Winged Words

Tariq Ali: On Muhammad, 17 June 2021

Muhammad 
by Maxime Rodinson, translated by Anne Carter.
NYRB, 373 pp., £14.99, March 2021, 978 1 68137 492 5
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... of location enabled a deep study of Islamic culture, its history and origins. Back in Paris he took charge of the Muslim section of the Bibliothèque Nationale and then taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. He left the PCF after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the crushing of the Hungarian Uprising by Soviet tanks in 1956, but ...

Brown Goo like Marmite

Neal Ascherson: Memories of the Fog, 8 October 2015

London Fog: The Biography 
by Christine Corton.
Harvard, 408 pp., £22.95, November 2015, 978 0 674 08835 1
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... and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass foundries. John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, or, the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661) dismissed the idea that domestic hearths had much to do with it – probably correctly at the time.Evelyn wrote about ‘Clowds of Smoak and Sulphur, so full of ...

Chasing Ghosts

Alex de Waal: The Failure of Jihad in Africa, 18 August 2005

... and on jihadism itself. In 1990, as the anti-Saddam coalition triumphed in Kuwait, Islamists took solace from the collapse of three of the most disliked secular dictatorships in Africa: Hissène Habré in Chad in December 1990, Siad Barre in Somalia in January 1991 and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia in May 1991 (precipitating Eritrea’s ...

Silks and Bright Scarlet

Christopher Kelly: Wealth and the Romans, 3 December 2015

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD 
by Peter Brown.
Princeton, 759 pp., £16.95, March 2014, 978 0 691 16177 8
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The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity 
by Peter Brown.
Harvard, 262 pp., £18.95, April 2015, 978 0 674 96758 8
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... to enter the kingdom of God.’ The twenty-year-old Melania and her husband, Valerius Pinianus, took Christ at his word. They interpreted their dream as divine encouragement to follow the equally challenging injunction: ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.’ But this was no ...

Heathrow to Canary Wharf

Nick Richardson: Crossrail, 11 October 2012

... It took sixty years for the supporters of Crossrail, the new railway being built under London, to convince Parliament it was worth the investment. Recession scuppered the project twice, in the 1970s and 1990s, and slowed it down again in 2009: it was supposed to be finished in time for the Olympics, then budget cuts forced the completion date forward to 2018 ...

Sucking up to P

Greg Grandin: Henry Kissinger’s Vanity, 29 November 2007

Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power 
by Robert Dallek.
Allen Lane, 740 pp., £30, August 2007, 978 0 7139 9796 5
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Henry Kissinger and the American Century 
by Jeremi Suri.
Harvard, 368 pp., £18.95, July 2007, 978 0 674 02579 0
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... and easy acceptance of American limits, is often contrasted with the neocon evangelism that took off after the attacks of 9/11. Kissinger had long served as a foil for the New Right. The secretary of state ‘sounds like Churchill’ but ‘acts like Chamberlain’, Norman Podhoretz wrote in 1976. And even before conservatives came to condemn Kissinger ...

Everyone has a voice

James Meek: Biotechnology, 11 July 2002

A Grain of Truth: the Media, the Public and Biotechnology 
by Susanna Hornig Priest.
Rowman and Littlefield, 160 pp., £14.95, January 2001, 0 7425 0948 6
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Travels in the Genetically Modified Zone 
by Mark Winston.
Harvard, 288 pp., £19.50, June 2002, 0 674 00867 7
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Seeds of Contention: World Hunger and the Global Controversy over GM Crops 
by Per Pinstrup-Andersen.
Johns Hopkins, 176 pp., £9, September 2001, 0 8018 6826 2
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... the imagination to ask. There were a few good students in the class, and one exceptional one. He took passive revenge on Mr Deas by becoming an accountant instead of heading for the maths faculty. Others did go on to maths and physics at university. The rest of us scraped through the exam and afterwards forgot everything we had learned. I can still add and ...

Dingy Quadrilaterals

Ian Gilmour: The Profumo Case, 19 October 2006

Bringing the House Down: A Family Memoir 
by David Profumo.
Murray, 291 pp., £20, September 2006, 0 7195 6608 8
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... impression on him. Their assignations were usually at Ward’s flat in Wimpole Mews, but once he took her to the family house where they made love in front of the television set. Whether or not Profumo was ‘sharing Christine Keeler’s favours’ with the Russian spy – the author’s guess is that lvanov did not quite make it – the ...

‘There is a woman behind this!’

Peter Clarke: Schumpeter, 19 July 2007

Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction 
by Thomas K. McCraw.
Harvard, 719 pp., £22.95, May 2007, 978 0 674 02523 3
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... in ideas and traducing their concepts in the process. By 1983, the centenary of the birth of both John Maynard Keynes (died 1946) and Joseph Alois Schumpeter (died 1950), it was the less dirigiste Schumpeter, so economists were saying, who spoke to the needs of the hour. The Age of Keynes thus gave way to the Age of Schumpeter, as can be confirmed by ...

End of the Road

R.W. Johnson: The Undoing of the ANC, 20 November 2008

Cyril Ramaphosa 
by Anthony Butler.
Currey, 442 pp., £18.95, February 2008, 978 1 84701 315 6
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After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey inside the ANC 
by Andrew Feinstein.
Jonathan Ball, 287 pp., R 170, October 2007, 978 1 86842 262 3
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Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred 
by Mark Gevisser.
Jonathan Ball, 892 pp., R 225, November 2007, 978 1 86842 101 5
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... committee trying to investigate the deal, Feinstein lasted only three months: the story itself took 18 months to unfold – inevitably, the account he gives is incomplete. The moment of truth for Feinstein should have come earlier, over Aids. He recounts with horror the scene in the ANC parliamentary caucus when Mbeki gave his lecture on Big Pharma and ...

If on a winter’s night a cyclone

Thomas Jones: ‘The Great Derangement’, 18 May 2017

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable 
by Amitav Ghosh.
Chicago, 176 pp., £15.50, September 2016, 978 0 226 32303 9
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... After losing territory to the British in the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852-53, King Mindon took control of the Yenangyaung oil fields – ‘effectively nationalising the industry’ – and did a deal with Price’s Patent Candle Company Ltd of London and Liverpool, selling them two thousand barrels of Burmese oil a month. In 1885, the British ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...

The Animalcule

Nicholas Spice: Little Mr De Quincey, 18 May 2017

Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey 
by Frances Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 397 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 1 4088 3977 5
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... was ‘a little friend of ours’; for Lamb, ‘the animalcule’; Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth took to calling him Peter Quince. Even his friends tended to diminish him: ‘Poor little fellow!’ Carlyle exclaimed to his wife, Jane, who mused: ‘What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk.’ Scarcely surprising, then, that De ...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

... with 64 gigabytes of RAM – and he grabbed the one that wasn’t yet fully encrypted. He also took Ramona’s phone, which wasn’t encrypted either, and headed for the door. They were on the 63rd floor. It occurred to him that the police might be coming up in the elevator, so he went down to the 61st floor, where there were office suites and a swimming ...

Attila the Hus

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 4 November 1982

Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896-1933 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 274 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 436 28849 4
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... of Mosley’s political career. Fellow politicians, Michael Foot and Richard Crossman among them, took the view that, like themselves, he was interested in power but that, unlike them, unlike Foot and Crossman at any rate, he was too impatient to wait his turn. For Skidelsky, though there are signs that he may now repent it, Mosley was a more heroic figure, a ...