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Three Minutes of Darkness

Theo Tait: Hari Kunzru, 27 July 2017

White Tears 
by Hari Kunzru.
Hamish Hamilton, 271 pp., £14.99, April 2017, 978 0 241 27295 4
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... when he sang, ‘He’ll sure write his name up and down your back,’ House replied: ‘That means beat you up.’) Seth plays the song to Carter; they both find it ‘mesmerising’. They stay up until six in the morning, ‘cleaning up the recording and deciphering the words’, filtering out the background noise until they have ‘a clear a ...

How to Run a Caliphate

Tom Stevenson, 20 June 2019

... to suffer. Retributive justice was important, but the caliphate also encouraged loyalty by other means. Tamimi has translated the lyrics of dozens of anasheed – patriotic anthems written and recorded by the state’s Ajnad Foundation for Media Production. They vary in quality. Removing the ‘stain of humiliation’ is a common theme, as are the glories ...

Peasants wear ultramarine

Barbara Newman: Nuns with Blue Teeth, 10 February 2022

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts: The Phenomenal Book 
by Elaine Treharne.
Oxford, 248 pp., £30, October 2021, 978 0 19 284381 4
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Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and Their Makers 
by Mary Wellesley.
Riverrun, 372 pp., £25, October 2021, 978 1 5294 0093 9
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The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books 
by Elina Gertsman.
Penn State, 232 pp., £99.95, June 2021, 978 0 271 08784 9
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... bore sacred images in precisely that space. Readers working their way through the book could watch David or Job, the suffering Christ, the Virgin or the Trinity drawing nearer or receding from them as they prayed. Manuscripts bear telltale signs of their use. In fact, book historians love the sloppy readers who would have pained librarians of old. Marginal ...

The Most Learned Man in Europe

Tom Shippey: Anglo-Saxon Libraries, 8 June 2006

The Anglo-Saxon Library 
by Michael Lapidge.
Oxford, 407 pp., £65, January 2006, 0 19 926722 7
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... books. St Aldhelm of Malmesbury wrote a Latin riddle with the title arca libraria, but what that means is, clearly, ‘book-box’. Very few Anglo-Saxons had access to enough books to warrant even a bookshelf. As Michael Lapidge tells us, they kept their ‘libraries’ in boxes, and when an Anglo-Saxon scholar ‘wished to consult a book, he got down on his ...

Travels without My Aunt

Catherine Gallagher: The 18th-century family, 3 November 2005

Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748-1818 
by Ruth Perry.
Cambridge, 466 pp., £50, August 2004, 0 521 83694 8
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... nor is there any discussion of the difficulty of tracking changes in emotional life by means of a new genre whose appearance is said to coincide with those changes. Since there are no 17th-century domestic novels to use as comparisons, how would we know if the late 18th century’s novels are registering new phenomena? The marriage plot, the ...

Hooray Hen-Wees

John Christensen: Pinochet’s Millions, 6 October 2005

Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System 
by Raymond Baker.
Wiley, 438 pp., £16.99, September 2005, 0 471 64488 9
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... use of tax havens by virtually every major global bank and multinational business has nullified David Ricardo’s doctrine of comparative advantage. Fundamentalist advocates of a no-holds-barred approach to free trade have persistently turned a blind eye to this problem. For those like Baker – and myself – who believe that free and fair trade can ...

Children of the State

Yitzhak Laor: The Zionist manipulation of history, 26 January 2006

Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood 
by Idith Zertal.
Cambridge, 236 pp., £19.99, October 2005, 0 521 85096 7
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... chose to file a libel suit against Grunewald. What followed turned into the political trial of David Ben-Gurion and his party, to which Kastner belonged. Grunewald was acquitted. Kastner, the German-born judge wrote, ‘had sold his soul to the devil’. In Zertal’s view this was the beginning of Ben-Gurion’s downfall. Worn out by the scandal, he ...

Give me a Danish pastry!

