The Art of Stealth

Bruce Ackerman: The Supreme Court under Threat, 17 February 2005

“... Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but had avoided clear-cut pronouncements on most major issues. Democrats bridled at the thought of Thomas as Thurgood Marshall’s successor, but, when interrogated, the nominee simply stonewalled. He stated, incredibly, that he had never expressed a view about Roe v. Wade in conversation with ...”

Sisyphus at the Selectric

James Wolcott: Undoing Philip Roth, 20 May 2021

Philip Roth: The Biography 
by Blake Bailey.
Cape, 898 pp., £30, April 2021, 978 0 224 09817 5Show More
Philip Roth: A Counterlife 
by Ira Nadel.
Oxford, 546 pp., £22.99, May 2021, 978 0 19 984610 8Show More
Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth 
by Benjamin Taylor.
Penguin, 192 pp., £18, May 2020, 978 0 525 50524 2Show More
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“... Sturm und Drang was the price of breaking the sound barrier that separated Promising Upstart from Major League Sensation, and there was way more money in the bigs. What was flummoxing for Roth was finding his name and his protagonist turned into punchline material. He didn’t share the mirth of his countrymen and women when Jacqueline Susann, author of ...”

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

“... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...”

Pseudo-Travellers

Ian Gilmour and David Gilmour, 7 February 1985

From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict 
by Joan Peters.
Joseph, 601 pp., £15, February 1985, 0 7181 2528 2Show More
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“... land can be sold to the Jews without dispossessing Arab cultivators,’ the High Commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, wrote to George V in 1930. ‘Only in a very few places in our colonisation,’ Ben Gurion said at a Zionist Congress in 1937, ‘were we not forced to transfer the earlier residents.’ Clearly, Israel’s first Prime Minister did not think that ...”

One Long Scream

Jacqueline Rose: Trauma and Justice in South Africa, 23 May 2019

“... in a bitter final chapter, ‘has not honoured the pain of our people in its politics’. John Jeffrey, the current deputy minister of justice, told him in September 2017 that turning a blind eye to the murder of the Cradock Four and others such as the activist Steve (Bantu) Biko ‘was the price that had to be paid’. Partly for budgetary ...”

Jungle Joys

Alfred Appel Jr: Wa-Wa-Wa with the Duke, 5 September 2002

“... the same racial issues. Composed by Bubber Miley and Ellington, it comprises two minor and major blues choruses. Miley’s mournful second plunger solo, following Nanton’s, concludes by unexpectedly quoting Chopin’s Funeral March, a readily identifiable allusion. (The solos may well have been composed to begin with, or written out after an initial ...”

Regime Change in the West?

Perry Anderson, 3 April 2025

“... idea of international regimes as arrangements assuring co-operative economic relations between the major industrial states, which might or might not take the form of treaties. These, it was held, developed out of US leadership after the Second World War, but superseded it with the formation of a consensual framework of mutually satisfactory transactions ...”

His Own Prophet

Michael Hofmann: Read Robert Lowell!, 11 September 2003

Collected Poems 
by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter.
Faber, 1186 pp., £40, July 2003, 0 571 16340 8Show More
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“... though for me it spoils the ‘line’ of the poem – was reinstated at the petitioning of John Berryman in For the Union Dead (1964); a revised version of that is printed as a separate poem called ‘Ovid and Caesar’s Daughter’ in History (1973); and now Bidart and Gewanter have unearthed a seven-stanza monster that was printed in the Kenyon ...”

Why the bastards wouldn’t stand and fight

Murray Sayle: Mao in Vietnam, 21 February 2002

China and the Vietnam Wars 1950-75 
by Qiang Zhai.
North Carolina, 304 pp., $49.95, April 2000, 0 8078 4842 5Show More
None so Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam 
by George Allen.
Ivan Dee, 296 pp., $27.50, October 2001, 1 56663 387 7Show More
No Peace, No Honour: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam 
by Larry Berman.
Free Press, 334 pp., $27.50, November 2001, 0 684 84968 2Show More
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“... Vietnam? Despite more than a thousand books and endless finger-pointing and breast-beating by the major American participants, no satisfactory account of what transpired there has yet appeared. Missing pieces of the puzzle, long hidden in the US archives, are now being declassified. Even more to the point, the key role of Mao’s China in arming and guiding ...”

The Person in the Phone Booth

David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010

“... necessary basis for the proper organisation of middle-class social, economic and cultural life in major cities around the world. Using the device was one way to be modern, in public and in private. ‘In Berlin, Zurich and Hamburg, telephonic kiosks have been established, so that anyone walking along and desirous of sending a communication by telephone, or ...”

All Those Arrows

Donald MacKenzie: A Major Cause of the Financial Crisis, 25 June 2009

Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe 
by Gillian Tett.
Little, Brown, 338 pp., £18.99, April 2009, 978 1 4087 0164 5Show More
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“... work was an Indian mathematician, Krishna Varikooty. Boisterousness that would have horrified John Pierpont Morgan was tolerated. At one gathering in Florida, one of the team’s managers broke his nose when drunken colleagues were pushing him into a hotel swimming-pool. The team’s pivotal innovation, introduced in December 1997, was a deal they called ...”

A View of a View

Marina Warner: Melchior Lorck, 27 May 2010

Melchior Lorck 
edited by Erik Fischer, Ernst Jonas Bencard and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen.
Royal Library Vandkunsten, 808 pp., €300, August 2009, 978 87 91393 61 7Show More
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“... There are very few surviving paintings and they are widely scattered; there has never been a major exhibition of or monograph about his work until now, and his own efforts to bring his graphic work into print failed and failed again. Few original drawings survive; instead they are reproduced in woodcuts for which Lorck did not do all the cutting or ...”

Flub-Dub

Thomas Powers: Stephen Crane, 17 July 2014

Stephen Crane: A Life of Fire 
by Paul Sorrentino.
Harvard, 476 pp., £25, June 2014, 978 0 674 04953 6Show More
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“... The virtues were a carefully written introduction by Joseph Conrad, which treated Crane as a major writer, and Beer’s lively and vigorous prose, which made for a readable book. The substantial demerit, slow to emerge, was that Beer had made parts of it up, sending later biographers down wrong roads for decades. Sorrentino concluded, but in many cases ...”

‘We ain’t found shit’

Scott Ritter, 2 July 2015

“... nuclear scientists. ‘It’s critical for us to know going forward,’ the US secretary of state, John Kerry, said in June, that ‘those activities have been stopped, and that we can account for that in a legitimate way.’ France has said that any agreement that doesn’t include inspections of military sites would be ‘useless’. Iran has been adamant ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... people decide – and then, if it doesn’t get the result it wants, overrule us from Holyrood. John Burnside New states​ are usually the product of catastrophe. Violence is the air they breathe. I can’t decide if it is Scotland’s good or bad fortune that its vote for statehood should take place against the background of an entirely normal birth of a ...”
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