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Free-Marketeering

Stephen Holmes: Naomi Klein, 8 May 2008

The Shock Doctrine 
by Naomi Klein.
Penguin, 558 pp., £8.99, June 2008, 978 0 14 102453 0
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... in Iraq. Nor were the mental blinkers restricted to the field operatives. On 10 September 2001, Donald Rumsfeld announced to a Pentagon audience: ‘Today we declare war on bureaucracy.’ This ‘war on bureaucracy’, inspired in part by Friedman, meant that virtually no effort was made to rebuild the shattered administrative and regulatory machinery in ...

Lace the air with LSD

Mike Jay: Brain Warfare, 4 February 2021

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control 
by Stephen Kinzer.
Henry Holt, 384 pp., £11.99, November 2020, 978 1 250 76262 7
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... a press conference and announced that they would be suing the agency. Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, was alerted to the danger by his deputy, Dick Cheney. The Olsons received a settlement of $750,000 in exchange for dropping their legal action, and were invited to the White House, where Ford made them a public apology.As the Rockefeller report ...

Ha ha! Ha ha!

Lauren Oyler: Jia Tolentino, 23 January 2020

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion 
by Jia Tolentino.
Fourth Estate, 303 pp., £14.99, August 2019, 978 0 00 829492 2
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... for the New Yorker in which she somewhat mournfully observed that, following the election of Donald Trump, ‘the personal-essay boom is over’: ‘Individual perspectives do not, at the moment, seem like a trustworthy way to get to the bottom of a subject.’ She sticks her Facebook profile into the book anyway, though regular readers of her work will ...

We must burn them

Hazel V. Carby: Against the Origin Story, 26 May 2022

The 1619 Project: A New American Origin Story 
edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones.
W.H. Allen, 624 pp., £25, November 2021, 978 0 7535 5953 6
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Exterminate All the Brutes 
directed by Raoul Peck.
HBO, April 2021
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... features Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. The idea that US supremacy is seen as being ordained by divine providence is underlined by an episode showing American presidents speaking the words ‘So help me God’ when reciting the Oath of Office, immediately followed by an account of the ...

A Tove on the Table

A.W. Moore: Versions of Wittgenstein, 1 August 2024

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Michael Beaney.
Oxford, 100 pp., £8.99, May 2023, 978 0 19 886137 9
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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Alexander Booth.
Penguin, 94 pp., £14.99, December 2023, 978 0 241 68195 4
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Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 
by Ludwig Wittgenstein, translated by Damion Searls.
Norton, 181 pp., £19.99, April, 978 1 324 09243 8
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... in which Wittgenstein commented on the first draft of the first translation, had not yet come to light (it was published only in 1973), so there was little appreciation at the time of Wittgenstein’s own input, however questionable, into Ogden and Ramsey’s text. After the correspondence emerged, Pears and McGuinness published a revised version of their ...

Four Moptop Yobbos

Ian Penman, 17 June 2021

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 642 pp., £9.99, March, 978 0 00 834003 2
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The Beatles and Sixties Britain 
by Marcus Collins.
Cambridge, 382 pp., £90, March 2020, 978 1 108 47724 6
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The Beatles in Context 
edited by Kenneth Womack.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £74.99, January 2020, 978 1 108 41911 6
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... area of Hamburg in the early 1960s was a humid mixture of postwar German efficiency and red-light anything goes. Contracted to play all night and half of the day, the Beatles couldn’t help but become more professional, even if their onstage demeanour remained spotty and unpredictable. Hamburg was both art school and chitlin circuit in one riotously ...

Are we having fun yet?

John Lanchester: The Biggest Scandal of All, 4 July 2013

... which happened either just before or just after the crash, and which would never have come to light had it not been for the financial crisis and the resulting surge in attention – mainly legislative attention – to the murkier deeds of the banks. The simplest of these stories concerns HBOS. This is another familiar narrative in that it involves a ...

Gentlemen and ladies came to see the poet’s cottage

Tom Paulin: Clare’s anti-pastoral, 19 February 2004

John Clare: A Biography 
by Jonathan Bate.
Picador, 650 pp., £25, October 2003, 0 330 37106 1
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‘I Am’: The Selected Poetry of John Clare 
edited by Jonathan Bate.
Farrar, Straus, 318 pp., $17, November 2003, 0 374 52869 1
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John Clare, Politics and Poetry 
by Alan Vardy.
Palgrave, 221 pp., £45, October 2003, 0 333 96617 1
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John Clare Vol. V: Poems of the Middle Period 1822-37 
edited by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson.
Oxford, 822 pp., £105, January 2003, 0 19 812386 8
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... no reason: yet is always correct and just in his remarks. He is low in stature – long visage – light hair – coarse features – ungaitly – awkward – is a fiddler – loves ale – likes the girls– somewhat idle, – hates work. As Bate says, this is condescending, but it also shows ‘terrific enthusiasm’. The last sentence of Drury’s ...

