Rights, Wrongs and Outcomes

Stephen Sedley, 11 May 1995

“... by reference to the legal principles which undoubtedly explain them the kinds of award made in major libel actions. There is nothing wrong with the argument that if this is the due result there is something wrong with the principles or the process that have produced it. Refusing to accept the objectionable outcome alongside the welcome one is not simply ...”

The Habit of War

Jeremy Harding: Eritrea, 20 July 2006

I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation 
by Michela Wrong.
Harper Perennial, 432 pp., £8.99, January 2005, 0 00 715095 4
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Unfinished Business: Ethiopia and Eritrea at War 
edited by Dominique Jacquin-Berdal and Martin Plaut.
Red Sea, 320 pp., $29.95, April 2005, 1 56902 217 8
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Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa 
edited by Robert Rotberg.
Brookings, 210 pp., £11.99, December 2005, 0 8157 7571 7
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“... engine types, guidance systems and fuel consumption. In 1950, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had explained the inevitability of federation in terms that every adult Eritrean can retrieve, more or less correctly, from somewhere in the mental files: ‘From the point of view of justice, the opinions of the Eritrean people must receive ...”

I’m always in the club

Christian Lorentzen: Peter Matthiessen in Paris, 5 February 2026

True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen 
by Lance Richardson.
Chatto, 709 pp., £30, October 2025, 978 1 78474 301 7
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“... charismatic, amoral outsider at the centre. The story got him the attention of the publisher John Farrar, who passed it to Edward Weeks at the Atlantic. Matthiessen was taken on as a client by ‘the toughest agent in town’. Bernice Baumgarten also represented John Dos Passos, Edna St Vincent Millay and Raymond ...”

Ever Closer Union?

Perry Anderson, 7 January 2021

“... wave of appointees also included one who was, in the words of an admirer, Europe’s equivalent of John Marshall, the patriarch of the Supreme Court in the US, responsible for establishing its authority across the land. Robert Lecourt was a leading politician in the French version of the Christian Democratic parties of Italy and Germany, the Mouvement ...”

Barely under Control

Jenny Turner: Who’s in charge?, 7 May 2015

“... work of the American E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Foundation, said to be a major influence on Gove. So long as your performance data look good and you did well in your most recent Ofsted inspection, the DfE doesn’t worry too much how you got there. (Both measures looked great at Park View until recently, which may be one reason things ...”

Across 8 Mile

James Meek: Democrats in Detroit, 5 November 2026

“... faces, thousands upon thousands of people in steeply raked seats. The Detroit Tigers, the city’s Major League baseball team, were playing the Washington Nationals. After games, the streets around the stadium fill up with people and traffic for a time, before the quiet descends again. Hundreds of millions of dollars of public money were spent subsidising new ...”

Why are you still here?

James Meek: Who owns Grimsby?, 23 April 2015

“... them, when they caught the wrong fish, to dump it.As I listened to Hardie I thought of something John Fenty, the local businessman who owns Grimsby Town football club, had told me a couple of days earlier: how he got his start in 1984 hiring transport out to a local trader who drove around the colliery villages inland, selling fish factory discards to ...”

Communiste et Rastignac

Christopher Caldwell: Bernard Kouchner, 9 July 2009

Le Monde selon K. 
by Pierre Péan.
Fayard, 331 pp., €19, February 2009, 978 2 213 64372 4
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“... If aid workers don’t want their organisations to become completely dependent on a few major donors, as some US NGOs already are, they must make their case through the media. Though some disguise this need better than others, and few are as outspoken about its necessity as Kouchner, aid workers are in the business of selling their organisations 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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“... 1934 (and was naturalised in 1938), it was taken semi-jocularly in many literary quarters to be a major item in that ongoing ‘punishment of England’ (‘Gott strafe England’) that had been on the German agenda since 1914.The composer Hanns Eisler records a meeting between Brecht and Zweig in London. Brecht, who ‘of course never read a line of ...”

Down to the Last Cream Puff

Steven Shapin: The End of Haute Cuisine, 5 August 2010

Au Revoir to All That: The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine 
by Michael Steinberger.
Bloomsbury, 248 pp., £8.99, July 2010, 978 1 4088 0136 9
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“... goes without saying that it is essential to be in France’ – and Joseph Wechsberg did major damage to the magazine’s expenses budget by explaining what Michelin stars meant and then filing reports from every one of France’s three-star establishments. Alice B. Toklas wrote her Cookbook, she said, ‘for America’, partly to explain the ...”

The Fastidious President

David Bromwich: The Matter with Obama, 18 November 2010

“... Obama sought an effect of comparable solemnity in the speech of 26 August that declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq. In it he announced that the Iraq war ‘has made America safer’. Doubtless he felt a need, as he called the war to an official close, to appease and comfort the soldiers and their families who had sacrificed so much, but the ...”

Scoop after Scoop

Ian Jack: Chapman Pincher’s Scoops, 5 June 2014

Dangerous to Know: A Life 
by Chapman Pincher.
Biteback, 386 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 1 84954 651 5
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“... the war’s ‘moral assets’. Certainly Pincher had imperial origins: the only child of a drum major in the Northumberland Fusiliers, he was born in the military cantonment at Ambala in Punjab – a birthplace he shares with Kim Philby, who arrived two years earlier. He’s proud to say that both parts of his name have their origins in old country ...”

The New World Disorder

Tariq Ali, 9 April 2015

“... to combat or contain it – or, as the realist theorists like the late Chalmers Johnson and John Mearsheimer demand, to make the United States dismantle its bases, get out of the rest of the world, and operate at a global level only if it is actually threatened as a country. Many realists in the United States argue that such a withdrawal is ...”

Aubade before Breakfast

Tom Crewe: Balfour and the Souls, 31 March 2016

Balfour’s World: Aristocracy and Political Culture at the Fin de Siècle 
by Nancy Ellenberger.
Boydell, 414 pp., £30, September 2015, 978 1 78327 037 8
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“... is partly because some of their number – Arthur Balfour, George Curzon and Wyndham – enjoyed major political careers, and partly because they generated an abundance of high-class anecdote, diligently archived by their descendants. They have, though, been rather unlucky in their champions, starting with themselves. In old age they struggled to justify ...”

Human Spanner

Stuart Jeffries: Kant Come Alive, 17 June 2021

Correspondence 1923-66: Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer 
edited by Wolfgang Schopf, translated by Susan Reynolds and Michael Winkler.
Polity, 537 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 0 7456 4923 8
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Kracauer: A Biography 
by Jörg Später, translated by Daniel Steuer.
Polity, 584 pp., £35, September 2020, 978 1 5095 3301 5
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“... On the side, he read sociology with Georg Simmel and phenomenology with Max Scheler. The one major extant example of Kracauer’s architectural work is Frankfurt’s Military Memorial Cemetery, which opened in 1916. Its tombs are arranged at right angles in allées lined by geometrically cut foliage; at the centre is a funerary cube bearing the names of ...”