George Ball on the Middle East

George Ball, 4 April 1991

... Iraq might he intending to continue its predatory sweep to the Saudi oil fields. Since the Saudis by themselves would not be able to stop them, the King reluctantly decided to invite American help. That help was provided, but initially with only a limited objective: to protect Saudi Arabia and avoid what could become a ...

Bravo, old sport

Christopher Hitchens, 4 April 1991

Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Post-War America 
byNeil Jumonville.
California, 291 pp., £24.95, January 1991, 0 520 06858 0
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... and morally true.) Anyway, last November the paper ran a ‘Correction’ which is unlikely to be bested: An article on Saturday about Israeli efforts to control violence after the killing of Rabbi Meir Kahane included an erroneous identification, supplied by Israeli officials, for a man detained as a suspect in the ...

Creole Zones

Benedict Anderson, 7 November 1991

The First Americans: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 
byD.A. Brading.
Cambridge, 761 pp., £55, March 1991, 9780521391306
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... the most racially-divided societies anywhere. Within a huge mulatto and black under-class, racked by permanent unemployment, drugs and Aids, homicide is the leading cause of death among young males. American economic hegemony, taken for granted a generation ago, is being eroded by the successes of Japan and the EEC. In the ...

Changing Places

Avi Shlaim, 9 January 1992

... of the 19th century, the Jewish-Arab battle for the possession of Palestine has been accompanied by a battle of persuasion to win the hearts and minds of the world. Although in essence the struggle was between two people for one land, the Zionists won a good deal of international sympathy by portraying Palestine as ‘a ...

He knew he was right

John Lloyd, 10 March 1994

Scargill: The Unauthorised Biography 
byPaul Routledge.
HarperCollins, 296 pp., £16.99, September 1993, 0 300 05365 7
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... about one man’ (as the Queen said to Routledge when visiting the Times) is nonetheless to be surprised, both by the apostasy of a man whose views I had assumed to be rigid, and by its tardiness. Scargill was the only child of an adoring ...

Oedipus was innocent

Malcolm Bull, 10 March 1994

Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith 
byNorman Cohn.
Yale, 271 pp., £20, October 1993, 0 300 05598 6
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... argument. Social order, he suggests, is founded on difference, but difference is then replaced by the rivalry that is initiated when people imitate one another’s desires. Individuals begin to see one another solely as obstacles to desire, and resort to a mimetic violence in which all differences disappear. The mimetic crisis is resolved ...

Mirror Images

Christopher Andrew, 3 April 1986

World of Secrets: The Uses and Limits of Intelligence 
byWalter Laqueur.
Weidenfeld, 404 pp., £25, November 1985, 0 297 78745 4
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... as well as with other senior Intelligence official and their main customers. Such goings-on would be unthinkable, or at the very least unavowable, in Britain. At the height of the Westland saga the Prime Minister’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, found time to denounce publicly those journalists who had dared to print the name of the head of ...

Madness and Method

Mark Philp, 3 April 1986

The Anatomy of Madness: Essays in the History of Psychiatry Vol. I: People and Ideas, Vol. II: Institutions and Society 
edited byW.F. Bynum, Roy Porter and Michael Shepherd.
Tavistock, 316 pp., £19.95, November 1985, 0 422 79430 9
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Madness, Morality and Medicine: A Study of the York Retreat 1796-1914 
byAnne Digby.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £27.50, October 1985, 0 521 26067 1
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... dramatic removal of the chains of lunatics at Bicêtre, and the establishment of the York Retreat by William Tuke, inaugurate the psychiatric enlightenment. The development of the asylum bears witness to the increasing ability to distinguish between the mad and the poor, idle and criminal classes, and to attempts by various ...

Gielgud’s Achievements

Alan Bennett, 20 December 1979

An Actor and his Time 
byJohn Gielgud.
Sidgwick, 253 pp., £8.95
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... of diminishing, nor his enterprise. He has come a long way. As a juvenile his ‘ambition was to be frightfully smart and West End, wear beautifully-cut suits lounging on sofas in French-window comedies’. Fifty years later ‘I was asked to put suppositories up my bottom under the bedclothes and play a scene in the lavatory which I confess I found somewhat ...

Indira’s India

Alok Rai, 20 December 1984

... before, in fact, her death had been announced over All India Radio – dark rumours began to be heard. All over North India, the mobs appeared, emanations from the barely suppressed sub-world of the Indian polity. The ensuing violence, a country-wide riot of communal murder, was a throwback to a tribal past in which only the males of the offending ...

Light on a rich country

Rosalind Mitchison, 17 June 1982

The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction 
byE.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield.
Edward Arnold, 779 pp., £45, October 1981, 0 7131 6264 3
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... what it says: it is about England, not England and Wales. The exclusion of the Celtic fringe can be explained by the very real difficulties which arise for some forms of historical reconstruction from the narrow range of Welsh surnames and the weakness of the Established Church in Wales. The work is based on the extraction ...

Constancy

Blair Worden, 10 January 1983

Neostoicism and the Early Modern State 
byGerhard Oestreich, edited byBrigitta Oestreich and H.G. Koenigsberger, translated byDavid McLintock.
Cambridge, 280 pp., £25, August 1982, 0 521 24202 9
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... of Classical Antiquity to the thought and values of Renaissance Europe. The term is given by historians to the cult of Stoic ethics – especially of Senecan ethics – at the courts and universities of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Against the grim background of protracted civil war in the Netherlands, in France and in Germany, Neostoicism ...

It can happen here

Alan Milward, 2 May 1985

Hitler and the Final Solution 
byGerald Fleming.
Hamish Hamilton, 219 pp., £12.95, January 1985, 0 241 11388 1
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Hitler in History 
byEberhard Jäckel.
University Press of New England, 115 pp., $9.95, January 1985, 0 87451 311 1
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Albert Speer: The End of a Myth 
byMatthias Schmidt, translated byJoachim Neugroschel.
Harrap, 276 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 245 54244 2
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... and foremost a problem in German history, and in the German Federal Republic the issues raised by Dawidowicz have stimulated an altogether higher level of debate and a controversy of profounder significance for all societies. This debate seeks to explain the genesis and execution of the massacres. Its protagonists fall roughly into two groups. On the one ...

The Wrong Blond

Alan Bennett, 23 May 1985

Auden in Love 
byDorothy Farnan.
Faber, 264 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 571 13399 1
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... you came here to look for – the ideal companion to whom you can reveal yourself totally and yet be loved for what you are, not what you pretend to be. You, Wystan, will find him very soon, within three months. You, Christopher, will have to wait much longer for yours ... At present he is only four years old.If looking for ...

Photo-Finish

John Hedley Brooke, 23 May 1985

Just Before the Origin: Alfred Russel Wallace’s Theory of Evolution 
byJohn Langdon Brooks.
Columbia, 284 pp., $39, January 1984, 0 231 05676 1
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China and Charles Darwin 
byJames Reeve Pusey.
Harvard, 544 pp., £21.25, February 1984, 0 674 11735 2
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... The phenomenon of simultaneous discovery is an old chestnut, roasted in turn by historians, sociologists and philosophers of science. No matter how frequently the phenomenon occurs, wrote Pierre Duhem, the historian can never suppress his astonishment. But the sociologist could and did. Robert Merton argued that independent simultaneous discoveries should be pereceived as the rule, not the exception ...