In Clover

Laleh Khalili: What does McKinsey do?, 15 December 2022

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm 
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe.
Bodley Head, 354 pp., £20, October 2022, 978 1 84792 625 8
Show More
Show More
... But they also worked closely with governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In Puerto Rico, Richard Bolin of Arthur D. Little advised the US colonial administration and was involved in setting up a factory enclave subject to minimal regulations in 1947 – he called it Operation Bootstrap. The enclave became a model for export processing zones, or free ...

Will I, Won’t I?

Daniel Soar: Dostoevsky’s Kiss, 6 March 2025

The Brothers Karamazov 
by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Michael Katz.
Liveright, 900 pp., £15.99, July 2024, 978 1 324 09510 1
Show More
Show More
... have been translations by David Magarshack (1958), Andrew MacAndrew (1970), Julius Katzer (1980), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990), David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and, most recently, Michael Katz. Apparently there are at least eleven translations into German, nine into French, five into Spanish, and who knows what else.Translators always ...

Do you feel like a failure?

Emily Witt: In the Manosphere, 11 September 2025

Extremism and Radicalisation in the Manosphere: Beta Uprising 
by Deniese Kennedy-Kollar.
Routledge, 152 pp., £42.99, September, 978 1 032 63107 3
Show More
Clown World: Four Years inside Andrew Tate’s Manosphere 
by Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea.
Quercus, 272 pp., £10.99, April, 978 1 5294 3784 3
Show More
Show More
... and advising them to isolate themselves from their families. His real name turns out to be Miles Gary Sonkin. His life follows the recent history of American grifts: high probability selling, neurolinguistic programming, the Rajneesh movement. ‘We’d long started to feel that the War Room resembled a cult,’ Tahsin and Shea write, ‘and given that ...

Little and Large

David Trotter: Lydia Davis’s Method, 5 March 2026

Into the Weeds 
by Lydia Davis.
Yale, 139 pp., £12.99, January, 978 0 300 27974 0
Show More
Show More
... paragraph cites, in no particular order, George Sturt, J.A. Baker, James Agee, Herman Melville, Richard Henry Dana Jr, Knut Hamsun and Elizabeth Smart. But I’m not being entirely fair. For one of these writers has already been singled out for extensive analysis.It’s an odd choice. Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop (1923) is a book Davis would have been ...

What I Heard about Iraq

Eliot Weinberger: Watch and listen, 3 February 2005

... 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan.’ I heard him say: ‘Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid ...

Battle of Britain

Patrick O’Brian, 7 July 1988

The Spanish Armada 
by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker.
Hamish Hamilton, 296 pp., £15, April 1988, 0 241 12125 6
Show More
Armada 1588-1988 
by M.J. Rodriguez-Salgado.
Penguin and the National Maritime Museum, 295 pp., £12.95, April 1988, 0 14 010301 5
Show More
Armada: A Celebration of the 400th Anniversary of the Defeat of the Spanish Armada 1588-1988 
by Peter Padfield.
Gollancz, 208 pp., £14.95, April 1988, 0 575 03729 6
Show More
Froude’s ‘Spanish Story of the Armada’, and Other Essays 
edited by A.L. Rowse.
Sutton, 262 pp., £5.95, May 1988, 0 86299 500 0
Show More
Ireland’s Armada Legacy 
by Laurence Flanagan.
Sutton, 210 pp., £9.95, April 1988, 9780862994730
Show More
The Armada in the Public Records 
by N.A.M. Rodger.
HMSO, 76 pp., £5.95, April 1988, 0 11 440215 9
Show More
The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588 
by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto.
Oxford, 300 pp., £14.95, June 1988, 0 19 822926 7
Show More
Show More
... observed. The Armada was in battle formation, a well-ordered line abreast, and it covered two miles of sea. War had not been officially declared, so Effingham sent his pinnace the Disdain to fire at what he took to be the Spanish flagship. He was in fact mistaken, but Medina Sidonia took the point and hoisted Philip II’s royal standard at the main. Upon ...
... I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. Elizabeth Taylor was more famous than ...

