Short Cuts

Thom Dyke: Detained in Guantánamo, 3 April 2025

... Al-Hawsawi is taking legal action against British intelligence agencies in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (where he was represented by Richard Hermer KC before his appointment as attorney general), alleging that they were complicit in his torture.In exchange for the men pleading guilty and agreeing not to bring any ...

Hi!

Michael Neve, 20 October 1983

Flashbacks 
by Timothy Leary.
Heinemann, 397 pp., £9.95, October 1983, 0 434 40975 8
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Freud and Cocaine 
by E.M. Thornton.
Blond and Briggs, 340 pp., £12.95, September 1983, 0 85634 139 8
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Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females 
by Andrea Dworkin.
Women’s Press, 254 pp., £4.95, June 1983, 0 7043 3907 2
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Hidden Selves: Between Theory and Practice in Psychoanalysis 
by Masud Khan.
Hogarth, 204 pp., £12.50, July 1983, 0 7012 0547 4
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... can be, the puzzle is how poorly accounts of it read, and how little difference the terrific powers of LSD-25 made to the social history of the time. Leary turned himself into an evangelist of evolutionary transcendence, and seems doomed to replicate the serious-mindedness of evangelicism while churning out a message of pranks, fun and cultural ...

‘Come, my friend,’ said Smirnoff

Joanna Kavenna: The radical twenties, 1 April 1999

The Radical Twenties: Aspects of Writing, Politics and Culture 
by John Lucas.
Five Leaves, 263 pp., £11.99, January 1997, 0 907123 17 1
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... was to side with newness, the strategy favoured by the Futurists, Egoists and Vorticists: Pound, Richard Aldington, Wyndham Lewis, Dora Marsden, Hilda Doolittle. Pound ‘took on’ technology: ‘what the analytical geometer does for space and form’ he compared to what ‘the poet does for the states of consciousness’; ‘as the abstract mathematician ...

Purchase and/or Conquest

Eric Foner: Were the Indians robbed?, 9 February 2006

How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier 
by Stuart Banner.
Harvard, 344 pp., £18.95, November 2005, 0 674 01871 0
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... In the early days of settlement, Indians sold land in order to cement alliances with European powers and to obtain manufactured goods that only settlers could provide. Especially after epidemics caused by contact with European diseases led to a disastrous population decline, Indians owned more land than they could possibly use, so selling some of it made ...

In the Streets of Londonistan

John Upton: Terror, Muslims and the Met, 22 January 2004

... the idea that we face a new and terrible threat, which necessitates the introduction of emergency powers and the expenditure of vast amounts of money, and then in time we face a normalisation of those powers.’ This process of normalisation, which concentrates power in the hands of law enforcement agencies, has several ...

Ruthless and Truthless

Ferdinand Mount: Rotten Government, 6 May 2021

The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism 
by Peter Oborne.
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 3985 0100 3
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Political Advice: Past, Present and Future 
edited by Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose.
I.B. Tauris, 240 pp., £21.99, February 2021, 978 1 83860 120 1
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... cabinet secretary, whose own power was further restricted by Jonathan Powell being given similar powers as Blair’s chief of staff. Johnson would give the same powers to Dominic Cummings. Within two years of taking power, New Labour had sacked or moved on 17 of the 19 information chiefs in Whitehall. Cummings’s ...

A Hard Dog to Keep on the Porch

Christopher Hitchens, 6 June 1996

... In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the ...

His Generation

Keith Gessen: A Sad Old Literary Man, 19 June 2008

Alfred Kazin: A Biography 
by Richard Cook.
Yale, 452 pp., £25, March 2008, 978 0 300 11505 5
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... began to produce books. In the library Kazin sometimes sat across from his friend the historian Richard Hofstadter, who was also writing his first book, and their simultaneous composition was also a form of becoming. The battle Kazin had all his writers fight in On Native Grounds was a battle against an uncaring America, a vast industrial civilisation. He ...

