Into the Net

Neal Ascherson: Records of the Spanish Civil War, 15 December 2016

Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39 
by Adam Hochschild.
Macmillan, 438 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 1 5098 1054 3
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¡No Pasarán! Writings from the Spanish Civil War 
edited by Pete Ayrton.
Serpent’s Tail, 393 pp., £20, April 2016, 978 1 84668 997 0
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The Last Days of the Spanish Republic 
by Paul Preston.
William Collins, 390 pp., £25, February 2016, 978 0 00 816340 2
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A Distant Heartbeat: A War, a Disappearance and a Family’s Secrets 
by Eunice Lipton.
New Mexico, 165 pp., £18.50, April 2016, 978 0 8263 5658 1
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... Eunice Lipton was one of those who came back, but representing the dead. Her uncle David was killed on Hill 666, in the Ebro offensive; her book is a memoir about her search for him. He came from just that New York Jewish working-class background which Hochschild mourns. It was a hotly disputatious family, in which Lipton’s brash ...

Thunderstruck

Tim Parks: Victor Hugo’s Ego, 4 May 2017

The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of ‘Les Misérables’ 
by David Bellos.
Particular, 307 pp., £20, January 2017, 978 1 84614 470 7
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... as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were. The title of David Bellos’s book on Les Misérables – The Novel of the Century – immediately tells us we’re in the territory; Hugo is greater than his rivals; Bellos has fallen under the spell. ‘I was entranced,’ he tells us at once of his first reading of the ...

Bonfire in Merrie England

Richard Wilson: Shakespeare’s Burning, 4 May 2017

... founded the Memorial, became ‘the most important figure in Chesterton’s life’, according to David Baker in Ideology of Obsession: A.K. Chesterton and British Fascism. The two met when Chesterton went to interview Flower, ‘whose reign over Stratford-upon-Avon came as near absolutism as made no odds’. Flower was impressed by Chesterton’s refusal to ...

God bless Italy

Christopher Clark: Rome, Vienna, 1848, 10 May 2018

The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe 
by David I. Kertzer.
Oxford, 474 pp., £25, May 2018, 978 0 19 882749 8
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... exile was a traumatic experience, whose grip on his personality would tighten over the years. As David Kertzer shows in this subtle and brilliantly told account, the exile of Pius IX was an event that shaped modern Europe. The revolution that broke out in Rome in the spring of 1848 had begun not with protests, but with jubilation. Little was known of ...

The Saudi Lie

Madawi Al-Rasheed, 21 March 2019

... his celebrants were some of America’s most esteemed foreign reporters and analysts, including David Ignatius of the Washington Post and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. But then, on 2 October last year, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and dismembered with a bone saw, causing outrage in the West. Even ...

As the toffs began to retreat

Neal Ascherson: Declinism, 22 November 2018

What We Have Lost: The Dismantling of Great Britain 
by James Hamilton-Paterson.
Head of Zeus, 360 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 1 78497 235 6
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The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A 20th-Century History 
by David Edgerton.
Allen Lane, 681 pp., £30, June 2018, 978 1 84614 775 3
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... its failure to maintain the extraordinary industrial and scientific leadership it once attained. David Edgerton’s book, the more academic of the two, is a brilliant and often very aggressive challenge to a set of assumptions about the recent past. James Hamilton-Paterson, still one of England’s most skilled and alluring prose writers in or out of ...

Squealing to Survive

John Lahr: Clancy was here, 19 July 2018

Black Sunset: Hollywood Sex, Lies, Glamour, Betrayal and Raging Egos 
by Clancy Sigal.
Icon, 352 pp., £12.99, May 2018, 978 1 78578 439 2
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The London Lover: My Weekend that Lasted Thirty Years 
by Clancy Sigal.
Bloomsbury, 274 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 4088 8580 2
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... Tynan) to write a musical on nuclear war; the Spectator appointed him film critic, and his friend David Astor got him permanent residence and made him a regular reporter on the Observer. Lessing and Sigal inspired and tormented each other in equal measure. ‘She blames me for forcing her into other men’s arms. (“You made me do it. I’m really a one-man ...

