Tiananmen Revisited

Philippa Tristram, 19 November 1992

... salaries and business interests, fought with police as they tried to force an entry and set up camp outside. Suppose that tens of thousands blocked approach roads from Harrow to Trafalgar Square with demonstrations, occupied a full square mile of central London, disrupted a state visit of major importance, extended their stay for more than seven weeks and ...

Allendistas

D.A.N. Jones, 5 November 1992

Death in Chile: A Memoir and a Journey 
by Tony Gould.
Picador, 277 pp., £15.99, July 1992, 0 330 32271 0
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Some write to the future 
by Ariel Dorfman, translated by George Shivers and Ariel Dorfman.
Duke, 271 pp., £10.95, May 1992, 0 8223 1269 7
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... political prisoners, Ledy Castro, and he reports on the horrible treatment of another, the late William Beausire, but his book is not much concerned with Pinochet’s penal atrocities. Although Gould, as an editor, had been ‘instrumental in publishing, in New Society’, articles about Pinochet’s savagery by Ariel Dorfman – ‘an exile who seems to ...

How Dirty Harry beat the Ringo Kid

Michael Rogin, 9 May 1996

John Wayne: American 
by Randy Roberts and James Olson.
Free Press, 738 pp., £17.99, March 1996, 0 02 923837 4
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... John Wayne ‘the most important American of our time. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are only camp followers of Wayne, supporting players in the biggest Western of them all.’ As Maureen O’Hara, no friend of un-American activities, put it in her Congressional testimony, ‘John Wayne is not just an actor. John Wayne is the United States of ...
Djuna Barnes 
by Philip Herring.
Viking, 416 pp., £20, May 1996, 0 670 84969 3
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... her looking at people, we can see the decadence unfurling – this is how Nightwood got its gloopy camp. One of Barnes’s funniest and most extravagant interviews (and one in which we get an image of Barnes herself) is with Helen Westley. The actress and co-founder of the Theatre Guild called her and said: ‘I want to be interviewed again.’ They met at the ...

Politics and the Prophet

Malise Ruthven, 1 August 1996

Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society 
by Michael Gilsenan.
Tauris, 377 pp., £14.95, February 1996, 1 85043 099 3
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The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World 
edited by John L. Esposito.
Oxford, 480 pp., £295, June 1995, 0 19 506613 8
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Unfolding Islam 
by P.J. Stewart.
Garnet, 268 pp., £25, February 1995, 9780863721946
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Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East 
by Fred Halliday.
Tauris, 256 pp., £35, January 1996, 1 86064 004 4
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... Halliday writes, ‘is sustained from two apparently contradictory sides – from the camp of those, mainly in the West, seeking to turn the Muslim world into another enemy, and from those within the Islamic countries who advocate confrontation with the non-Muslim, and particularly Western, world.’ Even if the present governments fighting ...

Perfect Companions

C.K. Stead, 8 June 1995

Christina Stead: A Biography 
by Hazel Rowley.
Secker, 646 pp., £12.99, January 1995, 0 436 20298 0
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... attacks on people living ignorant of their fate in selected areas, a sort of eugenic concentration camp.’ Louisa, the Christina figure, asks ‘unpleasantly’ whether he would keep himself alive, but gets no answer. As a young woman Stead became a teacher, the profession she dreaded most because she associated it with spinsterhood. Like Teresa in For Love ...

Space Wars

Fredric Jameson, 4 April 1996

The Invisible in Architecture 
edited by Ole Bouman and Roemer van Toorn.
Academy, 516 pp., $115, February 1994, 1 85490 285 7
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The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism 
by Roger Scruton.
Carcanet, 158 pp., £19.95, October 1994, 1 85754 054 9
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... would remodel itself perpetually, like a transformer or a superchangeling: an unrealisable ideal William Burroughs brought down to the affordability of ordinary people in his proposal for the cut-up book, which you could simply rearrange at home according to your fancy. But The Invisible in Architecture is closer to these ideal images than the literary works ...

