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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 ...

Destination Unknown

William Davies: Sociology Gone Wrong, 9 June 2022

The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past 
by Mike Savage.
Harvard, 422 pp., £28.95, May 2021, 978 0 674 98807 1
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Colonialism and Modern Social Theory 
by Gurminder K. Bhambra and John Holmwood.
Polity, 257 pp., £17.99, July 2021, 978 1 5095 4130 0
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A Brief History of Equality 
by Thomas Piketty.
Harvard, 272 pp., £22.95, April, 978 0 674 27355 9
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... block of geopolitical power, and the welfare state became essential to the pursuit of social justice. Liberal democracy was to be realised via the steady expansion of suffrage and legally protected human rights. Experts in both the natural and social sciences (newly divided into separate disciplines) would bend their knowledge to the development of ...

Waiting for the Poetry

Ange Mlinko: Was Adrienne Rich a poet?, 15 July 2021

The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography 
by Hilary Holladay.
Doubleday, 416 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 0 385 54150 3
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Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution 
by Adrienne Rich.
Norton, 345 pp., £13.99, May 2021, 978 0 393 54142 7
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... the full range of Rich’s concerns – which expanded over the decades, from pacifism and racial justice in the 1960s to feminism and queerness in the 1970s to antisemitism and Marxism in the 1980s – has dominated public discourse in the wake of the Trump years. It is also a study in the professionalisation of American poetry, and its imbrication with the ...

A Kind of Greek

Jeremy Harding: Frank Thompson, 7 March 2013

A Very English Hero: The Making of Frank Thompson 
by Peter Conradi.
Bloomsbury, 419 pp., £18.99, August 2012, 978 1 4088 0243 4
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... thinking along these lines – or thinking at all about the drastic turn that matters were taking. Donald McLachlan, who’d covered the burning of the Reichstag and then the trial for the Times, was now teaching at the school. By the time he arrived, Frank and his friend M.R.D. Foot – later New College and SOE – had already read McLachlan’s reports of ...

The Precarious Rise of the Gulf Despots

Nicolas Pelham: Tyrants of the Gulf, 22 February 2018

... multiple media platforms celebrate the demonstrations calling for freedom, democracy and justice which have swept the streets of Iran. But they condemn the dissent caused by increases in petrol prices and cuts to subsidies at home. Until recently, Saudi citizens – in common with those in large parts of the Gulf – have barely been taxed. This is ...

Can’t Afford to Tell the Truth

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

... greater fervour. Because he took the phrase as his own, these developments are associated with Donald Trump. But others saw this coming a decade before he became president. During the George W. Bush administration, the senior US journalist Ron Suskind encountered a White House official who admonished him for living in what he called the ‘reality-based ...

A Tove on the Table

A.W. Moore: Versions of Wittgenstein, 1 August 2024

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Michael Beaney.
Oxford, 100 pp., £8.99, May 2023, 978 0 19 886137 9
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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Alexander Booth.
Penguin, 94 pp., £14.99, December 2023, 978 0 241 68195 4
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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Damion Searls.
Norton, 181 pp., £19.99, April, 978 1 324 09243 8
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... the translator with nothing to translate. (Booth, in his acknowledgments, says that his editor, Donald Futers, has saved him from various errors, among which he lists ‘just plain nonsense’. He then adds the standard caveat that any remaining errors ‘sadly, are entirely my own’. Not if he has done his job properly! Such errors are then largely ...

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan, 6 March 2025

... of victimhood, the one to which we must now all defer; it also spawned the language of the social justice warriors.’ For Marshall, opposing ‘progressivism’ is a spiritual mission, but also an economic one: he has claimed that ‘woke capitalism’ will ‘end’ free-market capitalism. ‘Paul believes that this is a civilisational battle,’ someone ...

After Kemal

Perry Anderson, 25 September 2008

... still commanded a comfortable majority of the country. By 1965, this was consolidated behind the Justice Party led by Sülyman Demirel, which alone took 53 per cent of the vote. Thirty years later, Demirel would still be in the presidential palace. A hydraulic engineer with American connections – Eisenhower fellowship; consultant for Morrison-Knudsen ...

The Contingency of Community

Richard Rorty, 24 July 1986

... and ‘absolute’ is badly suited to describe the relation between the old and the new. Donald Davidson has pointed out that once we give up on the notion of ‘absolute criteria of rationality’, and begin using ‘rational’ to mean something like ‘internal coherence’, then, if we do not limit the range of this term’s application, we shall ...

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