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Wolves in the Drawing Room

Neal Ascherson: The SNP, 2 June 2011

... Smith – had stayed in Scotland to lead the party and the devolved government at Holyrood? Only Donald Dewar took the train back north and became first minister of Scotland in 1999. It would be good to think that John Smith, who fought so hard to bring Labour-designed devolution about, might have boarded the same train had he not died so early. As it ...

Poland after PiS

Jan-Werner Müller, 16 November 2023

The New Politics of Poland: A Case of Post-Traumatic Sovereignty 
by Jarosław Kuisz.
Manchester, 344 pp., £20, November, 978 1 5261 5587 0
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... The president, Andrzej Duda, in office until 2025, remains beholden to Kaczyński’s Law and Justice Party (PiS); the judiciary, public media and state enterprises have been colonised by PiS cronies. It is important to understand how a supposedly unstoppable ‘illiberal’ trend was reversed in these elections; yet rather than complacently celebrating ...

Don’t tread on me

Brigid von Preussen: Into Wedgwood’s Mould, 15 December 2022

The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain 
by Tristram Hunt.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 0 241 28789 7
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... brilliance and rags-to-riches narrative. The epilogue to the American edition quoted Donald Trump, who claimed Wedgwood would have been honoured to be described as a tycoon. (This might say more about the publishers’ desire for a good quote than it does about Trump’s interest in jasperware.) Hunt offers an analogy that probably fits his own ...

The Price

Dan Jacobson: The concluding part of Dan Jacobson’s interview with Ian Hamilton, 21 February 2002

... and some will be justly winnowed. We could get down to winnowing right away. There’s an essay by Donald Justice on ‘Oblivion’, about how reputations disappear. And the subject has a lot of pathos, in that he talks about lives spent devoted to creative objectives with all that that involves; and yet some of those so devoted are doomed to be, at ...

Après Brexit

Ferdinand Mount, 20 February 2020

... want to achieve is a simplification of democracy. The overall goal is often described, and with justice, as a sort of national populism, of the kind practised by Orbán, Bolsonaro and Erdoğan. But the mechanisms by which this new style of politics is to be delivered and entrenched are peculiar to Britain.The Tory right always loathed what I’ll call for ...

Free-Marketeering

Stephen Holmes: Naomi Klein, 8 May 2008

The Shock Doctrine 
by Naomi Klein.
Penguin, 558 pp., £8.99, June 2008, 978 0 14 102453 0
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... interpretation of neoliberal theorists as hired propagandists for corporate masters does not do justice to the independent role of Friedman’s ideology as Klein herself explains it. Although Friedman’s ‘vision’ and ‘the interests of large multinationals’ sometimes coincided, overlap of interests is not the same as identity of outlook. The ...

Gloves Off

Glen Newey: Torture, 29 January 2009

Death by a Thousand Cuts 
by Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon and Gregory Blue.
Harvard, 320 pp., £22.95, March 2008, 978 0 674 02773 2
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Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story 
by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris.
Picador, 286 pp., £8.99, January 2009, 978 0 330 45201 4
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Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law 
by Philippe Sands.
Allen Lane, 315 pp., £20, May 2008, 978 1 84614 008 2
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... also chronicles the importation into Abu Ghraib of the relaxed standards on prisoner status which Donald Rumsfeld had already approved for Guantánamo (or ‘Gitmo’). The laxer standards allowed 18 interrogation techniques, including hooding, sensory and sleep deprivation, forced ‘grooming’, use of water, and ‘mild, non-injurious physical ...

Not No Longer but Not Yet

Jenny Turner: Mark Fisher’s Ghosts, 9 May 2019

k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 
edited by Darren Ambrose.
Repeater, 817 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 1 912248 28 5
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... round capital … all we can do is perhaps bolt on a couple of tethers as gestures towards social justice.’ Or, in the more aphoristic language of the book: ‘Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed.’The text begins with a discussion of Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón’s film from 2006, adapted from a P.D. James novel, set in a ...

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Adam Shatz: Mass Incarceration, 4 May 2017

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America 
by James Forman.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp., £21.98, April 2017, 978 0 374 18997 6
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... outlawing school segregation; and more black adults were under the control of the criminal justice system – whether in prison, on probation or on parole – than were enslaved in 1850. Once again, it seemed, the defeat of one system of racial oppression had given birth to another, only this one was concealed by the ennobling rhetoric of ...

A Regular Bull

Christopher Hitchens, 31 July 1997

Whittaker Chambers: A Biography 
by Sam Tanenhaus.
Random House, 640 pp., $35, February 1997, 0 394 58559 3
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... when recalled to Moscow, had a marked tendency to check out. (One such ‘disappeared’ member, Donald Robinson, falsely accused of contact with Trotsky in Mexico, later turned up in Hiss’s handwritten notes of the period and is the reason some on the left have always doubted Hiss’s word.) Chambers contrived to separate himself from the clandestine ...

Sure looks a lot like conservatism

Didier Fassin: Macronisme, 5 July 2018

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation 
by Sophie Pedder.
Bloomsbury, 297 pp., £25, June 2018, 978 1 4729 4860 1
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... surprise – and a shock – that the guest of honour at Macron’s first 14 July celebration was Donald Trump, whose style seems the exact opposite. But the affinities between the two go beyond their unforeseen rise to power (‘You are like me a winner, a dealmaker. We’re going to work very well together,’ Trump told Macron on the day after the ...

Hong Kong v. Beijing

Chaohua Wang: Hong Kong heats up, 15 August 2019

... democratic camp. To allay public frustration, both Hu Jintao, China’s president at the time, and Donald Tsang, the CE, promised further reforms. An NPCSC decision reached at the end of 2007 explicitly stated that although there would be only minor modifications for the double election of 2012 – of both CE and legislature – ‘universal suffrage’ would ...

Self-Positioning

Stefan Collini: The Movement, 25 June 2009

The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie and Their Contemporaries 
edited by Zachary Leader.
Oxford, 336 pp., £18.99, May 2009, 978 0 19 955825 4
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... Enright’s volume contained work by eight poets: Robert Conquest, D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain, to which list Conquest’s volume added the name of Thom Gunn. Insofar as there has ever been agreement on the matter, the Movement has been taken to consist of these nine writers. They ...

Something Fine and Powerful

Thomas Laqueur: Pearl Harbor Redux, 25 August 2011

Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq 
by John Dower.
Norton/The New Press, 596 pp., £22, October 2010, 978 0 393 06150 5
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... possessed. From there it morphed into an example of the ‘shock and awe’ so beloved of Donald Rumsfeld, the military doctrine of delivering ‘instant, nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction directed at influencing society writ large’ and thereby destroying the will of an enemy to resist. Here was Clausewitz’s ‘wish to ...

Like a Mosquito

Mattathias Schwartz: Drones, 4 July 2013

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield 
by Jeremy Scahill.
Serpent’s Tail, 642 pp., £15.99, May 2013, 978 1 84668 850 8
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... and Special Operations Forces (SOF). These commando squads grew quickly as the US military, led by Donald Rumsfeld, jockeyed with the CIA. Though it has received less attention than the drones, the use of commandos has continued to expand under Obama. Between 2009 and 2011, the number of raids carried out each month in Afghanistan reportedly grew from twenty ...

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