Gruesomeness is my policy

Richard J. Evans: German Colonialism, 9 February 2012

German Colonialism: A Short History 
by Sebastian Conrad.
Cambridge, 233 pp., £17.99, November 2011, 978 1 107 40047 4
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... historical writing as there was on the subject – the work of the Anglo-German economic historian William Otto Henderson was the outstanding instance – tended to focus on refuting the allegations of violence and brutality that had led to the empire’s dismantling and redistribution at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. By the 1960s these arguments were no ...
State of Exception 
by Giorgio Agamben, translated by Kevin Attell.
Chicago, 104 pp., £8.50, January 2005, 0 226 00925 4
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... We have moved from Athens to Auschwitz: the West’s political model is now the concentration camp rather than the city state; we are no longer citizens but detainees, distinguishable from the inmates of Guantanamo not by any difference in legal status, but only by the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to be incarcerated – or unexpectedly ...

I say, damn it, where are the beds?

David Trotter: Orwell’s Nose and Prose, 16 February 2017

Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography 
by John Sutherland.
Reaktion, 256 pp., £15, August 2016, 978 1 78023 648 3
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Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism 
by Alex Woloch.
Harvard, 378 pp., £35.95, January 2016, 978 0 674 28248 3
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... narrative finds Orwell working for the BBC during the Second World War, in the cubicle next to William Empson. Orwell immediately propositioned Empson’s partner, Hetta Crouse, but to no effect. ‘It was the smell, Empson grimly implied.’ Sutherland reports that Hetta and Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, were in agreement about the deterrent of ...

Big toes are gross

Hal Foster: Surrealism's Influence, 6 June 2024

Why Surrealism Matters 
by Mark Polizzotti.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 25709 0
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... And Breton did start out, along with fellow poets Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard, in the Dadaist camp, won over by its charismatic leaders, Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia, who had converged on Paris as soon as possible after the First World War. Despite the internationalism of the moment, Breton gave the Surrealist movement a national cast in the ...

Up and Down Riverside Drive

Kasia Boddy: Lore Segal’s Luck, 5 December 2024

An Absence of Cousins 
by Lore Segal.
Sort of Books, 254 pp., £9.99, July 2024, 978 1 914502 10 1
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‘Ladies’ Lunch’ and Other Stories 
by Lore Segal.
Sort of Books, 160 pp., £8.99, March 2023, 978 1 914502 03 3
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... Before the Kinder were sent to foster homes, most spent some weeks in a Butlin’s summer camp at Dovercourt Bay near Harwich. The huts weren’t built for the severe winter of 1938, and Segal sat in coat and gloves writing letters to convince the refugee committee to help. In one ‘tear-jerker’, she compared her parents to a snow-covered rose ...

Diary

Patrick Cockburn: Interviewing Hitler, 9 October 2025

... found him ‘particularly upset because he had just interviewed a survivor from a concentration camp [probably Dachau], a communist who had been so badly tortured that he was in a wheelchair’. In Berlin the following summer, she went riding in the Grunewald forest park: ‘I enjoyed it until the press campaign started against Dad, when the Englishwoman ...

Diary

Jeremy Harding: My ’68, 19 July 2018

... were preoccupied with the US, alert to Vietnam and the growing anti-war movement. Others invoked William Blake and Rimbaud (‘the disordering of all the senses’), Allen Ginsberg and the scary William Burroughs. All exchanged their expertise freely as they strode the fields of cool together; they were mostly kind to ...

His Fucking Referendum

David Runciman: What Struck Cameron, 10 October 2019

For the Record 
by David Cameron.
William Collins, 732 pp., £25, September 2019, 978 0 00 823928 2
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... between the people who divide it in two and those who don’t, Cameron is squarely in the former camp. During the summer of 2014 he was putting the finishing touches to a government reshuffle that would see him shunt his old friend Michael Gove from the Department of Education to a new role as chief whip. In effect he was clearing the decks for the following ...