Chimps and Bulldogs

Stefan Collini: The Huxley Inheritance, 8 September 2022

An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family 
by Alison Bashford.
Allen Lane, 529 pp., £30, September 2022, 978 0 241 43432 1
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... on 22 October 4004 bc. Nor were ideas of ‘development’ new in themselves, and writers such as Robert Chambers, in his bestseller of the 1840s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, could run together an eclectic mix of geology, natural history and philosophical speculation to propose some kind of ‘evolutionary’ story. After 1859, Darwin’s name ...

The Eerie One

Bee Wilson: Peter Lorre, 23 March 2006

The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre 
by Stephen Youngkin.
Kentucky, 613 pp., $39.95, September 2005, 0 8131 2360 7
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... pathos of Expressionism’; Freud meets Strindberg, without the formal discipline of either. The young Loewenstein – who came to the Therapeutic Theatre complaining that his bourgeois parents did not understand him – fitted in straight away. It was Moreno who gave him his stage name, from an acquaintance called Peter and from the German word for ...

What a Woman!

J.L. Nelson: Joan of Arc, 19 October 2000

Joan of Arc 
by Mary Gordon.
Weidenfeld, 168 pp., £12.99, April 2000, 0 297 64568 4
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Joan of Arc: A Military Leader 
by Kelly DeVries.
Sutton, 242 pp., £20, November 1999, 0 7509 1805 5
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The Interrogation of Joan of Arc 
by Karen Sullivan.
Minnesota, 208 pp., £30, November 1999, 0 8166 3267 7
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... Every year on 8 May, a young woman dressed in armour and carrying a white banner rides in procession through the streets of Orléans in north-central France. Dignitaries of Church and State join in commemorating an event and a life. The event is the French relief of the city, after months of siege by the English, in 1429; the life is that of Joan of Arc, a 17-year-old girl from Lorraine told by heavenly voices to go ‘into France’ and to rescue Orléans ...

Plan it mañana

Geoffrey Hawthorn: Albert O. Hirschman, 11 September 2014

Wordly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman 
by Jeremy Adelman.
Princeton, 740 pp., £27.95, April 2013, 978 0 691 15567 8
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The Essential Hirschman 
edited by Jeremy Adelman.
Princeton, 367 pp., £19.95, October 2013, 978 0 691 15990 4
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... affairs. Kennan was glad to do so and invited several outsiders, including Reinhold Niebuhr and Robert Oppenheimer, to join him. They concluded that a sovereignty strong enough to calm French fears about Germany and resist what they took to be the threat of Soviet expansion would have to include the British and that the British, to maintain what they could ...

The Adulteress Wife

Toril Moi: Beauvoir Misrepresented, 11 February 2010

The Second Sex 
by Simone de Beauvoir and Constance Borde, translated by Sheila Malovany-Chevallier.
Cape, 822 pp., £30, November 2009, 978 0 224 07859 7
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... In most cases the word in French simply means ‘manly’ or ‘masculine’, or as Le Petit Robert tells us, ‘having the moral characteristics often attributed to men: active, energetic, courageous etc’. In the chapter on ‘The Lesbian’, Beauvoir is constantly made to speak of ‘virile’ and ‘viriloid’ women, when she means women who are ...

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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... so ‘hysterically discreet’ that he got married by proxy; who, in the words of the writer Robert Neumann, ‘spent his life on the run. From the Great War to Switzerland. From the symbolic firing-squad across the Channel. From Blitzed London to the safety of provincial Bath. From Hitler’s threatened invasion of England to the USA. From Roosevelt’s ...

Goings-on in the Tivoli Gardens

Christopher Tayler: Marlon James, 5 November 2015

A Brief History of Seven Killings 
by Marlon James.
Oneworld, 688 pp., £8.99, June 2015, 978 1 78074 635 7
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... myself I’m Gay Talese again.’ ‘The ones who come and go’, in James’s telling, include a young woman called Nina Burgess, who’s had a one night stand with Marley; Barry Diflorio, a CIA man; and Alex. The rest are gangsters, and the bigger picture they open up is a view from the ground of the working relationship between organised crime and Jamaican ...

