Another Country

Adam Shatz: Visions of America, 5 February 2026

... detail that the idea of freedom has gone hand in hand, for many white Americans, with the right to lord it over others, especially Black people and Native Americans, but also the victims of the country’s foreign adventures and, indeed, anyone who stands in its way, including its (former?) European allies. Freedom, as most Americans understand it, is the ...

The Europe to Come

Perry Anderson, 25 January 1996

The Rotten Heart of Europe 
by Bernard Connolly.
Faber, 427 pp., £17.50, September 1995, 0 571 17520 1
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Orchestrating Europe: The Informal Politics of European Union 1973-93 
by Keith Middlemas.
Fontana, 821 pp., £27.50, November 1995, 0 00 255678 2
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... master of the continent again? Are not the creation of jobs and growth of incomes issues closer to home? In France the next years are likely to offer an interesting test of the relative weights of consumption and strategy in the process of European integration. Meanwhile the pressures from below, already welling up in strikes and demonstrations, can only ...

Barbed Wire

Reviel Netz, 20 July 2000

... had the desired effect as the owner saw his hogs were getting terribly marked and kept them at home.’ What set Rose apart was that he took the trouble to patent his idea and to have it displayed at a farm exhibition held in de Kalb, Illinois.At this stage, iron barbs supplemented wood rather than substituting for it. Wire fencing already existed ‘for ...
Rationalism in Politics, and Other Essays 
by Michael Oakeshott, edited by Timothy Fuller.
Liberty, 556 pp., $24, October 1991, 0 86597 094 7
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... his political ideals had not attracted the support they merited, and that he had failed to bring home that ‘the predominant model of liberal democratic institutions’ in the Western world ‘necessarily leads to a gradual transformation of the spontaneous order of a free society into a totalitarian system’. To avert this fatal propensity, which Hayek ...

One Exceptional Figure Stood Out

Perry Anderson: Dmitri Furman, 30 July 2015

... World War, supposedly with some role in the surrender of Von Paulus at Stalingrad, before coming home damaged from the battle for Budapest in 1944. After the war this stepfather remained a fervent believer in communism, but not in Stalin, in time befriending others – mostly Jews like himself – who had returned from the camps. Observing such incompatible ...

The Price

Dan Jacobson: The concluding part of Dan Jacobson’s interview with Ian Hamilton, 21 February 2002

... but having read his prose essay on the family, it was as if he was just versifying bits of it. ‘Home after Three Months away’ and ‘Man and Wife’, though, really hit me as what poems should be. There are about half a dozen poems that had that kind of impact on me: the passionate speaking voice and intimate subject-matter. The internal rhymes and basic ...

The End of British Farming

Andrew O’Hagan: British farming, 22 March 2001

... nowadays they are all buried under concrete, except for the farm at Toddhill, which became a home for the mentally handicapped. In my youth they had been like haunted houses. There were echoes in the barns.Those farms seemed as remote from the daily reality of our lives as the one in the wedding picture. We would never live there: computer factories and ...

Why Partition?

Perry Anderson, 19 July 2012

... Without it, he said, he and his men would have ‘looked complete fools with the government at home, having led them up the garden path to believe that Nehru would accept the plan’, and ‘Dickie Mountbatten would have been finished and could have packed his bag.’ The invaluable Menon was to hand, and the day was saved when he redrafted the plan to ...