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Touch of Evil

Christopher Hitchens, 22 October 1992

KissingerA Biography 
by Walter Isaacson.
Faber, 893 pp., £25, September 1992, 0 571 16858 2
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... Lord Macaulay so crisply profiled Frederick ‘the Great’. Walter Isaacson’s new study of Kissinger shows beyond doubt that he rose to power by intriguing for and against an ally, the South Vietnamese military junta, whom he had sworn to defend, and that in the process of covering his tracks, consolidating and extending his power and justifying his ...

The Estate Agent

Terry Eagleton: Stanley Fish, 2 March 2000

The Trouble with Principle 
by Stanley Fish.
Harvard, 328 pp., £15.50, December 1999, 0 674 91012 5
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... Fish’s appeals to history are almost always gestural. He means by history something like what Henry Kissinger means by it – that is, as far back as he can remember. This is a pity, since if he had a rather richer sense of the past he might recognise that the universalist liberal principles he abhors were once the last word in iconoclasm. In the age ...

God’s Godfather

Douglas Johnson, 6 October 1983

God’s Banker: An Account of the Life and Death of Roberto Calvi 
by Rupert Cornwell.
Gollancz, 260 pp., £8.95, September 1983, 0 575 03351 7
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A Man of Honour: The Autobiography of a Godfather 
by Joseph Bonnano and Sergio Lalli.
Deutsch, 416 pp., £9.95, September 1983, 0 233 97609 4
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The Biggest Game in Town 
by A. Alvarez.
Deutsch, 186 pp., £8.95, September 1983, 0 233 97521 7
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... revealed Gelli’s friendship with all sorts of powerful international figures: the inevitable Henry Kissinger, Mr Moon, Vice-President Bush and the President of the World Bank, Robert McNamara. More serious was the realisation that the antique-dealer, Deverini, who was accused of having helped Gelli to enter Monaco illegally, had earlier been accused ...

God’s Medium

Sam Miller, 3 April 1986

The Mantle of the Prophet 
by Roy Mottahedeh.
Chatto, 416 pp., £12.95, January 1986, 0 7011 3035 0
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... never parochial in his outlook. At the Harvard International Summer Seminar of 1965, directed by Henry Kissinger, he told Ralph Ellison: ‘I believe that the problem of American blacks comes from the two refuges they have constructed for themselves: Christianity and jazz.’ But he became more and more apolitical and pessimistic. Despite his return to ...

Having it both Ways

Adam Phillips, 5 November 1992

Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety 
by Marjorie Garber.
Routledge, 443 pp., £25, May 1992, 0 415 90072 7
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... and a waiting list 33 years long’ – members include, to mention only the more exhausted, Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan – has an annual retreat with its own musical comedy show, artfully entitled The Low Jinks. It has an all-male cast and an all-male audience; the biggest crowd-pleaser, one witness reported, was Bubbles Boobenheim, a drag ...

Who’s in, who’s out?

Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka: The Nonproliferation Complex, 23 February 2012

... that the Senate compromise didn’t attract any criticism from Perry, his abolitionist allies (Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn), or, indeed, from any prominent figure in the nonproliferation complex. One might have assumed that one of them would have publicly condemned the move, yet there was barely a peep. This could be because the complex ...

Beyond the Ballot Box

Tim Barker: Occupy and Bernie, 8 September 2016

Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt 
by Sarah Jaffe.
Nation, 352 pp., £20, August 2016, 978 1 56858 536 9
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... crazy powerful Trump. The powerless fall out of the picture, as Clinton woos Condoleezza Rice and Henry Kissinger. Every popular front leaves someone out. The Democratic Convention featured speakers ranging from the mothers of victims of police murder to Michael Bloomberg, an unapologetic defender as mayor of New York of stop-and-search policing. It did ...

Just like that

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Second-Guessing Stalin, 5 April 2018

Stalin, Vol. II: Waiting for Hitler, 1928-41 
by Stephen Kotkin.
Allen Lane, 1154 pp., £35, October 2017, 978 0 7139 9945 7
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... Stalin is not ‘the supreme realist – patient, shrewd and implacable’ – described by Henry Kissinger, or even the ‘rational and level-headed’ statesman following traditional Russian imperatives portrayed by the Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky. Kotkin’s Stalin is shrewd and crafty, but sometimes too crafty for his own good. He ...

To the Bitter End

Adam Tooze: The Nolde above the sofa, 5 December 2019

Emil Nolde: The Artist during the Third Reich 
edited by Bernhard Fulda, Aya Soika and Christian Ring.
Prestel, 320 pp., £45, May 2019, 978 3 7913 5894 9
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... when he – Schmidt – was a teenager that had turned him against the regime. With the help of Henry Kissinger and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Schmidt worked assiduously to promote Nolde’s work in the United States. He liked to boast that thanks to their combined efforts the Germans had dethroned the French Fauvists in the international ...

One of Those Extremists

Seth Anziska: Golda Meir, 13 July 2023

The Only Woman in the Room: Golda Meir and Her Path to Power 
by Pnina Lahav.
Princeton, 376 pp., £28, November 2022, 978 0 691 20174 0
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... president, Anwar Sadat. But she did keep a close eye on Arab military activities, and asked Henry Kissinger to reassure Syria and Egypt that she had no intention of starting a conflict. She also called for a partial troop mobilisation shortly before the attack, without which the country’s losses would probably have been even ...

The Caviar Club

Azadeh Moaveni: Rebel with a Hermès Scarf, 9 September 2021

The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Rejected and Rediscovered Modern Art 
by Donna Stein.
Skira, 277 pp., £38, March, 978 88 572 4434 1
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Epic Iran 
V&A, until 12 September 2021Show More
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... While US and European economies faltered, Iran’s soared, buoyed by high oil prices. When Henry Kissinger entreated the shah to freeze oil prices in 1975, he refused, and later cited the US government’s ‘threatening tone’ and ‘paternalistic attitude’. It was time, he argued, for the oil-rich nations of the global South – countries ...

British Chill

Anatol Lieven: What E.H.Carr Got Right, 24 August 2000

The Vices of Integrity: E.H.Carr 1892-1928 
by Jonathan Haslam.
Verso, 306 pp., £25, July 1999, 1 85984 733 1
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... it (when speaking of the results of the Russian Revolution), ‘an English historian can praise Henry VIII without being supposed to condone the beheading of wives.’ However, it is hard not to see a fairly direct line leading from Carr’s character to his historical method. Haslam notes his ‘congenital inability to put himself in the shoes of ...

A Narrow Band of Liberties

Glen Newey: Global order, 25 January 2001

Profit over People: Neo-Liberalism and Global Order 
by Noam Chomsky.
Seven Stories, 175 pp., £26, October 1998, 1 888363 82 7
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Acts of Aggression: Policing ‘Rogue’ States 
by Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark, edited by Edward Said.
Seven Stories, 62 pp., £4.99, May 1999, 1 58322 005 4
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The Umbrella of US Power: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Contradictions of US Policy 
by Noam Chomsky.
Seven Stories, 78 pp., £3.99, December 1998, 1 888363 85 1
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The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo 
by Noam Chomsky.
Pluto, 199 pp., £30, November 1999, 0 7453 1633 6
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... life, anarchism is not merely true, but a truism. After all, the likes of Saddam Hussein and Henry Kissinger aren’t the likeliest incarnations of Kant’s ‘moral politician’. These grotesques manifest what in private life would amount to a criminal tendency. And given the less than intergalactic psychic distance between political and random ...

The Hagiography Factory

Thomas Meaney: Arthur Schlesinger Jr, 8 February 2018

Schlesinger: The Imperial Historian 
by Richard Aldous.
Norton, 486 pp., £23.99, November 2017, 978 0 393 24470 0
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... 1946, well before McCarthyism, he published a detailed exposé of the American Communist Party in Henry Luce’s Life magazine. In Schlesinger’s telling, the minuscule communist presence in the country had ballooned into a vast left-wing conspiracy. ‘Communists are working overtime to expand party influence, open and covert, in the labour movement, among ...

Lectures about Heaven

Thomas Laqueur: Forgiving Germany, 7 June 2007

Five Germanys I Have Known 
by Fritz Stern.
Farrar, Straus, 560 pp., £11.25, July 2007, 978 0 374 53086 0
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... permanently fixed. (His account of the countess’s funeral, attended by a small group including Henry Kissinger, is one of the finest pieces of writing in the book.) Even his remarks on Brandt end by describing what he would write ten years later and a quote from what he actually did write in 1971. Stern is occasionally aware of how time has frozen ...

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