Here was a plague

Tom Crewe, 27 September 2018

How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed Aids 
by David France.
Picador, 624 pp., £12.99, September 2017, 978 1 5098 3940 7
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Patient Zero and the Making of the Aids Epidemic 
by Richard A. McKay.
Chicago, 432 pp., £26.50, November 2017, 978 0 226 06395 9
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Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1989-90 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 314 pp., £9.99, May 2018, 978 1 78487 387 5
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Smiling in Slow Motion: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1991-94 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 388 pp., £9.99, August 2018, 978 1 78487 516 9
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The Ward 
by Gideon Mendel.
Trolley, 88 pp., £25, December 2017, 978 1 907112 56 0
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... Jarman made a note in his diary in April 1989: ‘Since autumn: Terry, Robert, David, Ken, Paul, Howard. All the brightest and best trampled to death – surely even the Great War brought no more loss into one life in just 12 months, and all this as we made love not war.’ In March 1992: ‘We talked of the people who died of Aids this week.’ ‘To ...

Finding an Enemy

Conor Gearty: Sixty Years of Anti-Terrorist Legislation, 15 April 1999

Legislation against Terrorism: A Consultation Paper. CM 4178. 
by Home Office and Northern Ireland Office.
70 pp., £9.95, December 1998, 0 10 141782 9
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... popularised by President Reagan, to describe the ‘threat’ to the ‘West’ (which included Israel) from Middle-Eastern ‘extremists’. Jellicoe’s own view was that ‘we may be facing this threat for many years to come’. He offered no factual evidence for this opinion. Indeed, there was no empirical basis for his recommendation to ...

Ça va un peu

Adam Shatz: Congo, 23 October 2014

Congo: The Epic History of a People 
by David Van Reybrouck.
Fourth Estate, 656 pp., £25, March 2014, 978 0 00 756290 9
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... Bank concerns it would be: “Do you really expect me to think you’re asking these questions of Israel and Egypt? Perhaps I should convert to Judaism.”’ Mobutu’s garish spending habits – his palace in the jungle included a Chinese pagoda village – enraged his patrons, but they didn’t cut him loose until the end of the Cold War. By then the ...

I am French

Jeremy Harding, 21 January 2016

Who is Charlie? Xenophobia and the New Middle Class 
by Emmanuel Todd, translated by Andrew Brown.
Polity, 211 pp., £16.99, September 2015, 978 1 5095 0577 7
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... taxation work? Or maybe class war? But without the Communist Party – of which Todd, grandson of Paul Nizan, was briefly a member in the 1960s – it’s not clear who would lead a struggle of this kind. Unless of course … And here it comes as no surprise to discover that the big incubations of the Front National, under Marine Le Pen’s father, took place ...

Unquiet Bodies

Thomas Laqueur: Burying the 20th Century, 6 April 2006

Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism 
by István Rév.
Stanford, 340 pp., £19.95, January 2005, 0 8047 3644 8
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... and 1956 and whose case was not closed for good until 1996. The chief prosecutor of the state of Israel, Rév reminds us, looked into whether its courts could retroactively reverse the Sanhedrin’s judgment of Jesus. Ground and surface need to be rearticulated. There is a chapter on the underworld: not Hades but the subterranean torture cells that were ...

Rejoicings in a Dug-Out

Peter Howarth: Cecil, Ada and G.K., 15 December 2022

The Sins of G.K. Chesterton 
by Richard Ingrams.
Harbour, 292 pp., £20, August 2021, 978 1 905128 33 4
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... were in cahoots, Belloc added a layer of antisemitism. Like his hero the writer and politician Paul Déroulède, Belloc felt France had been unbearably shamed by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and wanted revenge against the compromisers and financial interests that had undermined army morale. A thoroughgoing anti-Dreyfusard, he merged conspiracy theories ...

Kippers and Champagne

Daniel Cohen: Barclay and Barclay, 3 April 2025

You May Never See Us Again: The Barclay Dynasty – A Story of Survival, Secrecy and Succession 
by Jane Martinson.
Penguin, 336 pp., £10.99, October 2024, 978 1 4059 5890 5
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... effectively killing the deal.An auction got underway. The Spectator was sold separately to Paul Marshall, the hedge fund manager who owns the website UnHerd and co-owns the TV channel GB News, for £100 million.† So far the highest bid for the Telegraph – more than £550 million – has come from Dovid Efune, the Manchester-born owner of the New ...

