What Europeans Talk about when They Talk about Brexit

LRB Contributors: On Brexit, 3 January 2019

... member of the Armed Proletarians for Communism who was given refugee status by the Brazilian justice minister in 2009; that the Italian budget was to be rewritten again, with savings of €6.5 billion; that Chérif Chekatt, the suspected Christmas market terrorist, had been shot dead by police in Strasbourg. Way down the page: May returned from Brussels ...

In theory

Christopher Ricks, 16 April 1981

... in Measure for Measure –ISABELLA: Yet show some pity.ANGELO: I show it most of all, when I show justice,For then I pity those I do not know –and John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Angelo utters a thought – thought as principle – which is not less serious and searching than are Rawls’s concatenated and elaborated ...

Ecological Leninism

Adam Tooze: Drill, baby, drill, 18 November 2021

... without a revolutionary subject’. The environmental movement may have aligned itself with social justice activism, but it hasn’t been ‘able to challenge capitalism with anything like the power once evinced by the Third International or the national liberation movements, or even the social democratic parties of the Second International; a lame ...

Think outside the bun

Colin Burrow: Quote Me!, 8 September 2022

The New Yale Book of Quotations 
edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
Yale, 1136 pp., £35, October 2021, 978 0 300 20597 8
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... Bartlett for what became known as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations – which, if there were any justice in the world, should be known as Isabella Preston’s Familiar Quotations. ‘Bartlett’ in its later editions acknowledged that ‘what is familiar to one class of readers may be quite new to another,’ and in editions from 1863 stamped the aim of ...

Between the Raindrops

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

James Stewart at the NFT 
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... of men ride in, unhorse him, burn his wagons and shoot the mules. Stewart in this film, a man of justice in his own eyes, is, instead, to the old rancher Alec Waggoman (gravely played by Donald Crisp), a ‘man I saw in a dream’, the man who will surely ruin his life. He does that involuntarily as his quest proceeds, and ...

Vermicular Dither

Michael Hofmann, 28 January 2010

The World of Yesterday 
by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell.
Pushkin Press, 474 pp., £20, 1 906548 12 9
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... was nothing striking about his features’ (just as it does, incidentally, and with more justice, about Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘features, not in themselves striking’) isn’t going to raise the bar for perspicacity or boldness. Accordingly, the human portraits are not among the best things here: the pages on Vienna, Paris and especially Berlin are ...

Europe’s Sullen Child

Jan-Werner Müller: Breurope, 2 June 2016

... for Brussels’. Instead, shamefully, they opted to stand with Poland’s deeply illiberal Law and Justice party when it came under severe criticism in the European Parliament earlier this year (Cameron took the Tories out of the European People’s Party grouping in 2014 and joined an alliance with Poland’s ruling party as well as right-wing populists such ...

Did he want the job?

Tobias Gregory: Montaigne’s Career, 8 March 2018

Montaigne: A Life 
by Philippe Desan, translated by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal.
Princeton, 796 pp., £32.95, January 2017, 978 0 691 16787 9
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... office conferred noble status, according to the official explanation, because the king’s justice was royal and therefore should be administered by nobles. The real reason was that the crown sold the offices, and the title was an incentive. Montaigne’s uncle purchased himself a seat in the Bordeaux parlement in 1535, and Pierre Eyquem bought his ...

Wielded by a Wizard

Seamus Perry: Shelley’s Kind of Glee, 3 January 2019

Selected Poems and Prose 
by Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Jack Donovan and Cian Duffy.
Penguin, 893 pp., £12.99, January 2017, 978 0 241 25306 9
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... you, they, are … merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind.’ Donald Davie once took Shelley to task for his ‘loose use’ of pronouns, which showed, Davie thought, a lack of discipline and probably suspect moral hygiene; but the tangles of such moments are not really a mark of carelessness, any more than is the ...

The Comeuppance Button

Colin Burrow: Dreadful Mr Dahl, 15 December 2022

Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, an Unofficial Biography 
by Matthew Dennison.
Head of Zeus, 264 pp., £20, August 2022, 978 1 78854 941 7
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... busted many of Dahl’s many self-mythologisations) and the huge ‘official’ one by Donald Sturrock, which, while seeking to bring out the best in Dahl, doesn’t conceal his self-aggrandising side.Through the mid-1960s Dahl wrote film scripts, variously hacked about and supplemented by other hands, including the screenplay for the Bond movie ...

Ill-Suited to Reality

Tom Stevenson: Nato’s Delusions, 1 August 2024

Nato: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance 
by Sten Rynning.
Yale, 345 pp., £20, March, 978 0 300 27011 2
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Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of Nato 
by Peter Apps.
Wildfire, 624 pp., £25, February, 978 1 0354 0575 6
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Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance since the Cold War 
edited by Grey Anderson.
Verso, 356 pp., £19.99, July 2023, 978 1 80429 237 2
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... in the service of constructing ‘an order of common prosperity and well-being based upon justice’. The obvious comparison is the Warsaw Pact. But to see the two alliances as in any way similar invites the thought that Nato might not be so benign after all. It is sometimes argued that the US was hoodwinked into forming Nato by clever Europeans ...

Bastard Foreigners

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare v. the English, 2 July 2020

Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness 
by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton.
Cambridge, 245 pp., £75, October 2019, 978 1 108 49373 4
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... Szekspirowski, three-quarters funded with EU regional development money and officially opened by Donald Tusk in 2014. Built on the site of a converted fencing school in which touring English actors performed in the early 17th century, Renato Rizzi’s prodigy of an auditorium deploys hydraulic engineering to sidestep the question of whether a present-day ...

Nobody at Home

Jon Elster, 2 June 1983

Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism 
by Steven Collins.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £22.50, June 1982, 0 521 24081 6
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Le Bonheur-Liberté: Bouddhisme Profond et Modernité 
by Serge-Christophe Kolm.
Presses Universitaires de France, 637 pp., £150, January 1983, 9782130373162
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... mathematical economist, with many publications in the domain of public economics and economic justice. Like most economists, he is a utilitarian, and this is evident in his interpretation of Buddhism. He does not, however, cite the version of utilitarianism which is beyond doubt closest to his own view: the version developed in the work of Derek ...

America Explodes

Adam Shatz, 18 June 2020

... were wrongfully convicted of the assault and rape of a white female jogger in Central Park. Donald Trump took out advertisements in four New York City newspapers calling for the death penalty to be reinstated in New York; although the men were later cleared of all charges, he continues to insist on their guilt. Amy Cooper may have known to use the ...

Pointing the Finger

Jacqueline Rose: ‘The Plague’, 7 May 2020

... size in the normal run of things? These are the formulae, almost exactly, that were reached for by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in their earliest denial mode (from which Bolsonaro remains unbudged). To Camus, such thinking shouldn’t be dismissed as the ranting of dangerous fools, even when it is that. He is interested in how human subjects deal with ...