The Fighting Family

Avi Shlaim, 9 May 1996

Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream: Power, Politics and Ideology from Begin to Netanyahu 
by Colin Shindler.
Tauris, 324 pp., £25, August 1995, 1 85043 969 9
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Summing Up: An Autobiography 
by Yitzhak Shamir.
Weidenfeld, 276 pp., £19.99, April 1994, 0 297 81337 4
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Broken Covenant: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis between the US and Israel 
by Moshe Arens.
Simon and Schuster, 320 pp., $25, February 1995, 0 671 86964 7
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A Zionist Stand 
by Ze’ev Begin.
Cass, 173 pp., £15, January 1993, 0 7146 4089 1
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Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism 
by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Farrar, Straus, 152 pp., $17, October 1995, 0 374 15492 9
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... this abomination.’ But the most bizarre example of the analogy is a telegram he sent to Ronald Reagan in early August 1982, when the Israeli Army was bombarding Beirut: Now may I tell you, dear Mr President, how I feel these days when I turn to the creator of my soul in deep gratitude. I feel as a Prime Minister empowered to instruct a valiant ...

Diary

Peter Pomerantsev: In Brighton Beach, 13 September 2012

... soapbox on the street. Russian affection for the Republican Party is strengthened by nostalgia for Ronald Reagan as the man who stood up to the Soviet Union. The Republican claim of being defenders of true American values finds an echo here. At the same time there is also something opportunistic, something a little Ostap Bender, about the ‘Russian ...

Diary

Christian Lorentzen: At the Conventions, 27 September 2012

... best years were the ones between 1983 and 1987, that no one ever did as much for American women as Ronald Reagan and the personal computer, that the parties at the RNC have never been as good as they were for Goldwater in San Francisco in 1964, that New York is a bad place to live because of rapists, that the hottest guys at the convention were the ...

A Dog in the Fight

William Davies: Am I a fan?, 18 May 2023

A Fan’s Life: The Agony of Victory and the Thrill of Defeat 
by Paul Campos.
Chicago, 176 pp., £15, September 2022, 978 0 226 82348 5
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... experience. But the broader ideological terrain had already been set by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan: socialism and the organised working class had been defeated, their political threat neutered. In 1994, the year of Loaded’s first issue and Oasis’s first album, Tony Blair took over the Labour Party and immediately rewrote ‘Clause ...

How Do You Pay?

Bee Wilson: Falling for Michael Moore, 1 November 2007

Citizen Moore: An American Maverick 
by Roger Rapoport.
Methuen, 361 pp., £8.99, July 2007, 978 0 413 77649 5
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Manufacturing Dissent 
directed by Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk.
October 2007
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Sicko 
directed by Michael Moore.
October 2007
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... questioning plays on the deep American fear that free healthcare is somehow Soviet – the fear of Ronald Reagan that the government will tell doctors where to live and ‘one day we will awake to find that we are socialists.’ He quizzes a pair of French doctors about their income and whether it is taxed into oblivion and professes astonishment at their ...

Whoopers and Shouters

James Morone: William Jennings Bryan, 21 February 2008

A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan 
by Michael Kazin.
Anchor, 374 pp., $16.95, March 2007, 978 0 385 72056 4
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... and, later, Martin Luther King’s social gospel sermons. Bryan’s spirit remained vital until Ronald Reagan finally dropped the curtain on all that pandering. Still, the Populists looked backwards as much as they anticipated the future. Their common man lived in the countryside. And – always the little jolt of prejudice – Bryan’s people ...

Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill

Jonathan Raban: Sarah Palin’s Cunning, 9 October 2008

... to big business, and conviction that politicians are out to exploit the common man. In 1980, Ronald Reagan profitably tapped the movement with his promises of states’ rights, low taxes and a shrunken government in Washington; the ‘Reagan Democrats’ who crossed party lines to vote for him are still the most ...

My son has been poisoned!

David Bromwich: Cold War movies, 26 January 2012

An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War 
by J. Hoberman.
New Press, 383 pp., £21.99, March 2011, 978 1 59558 005 4
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... Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William Wyler, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Jerry Wald and Robert Young. Ronald Reagan, a New Deal Democrat at the time (and an FBI informant since 1941), decided after considerable brooding not to join the First Amendment protest. He spoke out anyway in roughly the same cause, from his new position as president of the Screen ...

Hauteur

Ian Gilmour: Britain and Europe, 10 December 1998

This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair 
by Hugo Young.
Macmillan, 558 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 333 57992 5
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... cause of her ‘truculent chauvinism in Europe’ (Lawson again) was her ideological bond with Ronald Reagan. Hence she found transatlantic relations far more agreeable than European ones. Her friendship with the President was a bonus during the Falklands conflict. As Argentina was the undeniable aggressor and three times as many Americans supported ...

Death-Qualified

Gary Indiana: The Brothers Tsarnaev, 10 September 2015

The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy 
by Masha Gessen.
Riverhead, 273 pp., £18.45, April 2015, 978 1 59463 264 8
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... the systemic social problems that have been allowed to metastasise ever since the presidency of Ronald Reagan. As everyday existence becomes more punitive for all but the monied few, more and more frustrated, volatile individuals will seek each other out online, aggravate whatever lethal fairy tale suits their pathology, and, ultimately, transfer their ...

Eat Your Spinach

Tony Wood: Russia and the West, 2 March 2017

Return to Cold War 
by Robert Legvold.
Polity, 208 pp., £14.99, February 2016, 978 1 5095 0189 2
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Should We Fear Russia? 
by Dmitri Trenin.
Polity, 144 pp., £9.99, November 2016, 978 1 5095 1091 7
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Who Lost Russia? How the World Entered a New Cold War 
by Peter Conradi.
Oneworld, 384 pp., £18.99, February 2017, 978 1 78607 041 8
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... Not since​ the days of Ronald Reagan has Russia played such a prominent role in US political life. After Donald Trump’s shock victory – greeted in the Russian parliament with cheers and champagne – came accusations of Russian meddling in the US electoral process, followed in January by the leak of a dossier claiming that the Russian authorities had accumulated (even more) compromising information on Trump ...

A Company of Merchants

Jamie Martin: The Bank of England, 24 January 2019

Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694-2013 
by David Kynaston.
Bloomsbury, 879 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 1 4088 6856 0
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... was 10.2 per cent in October 2009). Jimmy Carter, who had appointed Volcker, was crushed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election. But inflation was brought under control, and the lesson was learned: central banks must not concern themselves with the election cycle if they are to guarantee price stability. By the end of the 1990s, most of ...

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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... man is summed up in the single line ‘I’m the master of low expectations’? Or twenty from Ronald Reagan, when his dirty little Dirty Harry rip-off says it all: ‘I have my veto pen drawn and ready for any tax increase that Congress might even think of sending up. And I have only one thing to say to the tax increasers: Go ahead, make my ...

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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... made. He slept with starlets – and then, in 1953, he married one. Patricia Neal, co-star with Ronald Reagan in The Hasty Heart and former lover of Gary Cooper, was infinitely glamorous and their marriage was more or less instantly unhappy, since Neal wanted to be a movie star and Dahl wanted to be more than a movie star’s husband. Moreover, he ...

Between the Raindrops

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

James Stewart at the NFT 
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... when it was still the mainstream, and he endorsed the candidacies of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. There were other stars for whom that position became a major fact of life. Yet Stewart remained a friend through every disagreement with Henry Fonda – his housemate in New York in the early 1930s and in Brentwood after the war, and the ...