Otherwise Dealt With

Chalmers Johnson: ‘extraordinary rendition’, 8 February 2007

Ghost Plane: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Rendition Programme 
by Stephen Grey.
Hurst, 306 pp., £16.95, November 2006, 1 85065 850 1
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... jet with the registration number N379P painted on its tail. It took off at 2.40 a.m. for an unknown destination. As the Washington Post later reported, at 19.54 on 26 October, Anwar’s story was posted on the FreeRepublic.com website. A few minutes later a blogger reported the aircraft’s registered owner: Premier Executive Transport Services of ...

Alzheimer’s America

Mark Greif: Don DeLillo, 5 July 2007

Falling Man 
by Don DeLillo.
Picador, 246 pp., £16.99, May 2007, 978 0 330 45223 6
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... spaces and personal circles they move in. The book begins in an airplane, destination unknown, as the passengers watch the in-flight movie about revolutionary terrorists massacring a group of rich golfers and laughing: ‘We’re steeped in gruesomely humorous ambiguity,’ the narrator admits, ‘a spectacle of ridiculous people doing awful ...

The Old, Bad Civilisation

Arnold Rattenbury: Second World War poetry, 4 October 2001

Selected Poems 
by Randall Swingler, edited by Andy Croft.
Trent, 113 pp., £7.99, October 2000, 1 84233 014 4
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British Writing of the Second World War 
by Mark Rawlinson.
Oxford, 256 pp., £35, June 2000, 0 19 818456 5
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... of a Palaeolithic Cave’, which cover his agony at having survived soldier-comrades, known and unknown, and his emergence, subsequently, into the light of a history which continued nonetheless. (He began this last following a visit with Nancy Cunard to the Lascaux wall-paintings, themselves then newly come to light.) The two books in effect describe the ...

The English Disease

Hugh Pennington: Who’s to blame for BSE?, 14 December 2000

The BSE Inquiry 
by Lord Phillips et al.
Stationery Office, 5112 pp., £324.50, October 2000, 0 10 556986 0
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... the warm-blooded animals in which it has been looked for, from chickens to man. Its function is unknown. Genetic engineers have constructed mice that lack it and seem to have quite happy lives. It is located at the surface of many different cell types in the body; like other membrane proteins, it can be dissolved in chemicals that cause the coiled-up ...

Plan Colombia

Malcolm Deas, 5 April 2001

... In memoriam, Jesús Antonio Bejarano, murdered by unknown assassins on his way to class, 1999. Many more people continue to die in Colombia than in the Middle Eastern troubles between Israelis and Palestinians, and it’s high time more attention was paid to it internationally. It’s a country in the Northern Hemisphere and its capital city is within easy commuting distance of Miami ...

Big Bucks, Big Bangs

Chalmers Johnson: US intelligence and the bomb, 20 July 2006

Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea 
by Jeffrey Richelson.
Norton, 702 pp., £22.99, April 2006, 0 393 05383 0
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... originally designed to be 100 megatons but Khrushchev ordered the yield halved because of fears of unknown effects and the likely massive fallout. Had a 100-megaton bomb been tested, the US’s KC-135 aircraft monitoring Novaya Zemlya would not have made it back; as it was, it returned with a scorched fuselage. The nuclear arms race led to massive research ...

Restless Daniel

John Mullan: Defoe, 20 July 2006

The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography 
by John Richetti.
Blackwell, 406 pp., £50, December 2005, 0 631 19529 7
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A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe 
by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens.
Pickering & Chatto, 277 pp., £60, January 2006, 1 85196 810 5
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... Island of Great Britain was written even later than his novels, he would probably be entirely unknown to the general reader. He would, however, still be familiar to scholars interested in early 18th-century Britain, and its political and religious controversies. He was notorious long before he wrote those great and unprecedented works of fiction near the ...

Hidden Consequences

John Mullan: Byron, 6 November 2003

Byron: Life and Legend 
by Fiona MacCarthy.
Faber, 674 pp., £9.99, November 2003, 0 571 17997 5
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... were animated by a new soul, alive to wholly novel sensations and activated by feelings till then unknown’. Lady Caroline Lamb was, as MacCarthy notes, merely ‘the fan to end all fans’. Samuel Rogers gave her a proof copy of the poem. ‘I read it, and that was enough.’ But what was it in the poem that produced such rapture and that so completely made ...

