When did your eyes open?

Benjamin Nathans: Sakharov, 13 May 2010

Meeting the Demands of Reason: The Life and Thought of Andrei Sakharov 
by Jay Bergman.
Cornell, 454 pp., £24.95, October 2009, 978 0 8014 4731 0
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... than on history. Was Sakharov aware, I wonder, that his most prominent supporters in the West, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, were busy weeding out whatever ‘socialist’ elements had been planted in their capitalist societies? It wasn’t clear either how the introduction of ‘capitalist’ elements would stem the tide of consumerism and ...

Degeneration Gap

Andreas Huyssen: Cold War culture conflicts, 7 October 2004

The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War 
by David Caute.
Oxford, 788 pp., £30, September 2003, 0 19 924908 3
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... end are still open to debate – except for those who are happy to give all the credit to Ronald Reagan or the pope. Concerning its origins, it is no longer enough either to blame totalitarianism or to demonise the Truman doctrine and George Kennan’s strategy of ‘containment’. More objectionable still are the parallels drawn by Donald ...

Berlusconi in Tehran

Slavoj Žižek: The Rome-Tehran Axis, 23 July 2009

... gap between his ideals and ambitions on the one hand, and political realities on the other. With Ronald Reagan (and Carlos Menem in Argentina), a different figure entered the stage, a ‘Teflon’ president no longer expected to stick to his electoral programme, and therefore impervious to factual criticism (remember how ...

Bad Times

Andy Beckett: Travels with Tariq Ali, 20 February 2025

You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024 
by Tariq Ali.
Verso, 799 pp., £35, November 2024, 978 1 80429 090 3
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... Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties, was published in 1987, when Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and their free-market disciples were at their zenith. It ended on a downbeat note: ‘Most of the world is passing through bad times, but … hope itself cannot be abandoned.’ Yet much of the preceding narrative was about Ali’s involvement ...

Westland Ho

Paul Foot, 6 February 1986

... happened – perhaps in the course of one of those famous discussions on the ‘hot line’ to Ronald Reagan – which turned the Prime Minister from a neutral and rather bored observer of the argument into a passionate supporter of Sikorsky. Poor Heseltine, who had never got on with Mrs Thatcher, found himself being treated rather roughly. At an ...

They’re just not ready

Neal Ascherson: Gorbachev Betrayed, 7 January 2010

Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment 
by Stephen Kotkin, with Jan Gross.
Modern Library, 240 pp., $24, October 2009, 978 0 679 64276 3
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Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire 
by Victor Sebestyen.
Weidenfeld, 451 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 0 297 85223 0
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There Is No Freedom without Bread: 1989 and the Civil War that Brought Down Communism 
by Constantine Pleshakov.
Farrar, Straus, 289 pp., $26, November 2009, 978 0 374 28902 7
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1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe 
by Mary Elise Sarotte.
Princeton, 321 pp., £20.95, November 2009, 978 0 691 14306 4
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... either American academics or sojourners at American universities – swallows the old myth that Ronald Reagan ‘won’ the Cold War by standing tough on Communism. Sebestyen concludes that ‘it was 40 years of Western “containment” that weakened the Soviet Union’; Reagan, he writes, ‘made no progress ...

At the White House’s Whim

Tom Bingham: The Power of Pardon, 26 March 2009

... of a perceived disparity between his sentence and that imposed on others. Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, pardoned two FBI officers who had authorised illegal surveillance of radicals, while their appeals were pending, and exercised his pardon power a few days before leaving office on behalf of ten individuals, including the owner of the New York ...

Riding the Night Winds

Ron Ridenhour, 22 June 1995

Derailed in Uncle Ho’s Victory Garden: Return to Vietnam and Cambodia 
by Tim Page.
Touchstone, 248 pp., £14.99, April 1995, 0 671 71926 2
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In the Lake of the Woods 
by Tim O’Brien.
Flamingo, 306 pp., £5.99, April 1995, 0 00 654395 2
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In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam 
by Robert McNamara.
Random House, 432 pp., $27.50, April 1995, 0 8129 2523 8
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... Caspar Weinberger. Weinberger assumed Robert McNamara’s old job, Secretary of Defence, when Ronald Reagan took office in January 1983. In 1983, Powell became Weinberger’s military assistant. From there he became Deputy National Security Adviser to Reagan; and then National Security Adviser, the position held by ...

