London Review of Books

Hope in the Desert

Eric Foner: Democratic Party Blues, 12 May 2022

What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party
by Michael Kazin.
Farrar, Straus, 396 pp., $35, March, 978 0 374 20023 7Show More

“... Old Hickory (Jackson). The central event of Jackson’s eight years as president (1829-37) was his war against the Bank of the United States, a private corporation chartered by Congress whose powers made it the closest thing to an American central bank until the creation of the Federal Reserve system in 1913. The Bank ...”

Something of Importance

Philip Williamson, 2 February 1989

The Coming of the First World War
edited by R.J.W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann.
Oxford, 189 pp., £22.50, November 1988, 0 19 822899 6Show More

The Experience of World War One
by J.M. Winter.
Macmillan, 256 pp., £17.95, November 1988, 0 333 44613 5Show More

Russia and the Allies 1917-1920. Vol II: The Road to Intervention, March-November 1918
by Michael Kettle.
Routledge, 401 pp., £40, June 1988, 0 415 00371 7Show More

Douglas Haig 1861-1928
by Gerald De Groot.
Unwin Hyman, 441 pp., £20, November 1988, 0 04 440192 2Show More

Nothing of Importance: A Record of Eight Months at the Front with a Welsh Battalion
by Bernard Adams.
The Strong Oak Press/Tom Donovan Publishing, 324 pp., £11.95, October 1988, 9781871048018Show More

1914-1918: Voices and Images of the Great War
by Lyn Macdonald.
Joseph, 346 pp., £15.95, November 1988, 0 7181 3188 6Show More

“... Publications about the Great War continue to proliferate, hardly needing additional stimulation from the 70th anniversary of the Armistice. The present books are just a few on the subject to appear during 1988, and despite publication dates close to 11 November only one of these seems to be a largely opportunistic production ...”

When students ruled the earth

D.A.N. Jones, 17 March 1988

1968: A Student Generation in Revolt
by Ronald Fraser.
Chatto, 370 pp., £14.95, January 1988, 0 7011 2913 1Show More

Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties
by Tariq Ali.
Collins, 280 pp., £12.95, November 1987, 9780002177795Show More

Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades
by David Caute.
Hamish Hamilton, 464 pp., £14.95, January 1988, 0 241 12174 4Show More

Nineteen Sixty-Eight: A Personal Report
by Hans Koning.
Unwin Hyman, 196 pp., £10.95, April 1988, 9780044401858Show More

“... 1968: I was editing the Black Dwarf, a magazine I intended to promote socialist ideas for working-class readers. It was welcomed, however, by a quite different readership – the ‘student generation in revolt’ of Ronald Fraser’s title – and I was made to surrender my editorship to Tariq Ali. Before my dismissal, I appeared on television to defend the ...”

After the Wars

Adam Tooze: Schäuble’s Realm, 19 November 2015

The Age of Catastrophe: A History of the West 1914-45
by Heinrich August Winkler, translated by Stewart Spencer.
Yale, 968 pp., £35, September 2015, 978 0 300 20489 6Show More

“... say that he belongs to two earlier moments. His Christian conservatism dates from the early Cold War, warmed over by the neoconservative revival of the 1980s for which Helmut Kohl was the battering ram. The social market economy is for Schäuble not simply an economic policy option but the social form most appropriate to humanity, in its fallibility and ...”

Entanglements

V.G. Kiernan, 4 August 1983

The Working Class in Modern British History: Essays in Honour of Henry Pelling
edited by Jay Winter.
Cambridge, 315 pp., £25, February 1983, 0 521 23444 1Show More

The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830-60
edited by James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson.
Macmillan, 392 pp., £16, November 1982, 0 333 32971 6Show More

Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of 19th-Century Working Class Autobiography
by David Vincent.
Methuen, 221 pp., £4.95, December 1982, 0 416 34670 7Show More

“... social conservatism, in all classes’. Part One of the collection, though entitled ‘The Working Class in British Politics’, shows it in mainly passive roles – acted on, by its leaders or misleaders, more often than it acted. Part Two, ‘The Working Class in British Society’, is more faithful to its title. Two ...”

From The Blog

Blitz Spirit

Tariq Ali, 13 August 2011

“... The general impression of the Blitz, fostered by war movies and many books, is of a period when intense national solidarity reigned supreme and class was transcended as everybody sang songs and went about their work. But Alexander Cockburn in Counterpunch draws attention to a piece by Gavin Mortimer (author of The Blitz) in the First Post on looting during 'our finest hour': It didn't take long for a hardcore of opportunists to realise there were rich pickings available in the immediate aftermath of a raid – and the looting wasn't limited to civilians ...”

