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A Novel without a Hero

Christopher Ricks, 6 December 1979

The Mangan Inheritance 
by Brian Moore.
Cape, 336 pp., £5.50
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... It is Waverley itself which defines the kind of success gained here, for it is Waverley which Donald Davie celebrated in these terms in The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott: ‘The hero in the lost-father fable has to be what Scott and the others have made him – wavering (there is a sort of pun with “Waverley”), inconstant, mediocre, weak. How else should ...

We blitzed it

Laleh Khalili: Inhabiting the Oil World, 4 August 2022

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century 
by Helen Thompson.
Oxford, 384 pp., £20, February 2022, 978 0 19 886498 1
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... the protection of Indigenous sacred sites, but also about the origins of property, sovereignty and justice. They questioned notions of unrestricted growth fuelled by hydrocarbons. The protesters were imaginative in strategy and language, drawing on symbols, myths and rituals to bring attention to the cause. In Oceti Sakowin cosmology the Dakota Access Pipeline ...

Populism and the People

Jan-Werner Müller, 23 May 2019

... of the people themselves appropriating what was rightfully theirs. Both Fidesz and the Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland moved smartly to take control of the courts and exert power over the media. It was made clear that journalists should not report in ways that violated the interests of the nation, equated with the interests of the ruling party. Like ...

Because We Could

David Simpson: Soldiers and Torture, 18 November 2010

None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture 
by Joshua Phillips.
Verso, 237 pp., £16.99, September 2010, 978 1 84467 599 9
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... them? The ‘few bad apples’ theory was widely discredited from its very first utterance by Donald Rumsfeld, so it is disheartening to see it replicated in some of the statements still coming from the MoD. But at the other extreme, the idea that a coherent mandate condoning torture runs all the way along the chain of command is also hard to credit, if ...

More than a Million Names

Mattathias Schwartz: American Intelligence, 16 June 2016

Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror 
by Michael Hayden.
Penguin, 464 pp., £21.99, February 2016, 978 1 59420 656 6
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... one innocent suffer’ according to William Blackstone’s famous ratio. For the US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the 4 per cent of convicts exonerated after execution are significant enough to justify sparing the other 96 per cent. It was Benjamin Franklin who said it was folly to trade ‘essential liberty’ for ‘a little temporary ...

In Need of a New Myth

Eric Foner: American Myth-Making, 4 July 2024

A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America 
by Richard Slotkin.
Harvard, 512 pp., £29.95, March, 978 0 674 29238 3
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... points out, claimed to be an exercise in what today is called judicial ‘originalism’. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s infamous pronouncement in Dred Scott that Black persons had ‘no rights which the white man is bound to respect’ purported to reflect the founders’ racial views at the time the Constitution was written.White Southerners’ efforts ...

Let Them Drown

Naomi Klein, 2 June 2016

... mattered was the principle of respect for all human rights equally and the need for restorative justice to inform our actions and policies. This perspective is deeply relevant in our time of eroding coastlines, of nations disappearing beneath rising seas, of the coral reefs that sustain entire cultures being bleached white, of a balmy Arctic. This is ...
... and Lonrho’s boss, Roland ‘Tiny’ Rowland, in his Cheapside headquarters, and the editor, Donald Trelford. This began over an article Trelford wrote about atrocities in Zimbabwe. The main point made in 1982 was in line with evidence given to the Monopolies Commission by the paper’s former editor David Astor, by the chairman of the Observer Trust ...

Mailer’s Muddy Friend

Stephen Ambrose, 1 September 1988

Citizen Cohn 
by Nicholas von Hoffman.
Harrap, 483 pp., £12.95, August 1988, 0 245 54605 7
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... and innuendo. His main characteristic was cynicism. And yet his friends included Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Norman Mailer, Barbara Walters (they almost married), Cardinal Spellman, nearly all the top Mafia people, Richard Nixon, Si Newhouse, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, William F. Buckley, an endless list of Congressmen and judges and ...

Diary

John Lloyd: Split Scots, 25 June 1992

... Great Britishness. Thus within this intellectual construct is the suggestion that constitutional justice for Scotland would challenge the rotten fabric of the Ukanian state: hence it is a Common Cause beyond the Borders. Even after some reverses in the General Election and in the May local elections, Labour is still the dominant party in Scotland (though ...

Desperado as Commodity

Alex Harvey: Jean-Patrick Manchette, 26 May 2022

The N’Gustro Affair 
by Jean-Patrick Manchette, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
NYRB, 180 pp., £12, September 2021, 978 1 68137 512 0
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No Room at the Morgue 
by Jean-Patrick Manchette, translated by Alyson Waters.
NYRB, 188 pp., £12, August 2020, 978 1 68137 418 5
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... records his life story on a tape which is played by Marshal Oufiri, an African minister of justice inducted by the French into a murderous form of rule. Manchette creates a Brechtian distancing effect by describing Butron’s death in the first pages:The bullet pierces his heart and exits his back beneath the left shoulder blade, leaving a hole the ...

Candidate Macron

Jeremy Harding: The French Elections, 16 March 2017

... summons up resentment and a sense of unfinished business. But this simple description doesn’t do justice to the restlessness of the Algerian question, its tropism, or its susceptibility to fashion. Macron says he doesn’t like the word ‘centrism’, but he wants to make it the new fashion in French politics. He has had to run at the presidency from an ...

Diary

Linda Kinstler: At the 6 January trials, 26 September 2024

... had received the same summons. I already knew that 4 March had been set as the start date of Donald Trump’s criminal trial for his efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election. If everything went according to plan, the trial would finish before the Republican National Convention in July. I was instructed to fill out a questionnaire and prepare ...

How Utterly Depraved!

Deborah Friedell: What did Ethel know?, 1 July 2021

Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy 
by Anne Sebba.
Weidenfeld, 288 pp., £20, June 2021, 978 0 297 87100 2
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... and the chief prosecutors were Jewish. One of them was the 24-year-old Roy Cohn, now best known as Donald Trump’s mentor in his Studio 54 days. We would clean up after ourselves.The prosecution’s case depended almost entirely on the testimony of the Greenglasses. Ruth testified that in 1944 Julius had asked her to visit David in New Mexico and to persuade ...

Ever Closer Union?

Perry Anderson, 7 January 2021

... a complex composed of five principal institutions: the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Central Bank. A consideration of these can begin with the term conventionally encompassing the story of their development, ‘European integration’. This came from America, as Patel has ...

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