Life on Sark

Jonathan Parry: Life on Sark, 18 May 2023

... wealthy interlopers​ most determined to flout local traditions were the Barclay brothers. Sir David and Sir Frederick, owners of the Daily Telegraph, became interested in Sark affairs after they bought the small neighbouring island of Brecqhou in 1993 and spent millions on a castle and gardens there. Under Sark’s tax laws, they were liable to pay the ...

Outbreaks of Poets

Robert Crawford, 15 June 2023

The Treasuries: Poetry Anthologies and the Making of British Culture 
by Clare Bucknell.
Head of Zeus, 344 pp., £27.99, February, 978 1 80024 144 2
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... A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British Literature advocated a linguistically complicated idea of what ‘British’ meant. Sean Shesgreen’s ‘Short History of The Norton Anthology of English Literature’, published in Critical Inquiry in 2009, quotes ...

Like Cold Oysters

Bee Wilson, 19 May 2016

Edith Piaf: A Cultural History 
by David Looseley.
Liverpool, 254 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 1 78138 257 8
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... It’s got to tear [the audience] apart, scream at them, that’s what my character is.’In David Looseley’s new interpretation, Piaf’s notoriously elusive life story is best told as cultural history. This is a book about Piaf and her crowd. Rather than trying to get to the ‘real’ Piaf, as Robert Belleret did in Piaf, un mythe français ...

Repeal the 20th Century

William Davies: Pre-MAGA, 25 September 2025

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists and the Origins of Trumpism 
by John Ganz.
Penguin, 426 pp., £10.99, June, 978 1 4059 8169 9
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... But he was decisive in introducing to mainstream discourse the racist ideas of figures such as David Duke, which were unacceptable to the Republican Party of the time. Writing in the early 1980s, Francis already sounded like a MAGA provocateur: ‘The New Right is not a conservative force but a radical or revolutionary one.’ Its aim, he argued, should be ...

War on Heisenberg

M.F. Perutz, 18 November 1993

Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb 
by Thomas Powers.
Cape, 610 pp., £20, April 1993, 0 224 03641 6
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Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts 
introduced by Charles Frank.
Institute of Physics, 515 pp., £14.95, May 1993, 0 7503 0274 7
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... evidence to refute Goudsmit’s accusation, confirming the conclusion already reached in David Irving’s The German Atomic Bomb, that the German physicists wanted to build a reactor, but not a bomb. Their secretly recorded comments on Hiroshima have now provided further evidence of their reluctance; Heisenberg apparently regarded it as ...

Fatal Realism

Andrew O’Hagan: Walter Lippmann’s Warning, 25 December 2025

Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography 
by Tom Arnold-Forster.
Princeton, 353 pp., £30, July 2025, 978 0 691 21521 1
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... published between 1917 and 1920. ‘The investigators came up with some bitter conclusions,’ David Weingast wrote in 1950:They found the Times guilty of having misled its readers on one of the most stupendous events in modern history. The paper had failed in its primary responsibility to publish accurate, reliable information. Whatever its purpose, the ...

Siding with Rushdie

Christopher Hitchens, 26 October 1989

The Rushdie File 
edited by Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland.
Fourth Estate/ICA, 268 pp., £5.95, July 1989, 0 947795 84 7
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CounterBlasts No 4: Sacred Cows 
by Fay Weldon.
Chatto, 43 pp., £2.99, July 1989, 0 7011 3556 5
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Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation 
by Timothy Brennan.
Macmillan, 203 pp., £29.50, September 1989, 0 333 49020 7
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... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...

Looking Away

Stephen Holmes: Questions of Intervention, 14 November 2002

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide 
by Samantha Power.
Basic Books, 640 pp., £21.99, January 2002, 0 465 06150 8
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War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals 
by David Halberstam.
Bloomsbury, 540 pp., £20, April 2002, 0 7475 5946 5
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... Scowcroft, James Baker) rather than from the Democrats or the Left? Samantha Power and David Halberstam did not set out to solve this riddle, but they have unintentionally provided an important part of the answer. Power was motivated to study the history of disappointing US responses to genocide by her indignation at the Clinton Administration’s ...