Art of Embarrassment

A.D. Nuttall, 18 August 1994

Essays, Mainly Shakespearean 
by Anne Barton.
Cambridge, 386 pp., £40, March 1994, 0 521 40444 4
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English Comedy 
edited by Michael Cordner, Peter Holland and John Kerrigan.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £35, March 1994, 0 521 41917 4
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... Barton, ranging from American luminaries like Jonas Barish and Stephen Orgel to newcomers like Richard Rowland (who contributes a thumpingly good piece on Heywood). Shakespeare is still the most challenging object in the literary canon, the most generous with meaning and, at the same time, the most apt to find out folly in those who would interpret ...

Suspicious

Tariq Ali: Richard Sorge’s Fate, 21 November 2019

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent 
by Owen Matthews.
Bloomsbury, 448 pp., £25, March 2019, 978 1 4088 5778 6
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... The​ skills of the three top Soviet spies of the 20th century – Richard Sorge, Leopold Trepper and Ignace Poretsky/Reiss (better known as Ludwik) – remain unmatched. Sorge has always attracted particular attention. Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur ...

In the Châtelet

Jeremy Harding, 20 April 1995

François Villon: Complete Poems 
edited by Barbara Sargent-Bauer.
Toronto, 346 pp., £42, January 1995, 0 8020 2946 9
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Basil Bunting: Complete Poems 
edited by Richard Caddel.
Oxford, 226 pp., £10.99, September 1994, 0 19 282282 9
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... is the only peace of mind; and then, spelling out his position, which divine and temporal powers alike were liable to misconstrue unless he set the record straight: no ‘faith but of the faithless one’. All this gives Villon his sense that the lowliest man or woman can be lifted up into the city – his politics, presumably – and serves to ...

Howzat?

Stephen Sedley: Adversarial or Inquisitorial?, 25 September 2003

The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial 
by John Langbein.
Oxford, 376 pp., £30, February 2003, 0 19 925888 0
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Archbold: International Criminal Courts 
edited by Rodney Dixon, Richard May and Karim Khan.
Sweet and Maxwell, 1000 pp., £125, December 2002, 0 421 77270 0
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... in custody. Crown prosecutors in England and Wales have similar responsibilities but no such powers or status: they are civil servants who bring charges, and since 2000 can act as prosecutors. But Auld has been proved startlingly right by a recent experiment authorised by the Attorney-General in which having crown prosecutors formulate charges instead of ...

Pretence for Prattle

Steven Shapin: Tea, 30 July 2015

Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World 
by Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton and Matthew Mauger.
Reaktion, 326 pp., £25, May 2015, 978 1 78023 440 3
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... the exotically novel to the domestically ordinary, from a drug with possibly potent psychoactive powers to the mere ‘cup that cheers’, from a focus of social ritual to a casually taken and often solitary drink, from control by a quasi-state monopoly to a series of branded products largely dominated by multinational firms, from an artisanal to an ...

Sure looks a lot like conservatism

Didier Fassin: Macronisme, 5 July 2018

Revolution Française: Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation 
by Sophie Pedder.
Bloomsbury, 297 pp., £25, June 2018, 978 1 4729 4860 1
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... attacks in Paris, the state of emergency – the first since the Algerian war – granted special powers to the executive branch and law enforcement, and was extended six times. It was initially supported by 91 per cent of the population and voted for by 551 out of 558 representatives. It had no discernible effect on terrorist activity. According to a report ...

Misrepresentations

Dmitri Levitin: The Islamic Enlightenment, 22 November 2018

The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment 
by Alexander Bevilacqua.
Harvard, 340 pp., £25.95, February 2018, 978 0 674 97592 7
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The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle between Faith and Reason 
by Christopher de Bellaigue.
Vintage, 404 pp., £10.99, February 2018, 978 0 09 957870 3
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... of Islam contain a positive assessment of the 12th-century Kurdish prince Saladin, who fought Richard the Lionheart; and Reiske, who called for the incorporation of Islamic history into university curricula. ‘We wonder at the rapid progress of the victories of Alexander the Great, greater than anyone might conceive,’ he wrote in 1747. ‘Yet why do we ...