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Responses to the War in Gaza

LRB Contributors, 29 January 2009

... hiding in them. ‘Gaza is the problem,’ Levy Eshkol, then prime minister of Israel, said in June 1967. ‘I was there in 1956 and saw venomous snakes walking in the street. We should settle some of them in the Sinai, and hopefully the others will immigrate.’ Eshkol was discussing the fate of the newly occupied territories: he and his cabinet wanted ...

Big Man Walking

Neal Ascherson: Gorbachev’s Dispensation, 14 December 2017

Gorbachev: His Life and Times 
by William Taubman.
Simon and Schuster, 880 pp., £25, September 2017, 978 1 4711 4796 8
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... many people change the world. Fewer still are thanked for it. Adolf Hitler changed the world on 22 June 1941: by invading the Soviet Union, he delivered ‘Hitler’s Europe’, the divided continent we lived in until 1989. We were not grateful for that. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev changed the world, as so many adoring millions saw it at the time, by ending ...

Made in Algiers

Jeremy Harding: De Gaulle, 4 November 2010

Le mythe gaullien 
by Sudhir Hazareesingh.
Gallimard, 280 pp., €21, May 2010, 978 2 07 012851 8
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The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved 
by Jonathan Fenby.
Simon and Schuster, 707 pp., £30, June 2010, 978 1 84737 392 2
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... well as a tank commander but it scarcely mattered given the country’s collapse. For ten days in June, he had served as under-secretary of state for war and national defence, when France had no capacity for either. He had fallen out with Pétain even before the German invasion and the armistice. Both Fenby and Hazareesingh have brought the familiar story of ...

Chasing Steel

Ian Jack: Scotland’s Ferry Fiasco, 22 September 2022

... the north of the railway, while tenements, some of them spectacularly sited, lined the slopes that rose steeply to meet the Renfrewshire moorland. This was more or less the town as I first saw it. It seemed impossible that there could be a castle in such a workaday place, where the clamour of the shipyards reached into every street and black smoke plumed from ...

Italy’s Communists

Jonathan Steinberg, 21 July 1983

After Poland 
by Enrico Berlinguer, translated by Antonio Bronda and Stephen Boddington.
Spokesman, 114 pp., £2.25, March 1982, 0 85124 344 4
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... in the election year 1953, when it counted 2,134,285 registered members. The number of voters rose steadily from 4,358,243 to nearly eight million by 1963. Yet the growth, the sense of inevitable onward development, could not conceal a basic dilemma. On his return to Italy in March 1944, Togliatti chose the path of co-operation with the status quo – in ...

How Utterly Depraved!

Deborah Friedell: What did Ethel know?, 1 July 2021

Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy 
by Anne Sebba.
Weidenfeld, 288 pp., £20, June 2021, 978 0 297 87100 2
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... the American government might kill a woman. Female traitors during the Second World War – Tokyo Rose, Axis Sally, the ‘Doll Woman’ – had received prison terms. And no American civilian, man or woman, had ever received the death penalty in peacetime for ‘conspiracy to commit espionage’, the official charge against her. Almost until the last ...

Fleas We Greatly Loathe

Francis Wade: The Rohingya, 5 July 2018

... tightening restrictions on their freedom of movement. Since a first wave of mob violence in June 2012, upwards of 120,000 have been confined to camps and ghettos, prevented from leaving by barricades and armed police. Further north in the state, checkpoints line roads leading into towns where, until the violence in 2012, Rohingya had traded alongside ...

Go for it, losers

David Trotter: Werner Herzog’s Visions, 30 November 2023

Every Man for Himself and God against All 
by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann.
Bodley Head, 355 pp., £25, October, 978 1 84792 724 8
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... its outcome. After the screening, Herzog was to recall, the two thousand people in the audience ‘rose up with a single voice in an angry roar’ to denounce him for aestheticising the evidence of destruction. Relishing the palpable hostility, he proceeded to claim Dante, Goya, Breughel and Bosch as his models, before concluding with the observation that ...

Chechnya, Year III

Jonathan Littell: Ramzan Kadyrov, 19 November 2009

... is obvious that things are ‘better’. Memorial would almost agree with this view. In Moscow, in June, Cherkasov, who has been following the events in the North Caucasus since the first war of 1994-96, described ‘Chechenisation’ – the name given to the decision taken by Vladimir Putin in 2002 to set up a strong pro-Russian government, made up mainly of ...

His Own Sort of Outsider

Philip Clark: Tippett’s Knack, 16 July 2020

Michael Tippett: The Biography 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 750 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4746 0602 8
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... Fifth String Quartet, Byzantium – a setting of W.B. Yeats for soprano and orchestra – and The Rose Lake (a fifth symphony for orchestra in all but name) flew off the page with improvisational abandon.Oliver Soden​ was born in 1990, and his Life of Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale arguments. (The previous standard text, Ian ...

Rigging the Death Rate

Paul Taylor, 11 April 2013

... to have an HSMR of 127, a clear outlier and the fourth worst performing trust in the country. On 4 June the trust’s Clinical Quality and Effectiveness Group met and decided, not to check whether or not patients were being looked after properly, but to investigate the coding of their diagnoses. They instructed coders not to use the codes that seemed most ...

Don’t be a Kerensky!

David Runciman: Kissinger looks for his prince, 3 December 2020

The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World 
by Barry Gewen.
Norton, 452 pp., £22.99, April 2020, 978 1 324 00405 9
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Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography 
by Thomas Schwartz.
Hill and Wang, 548 pp., £27.99, September 2020, 978 0 8090 9537 7
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... Time and Newsweek, and in one red-letter week in 1972 fronting both magazines at the same time. In June 1974, two months before Watergate drove his boss Richard Nixon from office, Newsweek portrayed Kissinger as ‘Super K’ in full hero outfit, muscles rippling, cape swirling. He knew it was too good to last: those whom the gods wish to destroy they first ...

What! Not you too?

Richard Taws: I was Poil de carotte, 4 August 2022

Journal 1887-1910 
by Jules Renard, translated by Theo Cuffe.
Riverrun, 381 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 78747 559 5
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... father had begun life as a peasant farmer before becoming a builder. Even though François Renard rose to be mayor of Chitry, Renard felt acutely the distance between his life and the lives of his parents. He shared many of his father’s tics – tooth-picking, evasive answers, a fear of enemas – but was alert to their differences, and dreaded the ...

Diary

Marina Warner: Medea, 3 December 2015

... well-being, maternal ambivalence and the direction of feminism runs very high, as Jacqueline Rose searchingly discussed in her essay ‘Mothers’ (LRB, 19 June 2014). Ever since Euripides showed unexpected sympathy with Medea she has been a heroine for real-world questions about women – their status, their weakness ...

A Knife to the Heart

Susan Pedersen: Did the Suffragettes succeed?, 30 August 2018

Rise Up, Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes 
by Diane Atkinson.
Bloomsbury, 670 pp., £30, February 2018, 978 1 4088 4404 5
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Hearts and Minds: The Untold Story of the Great Pilgrimage and How Women Won the Vote 
by Jane Robinson.
Doubleday, 374 pp., £20, January 2018, 978 0 85752 391 4
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... in the West End, Emily Wilding Davison’s doomed attack on the king’s horse at the Derby in June 1913 – featured ‘ordinary’ women doing extraordinary things. Atkinson dwells on their experiences, but as a result her book rather loses sight of the thousands on thousands of women who marched in WSPU processions or sold the WSPU paper but never went ...

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