Whisky and Soda Man

Thomas Jones: J.G. Ballard, 10 April 2008

Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton – An Autobiography 
by J.G. Ballard.
Fourth Estate, 278 pp., £14.99, February 2008, 978 0 00 727072 9
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... is to overlook not only the work of such writers as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem, but also Ronald Moore’s remake of Battlestar Galactica, a TV series that’s as intelligent, nuanced and unflinching an examination of the United States’ post-9/11 militarism, foreign policy and relation to the un-American other as you are likely to find. Having had ...

Fatal Realism

Andrew O’Hagan: Walter Lippmann’s Warning, 25 December 2025

Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography 
by Tom Arnold-Forster.
Princeton, 353 pp., £30, July, 978 0 691 21521 1
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... VOA and union members filed a lawsuit, and on 22 April Judge Royce Lamberth, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, instructed that the broadcasts be resumed so that VOA could ‘fulfil its statutory mandate’. Late in September he ordered the Trump administration to reverse its sacking of hundreds of VOA employees. Despite this, the liquidation of the ...

Crisis-Mongering

Theodore Marmor, 21 May 1987

The Emergence of the Welfare States 
by Douglas Ashford.
Blackwell, 352 pp., £25, November 1986, 0 631 15211 3
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... political context, this critical interpretation is very much identified with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the subsequent attacks on Federal social spending. In Europe, it is associated with the triumph and continued victories of Margaret Thatcher and with shifts away from social-democratic control in a number of other regimes.1That ...

No more pretty face

Philip Horne, 8 March 1990

Emotion Pictures: Reflections on the Cinema 
by Wim Wenders, translated by Sean Whiteside and Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 148 pp., £12.99, November 1989, 0 571 15271 6
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Scorsese on Scorsese 
by Martin Scorsese, edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie.
Faber, 178 pp., £12.99, November 1989, 9780571141036
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... controversial Taxi Driver, which was cited by John W. Hinckley Jr as having driven him to shoot Ronald Reagan, should be clarified by Scorsese’s other comments on that film. Travis Bickle, Scorsese says, has ‘the power of the spirit on the wrong road. The key to the picture is the idea of being brave enough to admit having these feelings, and then ...

That’s democracy

Theo Tait: Dalton Trumbo, 2 March 2000

Johnny Got His Gun 
by Dalton Trumbo.
Prion, 222 pp., £5.99, May 1999, 1 85375 324 6
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... Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals – fronted by Gary Cooper, Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan (the last perhaps still smarting from his failed attempt to join the Party in 1938) – presented the acceptable face of red-baiting. The HUAC targeted screenwriters; only one of the initial ‘Unfriendly Nineteen’ had never worked as a ...

Thunderstruck

Arthur Gavshon, 6 June 1985

The Falklands War: Lessons for Strategy, Diplomacy and International Law 
edited by Alberto Coll and Anthony Arend.
Allen and Unwin, 252 pp., £18, May 1985, 0 04 327075 1
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... to the symposium display something of an Establishment bias that reflects the influence of Ronald Reagan and Alexander Haig, who, from the outset, identified philosophically and geopolitically with Mrs Thatcher’s cause. They had their own good reasons for doing so. After all, Mrs Thatcher had taken the initiative among European leaders in ...

Southern Belle

Russell Davies, 21 January 1982

Elvis 
by Albert Goldman.
Allen Lane, 598 pp., £9.95, December 1981, 0 7139 1474 2
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... that if he so desired he could himself be the president ... It did not require the election of Ronald Reagan to demonstrate that at this point in their history, Americans feel most fulfilled by leaders who are, or at least resemble, movie stars ... No less an expert than Richard Nixon assured Elvis that he had the power over people’s imaginations ...