How should we think about the Caliphate?

Owen Bennett-Jones: In the Caliphate, 17 July 2014

“... deployment of US forces would play into Baghdadi and Zawahiri’s hands. Towards the end of June, David Cameron told the House of Commons that Isis could take control of northern Iraq and set up a government there: ‘The people in that regime, as well as trying to take territory, are also planning to attack us here at home in the United Kingdom.’ It’s a ...”

Diary

Rebecca Solnit: Get Off the Bus, 20 February 2014

“... valley’s first major firm, Hewlett-Packard, was a military contractor. One of its co-founders, David Packard, was an undersecretary of defence in the Nixon administration; his signal contribution as a civil servant was a paper about overriding the laws preventing the imposition of martial law. Many defence contractors have flourished in Silicon Valley in ...”

Better to go to bed lonely than to wake up guilty

Tim Lewens: Self-Deception, 21 November 2013

Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others 
by Robert Trivers.
Penguin, 416 pp., £10.99, January 2014, 978 0 14 101991 8
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“... disproportionately large share of resources. Important evidence of this sort of effect comes from David Haig’s work on the struggle between mother and foetus during pregnancy. Haig argues that foetal genes are selected to take more than maternal genes are selected to give. The result – borne out in many empirical studies – is a series of otherwise ...”

Electroplated Fish Knife

Peter Howarth: Robert Graves’s Poems, 7 May 2015

Robert Graves: Selected Poems 
edited by Michael Longley.
Faber, 136 pp., £15.99, August 2013, 978 0 571 28383 5
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“... volumes had included many sentimental or chirpy verses, they had also contained ‘Goliath and David’, a rewriting of the story in Goliath’s favour which anticipates Graves’s many debunkings of history, from My Head, My Head! (1925) to King Jesus (1946), of which Goodbye to All That is one. In the ‘Familiar Letter to Siegfried Sassoon’, written ...”

Diary

Max Hastings: Letters from the Front, 10 September 2015

“... many modern historians recognise. In The Long Shadow, his recent study of the legacy of 1914-18, David Reynolds makes the important point that the bulk of contemporary poetry, far from being anti-war, was fiercely patriotic and positive in tone. It is often forgotten that Wilfred Owen went to his grave in 1918 still resolute that the allied cause was ...”

Within the Saffron Family

Andrew Whitehead: Modi, 10 September 2015

The Modi Effect: Inside Narendra Modi’s Campaign to Transform India 
by Lance Price.
Hodder, 342 pp., £25, March 2015, 978 1 4736 1089 7
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2014: The Election that Changed India 
by Rajdeep Sardesai.
Penguin, 372 pp., £16.99, November 2014, 978 0 14 342498 7
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“... talking to someone who just got more votes than any other politician anywhere in the universe,’ David Cameron told Modi. The BJP took 31 per cent of 550 million votes – barely above the Miliband mark – but the first-past-the-post system Britain bequeathed to India, combined with the strength of regional parties in the east and south, transformed this ...”

Brandenburg’s Dream

Derek Walmsley: Digital Piracy, 7 January 2016

How Music Got Free 
by Stephen Witt.
Bodley Head, 280 pp., £20, June 2015, 978 1 84792 282 3
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“... recordings could have data stripped from them and still sound as good. The information theorist David Huffman had also demonstrated that sonic regularities – a violin string vibrating at a steady pitch, say – could be encoded in such a way that they took up minimal data, then subsequently decoded and expanded into audio information at playback. On the ...”

Can they?

Dan Hancox: Podemos, 17 December 2015

Politics in a Time of Crisis: Podemos and the Future of a Democratic Europe 
by Pablo Iglesias, translated by Lorna Scott Fox.
Verso, 237 pp., £10.99, November 2015, 978 1 78478 335 8
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“... theory with pop culture. He cites Billy Elliot and The Wire alongside Francis Fukuyama and David Harvey to discuss neoliberalism’s corrosion of the postwar social democratic consensus, Game of Thrones alongside Gramsci to illustrate the meaning of power. The book is aimed at the ‘youth without a future’, the generation for whom adult life will ...”

Uncuddly

Christopher Tayler: Muriel Spark’s Essays, 25 September 2014

The Golden Fleece: Essays 
by Muriel Spark, edited by Penelope Jardine.
Carcanet, 226 pp., £16.99, March 2014, 978 1 84777 251 0
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“... by sex, and ended up living with Jardine in a companionable relationship best described – by David Lodge – as a ‘Boston marriage’.) Another effect of her conversion was to bolster the formal daring she’d shown in her first short stories. Broadly speaking, her novels are eager to puncture the conventions of realist fiction, though careful to throw ...”

‘Equality exists in Valhalla’

Richard J. Evans: German Histories, 4 December 2014

Germany: Memories of a Nation 
by Neil MacGregor.
Allen Lane, 598 pp., £30, November 2014, 978 0 241 00833 1
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Germany: Memories of a Nation 
British Museum, until 25 January 2015Show More
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“... is demonstrated and evil is overcome.’ The German oak came to stand for such victories. Caspar David Friedrich’s The Solitary Tree (1822) shows a battered oak in the foreground, damaged by the storms of the French invasion and the Napoleonic Wars but still in full leaf on its lower branches, providing shelter for a shepherd and his flock. Its loneliness ...”

What’s wrong with that man?

Christian Lorentzen: Donald Antrim, 20 November 2014

The Emerald Light in the Air: Stories 
by Donald Antrim.
Granta, 158 pp., £12.99, November 2014, 978 1 84708 649 5
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“... He’s invariably linked with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least ...”

Only Men in Mind

Susan Pedersen: R.H. Tawney, 21 August 2014

The Life of R.H. Tawney 
by Lawrence Goldman.
Bloomsbury, 411 pp., £65, September 2013, 978 1 78093 704 5
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“... he didn’t credit the men and women he met in the East End – ‘a subservient lot’, he told David Marquand years later – with his conversion to socialism. That may have already been underway but would be shaped by his work teaching in the industrial north.His quarrel with Oxford in a sense drove him there. In 1905, Tawney joined the newly formed ...”

Labour dies again

Ross McKibbin, 4 June 2015

“... a majority in the Parliament in 2011; the mobilising effects of the independence referendum; David Cameron’s decision (presumably well prepared) to use the result as an excuse to push for ‘English votes for English measures’, which allowed the SNP to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. From that moment, as Scottish MPs knew, Labour was finished ...”

Diary

Lana Spawls: What a Junior Doctor Does, 4 February 2016

“... was prepared to force the contract on doctors regardless of whether the BMA agreed to it. David Cameron said last month that junior doctors could not be allowed to ‘block progress in our NHS’. Whose NHS? The government has done everything it can to make it seem as if its main concern is with reducing weekend mortality rates, but even if that were ...”

Really Good at Killing

Thomas Nagel: The Ethics of Drones, 3 March 2016

Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President and the Rise of the Drone 
by Scott Shane.
Bantam, 416 pp., £20, September 2015, 978 0 8041 4029 4
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“... years after my initial request. We got heavily redacted copies of the two 2010 legal opinions by David Barron and Marty Lederman making the case that it was legal and constitutional to kill Awlaki. It is a dark twist to this story that Barron and Lederman owed their positions in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to ‘their scathing ...”