Search Results

Advanced Search

841 to 855 of 983 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Ultimate Choice

Malcolm Bull: Thoughts of Genocide, 9 February 2006

The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing 
by Michael Mann.
Cambridge, 580 pp., £17.99, January 2005, 0 521 53854 8
Show More
Genocide in the Age of the Nation State. Vol. I: The Meaning of Genocide 
by Mark Levene.
Tauris, 266 pp., £24.50, August 2005, 1 85043 752 1
Show More
Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Vol. II: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide 
by Mark Levene.
Tauris, 463 pp., £29.50, August 2005, 1 84511 057 9
Show More
Show More
... of entire social groups that happen to get in the way. And then there is what Michael Walzer and John Rawls both call a ‘supreme emergency’, when direct attacks on civilian targets are required in circumstances of dire military necessity. Since, in the nuclear age, ‘supreme emergency has become a permanent condition,’ this means that it is legitimate ...

Revolution must strike twice

Slavoj Žižek: Lenin’s Breakthrough, 25 July 2002

Lenin 
by Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, translated by George Holoch.
Holmes & Meier, 371 pp., £35, November 2001, 0 8419 1412 5
Show More
Show More
... false position which hides fear behind a protective screen of supposedly objective facts, laws or norms. The first step in combatting it is to announce clearly: ‘What, then, is to be done? We must aussprechen was ist, “state the facts”, admit the truth that there is a tendency, or an opinion, in our Central Committee . . .’ What happened when ...

Rancorous Old Sod

Colin Burrow: Homage to Geoffrey Hill, 20 February 2014

Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 973 pp., £35, November 2013, 978 0 19 960589 7
Show More
Show More
... which Clavics eccentrically cranks, allowing Lawes’s name to prompt meditations on the death of laws (lower-case) and the atrophy of the will (‘Quasi-Shakespearean this play on Will’) in the present. ‘Clavics’ (Hill’s coinage) he defines as ‘the alchemy of keys’. It marks the latest phase in his poetic response to the 17th century. He has ...

Were we bullied?

Jamie Martin: Bretton Woods, 21 November 2013

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White and the Making of a New World Order 
by Benn Steil.
Princeton, 449 pp., £19.95, February 2013, 978 0 691 14909 7
Show More
Show More
... When an ailing John Maynard Keynes travelled to the American South in March 1946, he was delighted by what he found. The ‘balmy air and bright azalean colour’ of Savannah offered a welcome reprieve from the cold and damp of London, he wrote on arriving, and the children in the streets were livelier company than the ‘irritable’ and ‘exceedingly tired’ citizens of postwar Britain ...

Cape of Mad Hope

Neal Ascherson: The Darien disaster, 3 January 2008

The Price of Scotland: Darien, Union and the Wealth of Nations 
by Douglas Watt.
Luath, 312 pp., £8.99, January 2007, 978 1 906307 09 7
Show More
Show More
... insanely short and lend insanely long. Many books have been written about the Darien Scheme. John Prebble’s The Darien Disaster of 1968 is still the best known. But The Price of Scotland surpasses them all on two grounds: first, Watt’s method and approach; second, his solidly convincing version of the story’s most contested aspect – the ...

What Works Doesn’t Work

Ross McKibbin: Politics without Ideas, 11 September 2008

... feeling that there must be more to political life than perpetual defeat. Neil Kinnock and John Smith felt this as strongly as their successors, but their successors went a lot further. In a famous essay published nearly ninety years ago, Max Weber suggested that politics was becoming the territory of the professional: politics was the politician’s ...

Deleecious

Matthew Bevis: William Hazlitt, 6 November 2008

New Writings of William Hazlitt: Volume I 
edited by Duncan Wu.
Oxford, 507 pp., £120, September 2007, 978 0 19 923573 5
Show More
New Writings of William Hazlitt: Volume II 
edited by Duncan Wu.
Oxford, 553 pp., £120, September 2007, 978 0 19 923574 2
Show More
William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man 
by Duncan Wu.
Oxford, 557 pp., £25, October 2008, 978 0 19 954958 0
Show More
Show More
... the abstract with the concrete’, yet at the same time he insists that ‘the mind has laws, powers and principles of its own, and is not a mere dependent on matter.’ Hazlitt admired Lamb because his friend’s ‘love of the actual does not proceed from a want of taste for the ideal.’ ‘Taste’ in this context is both an accomplishment and ...

