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
Show More
Show More
... 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
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching

Terry Eagleton: Richard Dawkins, 19 October 2006

The God Delusion 
by Richard Dawkins.
Bantam, 406 pp., £20, October 2006, 0 593 05548 9
Show More
Show More
... and its assorted local lackeys and running dogs took fright at his message of love, mercy and justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the poor, and did away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile political situation. Several of Jesus’ close comrades were probably Zealots, members of an anti-imperialist underground ...

Too Young

James Davidson: Lord Alfred Douglas, 21 September 2000

Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas 
by Douglas Murray.
Hodder, 374 pp., £20, June 2000, 0 340 76770 7
Show More
Show More
... scoundrel to a wretchedly silly youth. You ought to be ashamed to bring it out here.’ Mr Justice Darling advised him that he was not in court to comment on counsel. Douglas responded that he would answer the questions as he pleased. Poor Darling, who had already been cited by a witness as one of the perverts named in the Black Book, had difficulty ...

Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?

Slavoj Žižek: Love Thy Neighbour, 23 May 2002

... When Donald Rumsfeld designated the imprisoned Taliban fighters ‘unlawful combatants’ (as opposed to ‘regular’ prisoners of war), he did not simply mean that their criminal terrorist activity placed them outside the law: when an American citizen commits a crime, even one as serious as murder, he remains a ‘lawful criminal ...

Diary

Anne Enright: The Monsters of #MeToo, 24 October 2019

... which form part of the response to the #MeToo movement, often conflate the difference between justice and consequences. The world is not a court of law. After the New York Times broke the Harvey Weinstein story in October 2017, the #MeToo Twitter hashtag was used 1.7 million times in ten days. Some of the victims were men, and many of the supporters were ...

Pissing on Pedestrians

Owen Bennett-Jones: A Great Unravelling, 1 April 2021

Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell 
by John Preston.
Viking, 322 pp., £18.99, February, 978 0 241 38867 9
Show More
Show More
... business methods his response may have been justified, but his dismissiveness doesn’t do justice to a man who rose from a penury that Murdoch could never imagine. It was an ascent that relied on gargantuan self-confidence. Preston describes the way Maxwell conducted himself in Parliament. In his early appearances in the Commons, he made an ...

I must start completely alone

Gonzalo Pozo: Isaac Deutscher runs into trouble, 2 February 2023

... he had borrowed to work on the article. But he continued writing. The Economist’s deputy editor, Donald Tyerman, asked him to come to the office for a chat: ‘I was afraid that if he saw that I could not understand the spoken language and speak it, he would not believe that I was really the author of the articles and would treat me as an imposter,’ so he ...

The Little Man’s Big Friends

Eric Foner: Freedom’s Dominion, 1 June 2023

Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power 
by Jefferson Cowie.
Basic, 497 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 1 5416 7280 2
Show More
Show More
... Blacks, or immigrants, or a faraway national government, helps to explain why in the last election Donald Trump carried Tennessee in a landslide, winning 60 per cent of the vote and all but three of the state’s 95 counties. In many parts of the US, every month is Confederate History Month.Since the election of Ronald Reagan, historians have struggled to ...

Act One, Scene One

David Bromwich: Don’t Resist, Oppose, 16 February 2017

... a Harvard law professor, to write a column for Bloomberg entitled ‘On November 9, Let’s Forget Donald Trump Happened’. In 2003, six years out of law school, Feldman drafted the constitution for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and his confidence in the future of Iraqi democracy was now equalled by his confidence in a Hillary Clinton ...

Which is worse?

Adam Tooze: Germany Divided, 18 July 2019

Die Getriebenen: Merkel und die Flüchtlingspolitik – Report aus dem Innern der Macht 
by Robin Alexander.
Siedler, 288 pp., €19.99, March 2017, 978 3 8275 0093 9
Show More
Die SPD: Biographie einer Partei von Ferdinand Lassalle bis Andrea Nahles 
by Franz Walter.
Rowohlt, 416 pp., €16, June 2018, 978 3 499 63445 1
Show More
Germany’s Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe 
by Oliver Nachtwey, translated by Loren Balhorn and David Fernbach.
Verso, 247 pp., £16.99, November 2018, 978 1 78663 634 8
Show More
Die Schulz Story: Ein Jahr zwischen Höhenflug und Absturz 
by Markus Feldenkirchen.
DVA, 320 pp., €20, March 2018, 978 3 421 04821 9
Show More
Show More
... brought a complete change in governing parties. But how would it balance its commitments to social justice and modernisation? It delivered major changes to citizenship law, enabling dual citizenship for millions of Turkish-Germans. It continued and deepened Germany’s reckoning with its Nazi past, establishing new lieux de mémoire, such as the Memorial to ...

‘You can have patience or you can have carnage’

Charles Glass: In Afghanistan, 18 November 2004

... they lay out plans for education, medical care, the economy, agriculture, transportation, the justice system and security. Assisted by private consultants they plan to remake Afghanistan in much the way their forebears in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations sought to forge a new Vietnam alongside the backroom boys from the Rand Corporation. As in ...

The Health Transformation Army

James Meek: What can the WHO do?, 2 July 2020

... grey suit, his hair slicked down 1950s-style, bearing an uncomfortable resemblance to the late Donald Pleasence.It took Azar, Donald Trump’s health secretary and a one-time pharmaceutical industry lobbyist and executive, less than three snippy minutes to deliver his boss’s message. The pith was the astounding charge ...

Dev and Dan

Tom Dunne, 21 April 1988

The Hereditary Bondsman: Daniel O’Connell, 1775-1829 
by Oliver MacDonagh..
Weidenfeld, 328 pp., £16.95, January 1988, 0 297 79221 0
Show More
Eamon de Valera 
by Owen Dudley Edwards.
University of Wales Press, 161 pp., £19.95, November 1987, 0 7083 0986 0
Show More
Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland 
edited by C.H.E. Philpin.
Cambridge, 466 pp., £27.50, November 1987, 0 521 26816 8
Show More
Northern Ireland: Soldiers talking, 1969 to Today 
by Max Arthur.
Sidgwick, 271 pp., £13.95, October 1987, 0 283 99375 8
Show More
War as a Way of Life: A Belfast Diary 
by John Conroy.
Heinemann, 218 pp., £12.95, February 1988, 0 434 14217 4
Show More
Show More
... of agrarian protest is continued in two new contributions to the lively debate on the Land League. Donald Jorden joins in a key issue of that debate – the nature and limitations of the class alliance involved in what is another local study (despite its title), of Mayo. His economic/demographic analysis of the county in core-periphery terms is impressive, as ...

Swanker

Ronald Bryden, 10 December 1987

The Life of Kenneth Tynan 
by Kathleen Tynan.
Weidenfeld, 407 pp., £16.95, September 1987, 9780297790822
Show More
Show More
... the movement of an animal in a zoo. Anthony Quayle’s Coriolanus reminded him of a young bull, Donald Wolfit’s Iachimo of ‘a vast, gloating reptile’, while to evoke Louise Brooks’s Lulu in Pabst’s silent film he summoned comparisons with a swan, a gazelle and a tropical fish. He could use animal imagery to be scathing, as well. Alan Badel’s ...