Search Results

“... accept ‘Jewish colonisation’: it had either to stop or to proceed ‘behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach’. But there were other paradoxes. He said that he had no wish to oppress the Arabs, still less to ‘transfer’ or expel them, and he may have meant it. And yet not only did he insist that a Jewish majority ...”

“... and wild-westish the process became, take a look at a book by a former Texas mortgage broker, Richard Bitner, called Confessions of a Sub-Prime Lender.† The invention which made it possible for the lending to become so reckless was securitisation: the process by which loans were added together and sold on to other institutions as packages of debt. This ...”

“... At any rate, there is a very strenuous blend of women-envy in some of the magazines for men. Richard Wollheim has just finished telling us, in ‘Germs’, his frighteningly good memoir extracted in these pages, about wanting to be a woman sixty years ago. ‘I knew that what I wanted,’ he wrote, ‘was, not so much to have her, though I also wanted ...”

“... of the nation-state is founded, ultimately inspiring Donald Trump’s notion of a ‘city’ wall to keep out the barbarian Mexican horde, and Brexiters’ desire to ‘take back control’ from insurgent European bureaucrats. But what if the conventional narrative is entirely wrong? What if ancient ruins testify to an aberration in the normal state of ...”

“... their Soviet counterparts, while Radchenko, lively and engaging but sometimes a bit off the wall, draws on exhaustive research in Russian archives and is particularly good on the ways in which the presence of China affected relations between the superpowers.The Cold War dominated world politics for most of the second half of the 20th century. In ...”

“... circumvented the King-quota limit by bringing out five surplus horror tales under the pseudonym ‘Richard Bachman’. Unfortunately the Bachman books’ disguise was eventually penetrated. But, more significantly, their appeal was drastically altered when their true authorship was publicised. As King observed, Thinner sold 28,000 by ...”

“... aprons. Two of these were fashioned and the remainder of the skin hung as a partition wall in a public house in Keighley. Barely edible, often immobile, these were not so much animals as living monuments to man’s will to domesticate. But even within such bloated, breathing carcases, the wild boar remains. The differences between domesticated and ...”

“... of former colonies turned offshore tax havens: on its own the City of London is neck and neck with Wall Street as a financial centre, but if you include the offshore zones it’s estimated that a third of all international deposits and investments flow through Britain and its satellites. Moreover, according to the Financial Conduct Authority, most UK banks ...”

“... If you are not among the chosen, you can get yourself shot just by standing too close to the wall. In New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, Klein found poor evacuees living in ‘desolate, out-of-the-way trailer camps’ where private security companies ‘treated survivors like criminals’. In stark contrast were the gated communities built in the ...”

“... Diane Sawyer, as she moves from ‘Henry K’s lap’ to the former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke to her current husband, Hollywood director, Mike Nichols. Sawyer, also circulating from the Nixon White House to CBS’s 60 Minutes to ABC’s Prime Time, earns almost as much in a single day as is earned in a year by the mother she berated on ...”

“... already fading hopes of an egalitarian and communitarian alternative to capitalism once the Berlin Wall came down, he might more aptly have labelled him a non-violent intellectual descendant of Babeuf, executed in Paris in 1797 as leader of the Conspiracy of Equals, who believed that when anyone is starving it is a crime to have more than enough. An ...”

“... set for European unity. An early version of the EEC was dubbed the ‘Union Charlemagne’ by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in his 1950 speech accepting the inaugural Charlemagne prize, awarded by the city of Aachen every subsequent year to those who have advanced the cause of European unity. Receiving the award in 2018, Emmanuel Macron employed a ...”

“... anachronistic, antiqued model of “good literature”’; he quoted the naturalist Richard Mabey, who, like Fisher, had known and loved that coast for years. To read Sebald, according to Mabey, was to watch the belittlement of ‘a very close friend’.Fisher’s first book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? was published towards the ...”

“... or the magical or any such claptrap. I despise myths and legends and their ilk. I believe that Richard Dawkins does not go nearly far enough when he says that astrologers should be prosecuted for fraud. Instead, priests and imams and monks and rabbis from every religion should be thrown into prison, unless and until they can prove the truth of their ...”

“... offending. ‘Rat Boy’ was small enough to hide in the ventilation shafts of Newcastle’s Byker Wall estate; ‘Spider Boy’ once escaped custody by squeezing between the bars of the dock. Night after night, Sunderland’s sprawling postwar housing schemes echoed to the screech of tyres and the blare of sirens as joyriders performed handbrake turns and ...”