The Uninvited

Jeremy Harding: At The Rich Man’s Gate, 3 February 2000

... outside the country of their birth. The figure now is closer to 120 million. Migration across international borders is not a simple phenomenon and migrants themselves are as diverse as people who stay put. The banker from Seattle who signs a five-year contract for a post in Berlin is a migrant; so is the lay-out editor in Paris who moves to Moscow to work ...

The Gatekeeper

Adam Tooze: Krugman’s Conversion, 22 April 2021

Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics and the Fight for a Better Future 
by Paul Krugman.
Norton, 444 pp., £13.99, February, 978 0 393 54132 8
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... to explain the emergence of clusters of industrial specialisation which could in turn drive international trade, not as a result of natural comparative advantage, in growing bananas for example, but in manufacturing high-end products such as German-badged motor cars. It was theoretically elegant and it explained why, in the golden age of economic growth ...

Are we having fun yet?

John Lanchester: The Biggest Scandal of All, 4 July 2013

... affecting the entire Western world at the moment, but the causal mechanisms connecting the initial crisis and our current predicament are a separate subject. The crisis and its consequences are too big to count as a scandal: they’re more like a climate. We can all agree that we’d prefer a different climate. We can all ...

Born of the age we live in

John Lanchester, 6 December 1990

Stick it up your punter! The Rise and Fall of the ‘Sun’ 
by Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie.
Heinemann, 372 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 0 434 12624 1
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All played out: The True Story of Italia ’90 
by Pete Davies.
Heinemann, 471 pp., £14.99, October 1990, 0 434 17908 6
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Gazza! A Biography 
by Robin McGibbon.
Penguin, 204 pp., £3.99, October 1990, 9780140148688
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... daily in Britain during the Thirties – that had fallen on hard times. In 1961 the International Publishing Corporation had bought the loss-making Herald as part of a deal involving the acquisition of several lucrative magazine titles. Hugh Cudlipp, chairman of IPC, had given the unions a guarantee to keep the paper going for seven years, and ...

The Leveller

Ben Ehrenreich: Famine in East Africa, 17 August 2017

... see, were mainly colourful shreds of plastic ingested in the absence of natural pasture. I asked a group of men in Haro Sheikh if more camels, the most valuable livestock in the local pastoral economy, had died. They all began pointing at once. ‘Behind that tree,’ one said. ‘And another there.’ ‘And there.’I had left Hargeisa, Somaliland’s ...

Rules of the Game

Jon Elster, 22 December 1983

Mémoires 
by Raymond Aron.
Julliard, 778 pp., frs 120, September 1983, 9782260003328
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Clausewitz: Philosopher of War 
by Raymond Aron, translated by Norman Stone and Christine Booker.
Routledge, 418 pp., £15.95, October 1983, 0 7100 9009 9
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Clausewitz 
by Michael Howard.
Oxford, 79 pp., £7.95, March 1983, 0 19 287608 2
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... political life, but I am not sure it is a good principle on which to build an academic discussion group. It was probably inevitable, though. Being ‘on the right’, Aron was an untouchable for most French academics. They might have wanted to benefit from his teaching, but they did not want to be seen to do so. I remember an episode that encapsulates this ...

How bad can it be?

John Lanchester: Getting away with it, 29 July 2021

... the biggest event in rugby outside the quadrennial World Cup, and the T20 World Cup, the biggest international contest in the most popular form of cricket. And then there are all the regular annual contests, from the four tennis slams to the four golf majors to everything else. There’s a lot of sport – and that means a lot of cheating too.There is a ...

Boys and Girls

Andrew O’Hagan: With the Child Jihadis, 8 August 2013

... prison they simply scratch lines into the paper or scrunch it up. They can’t write. The second group are silent. But when they take the sheet of paper they begin to write the most beautiful script, their sentences full of fire and argument. These are the child jihadis and their mothers tell them they will succeed next time. The prison isn’t big on ...

The Unrewarded End

V.G. Kiernan: Memories of the CP, 17 September 1998

The Death of Uncle Joe 
by Alison Macleod.
Merlin, 269 pp., £9.95, May 1997, 0 85036 467 1
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Enemy Within: The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party 
by Francis Beckett.
Merlin, 253 pp., £9.95, August 1998, 0 85036 477 9
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... were sometimes initiated from below. In 1948, when I reached Edinburgh, the national Historians’ Group had resolved to give its work a more practical turn by trying to form local groups, which would study local history and feed information into the publicity pipeline. I found a few individuals interested in the idea, among them a bricklayer who spent his ...

Should we say thank you?

Hugh Wilford: The Overrated Marshall Plan, 30 April 2009

The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Reconstruction of Postwar Europe 
by Greg Behrman.
Aurum, 448 pp., £25, February 2008, 978 1 84513 326 9
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Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower 
by Nicolaus Mills.
Wiley, 290 pp., £15.99, August 2008, 978 0 470 09755 7
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... Marshall Plan, which at the very least succeeded in giving Europeans the confidence to weather the crisis of 1947. While few historians now believe that the plan saved the economies of Western Europe, it did enable its leaders to overcome the crisis without slashing wages or welfare programmes, which would have risked ...
The Socialist Agenda 
edited by David Lipsey.
Cape, 242 pp., £7.95, January 1981, 0 224 01886 8
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The Future of Socialism 
by Anthony Crosland.
Cape, 368 pp., £8.95, January 1981, 0 224 01888 4
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Politics is for people 
by Shirley Williams.
Allen Lane/Penguin, 230 pp., £8.50, April 1981, 0 7139 1423 8
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... outside: to turn the Social Democratic Party into a bigger and better version of the Manifesto Group or the Campaign for Labour Victory. That temptation is even more dangerous than the first. For the crisis which is now destroying the Labour Party is, in large measure, a crisis of ...

Diary

Carolyne Wright: Taslima Nasreen gets them going, 8 September 1994

... Court in Dhaka to receive bail, following two months spent in hiding. A radical right-wing Islamic group’s most recent death threat, and the 4 June arrest order issued against her by her own government on charges of offending the sentiments of Muslims, had put her life in danger. She has been known in Bangladesh since about 1989 as a poet, columnist and ...

Renters v. Rentiers

Jack Shenker, 8 May 2025

Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis 
by Nick Bano.
Verso, 232 pp., £15.99, April, 978 1 80429 833 6
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... How does anyone​ make sense of Britain’s rental crisis? Let’s start with Ruby’s story – and that of her landlord, which is inseparable from her own though they’ve never met. Ruby was born in Kent, where her mother had been sent to live as a teenager while under the care of a local authority in London, ‘a forgotten girl’, as Ruby called her, ‘shifted out to wherever was cheap ...

Comrades in Monetarism

John Lloyd, 28 May 1992

... the economist who had worked on the ‘500 Days’ programme with Shatalin and cooperated, with a group of US academics largely drawn from Harvard, on the ‘Window of Opportunity’ programme which represented the last of the efforts to force the Soviet Union to market. An intense and spirited man, Yavlinsky had refused to go with Gorbachev to the ...

Oh God, can we face it?

Daniel Finn: ‘The BBC’s Irish Troubles’, 19 May 2016

The BBC’s ‘Irish Troubles’: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland 
by Robert Savage.
Manchester, 298 pp., £70, May 2015, 978 0 7190 8733 2
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... ruled out of order. In spite of these precautions, television would have a catalytic role in the crisis that led to the demise of the ‘Orange state’. When officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary attacked a civil rights march in Derry in October 1968, the violence was filmed by a camera crew from the Irish state broadcaster RTE; its footage was ...