High on His Own Supply

Christopher Tayler: Amis Recycled, 11 September 2003

Yellow Dog 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 340 pp., £16.99, September 2003, 0 224 05061 3
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... But even He’s ministrations don’t entirely console the King when persons unknown send him a photograph of his daughter, Princess Victoria, naked. Princess V. is only 15 years old. Could it be ‘blickmail’? Probably. But how was the picture taken? Bugger is charged with ferreting out the truth. Finally, we meet Clint Smoker ...

Feuds Corner

Thomas Jones: Ismail Kadare, 6 September 2007

Chronicle in Stone 
by Ismail Kadare, translated by Arshi Pipa.
Canongate, 301 pp., £7.99, May 2007, 978 1 84195 908 5
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Agamemnon’s Daughter: A Novella and Stories 
by Ismail Kadare, original translation by Tedi Papavrami and Jusuf Vrioni, translated from the French by David Bellos.
Canongate, 226 pp., £7.99, August 2007, 978 1 84195 978 8
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The Successor 
by Ismail Kadare, original translation by Tedi Papavrami, translated from the French by David Bellos.
Canongate, 207 pp., £6.99, January 2007, 978 1 84195 887 3
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The File on H 
by Ismail Kadare, original translation by Jusuf Vrioni, translated from the French by David Bellos.
Vintage, 169 pp., £7.99, August 2006, 0 09 949719 0
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... in the event of the writer’s natural or “accidental” death, to declare that a previously unknown portion of his work would be published quickly. The revelation of … the unpublished works would make it much harder for the Communist propaganda machine to bend Kadare’s work and posthumous image to its own ends.’ The action of the novella, which is ...

How Shall We Repaint the Kitchen?

Ian Hacking: The Colour Red, 1 November 2007

Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind 
by G.E.R. Lloyd.
Oxford, 201 pp., £27.50, April 2007, 978 0 19 921461 7
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... recent, ‘early modern’, and, before the age of Western imperial expansion, rare or unknown anywhere else. The cosmology of his Amazon companions is much more widely distributed, and what we crudely call ‘animism’, attributing it to people whom we take for primitive, becomes a strikingly viable cosmology. Viveiros de Castro is less committed ...

Focus, Shoot, Conceal

Jeremy Harding: Apartheid in Pictures, 27 July 2023

House of Bondage 
by Ernest Cole.
Aperture, 230 pp., £50, December 2022, 978 1 59711 533 9
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... that toured between 2011 and 2014. In 2017 a cache of sixty thousand negatives, deposited by an unknown intermediary, was released to his nephew Leslie Matlaisane by a Swedish bank; some dated from Cole’s days in South Africa, others from his tentative field trips in the US before his Ford Foundation venture bombed. The negatives were shared by Magnum ...

Doing it with the in-laws

Francis Gooding, 12 September 2024

Forbidden Fruit: An Anthropologist Looks at Incest 
by Maurice Godelier, translated by Nora Scott.
Verso, 100 pp., £9.99, September 2023, 978 1 80429 234 1
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... societies and there are many exceptions – brother-sister and even parent-child marriage are not unknown in the historical record – almost all societies start with some sort of prohibition on sex with immediate kin. Frequently the degree of prohibition goes much further than that and covers lots of other people too. Despite this, incest still ...

Nation-building

Rosamond McKitterick: Capetian Kings, 24 October 2024

House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France 
by Justine Firnhaber-Baker.
Allen Lane, 408 pp., £30, March, 978 0 241 55277 3
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... as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. In part because Richer’s record of Hugh’s election was unknown in France, other versions of the Capetian takeover were invented by chroniclers. The fate of Richer’s account, which described a legitimate election rather than the usurpation portrayed in so many subsequent chronicles, serves as a salutary reminder of ...

His Very Variousness

Ferdinand Mount: Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments, 4 December 2025

Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin 
by Kevin J. Hayes.
Oxford, 480 pp., £30.99, September 2025, 978 0 19 755426 5
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Ingenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist 
by Richard Munson.
Norton, 288 pp., £23.99, December 2024, 978 0 393 88223 0
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... subsequent sojourn across the Atlantic, Franklin did in fact father an illegitimate child by an unknown mother. This child, William, was also to father an illegitimate son, Temple Franklin, who did the same thing when he was supposedly under the moral protection of his grandfather in Paris twenty years later. No strait laces about the Franklins, though the ...