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Real Questions

Ian Hamilton, 6 November 1986

Staring at the Sun 
by Julian Barnes.
Cape, 195 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 0 224 02414 0
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... enterprise would have been seriously imperilled: This is what happened. On a calm, black night in June, 1941, Sergeant-Pilot Thomas Prosser was poaching over Northern France. His Hurricane 11B was black in its camouflage paint. Inside the cockpit, red light from the instrument panel fell softly on Prosser’s hands and face; he glowed like an avenger ...

Diary

John Barrell: On Allon White, 29 August 1991

... writing Too close to the bone – this must have been in March 1988. A few weeks later Jacqueline Rose and I went away with Jen White and Allon to spend a night in Wells and to look at the cathedral, which Allon knew by heart from photographs but had never seen. By now, a second bone-marrow transplant seemed to have failed; he was very weak, and had to spend ...

Diary

Paul Foot: The Impotence of Alan Clark, 5 August 1993

... really worth while. Fuck them.’ Fuck them indeed, but only up to a point. Six months later on 14 June 1988, he trumpeted: We are now poised to put in place my personal chef d’oeuvre, the Fur Labelling Order. It has to lie on the table for a month, and then a brief debate in the House after ten, and if necessary a perfunctory whipped vote on a two liner. I ...

Spanish for Beginners

Lorna Scott Fox, 14 November 1996

Lola Montez: A Life 
by Bruce Seymour.
Yale, 468 pp., £20, May 1996, 0 300 06347 4
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... So began a rampage around Europe from Hamburg to Petersburg and beyond. Could a common English rose have got away with the scenes and scandals Lola created? Much was forgiven her in the name of southern fire and the lovely, ‘obviously Spanish face’, in the words of a Dresden critic, one of a thrilled and horrified chorus spouting similar nonsense ...

A Minor Irritant to the French Authorities

Fred Halliday, 20 February 1997

Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power 
by David Marr.
California, 602 pp., $50, October 1995, 0 520 07833 0
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... eve of World War Two it still appeared secure. The war created a new situation in Indochina: after June 1940, the French administration sided with Vichy, then, once Tokyo had entered the war in 1941, fell under the overall control of the Japanese, who chose to rule the area indirectly through the French, a situation that prevailed right up to March ...

Family Business

Fred Halliday, 17 July 1997

... opposed to Saudi Arabia in Yemen Qatar, among Palestinians and, more recently, in Syria. On 24 June it ran the story of Aitken interfering with witnesses alongside the Guardian cartoon by Austin showing two Gulf Arabs holding a sword marked ‘Truth’, and the caption, ‘They’re for Sale from the British.’ Between such extremes there is little room ...

Chef de Codage

Brian Rotman: Codes, 15 July 1999

Between Silk and Cyanide: The Story of SOE’s Code War 
by Leo Marks.
HarperCollins, 614 pp., £19.99, November 1998, 0 00 255944 7
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... each recruiting and running its own partisans, SOE was an intelligence professional’s bad dream. June 1942: enter young Leo Marks. Having failed to convince the cryptographic services that he was suitable for the coding unit at Bletchley, but evincing a wayward brilliance that indicated he was too smart to do routine work, Marks was assigned to keep an eye ...

Impossibility

Robert Crawford, 18 September 1997

... exiled, waving from twenty thousand leagues Under force eights the Lusitania, Hood, Tirpitz, Mary Rose lie barnacled, Cell-like binnacles of another life Lost to the world above but frozen here Among squid, mantas, coral, nameless shoals Writhing in a lurid, marine Somme Is the sea Scottish? What are the oceans’ flags? Britannia is ash on the surface of the ...

Those bastards, we’ve got to cut them back

Daniel S. Greenberg: Bush’s Scientists, 22 September 2005

The Republican War on Science 
by Chris Mooney.
Basic Books, 288 pp., £14.99, October 2005, 0 465 04675 4
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... of annual growth in government outlays for research, presidential medal-pinning ceremonies in the Rose Garden for revered elders of the profession, and expressions of respect for science produce a wonderful tranquillising effect on the endless frontier. With rare exceptions, this combination has prevailed for most of the collaboration between science and ...

Angry White Men

R.W. Johnson: Obama’s Electoral Arithmetic, 20 October 2011

... before. No less striking is that whereas in 2008, 78 per cent of Jews voted for Obama, a poll in June this year found that only 56 per cent still supported him. By a majority of more than seven to one, Jewish Democrats take Israel’s side against the president and by more than two to one they agree that he is ‘naive in thinking he can make peace with the ...

Pollutants

Antony Lerman: The Aliens Act, 7 November 2013

Literature, Immigration and Diaspora in Fin-de-Siècle England: A Cultural History of the 1905 Aliens Act 
by David Glover.
Cambridge, 229 pp., £55, November 2012, 978 1 107 02281 2
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... Britain’s Jews was relatively secure, became more problematic as social and political tensions rose. The Jewish population, around 60,000 in 1880, was 180,000 by 1905; anti-Jewish sentiment also increased. There were claims that East European Jews were essentially un-English and unassimilable and that Britain should avoid ‘a premature fusion with ...

Past Its Peak

Michael Klare: The Oil Crisis, 14 August 2008

... was beginning to falter. According to the Statistical Review of World Energy, published every June by BP, oil consumption jumped from 69.5 million barrels a day at the end of 1995 to 85.2 million barrels at the end of 2007. Some of this huge rise was generated by increased fuel consumption in the United States (where giant SUVs had become all the ...

Buckle Up!

Tim Barker: Oil Prices, 1 June 2017

Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices 
by Robert McNally.
Columbia, 300 pp., £27.95, January 2017, 978 0 231 17814 3
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... was spare capacity: control over existing oilfields that could be brought on line when demand rose and shuttered when demand fell. At one point, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had occupied this role; in the Opec era, Saudi Arabia did its best. But the role of swing producer exacts serious costs. You have to be willing to buy dear and sell cheap, because the ...

Short Cuts

David Todd: Bonapartism, Gaullism, Macronism, 1 August 2024

... politics.There was an echo of Murat’s laconic severity in Emmanuel Macron’s announcement on 9 June 2024: ‘I therefore dissolve the National Assembly.’ An hour earlier, exit polls had shown that his party, Renaissance, and its allies had been routed by the far right in elections for the European Parliament. The dissolution wasn’t a coup in the ...

Imperial Narcotic

Neal Ascherson, 18 November 2021

We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire 
by Ian Sanjay Patel.
Verso, 344 pp., £20, April 2021, 978 1 78873 767 8
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... Empire Windrush, bringing eight hundred Caribbean passengers to Britain, docked at Tilbury on 21 June 1948, while the act was still going through Parliament. Here again, myth has fogged up the truth. It’s vaguely believed that Britain deliberately recruited Jamaicans to relieve the desperate postwar labour shortage. But the opposite was true. Although one ...

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