Ordained as a Nation

Pankaj Mishra: Exporting Democracy, 21 February 2008

The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anti-Colonial Nationalism 
by Erez Manela.
Oxford, 331 pp., £17.99, July 2007, 978 0 19 517615 5
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... that resulted from the influx of European goods; high interest rates on loans; ownership of major businesses by foreign capitalists’. The war, which enfeebled the economies of the major imperialist powers – Britain, Germany and France – and further discredited their regimes, endowed America with both power and ...

Biff-Bang

Ferdinand Mount: Tariffs before Trump, 14 August 2025

Exile Economics: If Globalisation Fails 
by Ben Chu.
Basic Books, 310 pp., £25, May, 978 1 3998 1716 5
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No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China and Helping America’s Workers 
by Robert Lighthizer.
Broadside, 384 pp., £25, August 2023, 978 0 06 328213 1
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... was itself unprecedented. Its catastrophic results led to Trump’s election, and one of his major goals ‘was to return US trade policy to its realistic and pragmatic roots’. Historically, as we have seen, this is a justifiable claim. Lighthizer has every right to argue that ‘protecting American trade interests was one of the very reasons for our ...

Mrs Shakespeare

Barbara Everett, 18 December 1986

William Shakespeare: The Sonnets and ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ 
edited by John Kerrigan.
Viking, 458 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 670 81466 0
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... must be partly the help more recently given by such learned work on the art of inscriptions as John Sparrow’s, whose Visible Words, Line upon Line and Lapidaria are gratefully quoted in this and the following paragraph. For some three hundred years after the mid-15th century, a new art born in Italy swept Europe, accompanying the greater visual ...

Mr and Mr and Mrs and Mrs

James Davidson: Why would a guy want to marry a guy?, 2 June 2005

The Friend 
by Alan Bray.
Chicago, 380 pp., £28, September 2003, 0 226 07180 4
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... couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The Westminster Chronicle fills in the ...

Maurice Thomson’s War

Perry Anderson, 4 November 1993

Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders 1550-1653 
by Robert Brenner.
Cambridge, 734 pp., £40, March 1993, 0 521 37319 0
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The Nature of the English Revolution 
by John Morrill.
Longman, 466 pp., £32, June 1993, 0 582 08941 7
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... Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations of the Caroline crisis, and class interpretations of the Civil War, these histories ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... Art and New Wave. To see her in sunglasses was to see it was so. And in Roger Straus, the dapper major domo of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, she had a publisher who was closer to a studio boss in his roles as promoter, protector, enforcer and profane big daddy. Partisan Review was Sontag’s Book of Revelation. She revered the magazine from the first moment she ...

Blood for Oil?

Retort: The takeover of Iraq, 21 April 2005

... other OPEC powers; the dismal findings of the Simmons Report, spelling out the declining yields of major Saudi oilfields – had placed in doubt the Saudi role as a reliable ‘swing producer’, which could turn the taps on or off whenever it was in America’s strategic interest. The US government has, in its ‘special relationship’ with the House of ...

Was He Quite Ordinary?

Mary Beard: Marcus Aurelius, 23 July 2009

Marcus Aurelius: Warrior, Philosopher, Emperor 
by Frank McLynn.
Bodley Head, 684 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 0 224 07292 2
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... of Pliny’s speech in praise of Trajan (the Panegyric) and some commentary on the Gospel of St John. But the prize finds, making up the largest part of the book, were faintly legible copies of the correspondence of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, one of the leading scholars and orators of the second century ad, and tutor to the future emperor Marcus Aurelius, who ...

Anti-Magician

Geoffrey Hawthorn: Max Weber, 27 August 2009

Max Weber: A Biography 
by Joachim Radkau, translated by Patrick Camiller.
Polity, 683 pp., £25, January 2009, 978 0 7456 4147 8
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... associations, was still finding it difficult to write. ‘Incapable of lecturing or of publishing major works, he sought a new role as independent adviser, stimulator and organiser,’ and made the mistake of accepting an invitation from the publisher Paul Siebeck to produce a new handbook of political economy. One by one, the 45 contributors deserted, and he ...

Messages from the 29th Floor

David Trotter: Lifts, 3 July 2014

Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator 
by Andreas Bernard, translated by David Dollenmayer.
NYU, 309 pp., £21.99, April 2014, 978 0 8147 8716 8
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... scenes occur in the great mining films of the early 1940s (Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). Bernard soon leaves the mineshafts behind. His main interest lies in the ways in which the advent of the elevator transformed the design, construction and experience of high-rise buildings, and thus of modern urban life in ...

Death among the Barbours

Christopher Tayler: Donna Tartt, 19 December 2013

The Goldfinch 
by Donna Tartt.
Little, Brown, 771 pp., £20, October 2013, 978 1 4087 0494 3
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... back to New York, where Hobie is waiting to fill the role of substitute father. After the only major temporal dissolve, we catch up with Theo eight years later. Having had an undistinguished college career, he’s taken over the sales-and-money side of Hobie’s business and made a success of it. But he’s addicted to pharmaceutical opiates, tortured by ...

‘We’ and ‘You’

Owen Bennett-Jones: Suburban Jihadis, 27 August 2015

‘We Love Death as You Love Life’: Britain’s Suburban Terrorists 
by Raffaello Pantucci.
Hurst, 377 pp., £15.99, March 2015, 978 1 84904 165 2
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... looking for an imam often end up hiring graduates of these seminaries, giving the Deobandis a major role in the development of British Islam. Before 9/11, Deobandi mosques openly invited violent jihadis to Britain for speaking tours on which they encouraged young Muslims to head out east to fight jihad. Today such activities are more limited and more ...

Don’t talk to pigeons

Ben Jackson: MI5 in WW1, 22 January 2015

MI5 in the Great War 
edited by Nigel West.
Biteback, 434 pp., £25, July 2014, 978 1 84954 670 6
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... Germany and at first didn’t hesitate to express his impatience with the scare: when asked by Sir John Barlow, MP for Frome, whether he was aware that there were 66,000 German soldiers in England and 50,000 stands of Mauser rifles stored in cellars within a few hundred yards of Charing Cross, he thanked Barlow for providing such an excellent example of the ...

Destined to Disappear

Susan Pedersen: ‘Race Studies’, 20 October 2016

White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations 
by Robert Vitalis.
Cornell, 272 pp., $29.95, November 2015, 978 0 8014 5397 7
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... soul? A few white scholars thought the task impossible. Indeed, one of the most famous – John Burgess, founder of Columbia’s School of Political Science and of the Political Science Quarterly – opposed President McKinley’s imperial adventuring precisely because it threatened the democratic institutions he thought suited to ...

A Mess of Their Own Making

David Runciman: Twelve Years of Tory Rule, 17 November 2022

... Someone talked her out of that. Instead, she and Kwarteng spent the next ten days planning for a major shift in government policy at a time when most government activity was on hold. During the period of mourning Britain looked like a country that knew what it was about, confident in its institutions and proud of its traditions. But that’s because it was ...