Ten Bullets to One, Twenty to Another

Thomas Meaney: Sri Lanka, 2 February 2017

Rescued from the Nation: Anagarika Dharmapala and the Buddhist World 
by Steven Kemper.
Chicago, 480 pp., £31.50, January 2015, 978 0 226 19907 8
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Tamil: A Biography 
by David Shulman.
Harvard, 416 pp., £25, September 2016, 978 0 674 05992 4
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The Seasons of Trouble: Life amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War 
by Rohini Mohan.
Verso, 368 pp., £16.99, October 2015, 978 1 78168 883 0
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... highlands – his kingdom had withstood Europeans before. With Napoleon threatening Europe, Robert Brownrigg, the British governor at Colombo, was instructed not to drain the treasury with an unnecessary adventure. But he was ambitious for rank and title, and so found an excuse: King Vikrama, he claimed, had committed acts of barbarism against local ...

Conspire Slowly, Act Quickly

David Runciman: Thatcher Undone, 2 January 2020

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. III: Herself Alone 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 1072 pp., £35, October 2019, 978 0 241 32474 5
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... he is wholly at home in this world. The three volumes of his biography stand comparison with Robert Caro’s Life of Lyndon Johnson in their ability to show us how power works from the inside. Personal relationships at or near the top matter far more than political posturing. It would probably be wise to remember that in the years ahead.At the same ...

Regime Change in the West?

Perry Anderson, 3 April 2025

... a work co-authored by two pillars of the foreign policy establishment of the time, Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane, whose first edition – it went through many – appeared in 1977. Though presented as a system of norms and expectations that helped assure continuity between different administrations in Washington by introducing ‘greater discipline’ into ...

Let them eat oysters

Lorna Finlayson: Animal Ethics, 5 October 2023

Animal Liberation Now 
by Peter Singer.
Penguin, 368 pp., £20, June, 978 1 84792 776 7
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Justice for Animals 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Simon & Schuster, 372 pp., £16, January, 978 1 9821 0250 0
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... why anyone’s life, or their pain, matters.This is one problem with Singer’s enterprise. Like Robert Nozick, who starts Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) with a bald statement about the existence and authority of individual rights, Singer premises Animal Liberation Now on the idea that the experiential states of sentient creatures matter in an objective ...

Jungle Joys

Alfred Appel Jr: Wa-Wa-Wa with the Duke, 5 September 2002

... italicised phrases recollected from the once famous courtroom speech of the doomed Irish patriot, Robert Emmet, Bloom counting off like Rex Stewart or a rocketeer: ‘One. Two. Let my epitaph be. Karaaaaaaa.’ Joyce’s political point about gaseous rhetoric and false consciousness is analogous to Stewart’s lionising of Haile Selassie.Although most ...

While Statues Sleep

Thomas Laqueur, 18 June 2020

Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil 
by Susan Neiman.
Allen Lane, 415 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 0 241 26286 3
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... the history of the Civil War right – whatever that might mean – or by tearing down statues of Robert E. Lee across the South. The 2400 miles of Route 66, America’s most famous highway, pass through only one state in the former Confederacy, Texas. Yet in 1936 the first edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book identified half of the 89 counties along the ...

Why Literary Criticism is like Virtue

Stanley Fish, 10 June 1993

... very centre of its inside; what seemed circumstantial has been redefined as constitutive.’ As Robert Scholes put it, we must ‘make the object of study the whole intertextual system of relations that connects one text to others ... the matrix or master code that the literary text both depends upon and modifies’. That is, he continues, ‘in order to ...

Peace without Empire

Perry Anderson, 2 December 2021

Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union 
by Stella Ghervas.
Harvard, 528 pp., £31.95, March, 978 0 674 97526 2
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... by the covenant of the League of Nations that Wilson winched into it. With British helpmeets – Robert Cecil, Walter Phillimore – assisting, it was this initiative that gave rise to the spirit of Geneva. Lauding the League as the first international organisation for peace in which smaller powers set the tone, Ghervas is at pains to clear it of customary ...

What We’re about to Receive

Jeremy Harding: Food Insecurity, 13 May 2010

... Futures: Rethinking UK Strategy by Susan Ambler-Edwards, Kate Bailey, Alexandra Kiff, Tim Lang, Robert Lee, Terry Marsden, David Simons and Hardin Tibbs.Chatham House, 50 pp., February 2009http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/publications/papers/view/-/id/695/Rising Food Prices: Drivers and Implications for Development by Alex Evans. Chatham House, 11 pp., April ...

Who does that for anyone?

Adam Shatz: Jean-Pierre Melville, 20 June 2019

Jean-Pierre Melville: Le Solitaire 
by Bertrand Teissier.
Fayard, 272 pp., €22, October 2017, 978 2 213 70573 6
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Jean-Pierre Melville, une vie 
by Antoine de Baecque.
Seuil, 244 pp., €32, October 2017, 978 2 02 137107 9
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... film is based. The pages of the novel reveal the credits: a device, as André Bazin noted, that Robert Bresson borrowed for his 1951 adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest. Melville’s early films were bookish, and rather talky. But in the early 1960s he began to hone back his dialogue. The first seven minutes of Le Samouraï ...

In the Hyacinth Garden

Richard Poirier: ‘But oh – Vivienne!’, 3 April 2003

Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot 
by Carole Seymour-Jones.
Constable, 702 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 1 84119 636 3
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... James, followed by Pound himself, Gertrude Stein, and just recently, that robustly American figure Robert Frost who, with his wife and children, had in 1913 taken up residence outside London, and from there, with Pound’s assistance and to considerable public acclaim, published A Boy’s Will, his first book of poems. According to Valerie Eliot, it was Pound ...

The Last Witness

Colm Tóibín: The career of James Baldwin, 20 September 2001

... interviews and going on television. In May 1963 came the much publicised and stormy meeting with Robert Kennedy, in which Baldwin and a number of activists tried to explain the extent of black alienation, and Baldwin’s appearance on the cover of Time magazine the following day. He was not part of the organised leadership of the Civil Rights Movement and ...

Forgive us our debts

Benjamin Kunkel: The History of Debt, 10 May 2012

Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order 
by Philip Coggan.
Allen Lane, 294 pp., £20, December 2011, 978 1 84614 510 0
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Debt: The First 5000 Years 
by David Graeber.
Melville House, 534 pp., £21.99, July 2011, 978 1 933633 86 2
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... dynamics, so it has fallen mainly to Marxian thinkers to search for the causes of ebbing growth. Robert Brenner has adduced overcapacity in international manufacturing as the trigger of a systemic slowdown starting in 1973. Others have pointed to ‘the rising organic composition of capital’ or – a related phenomenon – the dwindling economic importance ...

Upriver

Iain Sinclair: The Thames, 25 June 2009

Thames: Sacred River 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Vintage, 608 pp., £14.99, August 2008, 978 0 09 942255 6
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... is the journey I decide to take; the legend of Grain, from Hogarth’s drunken boat party, through Robert Hamer’s moody film The Long Memory (1952), to the climate camp protests at Kingsnorth, was history enough for me. Ackroyd provided my starting point: London Stone. This beacon, on the east bank of the Yantlet Creek, is said to mark the point at which the ...