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How do you like your liberalism: fat or thin?

Glen Newey: John Gray, 7 June 2001

Two Faces of Liberalism 
by John Gray.
Polity, 161 pp., £12.99, August 2000, 0 7456 2259 3
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... Once again, the idea is to set up constitutional procedures, or something like them, to discipline day-to-day political activity: the state aims to be neutral or impartial between different conceptions of the good life, such as political ideologies or religious creeds. Where it can’t avoid taking a position (as, for ...

Hate Burst Out

Kim Phillips-Fein: Chicago, 1968, 15 August 2024

The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 
by Luke A. Nichter.
Yale, 370 pp., £35, October 2023, 978 0 300 25439 6
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... he was campaigning to retain the presidency: ‘I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes, or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office.’) Trump’s denunciations of academia, liberals and protesters echoes Wallace’s angry rhetoric. And students are again protesting about American ...

Chop-Chop Spirit

Sean Jacobs: Festac ’77 Revisited, 9 May 2024

Last Day in Lagos 
by Marilyn Nance, edited by Oluremi C. Onabanjo.
Fourthwall, 299 pp., £37.50, October 2022, 978 0 9947009 9 5
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... squares where ordinary Algerians and visitors could watch. The headliners included the R&B singer Barry White and radical artists such as Archie Shepp, Nina Simone and Miriam Makeba. In William Klein’s Festival panafricain d’Alger 1969, Shepp can be seen on stage with some Touareg musicians. Ted Joans, introducing him, shouts, ‘Jazz is a Black ...

Mishal’s Luck

Adam Shatz: The Plot against Hamas, 14 May 2009

Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas 
by Paul McGeough.
Quartet, 477 pp., £25, May 2009, 978 0 7043 7157 6
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... the Canadian ambassador to quiz the two men in Jordanian custody – ‘Shawn Kendall’ and ‘Barry Beads’ – on their ‘Canadian-ness’. It didn’t take long for them to be exposed as impostors. ‘We did it . . . We sprayed him with a chemical,’ Yatom confessed to Batikhi after landing in Jordan: ‘There’s nothing you can do about it ...

Thoughts on the New Economic History

David Cannadine, 15 April 1982

The Economic History of Britain since 1700. Vol. 1: 1700-1860 
edited by Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £25, October 1981, 0 521 23166 3
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The Economic History of Britain since 1700. Vol. II: 1860 to the 1970s 
edited by Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey.
Cambridge, 485 pp., £30, October 1981, 0 521 23167 1
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The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction 
by E.A. Wrigley.
Edward Arnold, 779 pp., £45, October 1982, 0 7131 6264 3
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The Decline of British Economic Power since 1870 
by M.W. Kirby.
Allen and Unwin, 211 pp., £15, June 1981, 0 04 942169 7
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The Coming of the Mass Market 1850-1914 
by Hamish Fraser.
Macmillan, 268 pp., £16, February 1982, 0 333 31034 9
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... In essence, Fraser’s picture illuminates the aggregates, tables and arguments assembled by Barry Supple in his essay on the same subject in the second volume of Floud and McCloskey. Here is the rise of a mass market, a revolution in retailing, and the transformation of light industry, with results which have lingered until our own ...

Frognal Days

Zachary Leader: Files on the Fifties, 4 June 1998

Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the Fifties 
by Nora Sayre.
Rutgers, 464 pp., £27.95, April 1997, 0 8135 2231 5
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... Hemingway depicted him in The Sun Also Rises (1926) as the successful writer Bill Gorton. Philip Barry, a Yale classmate, wrote the part of Nick Potter, the socialite hero of his hit comedy, Holiday (1929), with Stewart in mind – and Stewart played the part on Broadway. Between 1930 and 1949 he worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood on 28 movies, including ...

Dixie Peach Pomade

Alex Abramovich: In the Room with Robert Johnson, 6 October 2022

Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson 
by Annye C. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach.
Hachette Go, 224 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 306 84526 0
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... play a few times.’ Two of the better books written about him, Robert Johnson: Lost and Found by Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch (2003), and Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald (2004), attempt to untangle the tall tales and lies.Johnson used to be seen as a ‘primitive’, his raw experience unmediated by ...

