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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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Ikonography

Keith Kyle, 4 July 1985

Eisenhower. Vol. I: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect 1890-1952 Vol. II: The President 1952-1969 
by Stephen Ambrose.
Allen and Unwin, 637 pp., £12.50, February 1984, 0 04 923073 5
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Ike’s Letters to a Friend: 1941-1958 
edited by Robert Griffith.
Kansas, 211 pp., $19.95, October 1984, 0 7006 0257 7
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... powerful formulator of policies. Eisenhower had a rather arm’s-length view of the separation of powers: Congress was not normally to be too much chivvied by the White House, nor was Congressional curiosity about his executive office to be permitted. The Supreme Court had a duty to interpret the constitution but the executive branch did not have any special ...

Grail Trail

C.H. Roberts, 4 March 1982

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail 
by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln.
Cape, 445 pp., £8.95, January 1982, 0 224 01735 7
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The Foreigner: A Search for the First-Century Jesus 
by Desmond Stewart.
Hamish Hamilton, 181 pp., £9.95, October 1981, 0 241 10686 9
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Satan: The Early Christian Tradition 
by Jeffrey Burton Russell.
Cornell, 258 pp., £14, November 1981, 0 8014 1267 6
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... Chrestos – which may or may not be relevant). Stewart’s view of the early Church as exercising powers of censorship and control is anachronistic: as an illicit private society it was in no position to do so, however much it may have wished to – witness the extraordinary variety of Christian manuscripts, orthodox, apocryphal, Gnostic, found in the rubbish ...

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 ...

The New Cold War

Anatol Lieven: The New Cold War, 4 October 2001

... and self-discipline, and a deep hatred of the United States and the Western way of life. As Richard Hofstader and others have argued, for more than two hundred years this kind of combination has always acted as a prompt for paranoid and reactionary conspiracy theories, most of them groundless. Now the threat is real; and for the foreseeable future we ...

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 ...

Diary

Paul Henley: The EU, 14 January 2002

... should be developed piecemeal over a period of fifty years. As a result, both the distribution of powers and the language used to describe them is often opaque. Comprising 20 Commissioners and eighteen thousand officials to do their bidding, the Commission represents the so-called ‘supranational’ model. The current President, Romano Prodi, has described ...

Francine-Machine

Jonathan Rée: Automata, 9 May 2002

Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen 
by Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak.
Getty, 416 pp., £30, February 2002, 0 89236 590 0
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The Secret Life of Puppets 
by Victoria Nelson.
Harvard, 350 pp., £20.50, February 2002, 0 674 00630 5
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Living Dolls: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life 
by Gaby Wood.
Faber, 278 pp., £12.99, March 2002, 0 571 17879 0
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... no reason, as he put it in the Discourse on Method in 1637, to think that the human body had any powers beyond those of the marvellous ‘self-moving machines or automata that can be made by human ingenuity’. The late treatise on the Passions rests entirely on the assumption that the body is a ‘machine’. Even the truculent hero of the Meditations will ...

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