Whose Nuremberg Laws?

Jeremy Waldron: Race, 19 March 1998

Seeing a Colour-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race 
by Patricia Williams.
Virago, 72 pp., £5.99, April 1997, 1 86049 365 3
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Colour Conscious: The Political Morality of Race 
by Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann.
Princeton, 200 pp., £11.95, May 1998, 0 691 05909 8
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Race: The History of an Idea in the West 
by Ivan Hannaford.
Johns Hopkins, 464 pp., £49.50, June 1996, 0 8018 5222 6
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... grand-children? When the legal barriers are lifted and the violence suppressed, some sort of hope may return, opportunities may open up, and after a generation or two there may be some success stories. But the situation is not as it was before the injustice or as it would have been had ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Didn’t Do in 2007, 3 January 2008

... into the alliums, so many of them that the poor plants are bowed under their weight. 30 April-1 May. To Essential Music in Great Chapel Street to record The Uncommon Reader, which Gordon House, former head of drama at BBC Radio, has adapted and is producing. What other readers are like I’ve no idea, but I always feel I am a sound editor’s ...

Not Much like Consent

Daniel Trilling: Crisis at the Met, 30 March 2023

Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police 
by Tom Harper.
Biteback, 446 pp., £20, October 2022, 978 1 78590 768 5
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Tango Juliet Foxtrot: How Did It All Go Wrong for British Policing? 
by Iain Donnelly.
Biteback, 341 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 1 78590 716 6
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... her and forced her into his car. Its remit has now been expanded: it will also look at how David Carrick, nicknamed ‘Bastard Dave’ by his colleagues in the Met, raped and sexually assaulted at least twelve women over a period of seventeen years without being prosecuted. The Casey report into ‘standards and culture’ at the Met, prompted by the ...

Hot Dogs

Malcolm Bull, 14 June 1990

Mine eyes have seen the glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America 
by Randall Balmer.
Oxford, 246 pp., $19.95, September 1989, 0 19 505117 3
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In God’s Country: Travels in the Bible Belt, USA 
by Douglas Kennedy.
Unwin Hyman, 240 pp., £12.95, November 1989, 0 04 440423 9
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The Divine Supermarket 
by Malise Ruthven.
Chatto, 336 pp., £14.95, August 1989, 0 7011 3151 9
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The Democratisation of American Christianity 
by Nathan Hatch.
Yale, 312 pp., £22.50, November 1989, 0 300 44470 2
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Religion and 20th-Century American Intellectual Life 
edited by Michael Lacey.
Cambridge/Woodrow Wilson Centre for Scholars, 214 pp., £27.50, November 1989, 0 521 37560 6
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New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America 
by Mary Farrell Bednarowski.
Indiana, 175 pp., $25, November 1989, 0 253 31137 3
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... quelled religious enthusiasm in Europe. If national identities grow weaker, religious identities may harden and long-forgotten disputes re-ignite. Evangelical religion thrives on population mobility and social change: the frontierless European Community and the newly-liberated countries of Eastern Europe may both prove ...

Prince of Darkness

Ian Aitken, 28 January 1993

Rupert Murdoch 
by William Shawcross.
Chatto, 616 pp., £18.99, September 1992, 0 7011 8451 5
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... the Rothermeres, or even Lord Northcliffe, were pipsqueaks running parish magazines. They may have sought to influence the political complexion of a large Western democracy, but Murdoch is in the business of changing the cultural complexion of the entire world. If Mr Shawcross has a single clear message for us, it is that Murdoch is not driven by lust ...

Leave it to the teachers

Conrad Russell, 20 March 1997

... the Teacher Training Agency, John Patten’s attempt to gain control of the training colleges, may serve for an example; and finally direct intervention, as symbolised by David Blunkett’s threat (Independent on Sunday, 23 February) to ‘lay down from the centre exactly how reading should be taught’. Hobbes would ...
... by the domination of unions and professional organisations. Not a bad thing in principle, this may have worked, though, to narrow the teacher concerns the Council was prepared to address and to exclude those classroom teachers whose commitment to their work, or vulnerability to its pressures, make such public forums intimidating and unproductive. There are ...

