Resistance from Elsewhere

Kevin Okoth: Black Marxism, 7 April 2022

Black Marxism 
by Cedric Robinson.
Penguin, 436 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 0 241 51417 7
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Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition 
by Joshua Myers.
Polity, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2021, 978 1 5095 3792 1
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... according to Stanley Crouch, ‘one could see the signal bright red cover almost everywhere that young people were gathered.’) The book was Cruse’s response to the failures of the civil rights movement, and his sharp criticism of Black intellectuals, and their timid integrationism, appealed to student activists. But he also found Marxism and Black ...

O brambles, chain me too

Tom Paulin: Life and Vowels of Andrew Marvell, 25 November 1999

World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell 
by Nicholas Murray.
Little, Brown, 294 pp., £20, September 1999, 0 316 64863 9
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Marvell and Liberty 
edited by Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis.
Macmillan, 365 pp., £47.50, July 1999, 0 333 72585 9
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Andrew Marvell 
edited by Thomas Healy.
Longman, 212 pp., £12.99, September 1998, 0 582 21910 8
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... is reproduced on the dust-jacket of Marvell and Liberty, a collection of essays which, like David Norbrook’s recent Writing the English Republic, chimes with the discontent that a significant percentage of British people now feels about the monarchy. That sense of friendship, of a shared and living republican culture, is present in Melville’s many ...

Along the Divide

Nathan Thrall: Israel’s Allies, 5 November 2015

Periphery: Israel’s Search for Middle East Allies 
by Yossi Alpher.
Rowman and Littlefield, 196 pp., £23.95, January 2015, 978 1 4422 3101 6
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... to Israel’s occupation – in effect criminalising all Palestinian political activity. Young Palestinians in Jerusalem feel they have been abandoned. Many of them loathe the political leadership in Ramallah, which they feel stood by as Israel slowly transformed and took over the city’s east, cutting it off from the rest of the West Bank. The ...

Diary

Julian Barnes: People Will Hate Us Again, 20 April 2017

... insider when Cameron and Johnson were first seen as rivals for the leadership. ‘Boris thinks David’s a lightweight, and David thinks Boris is a loose cannon,’ said my source. ‘And the trouble is – they’re both right.’ Now Johnson, Fox and David Davis, another whose career ...

Can’t Afford to Tell the Truth

Owen Bennett-Jones: Trouble at the BBC, 20 December 2018

... before Wimbledon and other prized parts of the output go the way of the Premier League and Sir David Attenborough onto better financed channels. That’s not the only difficulty. It is generally reckoned that if the BBC is to justify being the beneficiary of a poll tax, the BBC needs to reach at least 90 per cent of the UK audience, although there is a bit ...

Hare’s Blood

Peter Wollen: John Berger, 4 April 2002

The Selected Essays of John Berger 
edited by Geoff Dyer.
Bloomsbury, 599 pp., £25, November 2001, 0 7475 5419 6
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... read many of the same books, from the same canon of French revolutionary literature. He respected David as a painter because of his ‘revolutionary classicism’ and, in his book on The Success and Failure of Picasso, he cites Bakunin’s typically anarchist dictum that ‘the urge to destroy is also a creative urge,’ comparing it to Picasso’s ...

Ruthless and Truthless

Ferdinand Mount: Rotten Government, 6 May 2021

The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism 
by Peter Oborne.
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 3985 0100 3
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Political Advice: Past, Present and Future 
edited by Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose.
I.B. Tauris, 240 pp., £21.99, February 2021, 978 1 83860 120 1
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... limited’. By that time, Oborne also had access to the memo of 14 March 2002 by Sir David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, reporting to his boss on his conversations with Condoleezza Rice: ‘I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very ...

How confident should she be?

Richard Lloyd Parry: Aung San Suu Kyi, 26 April 2012

The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi 
by Peter Popham.
Rider, 446 pp., £20, November 2011, 978 1 84604 248 5
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... diplomats have all called on Thein Sein. Each has returned cautious, but unmistakably impressed. David Cameron, who this week became the most important visitor so far, urged us all to ‘pay tribute … to the leadership of President Thein Sein and his government, which has been prepared to release political prisoners, hold by-elections and legalise ...

Non-Identity Crisis

Stephen Mulhall: Parfit’s Trolley Problem, 1 June 2023

Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality 
by David Edmonds.
Princeton, 380 pp., £28, April, 978 0 691 22523 4
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... For David Edmonds​ , and for many other philosophers, Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, was one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill. Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social resources, our relationship to future generations, and more ...

For Every Winner a Loser

John Lanchester: What is finance for?, 12 September 2024

The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates and the Unravelling of a Wall Street Legend 
by Rob Copeland.
Macmillan, 352 pp., £22, August, 978 1 5290 7560 1
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The Trading Game: A Confession 
by Gary Stevenson.
Allen Lane, 432 pp., £25, March, 978 0 241 63660 2
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... fund of the World Bank, run by Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg, who liked to make bets on up-and-coming young fund managers with something to prove. She ended up letting Bridgewater go, because ‘for all Dalio’s grandiloquence, the trades that Bridgewater had recommended for the World Bank were essentially just bets on whether interest rates would rise or ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2004, 6 January 2005

... lecturer; another, ignoring us completely as they all do, sits working by himself and could be a young broker in the City. Their history teacher talks about them quietly and the problems she and they have, particularly non-attendance, and it all seems a long way from the sixth form that I’ve written. 1 March. In the accounts I have seen of Sir Andrew ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Notes on 1997, 1 January 1998

... the same from one abbey to the next.2 April, Yorkshire. Come across a thirty-year-old note from David Vaisey, at that time a postgraduate student at Bodley and subsequently its Librarian. The note just has a crudely drawn swastika and the slogan ‘A.L. Raus’.14 April. Pass two slightly cheeky-looking middle-aged businessmen in Hanover Square, one of whom ...

The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett, 8 March 2007

... difference. ‘Maam can borrow up to six books.’ ‘Six? Heavens!’ Meanwhile the ginger-haired young man had made his choice and given his book to the librarian to stamp. Still playing for time the Queen picked it up. ‘What have you chosen, Mr Seakins?’ expecting it to be, well, she wasn’t sure what she expected, but it wasn’t what it ...

The Sound of Voices Intoning Names

Thomas Laqueur, 5 June 1997

French Children of the Holocaust: A Memorial 
by Serge Klarsfeld.
New York, 1881 pp., $95, November 1996, 0 8147 2662 3
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... time she had seen her mother, she insisted that Ida wear a comb to make her look more ‘like a young woman’. On the Auschwitz ramp, she speculates, it made her look old enough for a work-detail. There are a few more such testimonies. But the Shoah is by and large represented here neither in first-person accounts of the camps nor in pictures of its worst ...

Little Miss Neverwell

Hilary Mantel: Her memoir continued, 23 January 2003

... of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely available, I only half believed I could coerce my body, and suspected that it might have some ...