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Capos and Cardinals

Jonathan Steinberg, 17 August 1989

Fascism and the Mafia 
by Christopher Duggan.
Yale, 322 pp., £19.95, January 1989, 0 300 04372 4
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A Thief in the Night: The Death of Pope John Paul I 
by John Cornwell.
Viking, 301 pp., £14.95, May 1989, 0 670 82387 2
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... the ‘Iron Prefect’, a man of undoubted rigour and fortitude, to Palermo, armed with all the powers that a dictatorial regime could provide, and let him loose on thousands of rural cattle rustlers, peasant troublemakers and others, innocent and guilty alike. Hundreds were arrested and held without trial. Others went before courts in mass trials ...

Disorientation

Jonathan Coe, 5 October 1995

The Island of the Day Before 
by Umberto Eco.
Secker, 513 pp., £16.99, October 1995, 0 436 20270 0
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... one of Mazarin’s spies, and thereby finds himself caught up in trade wars between the European powers. Specifically, he is hired to find out whether the British, or the Dutch, have overcome the great stumbling block which has so far defeated the French navigators and cartographers – the ability to calculate longitude. There are further eggs to be thrown ...

And then there was ‘Playtime’

Jonathan Coe: Vive Tati!, 9 December 1999

Jacques Tati 
by David Bellos.
Harvill, 382 pp., £25, October 1999, 1 86046 651 6
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... fashions. The thought that a piece of slipshod, invention-free, self-satisfied garbage like Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me can clean up at the box office while Playtime remains unreleased in the US and all but forgotten in Europe … Well, not even Tati’s work, nor Bellos’s measured and affectionate tribute to it, can reconcile me to the horror of ...

Swank and Swagger

Ferdinand Mount: Deals with the Pasha, 26 May 2022

Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East 
by Jonathan Parry.
Princeton, 453 pp., £35, April, 978 0 691 18189 9
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... such an on-off affair, so fractious, elusive, splattered with froideurs and reconciliations. Jonathan Parry, a specialist in the 19th century, finds that his fellow historians have taken astonishingly little interest in British tangles in the Middle East in the first half of that century, though the relationship was then at its most intense. In fact, the ...

But this is fateful!

Theo Tait: Jonathan Lethem, 16 March 2017

The Blot: A Novel 
by Jonathan Lethem.
Cape, 289 pp., £16.99, February 2017, 978 0 224 10148 6
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The Blot 
by Jonathan Lethem and Laurence Rickels.
Anti-Oedipus, 88 pp., £6.99, September 2016, 978 0 9905733 7 1
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... Trying to make sense​ of Jonathan Lethem’s fiction as a whole is something of a fool’s errand: there is no easily discernible line from the early hipster science fiction to his big-selling detective story Motherless Brooklyn (1999), to his Cobble Hill coming-of-age novel The Fortress of Solitude (2003) to his intricate, ironic New York Buddenbrooks, Dissident Gardens (2013 ...

Mend and Extend

Jonathan Rée: Ernst Cassirer’s Curiosity, 18 November 2021

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 
by Ernst Cassirer, translated by Steve G. Lofts.
Routledge, 1412 pp., £150, September 2020, 978 1 138 90725 6
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... advertisements in the newspapers and commercial jingles on the radio, and was so taken with the Powers Girls that he resolved, with his customary smile, to follow their advice and never settle for any hair tonic except Kreml’s. But despite his affection for America, Toni knew that he could never abandon his ‘idea of Germany’ – ‘the land of ...

Sharing Secrets

Jonathan Lear: Christopher Bollas, 11 March 2010

The Evocative Object World 
by Christopher Bollas.
Routledge, 126 pp., £13.50, October 2008, 978 0 415 47394 1
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The Infinite Question 
by Christopher Bollas.
Routledge, 192 pp., £13.50, October 2008, 978 0 415 47392 7
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... based on his insight into Oedipus’ psychodynamics, rather than his own spiritual, supernatural powers or his better knowledge of the social context. On a more mundane plane, there have long been self-pitying drunks, people who get enraged at imagined slights, people who trip themselves up in romantic quests, and oafish tyrants who destroy their own ...

Can the virtuous person exist in the modern world?