Where little Fyodor played

Stephen Greenblatt, 24 January 1991

... Misha, who had been assigned to our group. He knew a great many Jews who had left Russia for Israel, he said, but they misrepresented their motives. It was not for fear of anti-semitism and certainly not for religious reasons. They knew nothing of Judaism: they couldn’t speak Hebrew or Yiddish, did not wear the little hats, did not eat special ...

Jottings, Scraps and Doodles

Adam Shatz: Lévi-Strauss, 3 November 2011

Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory 
by Patrick Wilcken.
Bloomsbury, 375 pp., £30, November 2011, 978 0 7475 8362 2
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... teach at the New School for Social Research in New York. In March 1941, he boarded the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle along with 350 other ‘undesirables’, among them Victor Serge, who described the ship as ‘a kind of floating concentration camp’. Lévi-Strauss found the ascetic Serge unapproachable, but while docked in Casablanca he struck up a lasting ...

Five Ring Circus

David Goldblatt: Blame it on the Olympics, 18 July 2024

What are the Olympics for? 
by Jules Boykoff.
Bristol, 157 pp., £8.99, March, 978 1 5292 3028 4
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Igniting the Games: The Evolution of the Olympics and Bach’s Legacy 
by David Miller.
Pitch, 272 pp., £12.99, July 2022, 978 1 80150 142 2
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... law is to be welcomed, but how does this fit with the seemingly legitimate participation of Israel?The more immediate questions facing Bach and the organisers of Paris 2024 are to do with cost. Allowing for inflation, Paris 2024 is the cheapest games for more than a quarter of a century, and the first since Los Angeles 1984 for which so little new ...

The earth had need of me

Joanna Biggs: A nice girl like Simone, 16 April 2020

Becoming Beauvoir: A Life 
by Kate Kirkpatrick.
Bloomsbury, 476 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 1 350 04717 4
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Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Me, a Memoir 
by Deirdre Bair.
Atlantic, 347 pp., £18.99, February 2020, 978 1 78649 265 4
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Diary of a Philosophy Student, Vol. II: 1928-29 
by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Barbara Klaw.
Illinois, 374 pp., £40, June 2019, 978 0 252 04254 6
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... bombs on students ‘returning home at night in evening dress’), was the ‘little band’ of Paul Nizan, René Maheu and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre was rumoured to be ‘the worst of the lot’.Beauvoir was preparing for her exams, full of love for Zaza, constantly addressing herself in her diary to the absent Jacques ...

Havel’s Castle

J.P. Stern, 22 February 1990

... in being a part of the illegal musical underground. (One of them, a young Canadian called Paul Wilson, who had come to Prague to teach English, is the translator of Letters to Olga.) Together with the philosopher Jan Patocka and Jiri Hajek, Foreign Minister in Dubcek’s cabinet, Havel was arrested in January 1977, after founding Charter 77, the group ...

The Hard Zone

Andrew O’Hagan: At the Republican National Convention, 1 August 2024

... of local universities through huge budget cuts. The city was horribly gerrymandered in the 2010s. Paul Ryan, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and a native of Janesville, Wisconsin, acted as a wrecking ball on social care in the area and was a friend to people who believe that tax cuts are evidence of enlightenment. The Democrats had grown ...

The Impossible Patient

Amia Srinivasan: Return of the Unconscious, 25 December 2025

... machine let loose on Gaza, accelerating into a genocide of the Palestinian people that has cost Israel a measure of its international legitimacy and led to the prolonged captivity and death of hostages, increased antisemitism and an exodus of Israel’s educated elite. The Israeli state performs its self-defeating ...

What else actually is there?

Jenny Turner: On Gillian Rose, 7 November 2024

Love’s Work 
by Gillian Rose.
Penguin, 112 pp., £9.99, March 2024, 978 0 241 94549 0
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Marxist Modernism: Introductory Lectures on Frankfurt School Critical Theory 
by Gillian Rose, edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson.
Verso, 176 pp., £16.99, September 2024, 978 1 80429 011 8
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... to great thinkers of the African diaspora, W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, for example, Paul Gilroy.But Rose was also interested in what Hegel, following the novel-within-a-novel in Wilhelm Meister, called the ‘beautiful soul’. Goethe tells of a young woman’s withdrawal from the outer world, which expects her to fulfil her duties as a wife and ...