The Asian Question

Mahmood Mamdani: On Leaving Uganda, 6 October 2022

“... Kyemba, who spun tales of Amin as a cannibal and killer, including of his own wives and children. David Owen, foreign secretary under James Callaghan, compared him to Pol Pot; he also looked into the possibility of having Amin assassinated.But Ugandan Asians are a poor fit as victims. For a start, the expulsion meant different things to different people. For ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: On failing to impress the queen, 5 January 2023

“... one of his readers who found Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman too much to take.9 October. Susan and David Neave are the authors of East Yorkshire and York: A Heritage Shell Guide, which they sent me this morning. On the lines of the previous volume for the West Riding, edited by William Glossop, it’s splendidly illustrated while like the original Shell guides ...”

Friends with Benefits

Tom Stevenson: The Five Eyes, 19 January 2023

The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the Shadowy International Spy Network, through Its Targets, Traitors and Spies 
by Richard Kerbaj.
John Blake, 416 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 1 78946 503 7
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Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena 
by Clinton Fernandes.
Melbourne, 176 pp., £35.95, October 2022, 978 0 522 87926 1
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“... atolls had contributed to a widespread scepticism about the bomb. In 1984, the new prime minister, David Lange, announced that he would make the country a nuclear-free zone – a policy hated by the US but popular, then as now, in New Zealand. When New Zealand began to refuse permission for nuclear-powered ships to enter its ports, the US suspended New Zealand ...”

Stupid Questions

Laleh Khalili: Battlefield to Boardroom, 24 February 2022

Risk: A User’s Guide 
by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico.
Penguin, 343 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 0 241 48192 9
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“... endowed by Thomas Kaplan and his wife, Dafna Recanati, and were designed with input from General David Petraeus, the disgraced former head of the CIA. Kaplan made his billions investing in Bolivian silver mines, African gold and platinum and US natural gas. He is the head of Tigris Financial Group and Electrum Group, in which the Emirati and other Gulf ...”

I going England tomorrow

Mendez: ‘The Lonely Londoners’, 7 July 2022

The Lonely Londoners 
by Sam Selvon.
Penguin, 138 pp., £16.99, June 2021, 978 0 241 50412 3
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“... citizens of the Commonwealth in 1948. In his documentary The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files, David Olusoga observed that the 1948 British Nationality Act was intended to attract Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders, who would be easily absorbed into the majority population, restoring Britain’s manpower after the war, while keeping it ...”

Rudy Then and Rudy Now

James Wolcott, 16 February 2023

Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor 
by Andrew Kirtzman.
Simon and Schuster, 458 pp., £20, September 2022, 978 1 9821 5329 8
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“... later,New York was a far different city on this day than it was when he assumed the mayoralty from David Dinkins … You could read it in the numbers and feel it in the streets.Crime was down nearly 60 per cent. The murder rate was even lower; 1250 fewer New Yorkers were killed in 2000 than in 1993. Car thieves stole more than 111,000 vehicles the year before ...”

Bounce off a snap

Hal Foster: Yve-Alain Bois’s Reflections, 30 March 2023

An Oblique Autobiography 
by Yve-Alain Bois, edited by Jordan Kantor.
No Place, 375 pp., £15.99, December 2022, 978 1 949484 08 3
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“... of a discursive throuple that he enjoyed with the English critic Guy Brett and the Filipino artist David Medalla, detailing how the three friends influenced one another, mostly at a distance, over the years. Still, how can a person indoctrinated in ‘the death of the author’ write an autobiography? Here ‘oblique’ takes on another meaning. Bois tells ...”

Impatience

J.P. Stern, 30 August 1990

Unmodern Observations 
by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Herbert Golder, Gary Brown and William Arrowsmith.
Yale, 402 pp., £30, February 1990, 0 300 04311 2
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The Importance of Nietzsche 
by Erich Heller.
Chicago, 200 pp., £23.95, February 1989, 0 226 32637 3
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“... Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over France a victory over French culture, Nietzsche writes, is a pernicious delusion, ‘not simply ...”

