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A Bit of Chaos

Margaret MacMillan: The Great War and After, 5 February 2015

The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 
by Adam Tooze.
Allen Lane, 672 pp., £30, May 2014, 978 1 84614 034 1
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... on the periphery. Nor did many in the outside world realise quite what was emerging in Russia. Robert Lansing, Wilson’s secretary of state, whom Tooze rescues from the obscurity to which he is usually consigned, pointedly noted that this was a new type of despotism, intelligent rather than ignorant like the tsarist one, and to be feared. Wilson preferred ...

Speak Bitterness

Isabel Hilton: Growing up in Tibet, 5 March 2015

My Tibetan Childhood: When Ice Shattered Stone 
by Naktsang Nulo, translated by Angus Cargill and Sonam Lhamo.
Duke, 286 pp., £17.99, November 2014, 978 0 8223 5726 1
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... or Lhasa, and Amdowan Tibetans still speak a dialect that is barely understood in Lhasa. As Robert Barnett explains in his extensive introduction, they bowed to the holy city of Lhasa, but ran their own temporal affairs, negotiating the shifting tribal and clan allegiances, and accepting obligations and protection from local religious figures. When ...

I could bite the table

Christopher Clark: Bismarck, 31 March 2011

Bismarck: A Life 
by Jonathan Steinberg.
Oxford, 577 pp., £25, February 2011, 978 0 19 959901 1
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... his statesmanship, the real or apparent brutality in his methods’. And it is certainly true, as Robert Gerwarth has shown in a recent study, that an authoritarian Bismarck myth flourished in anti-democratic circles on the German right during the Weimar Republic. It is also true, however, that Bismarck’s foreign policy, which was marked by a scrupulous ...

Judicial Politics

Stephen Sedley, 23 February 2012

... did so on the ground that its deviousness was a matter for political debate, not for adjudication. Robert Stevens in his book The English Judges comments that my decision did not endear me to ministers, but I doubt that allowing judicial review to proceed would have been more likely to earn their gratitude. Judges who sit in the Administrative Court could give ...

The Doom Loop

Andrew Haldane: Equity in Banking, 23 February 2012

... a hundred years after the introduction of limited liability, by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Merton, who showed that the equity of a limited liability company could be valued as if it were a financial option – that is, an instrument which offers rights over the future fruits of the company’s assets. This option has value – in the jargon, it ...

The Way of the Warrior

Tom Shippey: Vikings, 3 April 2014

Vikings: Life and Legend 
edited by Gareth Williams, Peter Pentz and Matthias Wernhoff.
British Museum, 288 pp., £25, February 2014, 978 0 7141 2337 0
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The Northmen’s Fury 
by Philip Parker.
Cape, 450 pp., £25, March 2014, 978 0 224 09080 3
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... updates, but there is no advance on Martin Arnold’s The Vikings: Culture and Conquest (2006), or Robert Ferguson’s The Hammer and the Cross (2009), or even Gwyn Jones’s magisterial History of the Vikings (1968, revised 1973). Consider the ‘key questions’ Parker starts with. First, why should Scandinavian societies have turned so suddenly to overseas ...

I am not a world improver

Christopher Turner: Building Seagram, 6 February 2014

Building Seagram 
by Phyllis Lambert.
Yale, 306 pp., £45, January 2013, 978 0 300 16767 2
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Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography 
by Franz Schulze and Edward Windhorst.
Chicago, 493 pp., £25, April 2013, 978 0 226 15145 8
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... anything more offensive than rubble.’18There was also a backlash within the profession. In 1966, Robert Venturi inverted Mies’s famous aphorism with the phrase, ‘less is a bore.’ Mies, who died of cancer in 1969, was an easy target for the postmodernists: in 1978, Stanley Tigerman made a photomontage showing his Crown Hall Building in Chicago ...

