The laws of physics impose inherent restrictions on picture quality from distant drones that no amount of money can overcome. Unless pictured from low altitude and in clear weather, individuals appear as dots, cars as blurry blobs. A ‘live video feed’ sounds ...

Hatpin through the Brain

Jonathan Meades: Closing Time for the Firm, 9 June 2022

The Palace Papers 
by Tina Brown.
Century, 571 pp., £20, April, 978 1 5291 2470 5
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... virgins or whores.Fair enough: the defenders of the faith need some respite from maintaining the laws of God, the true profession of the Gospel and the Protestant reformed religion established by law. God, then, returns the favour by being on hand to bless or chide when a decision is being made about the suitability of this or that late adolescent broodmare ...

For the Love of Uncle Enver

Thomas Meaney: Albania after Hoxha, 23 June 2022

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History 
by Lea Ypi.
Penguin, 313 pp., £9.99, June, 978 0 14 199510 6
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... classics of liberal philosophy and political theory – from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice – can’t realise their own putative ambitions without reckoning with the latent radicalism in their projects. For several years Ypi has been a co-editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy, an ...

I hear, I see, I learn

Nicholas Spice, 4 November 1993

The Green Knight 
by Iris Murdoch.
Chatto, 472 pp., £15.99, September 1993, 0 7011 6030 6
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... head on, and, quoting George Herbert’s poem ‘The Elixir’ (‘Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws/Makes that and th’action fine’) seems to resolve it by saying that all human occupations undertaken in the right spirit may and should become exercises in the discipline of virtuous attention. In The Green Knight, a similar accommodation is reached ...

Post-Nationalism

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 3 December 1992

English Questions 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 370 pp., £39.95, May 1992, 0 86091 375 9
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A Zone of Engagement 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 384 pp., £39.95, May 1992, 0 86091 377 5
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... common discursive universe, grounded in what Berlin has recently described as ‘universal ethical laws’. For this reason, Anderson complains – with rare limpness, for he’s uneasy with theory that’s abstracted from circumstance, and forgets that socialists have also made the same sort of assumption – Berlin is too monist, or too parochially ...

Taking leave

Mark Edmundson, 2 March 1989

Borrowed Time 
by Paul Monette.
Collins Harvill, 342 pp., £12.50, October 1988, 0 00 271057 9
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... making him the country’s first openly gay elected official. When a State Senator named John Briggs introduced an amendment that would have prevented gays from teaching in the California public schools, a grass-roots movement, led by Milk, rose and defeated the Bill by a two-to-one majority. Gay power was at its high-water mark. It was around that ...

With or without the ANC

Heribert Adam, 13 June 1991

The Unbreakable Thread: Non-Racialism in South Africa 
by Julie Frederikse.
Indiana, 304 pp., $39.95, November 1990, 0 253 32473 4
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A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society 
by David Horowitz.
California, 293 pp., $24.95, March 1991, 0 520 07342 8
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Koexistenz im Krieg: Staatszerfall und Entstehung einer Nation im Libanon 
by Theodor Hanf.
Nomos Verlag, 806 pp., September 1990, 3 7890 1972 0
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... electricity is cut, taxes remain uncollected, emergency calls go unheeded. Because apartheid laws and regulations were primarily designed to suppress and control, they have lost all legitimacy even where they potentially benefit the people. In a state of anomie, paralysed by the daily struggle to survive, the majority of the population waits to be ...

Goldthorpe, Halsey and Social Class

Edmund Leach, 20 March 1980

Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain 
by John Goldthorpe.
Oxford, 310 pp., £12, January 1980, 0 19 827239 1
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Origins and Destinations: Family, Class and Education in Modern Britain 
by A.H. Halsey.
Oxford, 240 pp., £14, January 1980, 0 19 827224 3
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... eliminate from consideration all exceptional cases. But if generalisations approximating to laws of nature are to be built up from empirical observations, the variations implicit in ‘exceptional cases’ may be of the utmost significance. After all, why should the changing class structure of Middlesbrough resemble in any way the changing class ...

What the Romans did

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 5 February 1987

English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson and Housman 
by C.O. Brink.
James Clark, 243 pp., £11.95, February 1986, 0 227 67872 9
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Latin Poets and Roman Life 
by Jasper Griffin.
Duckworth, 226 pp., £24, January 1986, 0 7156 1970 5
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The Mirror of Myth: Classical Themes and Variations 
by Jasper Griffin.
Faber, 144 pp., £15, February 1986, 0 571 13805 5
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... Mastership of Trinity, practised critical scholarship in his commentary on Marcus Aurelius, and John Pearson, an eminent theologian, who was successively Master of Jesus, Master of Trinity and Bishop of Chester, displayed it in brilliant emendations of the text of Aeschylus. In 1662 Richard Bentley, one of the greatest critical scholars, was born near ...

Fragments of a Defunct State

Stephen Holmes: Putin’s Russia, 5 January 2012

Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia 
by Luke Harding.
Guardian, 310 pp., £20, September 2011, 978 0 85265 247 3
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... material about ‘the corrupt nexus at the heart of the Russian state’. He cites a report by John Beyrle, the US ambassador to Moscow, who wrote that ‘police and MVD collect money from small businesses while the FSB collects from big businesses.’ But even when they amiably divide up the turf, the members of various agencies are doing so for their own ...

Lady Chatterley’s Sneakers

David Trotter, 30 August 2012

... it in the process or cutting loose from it altogether. The result is stalemate. In an essay on John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga written while he was completing the second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence argued that ‘the thing a man has a vast grudge against is the man’s determinant’. Something similar seems to be true of ...

Achieving Disunity

Corey Robin, 25 October 2012

Age of Fracture 
by Daniel Rodgers.
Harvard, 360 pp., £14.95, September 2012, 978 0 674 06436 2
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... of having a thin conception of society – unless by society we mean social democracy rather than laws, schools, churches, families and firms. As Rodgers points out, even Hayek’s most influential student, Margaret Thatcher, when she stated that ‘there is no such thing as society,’ added a rider regarding the irreducibly social and institutional nature ...

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