No Theatricks

Ferdinand Mount: Burke, 21 August 2014

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: from the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence 
by David Bromwich.
Harvard, 500 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 0 674 72970 4
Show More
Moral Imagination: Essays 
by David Bromwich.
Princeton, 350 pp., £19.95, March 2014, 978 0 691 16141 9
Show More
Show More
... defending the American colonists in their struggle not to be taxed by a Parliament three thousand miles away, not simply because there must be no taxation without representation and it would be absurd to send American MPs to Westminster, but also because the colonists had grown away from their mother country, grown too ‘Whiggish’ for their internal ...

First Person

Tony Wood: Putin’s Russia, 5 February 2015

‘Sistema’, Power Networks and Informal Governance 
by Alena Ledeneva.
Cambridge, 327 pp., £19.99, February 2013, 978 0 521 12563 5
Show More
The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin 
by Masha Gessen.
Granta, 314 pp., £9.99, January 2013, 978 1 84708 423 1
Show More
Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? 
by Karen Dawisha.
Simon and Schuster, 464 pp., £11.50, September 2014, 978 1 4767 9519 5
Show More
Show More
... Russia Modernise?, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013) and Richard Sakwa’s Putin Redux (2014). New Year’s Eve 1999 – when Yeltsin appeared on Russian TV screens to announce his resignation as president in favour of Putin – is often taken to mark a major turning point, from the ‘fevered 1990s’ to the stability ...

They rudely stare about

Tobias Gregory: Thomas Browne, 4 July 2013

‘Religio Medici’ and ‘Urne-Buriall’ 
by Thomas Browne, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff.
NYRB, 170 pp., £7.99, September 2012, 978 1 59017 488 3
Show More
Show More
... finally on the wrong side. The discovery of ancient funerary urns in a Norfolk field, some thirty miles from Norwich, prompted the writing of Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall (1658). Browne was intrigued by this local find, and his brief treatise on the subject is a mix of archaeological notes and antiquarian learning that blossoms into a reflection on last ...

‘It was everything’

Eliot Weinberger: The Republican Convention, 11 August 2016

... defenceless border and attack us right here in places like Arkansas.’ (Arkansas is six hundred miles from the Mexican border.) Ernst, who was rumoured to be on the vice-presidential shortlist, says that Obama has ‘become a dictator’ and should be impeached. She told an NRA convention that she’d take up her Smith & Wesson against the government ...

Places Never Explained

Colm Tóibín: Anthony Hecht, 8 August 2013

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht 
edited by Jonathan Post.
Johns Hopkins, 365 pp., £18, November 2012, 978 1 4214 0730 2
Show More
Show More
... my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters, When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. Jarrell was drafted late in 1942. ‘Being in the army,’ he wrote, ‘is like being involved in the ...

Honey, I forgot to duck

Jackson Lears: Reagan’s Make-Believe, 23 January 2025

Reagan: His Life and Legend 
by Max Boot.
Liveright, 836 pp., £35, October 2024, 978 0 87140 944 7
Show More
Show More
... Boot says. He made a smooth transition to Eureka College, a Disciples of Christ institution ninety miles south of Dixon, with Social Gospel roots. ‘Dutch would go from success to success, untroubled by the taint of failure,’ Boot writes. He was ‘a cocky SOB, a loud talker’, a classmate said. And when he talked, people listened. At the beginning of his ...

Underwater Living

James Meek, 5 January 2023

... Haven and the River Welland discharge into the Wash. The hypothetical breach was more than three miles from the Quadrant site, but the effects were severe. Taking predicted higher sea levels into account, a bad storm surge combined with a breach at that point in 2115 would cover the entire Quadrant site in water to a depth of between one and two ...

My Kind of Psychopath

Michael Wood, 20 July 1995

Pulp Fiction 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 198 pp., £7.99, October 1994, 0 571 17546 5
Show More
Reservoir Dogs 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 113 pp., £7.99, November 1994, 0 571 17362 4
Show More
True Romance 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 134 pp., £7.99, January 1995, 0 571 17593 7
Show More
Natural Born Killers 
by Quentin Tarantino.
Faber, 175 pp., £7.99, July 1995, 0 571 17617 8
Show More
Show More
... Tarantino’s characters swear all the time – there are even more motherfuckers here than in Miles Davis’s autobiography – and are more or less impossible to understand. Tarantino has come to be seen as a kind of Post-Modern primitive, neither immoral nor amoral but pre-moral, a kid who loves the shoot-’em-ups in movies and hasn’t even thought ...