The Dzhaz Age

Stephen Lovell: ‘Moscow 1937’, 17 July 2014

Moscow 1937 
by Karl Schlögel, translated by Rodney Livingstone.
Polity, 650 pp., £16.99, March 2014, 978 0 7456 5077 7
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... most notoriously violent moment. The period has been much written about in the forty years since Robert Conquest made the Soviet 1930s synonymous with the Great Terror. Scholarship on prewar Stalinism has bifurcated. On the one hand, studies of the Terror have become more detailed and nuanced. Now that the Soviet archives have been opened, it seems that the ...

Young Man’s Nostalgia

Diarmaid MacCulloch: William Byrd, 31 July 2014

Byrd 
by Kerry McCarthy.
Oxford, 282 pp., £25, August 2013, 978 0 19 538875 6
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... table in 1604 were linked to William Byrd.1 The most powerful, the great Protestant statesman Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, was the dedicatee of one of Byrd’s last and most haunting keyboard ensembles of pavan and galliard, so popular that they were still admired and adapted through the centuries when most Tudor music was relegated to the archives.2 ...

Before They Met

Michael Wood: Dr Zhivago, 17 February 2011

Doctor Zhivago 
by Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Harvill, 513 pp., £20, October 2011, 978 1 84655 379 0
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... coarse gesture of condescension and appeasement to the Russians’, and she asked if Lean and Robert Bolt would have placed a rainbow ‘over the future of England’. Actually it’s difficult to think of David Lean placing rainbows anywhere much, and more significantly, the mood of the rainbow, if not the actual image, is fully there in Boris ...

It should have ended with Verdi

John Davis: The Battle of Adwa, 24 May 2012

The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire 
by Raymond Jonas.
Harvard, 413 pp., £22.95, November 2011, 978 0 674 05274 1
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... missionaries, to which Parliament responded in 1868 by authorising a punitive expedition. General Robert Napier raised 13,000 troops, 20,000 logistic personnel, many thousands of mules and camels and 44 elephants in India, and shipped them to the Red Sea. After marching 780 miles overland to Tewodros’s capital, he defeated the imperial army (with the loss ...

Diary

Anne Enright: Lessons from Angela Carter, 17 February 2011

... carefully – at every volume on the shelves. I ended up with three paperbacks: the Greek Myths by Robert Graves, Volumes I and II, and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. This is a commonplace book written by a woman at the tenth-century court of the Heian dynasty in Japan. I thought it was wonderful. I read it countless times. I was entranced by the beauty and ...

In Pol Pot Time

Joshua Kurlantzick: Cambodia, 6 August 2009

Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia Special Reports 1-15 
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The Lost Executioner: The Story of Comrade Duch and the Khmer Rouge 
by Nic Dunlop.
Bloomsbury, 352 pp., £8.99, May 2009, 978 1 4088 0401 8
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... that helped the Khmer Rouge seize power, is not mentioned. When the foreign co-prosecutor, Robert Petit, a Canadian, suggested bringing more individuals to trial, his Cambodian co-prosecutor reportedly blocked him. In June Petit announced that he was resigning for ‘personal reasons’, but officials who follow the proceedings closely believe he was ...

Words as Amulets

Ange Mlinko: Barbara Guest’s Poems, 3 December 2009

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest 
edited by Hadley Haden Guest.
Wesleyan, 525 pp., £33.95, July 2008, 978 0 8195 6860 1
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Women, the New York School and Other True Abstractions 
by Maggie Nelson.
Iowa, 288 pp., £38.50, December 2007, 978 1 58729 615 4
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... declared, quoting Pasternak. Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never king. Guest’s origins were anything but kingly: born in North Carolina in 1920, she was shuffled around from town to town in ...

Diary

August Kleinzahler: My Last Big Road Trip, 2 December 2010

... keyboard. He keeps his hand in by studying piano with Mr Natural, or the individual on whom Robert Crumb’s comic-strip character Mr Natural is based. Mr Natural teaches out of a storefront in the Haight in San Francisco, where the Maestro and I are long-time neighbours. The Maestro regularly drives between San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, where ...

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