When Jihadis Win Power

Owen Bennett-Jones, 4 December 2014

The Inevitable Caliphate? A History of the Struggle for Global Islamic Union, 1924 to the Present 
by Reza Pankhurst.
Hurst, 280 pp., £18.99, June 2013, 978 1 84904 251 2
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... in private. The Islamic State’s spin doctors countered that the watch was actually an Al Fajr wa-10s Deluxe, the preferred choice of true Muslims: it has a built-in compass that indicates the direction of Mecca and can be programmed to alert wearers to the correct time for prayer in hundreds of cities around the world. The sceptics responded with mock ...

The World according to Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld

Michael Byers: American isolationism, 21 February 2002

... and the laws of war. Most disturbing, however, are some of the threats uttered by President Bush. The assertion that ‘you’re either with us or against us’ obviates a central aspect of state sovereignty – the right not to be involved – and recasts the US as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. The identification of an ‘axis of ...

My Old, Sweet, Darling Mob

Iain Sinclair: Michael Moorcock, 30 November 2000

King of the City 
by Michael Moorcock.
Scribner, 421 pp., £9.99, May 2000, 0 684 86140 2
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Mother London 
by Michael Moorcock.
Scribner, 496 pp., £6.99, May 2000, 0 684 86141 0
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... projects. King of the City is a very different beast. ‘Believe me, pards,’ it opens, ‘we’re living in an age of myths and miracles.’ (Moorcock, a wily veteran, knows perfectly well, after all those years of TV evangelists and Teflon politicos, how to manage the spin that sends a sentence into reverse, like a backward-travelling ...

Wrecking Ball

Adam Shatz: Trump’s Racism, 7 September 2017

... And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like … Did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?’ Trump was so mortified he practically ran to the exit after the plates were cleared. As Joshua Green reports in his new book on Trump’s relationship with Steve ...

Princeton Diary

Alan Ryan: In Princeton , 26 March 1992

... last year’s newspapers have been driven off the front page by more urgent matters: President Bush’s troubles with Pat Buchanan, General Motors’ record-breaking losses of $4.5 billion, and the usual va et vient of an election year, Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education has lost its lustre as his horror stories have been found not to stand up to ...

The Ugly Revolution

Michael Rogin: Martin Luther King Jr, 10 May 2001

I May Not Get there with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr 
by Michael Eric Dyson.
Free Press, 404 pp., £15.99, May 2000, 0 684 86776 1
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The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr. Vol. IV: Symbol of the Movement January 1957-December 1958 
edited by Clayborne Carson et al.
California, 637 pp., £31.50, May 2000, 0 520 22231 8
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... proportion of white male Republican voters typically reaches landslide proportions, as it did for George W. Bush. Before Johnson the only Southern Democrat to have been elected President since the Civil War was Woodrow Wilson, who had built his political career in New Jersey; since Johnson, no non-Southern Democrat has gone ...

Can’t Afford to Tell the Truth

Owen Bennett-Jones: Trouble at the BBC, 20 December 2018

... I were both World Service lifers, but never in the same part of it. From different vantage points we both witnessed significant changes. Some things, such as audio quality, improved, but editorial standards declined as the channel was transformed from one of the most respected radio stations on earth into a multimedia production house churning out material of ...

Hizbullah’s War

Zain Samir, 30 November 2023

... me, Israeli strikes had destroyed 130 houses – people didn’t want to go through that again. ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen,’ he said. ‘No one came and told us what to do. We don’t know if we should stay or leave, parents don’t know what to do with the ...

My Heart on a Stick

Michael Robbins: The Poems of Frederick Seidel, 6 August 2009

Poems 1959-2009 
by Frederick Seidel.
Farrar, Straus, 509 pp., $40, March 2009, 978 0 374 12655 1
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... for ‘military humanism’ that receives its ultimate articulation in Ooga-Booga’s ‘The Bush Administration’: The Bush administration likes its rain sunny-side up. I feel a mania of happiness at being alive As I write you this suicide note. I have never been so cheerily suicidal, so sui-Seidel. I am too cheery ...

The Politics of Good Intentions

David Runciman: Blair’s Masochism, 8 May 2003

... and doom-mongers at home were also routed, and Disraeli was able to tell the Commons that ‘we have asserted the purity of our purpose.’ ‘In an age accused, and perhaps not unjustly, of selfishness, and too great a regard for material interests,’ he continued, ‘it is something, in so striking and significant a manner, for a great nation to have ...

It was going to be huge

David Runciman: What Remained of Trump, 12 August 2021

Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency 
by Michael Wolff.
Bridge Street, 336 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 1 4087 1464 5
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... triumphed, with plenty to spare. At 10.30 he took a call from Karl Rove, former election guru to George W. Bush, congratulating him on his win. This sealed his mind against all remaining doubt. As Wolff writes: ‘Why would Rove – a man as in with the Beltway Republican establishment as anybody, who didn’t like Trump ...

The One-State Solution

Virginia Tilley: The future of Israel and Palestine, 6 November 2003

... state for the Egyptians, a Jewish state for the Jews, simply flies in the face of reality. What we require is a rethinking of the present in terms of coexistence and porous borders. Edward Said, 1999 For some years, most people sympathetic to Palestinian national aspirations – or simply alert to their durability and the political dangers they pose ...

A Circular Motion

James Butler: Protest, what is it good for?, 8 February 2024

If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution 
by Vincent Bevins.
Wildfire, 336 pp., £25, October 2023, 978 1 0354 1227 3
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The Populist Moment: The Left after the Great Recession 
by Anton Jäger and Arthur Borriello.
Verso, 214 pp., £10.99, September 2023, 978 1 80429 248 8
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... That night, attention was locked on the revolution that seemed to be underway in Egypt, which we followed spottily on our primitive Twitter feeds. Activists linked hands in a human chain across the portico of the British Museum, inspired by images of people lining up around the Egyptian Museum on the north side of Tahrir Square, to protect it from ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: Keywords, 13 September 1990

... to bless or curse my luck when he leaned forward, patted my kneecap and fluted: ‘I believe that we shall be such friends. I have two consuming interests – Adolf Hitler and Oscar Wilde.’ Only hours later, or so it seemed to my disordered fancy, we were sitting in a villa that had once housed the Nazi embassy, while he ...

You can’t put it down

Fintan O’Toole, 18 July 1996

The Fourth Estate 
by Jeffrey Archer.
HarperCollins, 550 pp., £16.99, May 1996, 0 00 225318 6
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Tickle the Public: One Hundred Years of the Popular Press 
by Matthew Engel.
Gollancz, 352 pp., £20, April 1996, 9780575061439
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Newspaper Power: The New National Press in Britain 
by Jeremy Tunstall.
Oxford, 441 pp., £35, March 1996, 0 19 871133 6
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... the earth move. If you were Jeffrey Archer would you not have understood from all of this that we live in a world where the relationship between fact and fiction is fundamentally altered and traditional concerns about media manipulation of public events are hopelessly naive. Such fears assume a distinction between events on the one hand and their ...