Hubbub

Nicholas Spice, 6 July 1995

Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music 
by Michael Chanan.
Verso, 204 pp., £39.95, May 1995, 1 85984 012 4
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Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak Easy Listening and other Moodsong 
by Joseph Lanza.
Quartet, 280 pp., £10, January 1995, 0 7043 0226 8
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... trompe-l’oeil window grilles, a floor of bumpy flagging. A waiter waltzes up to declaim the day’s specials. His rococo soliloquy is made unintelligible by being delivered, like a piece of 18th-century melodrama, against the ‘Dies Irae’ of the Mozart Requiem. By the time I’m eating the main course, the tape has been changed to the Four Last ...

Don’t go quietly

David Trotter: Ken Loach’s Fables, 6 February 2025

Kes 
by David Forrest.
BFI, 112 pp., £12.99, May 2024, 978 1 83902 564 8
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... an independent production company, Kestrel Films, with the sole purpose of bringing to the screen Barry Hines’s as yet unpublished novel A Kestrel for a Knave, a story about the sense of purpose instilled in a much-put-upon school reject by his capture and conscientious training of a falcon. The making of Kes (1969) was, as David Forrest explains in his ...

Bantu in the Bathroom

Jacqueline Rose, 19 November 2015

... On 3 March​ 2014, the first day in the trial of Oscar Pistorius for the killing of Reeva Steenkamp, Judge Thokozile Matilda Masipa made her way across courtroom GD at North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria slowly and haltingly. She suffers from severe arthritis and for the duration of the trial she sat on an orthopaedic chair, much smaller than the vast leather seats of the two assessors on either side ...

Dummy and Biffy

Noël Annan, 17 October 1985

Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community 
by Christopher Andrew.
Heinemann, 616 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 434 02110 5
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The Secret Generation 
by John Gardner.
Heinemann, 453 pp., £9.95, August 1985, 0 434 28250 2
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Two Thyrds 
by Bertie Denham.
Ross Anderson Publications, 292 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 86360 006 9
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The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany 1933-1939 
by Wesley Wark.
Tauris, 304 pp., £19.50, October 1985, 1 85043 014 4
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... book again involves a traitor and spans two generations from the Second World War to the present day. The author, who is the Conservative chief whip in the House of Lords, really knows how the upper classes talk and, as a master of deals behind the scenes, has written a story of singular ingenuity and suspense. Probably in revenge for years of listening to ...

Playboys of the GPO

Colm Tóibín, 18 April 1996

Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation 
by Declan Kiberd.
Cape, 719 pp., £20, November 1995, 0 224 04197 5
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... and to see him ultimately as a martyr for the cause, a cross between St Sebastian and Kevin Barry, which is how Stephen Rea made him appear in Terry Eagleton’s play St Oscar. Kiberd’s reading remains tentative and convincing, but he is forced to leave a great deal out, such as Wilde’s homosexuality. In taking only the aspects of Wilde and Shaw ...

So much was expected

R.W. Johnson, 3 December 1992

Harold Wilson 
by Ben Pimlott.
HarperCollins, 811 pp., £20, October 1992, 0 00 215189 8
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Harold Wilson 
by Austen Morgan.
Pluto, 625 pp., £25, May 1992, 0 7453 0635 7
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... its readiness to dictate terms to his government. In that event, Cromer replied, before election day there would be no sterling reserves left. In which case, said Wilson, they would let sterling float. In which case, shouted Cromer, there would be an international financial crisis (there wouldn’t, of course: Britain floated the pound without difficulty in ...

Investigate the Sock

David Trotter: Garbo’s Equivocation, 24 February 2022

Garbo 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Farrar, Straus, 438 pp., £32, December 2021, 978 0 374 29835 7
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... discovery and transformation into a living legend has been told often enough: most notably by Barry Paris in his biography of 1995. Born on 18 September 1905, Greta Lovisa Gustafsson was raised by respectable, hard-working parents in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Stockholm. Her education ended with her father’s early death, and by the age of ...

Between the Raindrops

David Bromwich: The Subtlety of James Stewart, 12 December 2002

James Stewart at the NFT 
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... that carry the film so adroitly to its end. This film nearly ends on a miserable Christmas Day, just as Made for Each Other nearly ends on a miserable New Year’s Eve. To be shut out from a scene where all others are celebrating is one of Stewart’s typical fates, the other side of his good cheer. Still, this is a Christmas movie, frankly modelled on ...

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