Enemies For Ever

James Wolcott: ‘Making It’, 18 May 2017

Making It 
by Norman Podhoretz.
NYRB, 368 pp., £13.98, May 2017, 978 1 68137 080 4
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... deadly to the book (‘Only Saul Bellow and [James] Baldwin are shown in any kind of unattractive light and then with care and preparation of context in order to strike no undue foul blow’), sapping its force, piddling away its momentum. Making It may have been intended as a tell-all, but what it delivered was a tepid modified limited hangout, to borrow a ...

On Not Going Home

James Wood, 20 February 2014

... stages of a child’s growth – all is unexpected. But there is also that strange distance, the light veil of alienation thrown over everything.And then there is the same light veil thrown over everything when I go back to Britain. When I was first living in the States, I was eager to keep up with life ‘back at ...

How bad can it get?

LRB Contributors: On Johnson’s Britain, 15 August 2019

... and (still awaiting completion) services.Today the union that Thatcher did so much to shape is light on social justice, tough on treasury borrowing, fixated by opening up markets to competition. If it weren’t for the electorate’s concerns over immigration, the Tory Brexiteers would look as though they were stuck in a time warp. After all, the EU long ...

Il n’y a pas de Beckett

Christopher Prendergast, 14 November 1996

Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett 
by James Knowlson.
Bloomsbury, 872 pp., £25, September 1996, 0 7475 2719 9
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Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist 
by Anthony Cronin.
HarperCollins, 645 pp., £25, October 1996, 9780246137692
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The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. Vol I: Waiting for Godot 
edited by Dougald McMillan and James Knowlson.
Faber, 472 pp., £75, March 1994, 0 571 14543 4
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The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. Vol II: Endgame 
edited by S.E. Gontarski.
Faber, 276 pp., £50, November 1992, 0 571 14544 2
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The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. Vol III: Krapp’s Last Tape 
edited by James Knowlson.
Faber, 286 pp., £50, May 1992, 0 571 14563 9
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Eleutheria 
by Samuel Beckett, translated by Barbara Wright.
Faber, 170 pp., £6.99, September 1996, 9780571178261
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... stated as heard in the present, already over. Knowlson, who quotes this passage from a letter to Donald Mc Whinnie, draws no lesson from it, other than the somewhat limp, and question-begging, suggestion that the world of How It Is is ‘related sometimes closely but rarely unambiguously to Beckett’s own life’. Certainly all possibility of a lesson ...

Which is worse?

Adam Tooze: Germany Divided, 18 July 2019

Die Getriebenen: Merkel und die Flüchtlingspolitik – Report aus dem Innern der Macht 
by Robin Alexander.
Siedler, 288 pp., €19.99, March 2017, 978 3 8275 0093 9
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Die SPD: Biographie einer Partei von Ferdinand Lassalle bis Andrea Nahles 
by Franz Walter.
Rowohlt, 416 pp., €16, June 2018, 978 3 499 63445 1
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Germany’s Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe 
by Oliver Nachtwey, translated by Loren Balhorn and David Fernbach.
Verso, 247 pp., £16.99, November 2018, 978 1 78663 634 8
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Die Schulz Story: Ein Jahr zwischen Höhenflug und Absturz 
by Markus Feldenkirchen.
DVA, 320 pp., €20, March 2018, 978 3 421 04821 9
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... provoked howls of indignation from SPD members. But though Schröder may have given it the green light, the decisive push for Agenda 2010, as Anke Hassel and Christof Schiller showed in Der Fall Hartz IV (2010), came from local government and the insurance and labour market agencies struggling to cope with crisis levels of unemployment. The Kohl government ...

Don’t Look Down

Nicholas Spice: Dull Britannia, 8 April 2010

Family Britain 1951-57 
by David Kynaston.
Bloomsbury, 776 pp., £25, November 2009, 978 0 7475 8385 1
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... era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the east and a sense of the light slowly but steadily strengthening. In 1945, more than 70 per cent of the population was working-class, employed either as rural labourers or industrial workers. Over the next decade, their story would be one of growing prosperity and wellbeing, of widening ...

Look on the Bright Side

Seamus Perry: Anna Letitia Barbauld, 25 February 2010

Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment 
by William McCarthy.
Johns Hopkins, 725 pp., £32, December 2008, 978 0 8018 9016 1
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... in placing Unitarianism within a wider tradition of dissenting Christianity; but in truth, as Donald Davie robustly maintained in A Gathered Church (1978), it hardly does justice to the enormous heterodoxy of Unitarianism to think of it as a form of Christianity at all. Certainly Coleridge came to think in that way. According to a story recorded by his ...

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