Goings-on in the Tivoli Gardens

Christopher Tayler: Marlon James, 5 November 2015

A Brief History of Seven Killings 
by Marlon James.
Oneworld, 688 pp., £8.99, June 2015, 978 1 78074 635 7
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... myself I’m Gay Talese again.’ ‘The ones who come and go’, in James’s telling, include a young woman called Nina Burgess, who’s had a one night stand with Marley; Barry Diflorio, a CIA man; and Alex. The rest are gangsters, and the bigger picture they open up is a view from the ground of the working relationship between organised crime and Jamaican ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: My Olympics, 30 August 2012

... bonanza. The soft-spoken Californian rodent was attended by his sleepover pal and minder, Michael Jackson. We have heard it stated, quite accurately, that construction work on the Olympic Park has been carried out with few casualties. But cycle deaths are mounting, from the early casualties of the fresh-painted lanes at the base of the Bow ...

Are we there yet?

David Simpson: Abasing language, abusing prisoners, 17 February 2005

Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror 
by Mark Danner.
Granta, 573 pp., £16.99, February 2005, 9781862077720
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The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib 
edited by Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel.
Cambridge, 1284 pp., £27.50, February 2005, 0 521 85324 9
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... a yet higher level. Should we then be either surprised or morally self-assured at the photos of young men and women in uniform leering at or torturing naked prisoners in an overcrowded prison in Iraq? As more and more evidence comes out of similar episodes in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Mosul, Basra and so on, it does begin to be clear that abusive ...

At the White House’s Whim

Tom Bingham: The Power of Pardon, 26 March 2009

... for clemency awaited his decision. Among the applicants, it is reported, were Conrad Black; Michael Milken, of junk bond fame; John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban’; a former Republican congressman jailed for accepting bribes; and a former Democratic governor of Louisiana, convicted on racketeering charges. They were doomed to ...

I figured what the heck

Jackson Lears: Seymour Hersh, 27 September 2018

Reporter 
by Seymour M. Hersh.
Allen Lane, 355 pp., £20, June 2018, 978 0 241 35952 5
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... to hate him, to see him as a child-killing monster, but instead I found a rattled, frightened young man, short, slight, and so pale that the bluish veins on his neck and shoulders were visible.’ After a long bourbon-soaked conversation, Calley interrupted Hersh’s questioning to phone the man who had been his immediate superior in Vietnam, Captain ...

They would have laughed

Ferdinand Mount: The Massacre at Amritsar, 4 April 2019

Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre 
by Kim A. Wagner.
Yale, 325 pp., £20, February 2019, 978 0 300 20035 5
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... to look at the series of British actions leading up to the massacre, in particular those of Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the lieutenant governor of the Punjab. Unlike Dyer, O’Dwyer could not be said to be a stupid man; he had a first in jurisprudence from Balliol. But like several clever men who went out to India – Virginia Woolf’s uncle James Fitzjames ...

Unfair Judgments

Ed Kiely: Lethal Cuts at the DWP, 17 April 2025

The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence 
by John Pring.
Pluto, 292 pp., £16.99, August 2024, 978 0 7453 4989 3
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... her as aggressive and confrontational. Her brother saw this as ‘casual racism’: when a young black woman was ‘emotional and upset’ this was interpreted as threatening behaviour.Ahmed’s death led the coroner to issue a prevention of future deaths notice to the DWP; so did Carré’s death. Recipients are legally obliged to act to prevent ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: The Plutocrat Tour, 7 July 2022

... the freakishly perverse bankers and investors, she behaves like Orwell in Wigan, like those nice young poets sent north to report back on the dining habits of the natives. To listen on buses and in pubs. Jack London became a disguised tourist in the lower depths for The People of the Abyss in 1902, but Knowles plays smart. She dresses correctly, making the ...

Anti-Dad

Adam Mars-Jones: Amis Resigns, 21 June 2012

Lionel Asbo: State of England 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 288 pp., £18.99, June 2012, 978 0 224 09620 1
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... if you can call it meeting when the other person is unconscious on a bench, and lost his mother young. Lionel brings him up, standing in loco parentis (assuming that emotional involvement is no part of what a parent does), offering a workable role model as long as the polarity of every term (‘Do something useful. Steal a car’; ‘Go home and watch some ...

Cubist Slugs

Patrick Wright: The Art of Camouflage, 23 June 2005

DPM: Disruptive Pattern Material; An Encyclopedia of Camouflage: Nature – Military – Culture 
DPM, 2 vols, 944 pp., £100, September 2004, 9780954340407Show More
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... for his ‘angel’ paintings, in which he added feathery white wings to portraits of girls and young women. His influence in the early days of strategic camouflage derived from the fact that this New Hampshire conservationist, who admired Thoreau and revered the natural world as ‘God’s studio’, had developed a more scientific interest in plumage and ...

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

Rebecca Solnit: Losing San Francisco, 8 February 2024

... chat to whomever was around or just people-watch. In this millennium, in cafés frequented by young white people, every customer seems to be silently staring at an Apple product, so that the places look and feel like offices. Even this phase may be on the way out. The next phase – of trying to keep customers from sticking around – has arrived. A food ...

The Hijackers

Hugh Roberts: What will happen to Syria?, 16 July 2015

From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-Revolution and Its Jihadi Legacy 
by Jean-Pierre Filiu.
Hurst, 328 pp., £15.99, July 2015, 978 1 84904 546 9
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Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising 
by Jonathan Littell.
Verso, 246 pp., £12.99, April 2015, 978 1 78168 824 3
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The Rise of Islamic State: Isis and the New Sunni Revolution 
by Patrick Cockburn.
Verso, 192 pp., £9.99, January 2015, 978 1 78478 040 1
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Isis: Inside the Army of Terror 
by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan.
Regan Arts, 288 pp., £12.99, February 2015, 978 1 941393 57 4
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... would recycle and refine this recruitment strategy with the devshirme, the ‘harvest’ of young boys from Christian families in the Balkans and southern Russia, who would be taken to Istanbul, converted to Islam and trained for careers in the army (as Janissaries), the palace or the bureaucracy. The key principle was that the army should not be ...

The Arrestables

Jeremy Harding: Extinction Rebellion, 16 April 2020

... more than a week of protests. The activists decide to disperse, but a mural remains at the site: a young girl with a spade has just planted a sapling; she is holding a plant label with the XR logo, an hourglass in a circle. The piece, which has all the distinguishing features of a Banksy, borrows a line from Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life ...

What more could we want of ourselves!

Jacqueline Rose: On Rosa Luxemburg, 16 June 2011

The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg 
edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza, translated by George Shriver.
Verso, 609 pp., £25, February 2011, 978 1 84467 453 4
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... to the war, she praised Kautsky for still holding on to the ‘groping, searching, anxious’ young woman inside her – Kautsky was 53 at the time. When Kautsky visited Luxemburg in prison in May, her inner torment, her ‘restless, dissatisfied searching’ had been evident in her eyes (younger than the rest of her, Luxemburg insists, by 20 ...

Strenuous Unbelief

Jonathan Rée: Richard Rorty, 15 October 1998

Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in 20th-Century America 
by Richard Rorty.
Harvard, 107 pp., £12.50, May 1998, 9780674003118
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Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. III 
by Richard Rorty.
Cambridge, 355 pp., £40, June 1998, 0 521 55347 4
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... the bad boy of American philosophy, Richard Rorty struck his colleagues as a safe and promising young man. His first book, published in 1967, was an anthology of Essays in Philosophical Method designed to document the reorientations in analytic philosophy that followed Rudolf Carnap’s move from Germany to the US in 1935. Carnap had promoted the cause of ...