Holocaust History

Geoff Eley, 3 March 1983

... fiction of Elie Wiesel to George Steiner’s ruminations in In Bluebeard’s Castle and Richard Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History. But to insist on the uniqueness of the event is a short step to insisting on the exclusiveness of interpretation which asserts an empathetic privilege and even a Jewish proprietorship in the subject. Seven years ...

Keepers

Andrew Scull, 29 September 1988

Mind Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency 
by Roy Porter.
Athlone, 412 pp., £25, August 1987, 0 485 11324 4
Show More
The Past and the Present Revisited 
by Lawrence Stone.
Routledge, 440 pp., £19.95, October 1987, 0 7102 1253 4
Show More
Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in 17th-Century England 
by Lucinda McCray Beier.
Routledge, 314 pp., £30, December 1987, 0 7102 1053 1
Show More
Illness and Self in Society 
by Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret, translated by Elborg Forster.
Johns Hopkins, 271 pp., £20.25, January 1988, 0 8018 3228 4
Show More
Medicine and Society in Wakefield and Huddersfield 1780-1870 
by Hilary Marland.
Cambridge, 503 pp., £40, September 1987, 0 521 32575 7
Show More
A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane 
by Roy Porter.
Weidenfeld, 261 pp., £14.95, October 1987, 0 297 79223 7
Show More
Show More
... whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in surprisingly sympathetic ways, joined in the chorus of condemnation of the ‘medical brutality’ which ...
... about the ‘ineptitude of the governing statute’ – to borrow a phrase from the article by Richard Buxton QC which we cited in the Report. Some of us were very attracted to the Scottish regime, in which a single broad ground gives the Court of Appeal sufficient flexibility to quash any conviction where it believes ...

Is Syria next?

Charles Glass, 24 July 2003

... that has been in place since 1970. Only in a small corner of today’s Damascus, demarcated by the broad stone walls of the Old City, are ancient houses being restored and gentrified after generations of neglect. Syrians who for years avoided the dilapidated bazaars are revisiting the charm of mud and wood, stone and marble, running fountains and cobbled paths ...

No Grand Strategy and No Ultimate Aim

Stephen Holmes: US policy in Iraq, 6 May 2004

Incoherent Empire 
by Michael Mann.
Verso, 278 pp., £15, October 2003, 1 85984 582 7
Show More
Show More
... unseat George W. Bush. He does this in his own bookish way, situating Bush’s foreign policy in a broad historical context and exposing its pathologies without resorting to ‘high moral rhetoric’. Instead of denouncing American power as evil, he charges it with incoherence, exposing US foreign policy as self-defeating rather than merely malevolent or ...

The Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, 23 March 2006

... exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier. The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ...

He, She, One, They, Ho, Hus, Hum, Ita

Amia Srinivasan: How Should I Refer to You?, 2 July 2020

What’s Your Pronoun? Beyond He and She 
by Dennis Baron.
Liveright, 304 pp., £16.99, February 2020, 978 1 63149 604 2
Show More
Show More
... as was only appropriate for ‘this age of improvement’. In 1868 the popular language columnist Richard White rejected a reader’s suggestion of en, from French (surprisingly not the more apt on), the virtues of which the reader had illustrated with the sentence ‘If a person wishes to sleep, en mustn’t eat cheese for supper.’ White, who favoured the ...

Mr and Mr and Mrs and Mrs

James Davidson: Why would a guy want to marry a guy?, 2 June 2005

The Friend 
by Alan Bray.
Chicago, 380 pp., £28, September 2003, 0 226 07180 4
Show More
Show More
... Archaeological Museum says. The couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1998, 21 January 1999

... tombstones have ended up. Much more interesting is the lychgate (restored c.1989): a single broad gate, attached by a bar and chain to an ancient pulley in the thickness of the wall. If you push against the right-hand side of the gate it opens inwards with the left-hand side opening outwards, the pulley then closing the gate. It’s the kind of thing ...

Bloody Sunday Report

Murray Sayle: Back to Bloody Sunday, 11 July 2002

... a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s ...

The Breakaway

Perry Anderson: Goodbye Europe, 21 January 2021

... her, the Labour right, which had always commanded a huge majority in the PLP, regrouped behind the broad front for a ‘People’s Vote’ that took shape in the spring of 2018, campaigning for a second referendum to reverse the result of the first along standard EU lines, as pulled off in Denmark and Ireland. Recovering its spirits, the Guardian was soon ...

Blood for Oil?

Retort: The takeover of Iraq, 21 April 2005

... His obvious oil-profits motive elicited widespread condemnation in the Arab world and provided a broad multilateral basis for the American military response. What was on offer to the industry in 2003, on the other hand, was unilateral adventurism in the face of a global Muslim insurgency, and the prospect of enraging the most numerous generation of young ...

Growing

Barbara Everett, 31 March 1988

... Hamlet’ has a more absolute meaning. In an early allusion, the writer of an elegy for Richard Burbage after his death in 1619 names his great roles as     young Hamlett, ould Hieronymoe, Kind Leer, the Greved More – where Hamlet is young as Lear is kind and the Moor grieved. The phrase, which may have been regular in use, gives a valuable ...

The Reptile Oculist

John Barrell, 1 April 2004

... and Taylor was promoted from drama critic to editor, though with the politician and dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan managing the paper’s political department. This arrangement lasted for two years, until Sheridan, with whom Taylor, by his own account, was especially intimate, decided to position the Post further to the left, and fired his Tory ...

How to Grow a Weetabix

James Meek: Farms and Farmers, 16 June 2016

... go. You would go out on a summer’s day and not see any butterflies. Most farmland is drenched in broad spectrum insecticides so there are no insects to be found anywhere. Farming birds are threatened because they have nothing to eat and nowhere to live.’ But FWAG has to work with farmers, not against them. ‘FWAG is very careful we don’t see ourselves ...