A Terrible Bad Cold

John Sutherland, 27 September 1990

Dickens 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 1195 pp., £19.95, September 1990, 1 85619 000 5
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“... and development of the great writer. He was born on a Friday, on the same day as his young hero David Copperfield, and for ever afterwards Friday became for him a day of omen ... Born in Portsmouth on Friday, February 7, 1812, Charles Dickens was the second child of a slim, dark-haired, pretty woman. On the night of his birth, Elizabeth Dickens, who ...”

No more pretty face

Philip Horne, 8 March 1990

Emotion Pictures: Reflections on the Cinema 
by Wim Wenders, translated by Sean Whiteside and Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 148 pp., £12.99, November 1989, 0 571 15271 6
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Scorsese on Scorsese 
by Martin Scorsese, edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie.
Faber, 178 pp., £12.99, November 1989, 9780571141036
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“... Wim Wender’s very pleasurable Paris, Texas (1984) is both an American movie and a European film. Its creative pedigree is mixed – all through the credits: the German Wenders as director, the American Sam Shepard as writer; the German Robby Müller as cinematographer, the American Ry Cooder as composer/performer of the music; the American actors Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell as the central Henderson brothers, the French Aurore Clément and the German Nastassia Kinski as their wives ...”

Fraternity

Nicholas Penny, 8 March 1990

The Image of the Black in Western Art. Vol. IV, Parts I-II: From the American Revolution to World War One 
by Hugh Honour.
Harvard, 379 pp., £34.95, April 1989, 9780939594177
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Primitive Art in Civilised Places 
by Sally Price.
Chicago, 147 pp., £15.95, December 1989, 0 226 68063 0
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The Return of Cultural Treasures 
by Jeanette Greenfield.
Cambridge, 361 pp., £32.50, February 1990, 0 521 33319 9
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“... all, there is the Portrait d’une Négresse exhibited at the Paris salon in 1800 by a pupil of David, Marie-Guilhelmine Benoist. The woman’s breast is exposed, but not with any sly or coy intention – her undress seems as natural to her as her white cotton turban; and the candour of her gaze is as disarming as the dignity of her bearing is ...”

Why Bosnia matters

Christopher Hitchens, 10 September 1992

“... saw a poster facing me. Executed in yellow and black, it was a combined logo featuring the Star of David, the Islamic star and crescent, the Roman Catholic cross and the more elaborate cruciform of the Serbian and Bosnian Orthodox. Gens una summus,read the superscription. ‘We are one people’. Here, rendered in iconographic terms, was the defiant remnant of ...”

Tiananmen Revisited

Philippa Tristram, 19 November 1992

“... million marching in Hong Kong was even more significant than one million demonstrating in Beijing. David Owen warned that the involvement of the colony could be ‘very dangerous’. In early June a further demonstration damaged property and the Hong Kong riot police were sent in promptly. It was alleged, in language reminiscent of Beijing, that ‘criminal ...”

Vibrations

Margaret Anne Doody, 5 August 1993

The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in 18th-century Britain 
by G.J. Barker-Benfield.
Chicago, 520 pp., £39.95, October 1992, 0 226 03713 4
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Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context 
by Ann Jessie van Sant.
Cambridge, 143 pp., £27.95, January 1993, 0 521 40226 3
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Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices: Criminal Biographies of the 18th Century 
by Philip Rawlings.
Routledge, 222 pp., £40, October 1992, 0 415 05056 1
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Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700-1830 
by Rictor Norton.
Gay Men’s Press, 302 pp., £12.95, September 1992, 0 85449 188 0
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“... I look in the index of books on either sensibility or sentiment, and if there is no reference to David Hartley I close the volume. G.J. Barker-Benfield passes the test – his index lists Hartley as well as Shaftesbury, Hume, Adam Smith and, of course, Locke, for even the non-philosophical usually know that a brief reference to Locke must be ...”

Every one values Mr Pope

James Winn, 16 December 1993

Alexander Pope: A Critical Edition 
edited by Pat Rogers.
Oxford, 706 pp., £11.95, July 1993, 0 19 281346 3
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Essays on Pope 
by Pat Rogers.
Cambridge, 273 pp., £30, September 1993, 0 521 41869 0
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“... decision would appear to contradict the principles of the first, it is not entirely arbitrary. As David Foxon established in his wonderful study Pope and the Early 18th-Century Book Trade, Pope was fussy about the details of his texts, closely supervising and altering later editions and moving them away from the somewhat baroque typography in which his early ...”