Purges and Paranoia
When military juntas imposed martial law at least there was always the hope that a return to civilian rule would bring a reprieve. Turkey today is a deeply traumatised society. The purges and detentions are a lottery: one signatory of a petition calling for peace with the Kurds is purged from higher education, another remains precariously employed; someone is detained for getting a mortgage from a now expropriated bank, someone else who held an account with the same bank is unaffected. Turks today confront the capriciousness of arbitrary power with no recourse to anything that resembles the rule of law. More
An Irish Problem
The abortion rate in Ireland will not fall if the referendum fails; it may not increase substantially if the referendum passes. But the relationship of pregnant women in Ireland to their own bodies will change, and change significantly, if the ‘Yes’ campaign is successful. I was born in 1991, the same year a Virgin Megastore in Dublin was raided for selling condoms without a pharmacist present. Two years before the decriminalisation of homosexuality. Four years before the legalisation of divorce. Twenty-seven years, I can only hope, before the repeal of the Eighth Amendment. More
An Autopsy
The two-state solution died because Netanyahu and successive Israeli governments were determined to kill it, and those who could have prevented its demise lacked the resolve and moral courage to do so. America failed in the mission it thought itself uniquely qualified to accomplish because it failed to understand that the diplomatic objective of a great power, and particularly the world’s greatest power, should not be peace, a goal that Netanyahu dishonestly embraced, but justice. More
That was the year that was
The French May erupted as we were about to launch the first issue of The Black Dwarf, which had come out looking miserabilist and unimaginative. It was generally felt that the cover was awful. We voted to pulp it and D.A.N. Jones, later of the LRB, walked out. We’d lost the editor. I was asked to take over and with the designer Robin Fior looking over my shoulder I wrote: WE SHALL FIGHT, WE WILL WIN: PARIS, LONDON, ROME, BERLIN. The vote was unanimous. We were for Utopia. More
Diary
‘Have I told you about my old friend who’s married to the Republican governor of Missouri?’ Too often, the answer was yes, I had – sometimes more than once. My Sheena story was my best story, the anecdote that rarely failed, which was fortunate, because I couldn’t stop telling it, usually in the same way, even with the same pauses and hand gestures. At the end, I would play on my phone one of Eric’s earliest campaign ads, in which he shoots a machine gun into a field as he promises to take ‘dead aim at politics as usual’. ‘If you’re ready for a conservative outsider,’ he says, ‘I’m ready to fire away.’ More
LATEST AUDIO AND VIDEO
AUDIO The problem with winning
In her Winter Lecture, Linda Colley asks whether Britain’s political stability has become too pronounced. Listen »
VIDEO Frock consciousness
Rosemary Hill looks at what happens between women and clothes, in her Winter Lecture. Watch »
