On Thinning Ice

Michael Byers: When the Ice Melts, 6 January 2005

Impacts of a Warming Arctic: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment 
Cambridge, 139 pp., £19.99, February 2005, 0 521 61778 2Show More
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... only in zoos. In the two hundred years since industrialisation – a geological millisecond – we’ve increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere by 35 per cent; a third of that has appeared in the last four decades. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, such as methane, trap heat that would otherwise radiate into ...

Diary

Christian Lorentzen: The Democratic Convention, 11 August 2016

... victims here to prove that ‘America is already great,’ ‘love trumps hate’ and ‘we’re stronger together.’ These were the convention’s three slogans. The first is risky in a country with evident self-esteem issues. The second puts the opponent’s name at its centre. The last doesn’t appeal to individualists who think they’re ...

Diary

Tom Crewe: Homelooseness, 22 April 2021

... from.I was born in Middlesbrough (like my mother and her parents) at the tail-end of Thatcherism. We lived at first in the next-door borough, Stockton-on-Tees, where I went to school until I was sixteen. In 1997, I was playing by our front gate when an election car, tannoy mounted on the roof, drove up the street. A man got out and handed me a New Labour ...

Diary

Adewale Maja-Pearce: In Monrovia, 6 February 2020

... own citizens go before an international criminal court.There was also the awkward fact that the George W. Bush administration (in concert with Tony Blair’s government) was at the time waging an even more devastating (and equally illegal) war on Iraq, also to unseat a president, and that a previous administration had ...

Green Pastel Redness

Colin Kidd: The Supreme Court Coup, 24 March 2022

Dissent: The Radicalisation of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Supreme Court 
by Jackie Calmes.
Twelve, 478 pp., £25, July 2021, 978 1 5387 0079 2
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Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months that Transformed the Supreme Court 
by Linda Greenhouse.
Random House, 300 pp., £22.50, November 2021, 978 0 593 44793 2
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... recent history have magnified the court’s profile; its partisan contortions in favour of George W. Bush in the case of Bush v. Gore decided the 2000 presidential election. But nothing has done more to push the court into the public eye than abortion. In Britain abortion was ...

Back to the Cold War?

Michael Byers: Missile Treaties, 22 June 2000

... missile attack’. When President Clinton signed the law in July 1999, he stated: ‘Next year, we will, for the first time, determine whether to deploy a limited National Missile Defense.’ That decision is fast approaching. Referred to by some of its proponents as ‘son of Star Wars’, the NMD system is a scaled-down version of Ronald Reagan’s plan ...

In Tegucigalpa

John Perry: The Honduran Coup, 6 August 2009

... Sun. Later, Negroponte was one of several veterans of the Contra war restored to high office by George W. Bush: he was made ambassador to Iraq in 2004. Challenged about the death squads in Honduras during his Congressional hearings, he again denied knowledge of them. In 1990, worn down by the crippling effects of the ...

The Nominee

Andrew O’Hagan: With the Democrats, 19 August 2004

... on My Mind’, and said: ‘After 9/11, America stood proud . . . but in just 34 months we have watched with deep concern as this good will has been squandered by a virtually unbroken series of mistakes . . . At stake is nothing less than our nation’s soul.’ Hillary Clinton appeared in a canary yellow trouser suit and the crowd went ...

Iran’s Bomb: A Revision

Norman Dombey: Iran’s Bomb: A Revision, 24 January 2008

... The US defence and intelligence community launched a pre-emptive strike at George Bush and Richard Cheney on 3 December. The new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released that day concluded: ‘We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme ...

Fellow Freaks

Sam Thompson: Wells Tower, 9 July 2009

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned 
by Wells Tower.
Granta, 238 pp., £10.99, April 2009, 978 1 84708 048 6
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... an exploration of the places where Florida’s natural splendours meet its tourist industry (‘We had to build a fence around it, construct several gift shops on it and set it to a fake-calypso soundtrack in order to save it’). He has ventured beyond the cultural comfort zone of the East Coast liberal into territories shaped by the ...

Bad Times

Andy Beckett: Travels with Tariq Ali, 20 February 2025

You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024 
by Tariq Ali.
Verso, 799 pp., £35, November 2024, 978 1 80429 090 3
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... Cat Ballou in 1967 has also survived, although it is now an evangelical church. Gott insisted that we visit La Cancha … the indigenous market opposite the old railway station … Little has changed since 1967, though the quality seems to have declined a bit. I bought two cheap tin plates painted with flowers, which turned out to have been made in China.In ...

So Much to Hate

Bernard Porter: Rudyard Bloody Kipling, 25 April 2002

The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling 
by David Gilmour.
Murray, 351 pp., £22.50, March 2002, 0 7195 5539 6
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... In his later years he lost many of the friends he had, except the most right-wing ones and King George V, who found Kipling the only literary figure he could get on with at all. He lost them not only because of his own reactionary views, but also because of the mood they put him in – of dark, unattractive pessimism – and the way he expressed them, often ...

Poor George

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 7 March 1991

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power 
by Daniel Yergin.
Simon and Schuster, 877 pp., £20, January 1991, 0 671 50248 4
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... cents a gallon. Reporters sought Billy’s opinion on the future. ‘That’s overseas. Nothing we can do about that till the Arabs get the price right.’ In less than six months the price of West Texas Intermediate, the standard for the futures market that had started three years before on the New York Exchange, had fallen by three-quarters. In the ...

What’s your story?

Terry Eagleton, 16 February 2023

Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative 
by Peter Brooks.
NYRB, 173 pp., £13.99, October 2022, 978 1 68137 663 9
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... high theory so readily entered everyday language. The narratologists had given birth to a monster: George W. Bush announced that ‘each person has got their own story that is so unique’; ‘We are all virtuoso novelists,’ the philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote. What Brooks glumly calls ...

You must do something

Randall Kennedy: John Lewis fights for freedom, 23 October 2025

John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community 
by Raymond Arsenault.
Yale, 558 pp., £25, February 2024, 978 0 300 28181 1
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John Lewis: A Life 
by David Greenberg.
Simon & Schuster, 704 pp., $23, October 2024, 978 1 9821 4300 8
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... the University of Chicago, had written several books, was the president of two colleges and knew W.E.B. DuBois and Albert Einstein. Lewis attended segregated schools then the American Baptist Theological Seminary; Bond went to the George School, a virtually all-white Quaker prep school in Pennsylvania, before returning to ...