Christopher Tayler: Nordic crime fiction, 17 August 2006

The Priest of Evil 
by Matti-Yrjänä Joensuu, translated by David Hackston.
Arcadia, 352 pp., £11.99, May 2006, 1 900850 93 1
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Roseanna 
by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, translated by Lois Roth.
Harper Perennial, 288 pp., £6.99, August 2006, 0 00 723283 7
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Borkmann’s Point 
by Håkan Nesser, translated by Laurie Thompson.
Macmillan, 321 pp., £16.99, May 2006, 0 333 98984 8
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The Redbreast 
by Jo Nesbø, translated by Don Bartlett.
Harvill Secker, 520 pp., £11.99, September 2006, 9781843432173
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Voices 
by Arnaldur Indridason, translated by Bernard Scudder.
Harvill Secker, 313 pp., £12.99, August 2006, 1 84655 033 5
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... refers to him as ‘that other detective … the sad one’, no one has to ask which one she means. A stocky man in his fifties, shabbily dressed, rumpled from sleeping in an armchair, he lives on ‘cold boiled sheep head’ and ‘tubs of curds’. He kills time by browsing in his book collection – mostly accounts of ‘missing persons in ...

Make enemies and influence people

Ross McKibbin: Why Vote Labour?, 20 July 2000

... that such attacks have done the Government any electoral good at all. To spend more, of course, means to tax more. As with spending, there have been surreptitious (or, like increases in petrol tax, would-be surreptitious) increases in taxation; but underspending can probably only be corrected, given the Government’s reluctance to borrow more, by increases ...

Endless Uncertainty

Colin Kidd: Adam Smith’s Legacy, 19 July 2001

Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment 
by Emma Rothschild.
Harvard, 366 pp., £30.95, June 2001, 0 674 00489 2
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... a powerful critic of the confessional fiscal-military states of 18th-century Europe, Britain by no means excluded. Smith complained of their ‘public prodigality and misconduct’, their ‘expensive and unnecessary wars’, their ‘great fleets and armies’. Nor did he care for the national prejudices which accompanied, and ...

It’s wild. It’s new. It turns men on

Yitzhak Laor: Amos Oz, 20 September 2001

The Same Sea 
by Amos Oz.
Chatto, 201 pp., £15.99, February 2001, 0 7011 6924 9
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... a major role in modern Hebrew prose, partly because it is an aestheticised (civilised, liberal) means of choking off the Other’s voice, leaving him or her the right to speak only on condition that the ‘I’ has the final say. Yet, when Oz speaks to himself, about himself, for the first time in his long public career, he sounds more sincere than he ever ...

A Man without Regrets

R.W. Johnson: Lloyd George, 20 January 2011

David Lloyd George: The Great Outsider 
by Roy Hattersley.
Little, Brown, 709 pp., £25, September 2010, 978 1 4087 0097 6
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... happily recorded in her diary how he had begged her to ‘join him’ when he died, presumably by means of a suicide pact of the kind that brought so much posthumous criticism on Arthur Koestler, who got his much younger and perfectly healthy wife to ‘join’ him. Frances, however, was concerned only that she might die first. Happily, she survived him by 27 ...

Everyone Loves Her

Will Frears: Stieg Larsson, 16 December 2010

Stieg Larsson, My Friend 
by Kurdo Baksi.
MacLehose Press, 143 pp., £14.99, 0 85705 021 4
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... money to a regional branch of the Communist Workers League; but the will was unwitnessed, which means it’s not valid under Swedish law, so his entire estate has gone to his brother and father. The estate, close to worthless at the time of his death, is now a multi-million-dollar concern. This has led, unsurprisingly, to acrimony. Larsson had been in a ...

Policing the Police

Fredrick Harris: The Black Panthers, 20 June 2013

Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party 
by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin.
California, 539 pp., £24.95, January 2013, 978 0 520 27185 2
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... who gained international notoriety, mostly through celebrated trials: Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, Ericka Huggins, Elaine Brown. But rather than focusing on the sensationalist and salacious aspects of the party’s history – the confrontations, violence, criminality – Bloom and Martin choose to recount ...

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