Victory in Defeat

Neal Ascherson: Trotsky, 2 December 2004

The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-21
by Isaac Deutscher.
Verso, 497 pp., £15, December 2003, 1 85984 441 3Show More

The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-29
by Isaac Deutscher.
Verso, 444 pp., £15, December 2003, 1 85984 446 4Show More

The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-40
by Isaac Deutscher.
Verso, 512 pp., £15, December 2003, 1 85984 451 0Show More

“... of capitalism,’ Hobsbawm wrote in Age of Extremes, ‘was to save its antagonist both in war and peace – that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself.’ Again, interpretations of 1917 and its aftermath have changed almost out of recognition. Most contemporary readers of history probably agree that the ...”

Let every faction bloom

John Patrick Diggins, 6 March 1997

For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism
edited by Joshua Cohen.
Beacon, 154 pp., $15, August 1996, 0 8070 4313 3Show More

For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism
by Maurizio Viroli.
Oxford, 214 pp., £22.50, September 1995, 0 19 827952 3Show More

Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism
edited by John Bodnar.
Princeton, 352 pp., £45, September 1996, 0 691 04397 3Show More

Buring the Flag: The Great 1989-90 American Flag Desecration Controversy
by Robert Justin Goldstein.
Kent State, 453 pp., $39, July 1996, 0 87338 526 8Show More

“... was beginning to sense its impotence after the part it had played in bringing to an end the war in Vietnam, I was asked to give a talk at the University of Florence on the subject of American radicalism. Italian students and academics, many of them Marxists and feminists, seemed to appreciate my account of a student phenomenon that was unable to reach ...”

Poor Man’s Crime

Ian Gilmour, 5 December 1991

The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the 18th Century
by Peter Linebaugh.
Allen Lane, 484 pp., £25, September 1991, 0 7139 9045 7Show More

“... led by Oliver Cromwell and organised in Parliament, aroused the English proletariat to make war against Charles I, the High Church and the aristocracy. Having vanquished them, Cromwell then turned against his erstwhile class ally, the many-headed multitude, which during the course of the struggle against the King had ...”

Damsons and Custard

Paul Laity: Documentary cinema’s unsung poet, 3 March 2005

Humphrey Jennings
by Kevin Jackson.
Picador, 448 pp., £30, October 2004, 0 330 35438 8Show More

“... more generally acknowledged is partly because Jennings died only five years after the end of the war, at the age of 43, but mostly because, as Kevin Jackson says in this engaging, adulatory biography, he ‘spent most of his professional life not in the glamorous and highly publicised world of features’, but as a jobbing documentary-maker on the payroll of ...”

Diary

Christian Parenti: Who owns the rain?, 7 July 2005

“... and taxis were idle; garbage collection stopped; banks, hotels, offices, restaurants and middle-class neighbourhoods felt the pinch. Congress was unable to convene. Outnumbered and often undersupplied, the poorly paid paramilitary police fought highly theatrical but nonetheless violent street battles against tens of thousands of Aymara and Quechua ...”

Wild Words

Stuart Hampshire, 18 August 1983

A History of the Modern World: From 1917 to the 1980s
by Paul Johnson.
Weidenfeld, 832 pp., £16.50, April 1983, 0 297 78226 6Show More

“... F.D.R., he turned Washington into a city of hope: that is to say, a place where middle-class intellectuals flocked for employment.’ Now we know why there were pictures of Kennedy in bars and public places in Europe, as of Churchill, and previously of Roosevelt, but not of any other President on anything like a similar scale. About the missile ...”

The Great Unleashing

Jeremy Harding: The End of Jihad, 25 July 2002

Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam
by Gilles Kepel, translated by Anthony F. Roberts.
Tauris, 454 pp., £25, June 2002, 1 86064 685 9Show More

“... was no import substitution to speak of. Despite the existence of a moderately prosperous middle class, it was the political elite, senior bureaucrats and the various managerial strata of state enterprises who tended to benefit most from this situation. The FLN’s control of the export-import process, and its self-serving ways, eventually became known as ...”

From The Blog

Among School Children

, 5 May 2022

“... are taught in parallel programmes but others have joined regular classes. National limits on class sizes have been lifted. A Ukrainian school opened last month in central Warsaw. Some children have online lessons with their teachers from Ukraine. Some may not go to school at all. If I had saved my children from being shelled and living in basements, I ...”

Dirty Little Secret

Fredric Jameson: The Programme Era, 22 November 2012

The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
by Mark McGurl.
Harvard, 466 pp., £14.95, November 2012, 978 0 674 06209 2Show More

“... finding the tuition fees (the cost of living that life), is one of freedom, freedom from ideology (class interests have not yet come down like an iron cage), the freedom of discovery – sexuality, culture, ideas – and in a more subtle sense, perhaps, the freedom from nationality, from the guilt of class and of being an ...”

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