Jonathan Lear: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Virtues, 2 November 2006

The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Vol. I 
by Alasdair MacIntyre.
Cambridge, 230 pp., £40, June 2006, 0 521 67061 6
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Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Vol. II 
by Alasdair MacIntyre.
Cambridge, 239 pp., £40, June 2006, 0 521 67062 4
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... perhaps the point of doing philosophy is to enable people to lead, so far as it is within their powers, philosophical lives.’ MacIntyre has a conception of the good life for human beings and he is spending his life explicating it, defending it and encouraging others to take it seriously. I am delighted by the brilliance of his thought, I admire the ...

Newton reinvents himself

Jonathan Rée, 20 January 2011

Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist 
by Thomas Levenson.
Faber, 318 pp., £9.99, August 2010, 978 0 571 22993 2
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... arts, and over a period of twenty years he had won himself a battery of quasi-monarchical powers throughout the Dutch provinces. He thanked God for sending the wind that sped him and 15,000 Dutch soldiers to Torbay on the auspicious date of 5 November; but he also took care to smooth the path of providence by means of a web of alliances with dissident ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: You had better look out, 10 December 1998

... pact? Not nice, but perhaps it means we shan’t be having to fight an alliance of three Fascist powers, including Franco’s Spain. Churchill as prime minister? All very well, but some of us remember the Dardanelles – and besides, look at the people around him! To be sure, reading the newspapers of the time can have something of the same effect, as is ...

Policy Failure

Jonathan Parry: The Party Paradox, 21 November 2019

The End Is Nigh: British Politics, Power and the Road to the Second World War 
by Robert Crowcroft.
Oxford, 284 pp., £25, May 2019, 978 0 19 882369 8
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... territorial ambition. In 1934 the chiefs of staff warned that Britain could not fight these three powers simultaneously and would have to make difficult defence choices. In 1935 a cautious rearmament programme began, but so did the appeasement of Mussolini’s aggression towards Abyssinia. Public opinion accepted Hitler’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland ...

A Regular Grey

Jonathan Parry, 3 December 2020

Statesman of Europe: a Life of Sir Edward Grey 
by T.G. Otte.
Allen Lane, 858 pp., £35, November, 978 0 241 41336 4
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... that their campaign in response to the Armenian atrocities of 1894-96 was an invitation to other powers to try once more to carve up the Ottoman Empire. His main concern was to educate Liberals to accept the reality of British power in the Nile valley and Eastern Africa. The Gladstonians had never confronted the consequences of their own occupation of Egypt ...

Francine-Machine

Jonathan Rée: Automata, 9 May 2002

Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen 
by Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak.
Getty, 416 pp., £30, February 2002, 0 89236 590 0
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The Secret Life of Puppets 
by Victoria Nelson.
Harvard, 350 pp., £20.50, February 2002, 0 674 00630 5
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Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life 
by Gaby Wood.
Faber, 278 pp., £12.99, March 2002, 0 571 17879 0
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... no reason, as he put it in the Discourse on Method in 1637, to think that the human body had any powers beyond those of the marvellous ‘self-moving machines or automata that can be made by human ingenuity’. The late treatise on the Passions rests entirely on the assumption that the body is a ‘machine’. Even the truculent hero of the Meditations will ...

Who started it?

Jonathan Steele: Who started the Cold War?, 25 January 2018

The Cold War: A World History 
by Odd Arne Westad.
Allen Lane, 710 pp., £30, August 2017, 978 0 241 01131 7
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... liberation grew within the former British, French and Dutch colonies in Asia. While the European powers sought to regain control over colonies that had fallen under Japanese occupation during the war, Washington saw things through the lens of the Cold War. Should it support its European allies in resisting change or get on board with the anticolonial ...

Was it better in the old days?

Jonathan Steele: The Rise of Nazarbayev, 28 January 2010

Nazarbayev and the Making of Kazakhstan 
by Jonathan Aitken.
Continuum, 269 pp., £20, July 2009, 978 1 4411 5381 4
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... long road to nation-building. Kazakhstan was the last of the 15 republics to declare independence. Jonathan Aitken is an unlikely candidate to write a book on this subject. Since emerging from prison after his conviction for perjury in 1999 he has written books about himself and other public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special ...

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