Guns, Money and Opium

Laleh Khalili, 19 February 2026

The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces 
by Seth Harp.
Viking, 357 pp., £22.50, August 2025, 978 0 593 65508 5
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“... the people’, and in his acerbic book The Best and the Brightest, published a decade later, David Halberstam described it as ‘a real whizbang day. There were ambushes, counter-ambushes and demonstrations in snake-meat eating, all topped off by a Buck Rogers show: a soldier with a rocket on his back who flew over water to land on the other side.’In ...”

Stink of Gin

Colin Burrow: Character Types, 19 February 2026

The Character Sketch as Philosophy: Manners, Mores, Types 
by Katie Ebner-Landy.
Harvard, 390 pp., £41.95, October 2025, 978 0 674 29412 7
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“... systematic ethics and fiction. This way of doing philosophy, she suggests, fell from favour with David Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), which sought to explicate the principles underlying human conduct rather than portray instances of virtue or vice in the form of characters. After Hume, the character sketch ‘was no longer considered ...”

Thriving on Chaos

Patrick Cockburn: After al-Baghdadi, 21 November 2019

“... Baghdad, and that the Iraqi army could not get them out. Earlier that month Barack Obama had told David Remnick of the New Yorker that, compared to al-Qaida, IS was a junior varsity basketball team playing out of its league; a few months later its fighters emerged from the desert to defeat six Iraqi army divisions and capture Mosul. Wary of making the same ...”

In America’s Blood

Deborah Friedell, 24 September 2020

The NRA: The Unauthorised History 
by Frank Smyth.
Flatiron, 295 pp., $28.99, March 2020, 978 1 250 21028 9
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“... machine whirring more effectively than convincing the faithful that they’re a pro-gun David facing an invincible anti-gun Goliath.’ And the NRA needed the money – not only for its voter registration drives. The New York attorney general, Letitia James, alleges that NRA executives, principally LaPierre, have been diverting ‘charitable assets ...”

Worker, Hipster, Banker

Susan Pedersen: Modern British Cities, 23 July 2026

The Modern British City 1945-2000 
edited by Simon Gunn, Peter Mandler and Otto Saumarez Smith.
Lund Humphries, 496 pp., £65, November 2025, 978 1 84822 729 3
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“... radios, clothing) its population demanded. Our understanding of that national economy owes much to David Edgerton, who in a smart piece on port cities explains that inner-city docks declined not just because of containerisation but also because Britain – like France – was once again growing most of its own food; when imports shot up again in the 1980s (of ...”

Diary

Rosa Lyster: Louisiana Underwater, 7 October 2021

“... it was and by spending as much money as possible in service of that goal.I met another architect, David Waggonner, who for the last ten years has been attempting to show that there is another way of doing things. His firm’s water management plan for New Orleans is founded on the argument that the water has to be accepted and accommodated, as it is in places ...”

The Strange Death of Municipal England

Tom Crewe: Assault on Local Government, 15 December 2016

“... rather than padlock themselves to the gates of Downing Street. Strangest of all, in September 2015 David Cameron wrote to the Conservative leader of Oxfordshire County Council to complain about cuts it had recently announced: I was disappointed at the long list of suggestions floated in the briefing note to make up significant cuts to frontline services ...”

The Reptile Oculist

John Barrell, 1 April 2004

“... him, however, and Watt was charged with high treason, along with an elderly goldsmith called David Downie, who was unfortunate enough to be at the meeting at which Watt disclosed his crackpot plan. The government was keen to persuade the jury and public opinion (though it was certainly not true) that the Edinburgh plot was part of a co-ordinated ...”

Four pfennige per track km

Thomas Laqueur: Adolf Eichmann and Holocaust photography, 4 November 2004

Eichmann: His Life and Crimes 
by David Cesarani.
Heinemann, 458 pp., £20, August 2004, 0 434 01056 1
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Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence 
by Janina Struk.
Tauris, 251 pp., £15.95, December 2003, 1 86064 546 1
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“... much heart.Reitlinger devotes a substantial number of pages to Eichmann and concludes, in a phrase David Cesarani quotes, that Eichmann’s ‘career was that of a German civil servant, absorbed in his work and getting no glory for it’. Reitlinger didn’t fail to recognise his significance in the murder of millions of Jews but, like Arendt later on, he ...”

After George W. Bush, the Deluge

Murray Sayle: Back to the Carboniferous, 21 June 2001

Draft Report of the 17th Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Nairobi, 4-6 April 2001 
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Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability 
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The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the Struggle to Slow Global Warming 
by David Victor.
Princeton, 192 pp., £12.95, April 2001, 0 691 08870 5
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Managing the Planet: The Politics of the New Millennium 
by Norman Moss.
Earthscan, 232 pp., £16.99, September 2000, 1 85383 644 3
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“... his presciently titled book (Bush had not yet loosed his thunderbolt when the MS was completed), David Victor of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, calls it ‘the Kyoto fantasyland’, and in retrospect there was never a chance of a workable agreement. But the Kyoto delegates believed they had two precedents to hearten them. In 1985 Joe ...”

Red Power

Thomas Meaney: Indigenous Political Strategies, 18 July 2024

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hämäläinen.
Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History 
by Ned Blackhawk.
Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
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Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance 
by Nick Estes.
Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
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“... across their ancient homeland. Hämäläinen relates the account given to the English explorer David Thompson by one of the Blackfeet Indians, Saahkómaapi. In around 1730, the Blackfeet heard that there were horses in Snake Indian country and that not far away was the body of a horse that had been killed by an arrow. They found the dead horse and gathered ...”

Time of the Red-Man

Mark Ford: James Fenimore Cooper, 25 September 2008

James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years 
by Wayne Franklin.
Yale, 708 pp., £25, July 2008, 978 0 300 10805 7
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“... ecological credentials, which anticipate those of another wilderness-loving loner, Henry David Thoreau, Natty is also, as the book’s final words put it, ‘the foremost in that band of Pioneers, who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent’. More than three thousand copies of The Pioneers were purchased within hours of ...”

Diary

McGuire Gibson: The Theft of Iraq’s Antiquities, 1 January 2009

“... before the war by the museum authorities at the behest of Saddam. Two days later, in the Guardian, David Aaronovitch seconded Cruickshank, and right-wing commentators in the US took up the story. Later that month, many of the same media figures used part of a statement by Donny George, the director of the Iraq Museum, to bury the story that had embarrassed the ...”

The Parliamentary Peloton

Peter Mair: Money and Politics, 25 February 2010

A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal and How to Save Our Democracy 
by Martin Bell.
Icon, 246 pp., £11.99, October 2009, 978 1 84831 096 4
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“... allow Berlusconi to escape judgment in the bribery case that has already led to the conviction of David Mills, Tessa Jowell’s estranged husband. Lower down the hierarchy, public services and state institutions continue to be used extensively by politicians to extract profits or as a source of jobs for friends and party colleagues. It isn’t only ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2009, 7 January 2010

“... play. We all have a cup of tea and there’s a lot of laughing, particularly as the actors from David Hare’s The Power of Yes begin to drift out after their matinée. One of them is Simon Williams, a tall distinguished figure, handsome throughout his life just as was his father, whom I remember from a film I saw as a child, One of Our Aircraft Is ...”