Sheep into Goats

Gabriele Annan, 24 January 1980

The British Aristocracy 
by Mark Bence-Jones and Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd.
Constable, 259 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 0 09 461780 5
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The Astors 
by Virginia Cowles.
Weidenfeld, 256 pp., £8.50, November 1980, 9780297776246
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Barclay Fox’s Journal 
edited by R.L. Brett.
Bell and Hyman, 426 pp., £8.95, July 1980, 0 7135 1865 0
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... at its most rigid, a duke and an Indian army subaltern were equal in class, however different they may have been in rank or wealth.’ And they go on: ‘there is only one essential prerequisite for being counted among the British aristocracy: the right to be called a gentleman … so that anyone who has inherited the gentlemanly values, or for that ...

What did it matter who I was?

Gaby Wood, 19 October 1995

The Blue Suit 
by Richard Rayner.
Picador, 216 pp., £9.99, July 1995, 0 330 33821 8
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The Liar’s Club 
by Mary Karr.
Picador, 317 pp., £14.99, October 1995, 0 330 33597 9
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... Black Mischief, another old Chapman & Hall first, no dj, but handsome mottled brown boards.’ We may choose to believe Richard Rayner, as he presents himself to us raw: ‘Perhaps we all have this dream, to tell everything and yet not forfeit love – the only sinner not to be roasted.’ What he’s admitting to, though, is not a series of ...

Vivre comme chien et chat

Paul Delany, 20 August 1992

Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country 
by Mordecai Richler.
Chatto, 277 pp., £13.99, June 1992, 0 7011 4673 7
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... two are risks that Francophones must assess for themselves. Inside and outside Québec, a majority may come to feel that separation would clear the air and allow each of the ‘founding peoples’ to pursue their destiny unhindered. Once on its own, Québec might have to reconsider its linguistic ideals. Anglophones and allophones would be nervous about ...

In Cardiff

John Barrell: Richard Wilson, 25 September 2014

... more classically Arcadian in its subjects and atmosphere, more expansive in its distances. ‘You may walk in Claude’s pictures and count the miles,’ Wilson declared, but to my eye his management of distance is superior to Claude’s, more subtle in its tonal range and aerial perspective. barr01_3618 Gallery The relative qualities of the two painters ...

They don’t even need ideas

William Davies: Take Nigel Farage ..., 20 June 2019

... century of national politics are in crisis; an astonishing YouGov poll conducted at the end of May put both Labour and the Conservatives on 19 per cent, behind the Liberal Democrats and Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. An Opinium poll subsequently put the Brexit Party out in front on 26 per cent. Farage’s outfit has adopted the model of a platform ...

Too Glorious for Words

Bernard Porter: Lawrence in Arabia, 3 April 2014

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East 
by Scott Anderson.
Atlantic, 592 pp., £25, March 2014, 978 1 78239 199 9
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... that surrounded his reputation both in his own day and afterwards, as reflected in the 1962 David Lean biopic, presenting him as the romantic hero – tall, blue-eyed, in flowing robes – he always wanted to be. His failures are familiar to anyone who has taken any serious interest in him, and were only too painfully known to himself. He either led or ...

Watching a black man in the shower

Michael Wood, 12 September 1991

Young Soul Rebels 
directed by Isaac Julien.
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Diary of a Young Soul Rebel 
by Isaac Julien and Colin MacCabe.
BFI, 218 pp., £10.95, September 1991, 0 85170 310 0
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... the stage goes up in flames. Loudspeakers fall, records are scattered in the mud. This last item may seem pretty minor in a context of such horror and confusion, but it is shot and situated – we see the disc jockeys eager to save their records rather than themselves – in a way that makes the records stand for much else that is scattered here and could be ...

Beware of shallowness

James Wood, 7 July 1994

Art & Lies 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Cape, 224 pp., £14.99, June 1994, 0 224 03145 7
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... their tight formations, the ranks hold each other up; soloists are apt to droop. Dickens finishes David Copperfield uncharacteristically: ‘O Agnes, O my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now ...