Advice to the Palestinian Leadership

Raja Shehadeh: Advice to the Palestinians, 3 July 2014

... shrapnel in Israel’s backside. My father refused to register my family with UNRWA. Reluctantly, we became citizens of Jordan, which was trying its best to make us forget we were Palestinians. But the hope of dividing Palestine between Israel and Jordan, with each absorbing as citizens some of these refugees without ...

A Hologram for President

Eliot Weinberger, 30 August 2012

... above all, in their presidential candidates, regardless of opinions on specific issues. Obama, Bush Jr, Bill Clinton, Reagan all appeared to mean what they say. Failed candidates (Hillary Clinton, McCain, Kerry, Gore, Bush Sr) were all too obviously reversing or avoiding long-held beliefs to pander to the various voting ...

Past Its Peak

Michael Klare: The Oil Crisis, 14 August 2008

... government to make car production and ownership a ‘pillar’ of the Chinese economy; and by the Bush administration’s National Energy Policy of 2001, which backed the continued production and consumption of oil rather than the development of alternative sources of energy. Both policies ensured that the global demand for oil would rise just at the moment ...

Diary

David Rieff: Cuban Miami, 5 February 1987

... who could be numbered among Ronald Reagan’s most enthusiastic supporters removed the ‘Reagan-Bush ’84’ bumper-stickers from their cars fairly soon after the 1984 Election was safely in the bag. No one thought the things were supposed to adorn the family automobile in perpetuity in the way that Saint Christopher medals adorned the dashboards of ...

The Finchley Factor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Thatcher in Israel, 13 September 2018

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East 
by Azriel Bermant.
Cambridge, 274 pp., £22.99, September 2017, 978 1 316 60630 8
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... returned to office as foreign secretary in the wartime coalition government led by David Lloyd George. The British government would ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind the Balfour ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: The biography of stuff, 5 July 2001

... of the drug is possible, would you set about getting it authorised? Who would you ask? George W. – ‘W’ in this instance standing for ‘When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible’ – Bush? Or perhaps the Queen, within yards of whom, the Evening Standard was shocked to report, other ...

Denizens of Baghdad’s Green Zone, take note

Andrew Bacevich: America’s Forgotten General, 20 April 2006

Leonard Wood: Rough Rider, Surgeon, Architect of American Imperialism 
by Jack McCallum.
New York, 368 pp., $34.95, December 2005, 0 8147 5699 9
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... of the entire island until Washington granted Havana (limited) independence in 1902. What the Bush administration has promised in Iraq, Wood actually delivered in Cuba. Vowing to provide his charges with ‘a firm but liberal and just government of the people, for the people and by the people, under American military supervision’, he made good on his ...

Do, Not, Love, Make, Beds

David Wheatley: Irish literary magazines, 3 June 2004

Irish Literary Magazines: An Outline History and Descriptive Bibliography 
Irish Academic, 318 pp., £35, January 2003, 0 7165 2751 0Show More
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... the Artist’ in 1904, it outspokenly attacked the Church and the Revival, as well as publishing George Moore, an important figure in the Revival. Joyce eventually sneaked in with a wispy ‘Song’ in August 1904, though he still included the editor of Dana, John Eglinton (W.K. Magee), in the rogues’ gallery of his ...

Adrift from Locality

James Davidson: Captain Cook’s Mistake, 3 November 2005

Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa 
by Marshall Sahlins.
Chicago, 334 pp., £21, December 2004, 0 226 73400 5
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... history itself has a structural dynamic; that rather than studying the history of nations per se, we should think of nations as the structural elements of history – and there clearly is some structural oppositioning of Athens and Sparta in practice, but his particular elaborations of the principle do not stand up to examination. Either his oppositions seem ...

A Degree of Light-Heartedness

Christopher Clark: Merkel’s Two Lives, 20 February 2025

Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021 
by Angela Merkel with Beate Baumann, translated by Alice Tetley-Paul et al.
Macmillan, 709 pp., £35, November 2024, 978 1 0350 2075 1
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... machine impervious to their concerns’. But at the heart of her recollection of this scene, we find the sentence: ‘It was the first time I had ever held a turbot in my hands and felt its distinctive stone-like bumps.’ Merkel brings to her encounter with the turbot the eye (and thumbs) of a scientist. Yet there is more to it than that, because on ...
What is Love? Richard Carlile’s Philosophy of Sex 
edited by M.L. Bush.
Verso, 214 pp., £19, September 1998, 1 85984 851 6
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... but over the whole of the British Isles’ – just what was lost as a result? Logic suggests that we will find ourselves back in congenial company once we are divagating mentally in the early years of the 19th century, or the last years of the 18th. This is above all an attractive prospect in relation to sex. What ...

Terrorists? Us?

Owen Bennett-Jones, 7 June 2012

Terror Tagging of an Iranian Dissident Organisation 
by Raymond Tanter.
Iran Policy Committee, 217 pp., £10, December 2011, 978 0 9797051 2 0
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... of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s links with al-Qaida. Then, as George Bush took the US to war, all that remained for the INC and its leaders was to sit back and prepare for government. Many in Washington believe that, for better or worse, the US will go to war with Iran and that the MEK will have a role to play. But ...

Uncaging the beast

Sheldon Rothblatt, 16 February 1989

Victorian Anthropology 
by George Stocking.
Collier Macmillan, 429 pp., £22, October 1987, 0 02 931550 6
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... examine their leading concepts (‘culture’, ‘evolution’) or place them in perspective than George Stocking of the University of Chicago. His brilliant essays and intellectual leadership have virtually built an academic specialty. And Victorian Anthropology is unquestionably his masterpiece, a work of precision, subtlety and historical irony. Two ...

Where has all the money gone?

Ed Harriman: On the Take in Iraq, 7 July 2005

US House of Representatives Government Reform Committee Minority Office 
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US General Accountability Office 
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Defense Contract Audit Agency 
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International Advisory and Monitoring Board 
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Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General 
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Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction 
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... Waxman voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq. But since the war he’s been demanding that the Bush administration account for its cost. Within six months of the invasion, Waxman’s committee had evidence that the Texas-based Halliburton corporation was being grossly overpaid by the American occupation authorities for the petrol it was importing into Iraq ...

Brown and Friends

David Runciman, 3 January 2008

... David Cameron and William Hague all went to Oxford and read PPE. The exceptions to this rule are George Osborne (Oxford, history), Boris Johnson (Oxford, classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like Andy Burnham, Chris Grayling, Nick Herbert and Nick Clegg, who went to Cambridge. (Chris Huhne, incidentally, also read PPE at Oxford, but he is now ...