Do, Not, Love, Make, Beds

David Wheatley: Irish literary magazines, 3 June 2004

Irish Literary Magazines: An Outline History and Descriptive Bibliography 
Irish Academic, 318 pp., £35, January 2003, 0 7165 2751 0Show More
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... the Artist’ in 1904, it outspokenly attacked the Church and the Revival, as well as publishing George Moore, an important figure in the Revival. Joyce eventually sneaked in with a wispy ‘Song’ in August 1904, though he still included the editor of Dana, John Eglinton (W.K. Magee), in the rogues’ gallery of his ...
What is Love? Richard Carlile’s Philosophy of Sex 
edited by M.L. Bush.
Verso, 214 pp., £19, September 1998, 1 85984 851 6
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... but over the whole of the British Isles’ – just what was lost as a result? Logic suggests that we will find ourselves back in congenial company once we are divagating mentally in the early years of the 19th century, or the last years of the 18th. This is above all an attractive prospect in relation to sex. What ...

Terrorists? Us?

Owen Bennett-Jones, 7 June 2012

Terror Tagging of an Iranian Dissident Organisation 
by Raymond Tanter.
Iran Policy Committee, 217 pp., £10, December 2011, 978 0 9797051 2 0
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... of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s links with al-Qaida. Then, as George Bush took the US to war, all that remained for the INC and its leaders was to sit back and prepare for government. Many in Washington believe that, for better or worse, the US will go to war with Iran and that the MEK will have a role to play. But ...

Where has all the money gone?

Ed Harriman: On the Take in Iraq, 7 July 2005

US House of Representatives Government Reform Committee Minority Office 
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US General Accountability Office 
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Defense Contract Audit Agency 
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International Advisory and Monitoring Board 
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Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General 
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Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction 
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... Waxman voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq. But since the war he’s been demanding that the Bush administration account for its cost. Within six months of the invasion, Waxman’s committee had evidence that the Texas-based Halliburton corporation was being grossly overpaid by the American occupation authorities for the petrol it was importing into Iraq ...

Uncaging the beast

Sheldon Rothblatt, 16 February 1989

Victorian Anthropology 
by George Stocking.
Collier Macmillan, 429 pp., £22, October 1987, 0 02 931550 6
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... examine their leading concepts (‘culture’, ‘evolution’) or place them in perspective than George Stocking of the University of Chicago. His brilliant essays and intellectual leadership have virtually built an academic specialty. And Victorian Anthropology is unquestionably his masterpiece, a work of precision, subtlety and historical irony. Two ...

Brown and Friends

David Runciman, 3 January 2008

... David Cameron and William Hague all went to Oxford and read PPE. The exceptions to this rule are George Osborne (Oxford, history), Boris Johnson (Oxford, classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like Andy Burnham, Chris Grayling, Nick Herbert and Nick Clegg, who went to Cambridge. (Chris Huhne, incidentally, also read PPE at Oxford, but he is now ...

Diary

Patrick Cockburn: The End of Iraq, 6 April 2006

... and 60 bullets and if they come for me I am going to open fire.’ It is strange to hear George Bush and John Reid deny that a civil war is going on, given that so many bodies – all strangled, shot or hanged solely because of their religious allegiance – are being discovered every day. Car bombs exploded in the markets in the great Shia slum ...

Sinnermen

Niela Orr, 26 June 2025

... in Chicago – and have come back to Clarksdale to escape the racism in the north for the ‘devil we know’. They decide to open a juke joint, and buy a derelict mill from the town’s closeted KKK leader, Hogwood (David Maldonado). The twins enlist their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a sharecropper and precociously talented preacher’s boy who sings and ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: The art of protest, 8 February 2007

... banners, slogans, posters, cards, photographs of deformed babies, cartoons of Blair, Brown and Bush, the parliamentary voting records of MPs, grubby teddy bears and toys (as well as the plastic sheets and cans that constituted Haw’s accommodation). They acted under Section 132 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act: a rather heavy legal vehicle ...

The Garden, the Park and the Meadow

David Runciman: After the Nation State, 6 June 2002

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History 
by Philip Bobbitt.
Allen Lane, 960 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 7139 9616 1
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Reordering the World: The Long-Term Implications of 11 September 
edited by Mark Leonard.
Foreign Policy Centre, 124 pp., £9.95, March 2002, 1 903558 10 7
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... The whole continent is written off as a place where good things can happen – a place where, in George W. Bush’s memorable phrase, ‘wings take dream’. It is left to rot. Welcome to the world of post-modern politics. This scenario (or something like it) is laid out by Philip Bobbitt in the course of describing three ...

Guests in the President’s House

Steven Shapin: Science Inc., 18 October 2001

Science, Money and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion 
by Daniel Greenberg.
Chicago, 530 pp., £22.50, October 2001, 0 226 30634 8
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... a big vote-winner with the folks back home in Kansas. That is one reason why, as long ago as 1962, W.H. Auden said: ‘When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.’ By these and other measures, the American love affair with science has become even more ardent over ...

Infinite Wibble

Ian Penman: Brian v. Eno, 25 September 2025

What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory 
by Brian Eno and Bette A.
Faber, 122 pp., £14.99, January, 978 0 571 39551 4
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A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary 1995 
by Brian Eno.
Faber, 441 pp., £16.99, March 2023, 978 0 571 37462 5
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... impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost ...

Washed White

Michael Rogin, 10 June 1993

The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America 
by Sacvan Bercovitch.
Routledge, 424 pp., £40, November 1992, 9780415900140
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Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America 
by Garry Wills.
Simon and Schuster, 315 pp., £17.99, April 1993, 0 671 76956 1
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... to Martin Luther King – a place to stand against recent orthodoxies from Kennedy to Reagan and Bush. Impatient with easy liberal scapegoating of religious faith, Wills rescues a politics of religious commitment from the clutches of right-to-life fanaticism and a sacralised US mission. For Bercovitch, however, religion is the original sin. The Puritan shift ...

Riding the Night Winds

Ron Ridenhour, 22 June 1995

Derailed in Uncle Ho’s Victory Garden: Return to Vietnam and Cambodia 
by Tim Page.
Touchstone, 248 pp., £14.99, April 1995, 0 671 71926 2
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In the Lake of the Woods 
by Tim O’Brien.
Flamingo, 306 pp., £5.99, April 1995, 0 00 654395 2
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In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam 
by Robert McNamara.
Random House, 432 pp., $27.50, April 1995, 0 8129 2523 8
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... The refuse is the unexploded US ordnance which litters the countryside. Through Page’s eyes we see the beauty of Vietnam as well as the horror and the excitement of the war that held so many bao chi – the Vietnamese for ‘reporter’ – with an often blinding fascination. ‘The war days had been the ultimate in experience.’ Page dreamily ...

Enemies of All Mankind

Stephen Sedley: Pirates, 24 June 2010

The Treatment of Prisoners under International Law 
by Nigel Rodley, with Matt Pollard.
Oxford, 697 pp., £85, August 2009, 978 0 19 921507 2
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The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations 
by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Zone, 295 pp., £21.95, November 2009, 978 1 890951 94 8
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The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates 
by Peter Leeson.
Princeton, 271 pp., £16.95, May 2009, 978 0 691 13747 6
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... they are entitled not to be summarily executed or tortured or held indefinitely without trial. The Bush administration after 9/11 set out to change all that. With the designation of unlawful combatant it created a self-sustaining doctrine that there are individuals who, having attacked the US or opposed it by force, have forfeited all rights both as combatants ...