Let’s call it failure

John Lanchester: The Shit We’re In, 3 January 2013

... government of the day. The OBR was set up to correct that tendency. To run it, Osborne brought in Robert Chote, who had been head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a highly respected think tank which analyses government tax and spending plans and reports on them in a spirit of Cassandra-meets-Scrooge. In June 2010, the OBR predicted that the UK economy ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: My Olympics, 30 August 2012

... him through France, en route to yellow jersey and victor’s laurels: the vehicle carrying young James Murdoch, his Team Sky paymaster. The other stroke of luck with the gold medal was that David Cameron, with his reverse Midas touch, chose not to make the time-trial finish at Hampton Court one of his photo opportunities. While Cameron, with his ...

Beijing Envy

Joshua Kurlantzick: China in Africa, 5 July 2007

China and Africa: Engagement and Compromise 
by Ian Taylor.
Routledge, 233 pp., £75, August 2006, 0 415 39740 5
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China and the Developing World: Beijing’s Strategy for the 21st Century 
edited by Joshua Eisenman, Eric Heginbotham and Derek Mitchell.
Sharpe, 232 pp., $29.95, April 2007, 978 0 7656 1713 2
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China’s African Policy 
Foreign Ministry of the People’s Republic of China, January 2006Show More
China’s Expanding Role in Africa: Implications for the United States 
by Bates Gill, Chin-hao Huang and J. Stephen Morrison.
Centre for Strategic and International Studies, February 2007
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Friends and Interests: China’s Distinctive Links with Africa 
by Barry Sautman.
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, April 2006
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African Perspectives on China in Africa 
edited by Firoze Manji and Stephen Marks.
Fahamu, 174 pp., £11.95, March 2007, 978 0 9545637 3 8
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Africa’s Silk Road: China and India’s New Economic Frontier 
by Harry Broadman.
World Bank, 391 pp., $20, November 2006, 0 8213 6835 4
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... personal contact, funding anti-malaria clinics and launching a programme to bring idealistic young volunteers to teach Chinese or help farmers. Nearly 18,000 Africans have received scholarships to study in China, the Chinese government has started to support Chinese-language studies in Africa, and Beijing has run an ‘Understanding China’ symposium ...

The History Boy

Alan Bennett: Exam-taking, 3 June 2004

... that was it. A stock vision of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your ...

Degrees of Not Knowing

Rory Stewart: Does anyone know how to govern Iraq?, 31 March 2005

What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building 
by Noah Feldman.
Princeton, 154 pp., £12.95, November 2004, 0 691 12179 6
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Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam’s Iraq 
by Matthew McAllester.
Harper Perennial, 304 pp., $13.95, February 2005, 0 06 058820 9
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The Fall of Baghdad 
by Jon Lee Anderson.
Little, Brown, 389 pp., £20, February 2005, 0 316 72990 6
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The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq 
by Christian Parenti.
New Press, 211 pp., £12.99, December 2004, 1 56584 948 5
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... when the problem becomes interesting, sets it aside – a bad habit he shares with his mentor Robert Nozick.1 Feldman writes, for example: It is appropriate for us to favour – not to impose – certain substantive constitutional outcomes, particularly those that guarantee equal treatment of all Iraqis, regardless of sex, religion and so forth. But the ...

Diary

Tom Paulin: Trimble’s virtues, 7 October 2004

... and it reproduced the famous propaganda poster, Ulster 1914, with the province personified as a young woman with long, flowing hair, defiantly carrying a rifle against a Union Jack, and proclaiming: ‘Deserted! Well – I Can Stand Alone.’ Part of Godson’s theme is Unionist or Protestant solitariness, their distrust of the English, and commitment to ...

Militias, Vigilantes, Death Squads

Charles Tripp: Iraq’s Shadow State, 25 January 2007

... Rumsfeld in the wake of the mid-term elections, and his replacement as secretary of defense by Robert Gates, a member of Baker’s group, appears to testify to such a change. ‘Security’ in Iraq seems to have been reduced to its most basic meaning of safety from physical harm. Whether it’s a matter of Iraqi government personnel, of communities and ...

Not Iran, Not North Korea, Not Libya, but Pakistan

Norman Dombey: The Nuclear Threat, 2 September 2004

... uranium, Urenco pioneered the use of the more efficient gas centrifuge. In 1972, A.Q. Khan, a young Pakistani, received his PhD from Leuven and went to work in Amsterdam for a sub-contractor of Urenco. In 1976, he went to work for the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. He took with him blueprints of the centrifuges then in use at Urenco, together with a ...