Knights’ Moves

Peter Clarke: The Treasury View, 17 March 2005

Keynes and His Critics: Treasury Responses to the Keynesian Revolution 1925-46 
edited by G.C. Peden.
Oxford, 372 pp., £45, December 2004, 0 19 726322 4
Show More
Show More
... not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil. The author of this passage was John Maynard Keynes. His words were not carelessly uttered but form the pregnant last paragraph of his magnum opus, The General Theory, published in 1936. This obviously expressed his hope that his own ideas would be disseminated through such a process and in ...

Too Much

Barbara Taylor: A history of masturbation, 6 May 2004

Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation 
by Thomas Laqueur.
Zone, 501 pp., £21.95, March 2003, 1 890951 32 3
Show More
Show More
... boat. This time, however, it was not the thought of pretty girls that diverted him but his friend John Evelyn’s ‘pretty’ new book ‘against Solitude’. Evelyn’s Publick employment and an active life prefer’d to solitude, published in 1667, was written to refute Sir George Mackenzie’s 1665 work, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Public ...

I only want to keep my hand in

Owen Bennett-Jones: Gerry Adams, 16 November 2017

Gerry Adams: An Unauthorised Life 
by Malachi O’Doherty.
Faber, 356 pp., £14.99, September 2017, 978 0 571 31595 6
Show More
Show More
... the time of the Rivonia trial by the South African minister of justice and later prime minster John Vorster, who remarked that he would swap all his emergency laws for the clause of the Special Powers Act which allowed the British authorities to arrest and detain without trial, ban meetings, take land and destroy ...

Bourgeois Stew

Oliver Cussen: Alexis de Tocqueville, 16 November 2023

The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville 
by Olivier Zunz.
Princeton, 443 pp., £22, November, 978 0 691 25414 2
Show More
Travels with Tocqueville beyond America 
by Jeremy Jennings.
Harvard, 544 pp., £34.95, March, 978 0 674 27560 7
Show More
Show More
... America itself was constantly on the move, due in no small measure to partible inheritance laws which, in contrast to primogeniture, destroyed the bond between family and land and forced the dispossessed children of the gentry to break their own ground in ‘the valleys of the Mississippi’. Even everyday language was volatile: old words took on new ...

Always look in the well

Rachel Nolan: Guatemala’s Graves, 13 July 2023

Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics and What Remains 
by Alexa Hagerty.
Wildfire, 296 pp., £22, March, 978 1 4722 9577 4
Show More
Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velásquez and Her Father’s Quest for Justice 
by Victoria Sanford.
California, 200 pp., £24, May, 978 0 520 39345 5
Show More
Show More
... the remains of Josef Mengele and giving congressional testimony about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among other high-profile cases. He died nine years ago, but the colourful interviews and writings he left behind enable Hagerty to provide a substantial account. In 1984, Snow, a chain-smoker in cowboy boots, was invited to Argentina by the ...

The Lives of Ronald Pinn

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 January 2015

... I noted down the names of Paul Ives, Graham Paine (‘who lost his life by drowning’), Clifford John Dunn, Ronald Alexander Pinn and John Hill, all of whom were born in the 1960s, as I was, and died early.The practice of using dead children’s identities began in the Metropolitan Police Force in the 1960s. Until very ...

All I Can Stand

Thomas Powers: Joseph Mitchell, 18 June 2015

Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the ‘New Yorker’ 
by Thomas Kunkel.
Random House, 384 pp., £22.50, April 2015, 978 0 375 50890 5
Show More
Show More
... out in sermons was no-nonsense description of God’s determination to punish those who broke his laws with eternal torment in a fiery hell. Planted early and repeated often this dark theology can be hard to shake. Some Southerners after they grow up and move north leave the Baptist horrors behind, but not Mitchell. I would say that he did not really believe ...

Fugitive Crusoe

Tom Paulin: Daniel Defoe, 19 July 2001

Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions 
by Maximilian Novak.
Oxford, 756 pp., £30, April 2001, 0 19 812686 7
Show More
Political and Economic Writings of Daniel Defoe 
edited by W.R. Owens and P.N. Furbank.
Pickering & Chatto, £595, December 2000, 1 85196 465 7
Show More
Show More
... to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like John Toland. He believes in a ‘legal limited monarchy’, and has a humane idea of consensus and national unity within such an arrangement. He is an active, adept pragmatist, a revolutionary moderate. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe speaks of Crusoe’s ‘life of ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences