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The Reptile Oculist

John Barrell, 1 April 2004

... Treasury payroll.It was in the summer of 1792 that Taylor’s life began to get exciting. In early June he arrived in Edinburgh, on his majesty’s secret service, in time for the king’s birthday. By tradition this day had been celebrated in Scotland with carnivalesque disorder in the streets, and sometimes worse than that. This particular year, however, it ...

Stand and Die

Richard Overy: Rückzug, 10 October 2013

Rückzug: The German Retreat from France, 1944 
by Joachim Ludewig, edited by David Zabecki.
Kentucky, 435 pp., £33.95, September 2012, 978 0 8131 4079 7
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... like that conducted by Kesselring in Italy following the Allies’ capture of Rome in early June 1944, might have secured a more stable and defensible line in France and have held up the Allies for longer. But Hitler was also convinced that the main weight of the Allied attack would come in the Pas de Calais, making a powerful counter-offensive ...

Diary

Manjushree Thapa: The Maoists Come to Power, 8 May 2008

... the Maoists. In 1990, riding the wave of democracy that had swept through Eastern Europe, Nepal rose up once more against the autocracy in a movement led by the Nepali Congress and a coalition of leftist parties that included the Maoists, but was dominated by the party that went on to become the UML. A constitution was swiftly promulgated, turning the ...

A Little Holiday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Ben Hecht’s Cause, 23 September 2021

A Child of the Century 
by Ben Hecht.
Yale, 654 pp., £16, April 2020, 978 0 300 25179 1
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Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures 
by Adina Hoffman.
Yale, 245 pp., £10.99, April 2020, 978 0 300 25181 4
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... he had known, though he soon left her and their young daughter for the journalist and actress Rose Caylor. They married in 1926 and remained together until his death in 1964.At the end of the First World War, Hecht was sent to Europe as a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. He saw in Germany, he later wrote, ‘all the inhumanity that I note today ...

A Matter of War and Peace

James Buchan, 31 July 1997

... Maastricht Treaty, as glossed by a so-called Stability and Growth Pact adopted at Amsterdam on 16 June this year, the Governments of the Union must not spend more than they receive in taxes and other income each year than the equivalent of 3 per cent of their state’s national product. If they overspend that limit this year, or plan to do so next, they will ...

Too Proud to Fight

David Reynolds: The ‘Lusitania’ Effect, 28 November 2002

Wilful Murder: The Sinking of the ‘Lusitania’ 
by Diana Preston.
Doubleday, 543 pp., £18.99, May 2002, 0 385 60173 5
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Lusitania: Saga and Myth 
by David Ramsay.
Chatham, 319 pp., £20, September 2001, 1 86176 170 8
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Woodrow Wilson 
by John Thompson.
Longman, 288 pp., £15.99, August 2002, 0 582 24737 3
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... her decks. Within minutes the liner listed to starboard and her bow started to sink. As the stern rose in the water, four great propellers could be clearly discerned. Then she was gone. George Henderson was only six at the time. ‘I can still sit here now,’ he told a TV crew in 1994, ‘and see that great liner just sliding below the waves.’ The ...

Macron’s Dance

Jeremy Harding: France and Israel, 4 July 2024

... announced that Israel, which planned to send 74 of its arms and security companies to Paris in mid-June, would no longer be welcome at this year’s Eurosatory, a biennial arms bazaar hosted by France (the courts have just ruled the decision unconstitutional, too late for this year’s fair).The pro-Palestinian movement in France germinated in the late ...

Paralysed by the Absence of Danger

Jeremy Harding: Spain, 1937, 24 September 2009

Letters from Barcelona: An American Woman in Revolution and Civil War 
edited by Gerd-Rainer Horn.
Palgrave, 209 pp., £50, February 2009, 978 0 230 52739 3
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War Is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War 
by James Neugass.
New Press, 314 pp., £16.99, November 2008, 978 1 59558 427 4
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We Saw Spain Die: Foreign Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War 
by Paul Preston.
Constable, 525 pp., £9.99, June 2009, 978 1 84529 946 0
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... under Norman Thomas and perhaps, at university, an admirer of the young militants whose star rose in the party during the early 1930s. Lois sends a funny letter to her family in December 1936, responding to ‘Mother’s crack that she was sorry I was a Trotskyist’: ‘Lady, I ain’t no Trotskyist. You should read up on the position of the USA ...

A Piece of White Silk

Jacqueline Rose: Honour Killing, 5 November 2009

Murder in the Name of Honour 
by Rana Husseini.
Oneworld, 250 pp., £12.99, May 2009, 978 1 85168 524 0
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In Honour of Fadime: Murder and Shame 
by Unni Wikan, translated by Anna Paterson.
Chicago, 305 pp., £12.50, June 2008, 978 0 226 89686 1
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Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed 
by Ayse Onal.
Saqi, 256 pp., £12.99, May 2008, 978 0 86356 617 2
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... and traditions’ in the first draft). The resolution, which was refined and strengthened in June this year, is exemplary for the action it calls for against honour-related violence, but the word ‘archaic’ lifts the crime, and entire cultures – ‘archaic, unjust cultures’ – out of the complexities of modern life, indeed out of the heart of ...

Off with her head

John Lloyd, 24 November 1988

Office without Power: Diaries 1968-72 
by Tony Benn.
Hutchinson, 562 pp., £16.95, October 1988, 0 09 173647 1
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... In June of this year Tony Benn took part in a radio discussion on the working of Parliament, together with John Biffen and Roy (Lord) Jenkins. Asked by the chairman, Peter Hennessy, if he did not think that the Lords now functioned as a ‘focus of opposition’, Benn responded that it was, instead, ‘part of an attack on democracy ...

Family History

Miles Taylor: Tony Benn, 25 September 2003

Free at Last: Diaries 1991-2001 
by Tony Benn.
Hutchinson, 738 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 09 179352 1
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Free Radical: New Century Essays 
by Tony Benn.
Continuum, 246 pp., £9.95, May 2003, 9780826465962
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... With great pride and symbolism, he describes introducing his own son, Hilary, to the House in June 1999, just as his father had introduced him in 1950, and just as his grandfather, John Benn, had introduced William Wedgwood Benn in 1906. Such anecdotes make this the most personal and moving of Benn’s diaries to date. In political terms, however, this is ...

Wafted to India

Richard Gott: Unlucky Wavell, 5 October 2006

Wavell: Soldier and Statesman 
by Victoria Schofield.
Murray, 512 pp., £30, March 2006, 0 7195 6320 8
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... however inadequate, as the last great military commander of the British Empire. ‘Wavell’s star rose high at an early stage of the war,’ his friend Basil Liddell Hart wrote. ‘The glow was the more brilliant because of the darkness of the sky.’ He entered the army in 1900, aged 17 and straight from school. Commissioned a year later, he was sent to ...

Little Bottles

Philippa Tristram, 22 February 1990

The Miraculous Pigtail 
by Feng Jicai.
Chinese Literature Press, Beijing, 312 pp., September 1988, 0 8351 2050 3
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Mimosa 
by Zhang Xianliang.
Chinese Literature Press, Beijing, 170 pp., January 1987, 0 8351 1336 1
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Dialogues in Paradise 
by Can Xue, translated by Ronald Jansson.
Northwestern, 173 pp., $17.95, June 1989, 0 8101 0830 5
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Baotown 
by Wang Anyi.
Penguin, 143 pp., £11.95, May 1989, 0 670 82622 7
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The Broken Betrothal 
by Gao Xiaosheng.
Chinese Literature Press, Beijing, 218 pp., December 1987, 0 8351 2051 1
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At Middle Age 
by Shen Rong.
Chinese Literature Press, Beijing, 366 pp., December 1987, 0 8351 1609 3
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Snuff-Bottles, and Other Stories 
by Deng Youmei.
Chinese Literature Press, Beijing, 220 pp., January 1987, 0 8351 1607 7
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... one of my Chinese students described a Westerner’s day, he was succinct: his Western businessman rose at six o’clock to take his two snakes for an airing in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes; they stopped at a pub en route, emerged blind-drunk, and crashed the car into a scholartree. Sarah Lubman recently explained in the Washington Post that Chinese students ...

Short Cuts

Ferdinand Mount: Untilled Fields, 1 July 2021

... and binding machinery that solved the nagging labour shortage in the Midwest. Grain imports rose from only 2 per cent of Britain’s total supply in the 1830s to 45 per cent in the 1880s (65 per cent for wheat) and went on rising remorselessly. Already by 1900, wheatfields covered only half the acreage of 1872. The First World War and German U-boats ...

Taking Flight

Thomas Jones: Blake Morrison, 7 September 2000

The Justification of Johann Gutenberg 
by Blake Morrison.
Chatto, 259 pp., £14.99, August 2000, 0 7011 6965 6
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... a flat-bed printing press employing reusable type (see Charley Seavey’s letter to the LRB, 1 June) – but that doesn’t really matter for the purposes of the novel, the dynamic of which is dependent on the tension between his flawed character and his role as the founding genius of modernity. But the tension isn’t there, regardless of doubts about the ...

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