Purges and Paranoia

Ella George, 24 May 2018

“... of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Turkish republic has been ably told in these pages by Perry Anderson.* The founding of the republic in 1923 was a largely authoritarian affair, even if the declaration of popular sovereignty represented a break with the imperial past. Tightly controlled elections gave Mustafa Kemal the presidency of what by ...”

Who holds the welding rod?

James Meek: Our Turbine Futures, 15 July 2021

“... that is now one of global consumer capitalism’s great foundries. After the Second World War, Perry Anderson wrote in 2002, the historical links between capital and the national, on one hand, and labour and the international, on the other, were broken. ‘Nationalism becomes predominantly a popular cause, of exploited and destitute masses, in an ...”

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: Reform’s Disaster Capitalism, 25 September 2025

“... the Humber in the bustling membership enclosure. The previous night, he had been drinking with Lee Anderson, the MP for Ashfield and another host on GB News. ‘We’re the party with characters.’ But Reform’s darker vistas were also visible. A young American woman who lives in London told me she couldn’t understand why Farage had appointed the ...”

Infinite Wibble

Ian Penman: Brian v. Eno, 25 September 2025

What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory 
by Brian Eno and Bette A.
Faber, 122 pp., £14.99, January, 978 0 571 39551 4
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A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary 1995 
by Brian Eno.
Faber, 441 pp., £16.99, March 2023, 978 0 571 37462 5
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“... Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost erotic.Eno’s young life was lived ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: Bennett’s Dissection, 1 January 2009

“... that it was made by Proust’s tailor. 18 April. A pre-operation session at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson wing of UCH down Huntley Street, in which Siobhan, a nice, cheerful and silly nurse, takes me through the same questionnaire I answered twice last week. She then takes me in to see the anaesthetist, and he goes through the same questionnaire. He’s ...”

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

“... the editing and presenting of that work in a way that was of permanent historical value. Perry Anderson of Verso Books had the same thought, and I put it to Julian that the WikiLeaks Map of the World should be a series which provided for a proper academic study of what the biggest security leaks in history had revealed, with expert ...”

Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
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The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
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“... about the place. (His distaste for George Steiner took something of the same form.) Incidentally, Perry Anderson’s general matrix of the ‘White’ intellectual emigration, which suggested that the radical exiles went to America while the conservative ones – with Gellner exempted – settled in England, understates the manner in which Berlin’s ...”