Dirty Money

Paul Foot, 17 December 1992

A Full Service Bank: How BCCI stole millions around the world 
by James Ring Adams and Douglas Frantz.
Simon and Schuster, 381 pp., £16.99, April 1992, 0 671 71133 4
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Bankrupt: The BCCI Fraud 
by Nick Kochan and Bob Whittington.
Gollancz, 234 pp., £4.99, November 1991, 0 575 05279 1
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The BCCI Affair: A Report to The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 
by Senators John Kerry and Hank Brown.
US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 800 pp., September 1992
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Inquiry into the Supervision of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International 
by Lord Justice Bingham.
HMSO, 218 pp., £19.30, October 1992, 0 10 219893 4
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... no such thing. Then there was President Carter himself. After being beaten in the 1980 Election by Ronald Reagan, Carter had an understandable yearning to be taken seriously, and Abedi took him very seriously indeed. The holy banker flew round and round the world with the exPresident so that both men could declare their shared faith in the importance of ...

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 ...

Hanging on to Mutti

Neal Ascherson: In Berlin, 6 June 2013

... remodelling of postwar welfare states on neoliberal lines – should be copied all over Europe. Ronald Reagan did it, Thatcher and Tony Blair did it, Germany did it – so why can’t François Hollande do it? The fact that the global bank disaster scarcely touched Germany, with its strictly controlled banking system, means that its politicians, from ...

Give your mom a gun

Geoff Mann: America’s Favourite Gun, 7 March 2024

American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 
by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson.
Farrar, Straus, 473 pp., £25, September 2023, 978 0 374 10385 9
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Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America 
by Andrew C. McKevitt.
North Carolina, 319 pp., £24.95, November 2023, 978 1 4696 7724 8
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... around’. By 1980, a radicalised NRA was ready to make its first presidential endorsement, for Ronald Reagan. In 1986, the Firearms Owners Protection Act was passed, repealing or neutralising even the mild measures in the 1968 law.American Gun leaves no stone unturned in the story of the AR-15, but does everything it can to avoid taking a political ...

Diary

Charles Glass: Beirut, Now and Then, 23 April 2026

... the patient but never leaves him. ABC News sent me back full-time for television coverage in 1983. Ronald Reagan, in the wake of the Israeli invasion of 1982, had posted US Marines on the low ground beside the airport, the ideal spot for a suicide bomber to kill 241 American military personnel on the morning of 23 October 1983. When the number of ...

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 ...

An American Romance

Edward Mendelson, 18 February 1982

Old Glory: An American Voyage 
by Jonathan Raban.
Collins, 527 pp., £9.95, October 1981, 9780002165211
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No particular place to go 
by Hugo Williams.
Cape, 200 pp., £6.50, October 1981, 0 224 01810 8
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... their task. Worst of all are the heroes Raban hears praised most often: complacent naysayers like Ronald Reagan with his Hollywood pieties, and the ‘twinkling demagogue’ John Paul II, who toured America while Raban was on the river. Raban does encounter one local hero worth following, and in Memphis, Tennessee, he abandons his river journey for a few ...

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 ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: Exit Blair, 24 May 2007

... that he would have such limited influence with George Bush as Margaret Thatcher had had with Ronald Reagan, he should have realised that he would, as the saying goes, have another think coming. Yet there he was at Number Ten for all those years. Politics is supposed to be a rough game, Blair is supposed to be a nice guy, and in rough games nice guys ...

The Ugly Revolution

Michael Rogin: Martin Luther King Jr, 10 May 2001

I May Not Get there with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr 
by Michael Eric Dyson.
Free Press, 404 pp., £15.99, May 2000, 0 684 86776 1
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The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr. Vol. IV: Symbol of the Movement January 1957-December 1958 
edited by Clayborne Carson et al.
California, 637 pp., £31.50, May 2000, 0 520 22231 8
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... death. Dyson’s book enters the fray over who gets to speak for the icon of Martin Luther King. Ronald Reagan, who had opposed not only the civil rights movement but also the national legislation ending legal discrimination and guaranteeing the black right to vote, was the President who signed the Bill declaring King’s birthday a national ...

Neo-Con Futurology

Stephen Holmes: The incoherent thinking behind US foreign policy, 5 October 2006

After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads 
by Francis Fukuyama.
Profile, 226 pp., £12.99, March 2006, 1 86197 922 3
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... moral weaknesses and contradictions’, Fukuyama tells us. But the neo-cons credited President Reagan with ending the evil empire by forcing the Russians into an economically unsustainable arms race. As we know from the case of bin Laden and the Afghan Arabs, the illusion of having brought down the USSR can reinforce latent psychological tendencies to ...

Is this the end of the American century?

Adam Tooze: America Pivots, 4 April 2019

... president to evoke a mixture of outrage, horror and derision both at home and abroad. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were accused, in their time, of endangering the legitimacy of the American world order. The cultural conservatism and overt nationalism of the American right is fiercely at odds with bien pensant global opinion. This culture ...

The Candidates

Chris Lehmann: Scott, Rick, Ted, Marco and Jeb, 18 June 2015

... pluck the fire-breathing young conservative (at Marquette he had displayed a photo of himself with Ronald Reagan in his dorm room) devoted himself entirely to Republican electoral politics. Here, too, he started out as a failure, running a doomed state legislative campaign in a mainly black, Democratic district of Milwaukee; he was trounced by 38 ...

After Monica

Edward Luttwak, 1 October 1998

... their own post-election State of the Union speeches – take Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’ or Reagan’s promise to ‘abolish nuclear weapons’. Not Clinton. Surprising everyone, he offered no grand project, did not claim a mandate for even medium-sized reforms, made no attempt to restart the healthcare debate and failed to preach on any subject at ...

I need money

Christian Lorentzen: Biden Tries Again, 10 September 2020

Yesterday’s Man: The Case against Joe Biden 
by Branko Marcetic.
Verso, 288 pp., £12.99, March 2020, 978 1 83976 028 0
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... homes for the poor, he would spend the following decades housing them in jails.’During the Reagan administration Biden took part in the hysteria over drugs, and often tacked to the right of the president on narcotics law enforcement. ‘The drug trade,’ he said, ‘is as much a threat to the international security of America as anything the Soviets ...