Hey man, we’re out of runway

Christian Lorentzen: Bad Times for Biden, 18 July 2024

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future 
byFranklin Foer.
Penguin, 432 pp., £24, September 2023, 978 1 101 98114 6
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The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House 
byChris Whipple.
Scribner, 409 pp., £12.99, December 2023, 978 1 9821 0644 7
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The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump 
byAlexander Ward.
Portfolio, 354 pp., £28.99, February, 978 0 593 53907 1
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... that someday we’ll all die. In retrospect Biden’s advanced age was a political asset in 2020. By contrast with the sneering and erratic Trump, given to mocking the disabled and insulting anyone unlucky enough to be in his vicinity, here was a kindly and familiar old man who had suffered terrible personal tragedies: the ...

Nation-building

Rosamond McKitterick: Capetian Kings, 24 October 2024

House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France 
byJustine Firnhaber-Baker.
Allen Lane, 408 pp., £30, March, 978 0 241 55277 3
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... of fifteen Capetian kings began in 987 when Hugh Capet was elected to the kingship of the Franks by his fellow magnates at Senlis, replacing the Carolingian dynasty that had ruled the kingdom of the Franks since Charlemagne’s father, Pippin III, deposed the last Merovingian king in 751. The lands the Capetian kings controlled would eventually expand far ...

Raised on Spam

Owen Hatherley: British Communist Art, 9 July 2026

Comrades in Art: Artists against Fascism 1933-43 
byAndy Friend.
Thames & Hudson, 360 pp., £40, September 2025, 978 0 500 02741 7
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... Library in Clerkenwell. The library is a 1960s reconstruction of an 18th-century school, which by the early 20th century housed, among other things, the printing house of Iskra, the newspaper of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. ‘Lenin’s office’ still exists in a back room, though it is as fake as the library’s neo-Georgian façade. The ...

The Lives of Ronald Pinn

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 January 2015

... I’d noticed how many of the people buried there had died young – you can often pick them out by the soft toys resting against the gravestones. Last winter I came back to the same place. It was even colder this time, and the pathways were glittering as I made my way down to the church. I hadn’t taken in before that Charlie Richardson, leader of the ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Notes on 1997, 1 January 1998

... Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn the air miles – enough presumably to last him till the end of his days. Such lacing of extravagance with prudence has since become so common that Christie’s have now suspended credit card payments altogether.6 ...

Last Exit

Murray Sayle, 27 November 1997

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong 
byJonathan Dimbleby.
Little, Brown, 461 pp., £22.50, July 1997, 0 316 64018 2
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In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major 
byPercy Cradock.
Murray, 228 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 7195 5464 0
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Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule: The Economic and Political Implications of Reversion 
edited byWarren Cohen and Li Zhao.
Cambridge, 255 pp., £45, August 1997, 0 521 62158 5
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The Hong Kong Advantage 
byMichael Enright, Edith Scott and David Dodwell.
Oxford, 369 pp., £20, July 1997, 0 19 590322 6
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... authority, or rule. OED Without conflicting mental reservations, international agreements would be impossible. French diplomatic maxim Christopher Francis Patten, Hong Kong’s last governor, famously wept just before he left aboard the royal yacht Britannia at midnight on 30 June, while sirens whooped and rockets soared over Asia’s most stunning ...

My Darlings

Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007

... the greater the stray memories and associations you build up. Sometimes this sense of the city can be greatly added to by history and by books; sometimes, however, the past – I mean the distant past – and the books hardly matter, seem a strange irrelevance. On a busy day it is easy to ...

In the Streets of Londonistan

John Upton: Terror, Muslims and the Met, 22 January 2004

... hand on which is written a speech, and in his right a megaphone to berate his audience of passers-by and journalists on the other side of the road. ‘This is a sovereign nation. These people are committing treason. Why are they not being arrested?’ The megaphone squeals with feedback. A man is talking about them on his mobile phone; he laughs openly. The ...

No Ordinary Law

Stephen Sedley: Constitution-Makers, 5 June 2008

... Streets of the World’s Metropolis, London, Londres, London?’ The foreign gentleman begged to be pardoned, but did not altogether understand . . . ‘It merely referred,’ Mr Podsnap explained, with a sense of meritorious proprietorship, ‘to Our Constitution, Sir. We Englishmen are Very Proud of our Constitution, Sir. It Was Bestowed Upon Us ...

They’re just not ready

Neal Ascherson: Gorbachev Betrayed, 7 January 2010

Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment 
byStephen Kotkin, with Jan Gross.
Modern Library, 240 pp., $24, October 2009, 978 0 679 64276 3
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Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire 
byVictor Sebestyen.
Weidenfeld, 451 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 0 297 85223 0
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There Is No Freedom without Bread: 1989 and the Civil War that Brought Down Communism 
byConstantine Pleshakov.
Farrar, Straus, 289 pp., $26, November 2009, 978 0 374 28902 7
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1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe 
byMary Elise Sarotte.
Princeton, 321 pp., £20.95, November 2009, 978 0 691 14306 4
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... than the tenth. In 1999, Berlin was in the middle of a hangover. The European Union was plagued by doubts about its future course; the bloodbath in the former Yugoslavia had unnerved optimists; the Russian economy had collapsed; the sullen misery and unemployment in what had been East Germany seemed to mock the hopes of real unification. This November was ...

Other People’s Mail

Bernard Porter: MI5, 19 November 2009

The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 
byChristopher Andrew.
Allen Lane, 1032 pp., £30, October 2009, 978 0 7139 9885 6
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... It seems to be widely acknowledged today that states need secret intelligence services. It is generally accepted, so long as those states are thought to be legitimate, trustworthy, and to represent a public as well as a more partisan interest. But it wasn’t always the case. For most of the 19th century, espionage was thought to be a low and foreign practice that the British – or at any rate the English – should not stoop to in any circumstances ...

Terms of Art

Conor Gearty: Human Rights Law, 11 March 2010

The Law of Human Rights 
byRichard Clayton and Hugh Tomlinson.
Oxford, 2443 pp., £295, March 2009, 978 0 19 926357 8
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Human Rights Law and Practice 
edited byAnthony Lester, David Pannick and Javan Herberg.
Lexis Nexis, 974 pp., £237, April 2009, 978 1 4057 3686 2
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Human Rights: Judicial Protection in the United Kingdom 
byJack Beatson, Stephen Grosz, Tom Hickman, Rabinder Singh and Stephanie Palmer.
Sweet and Maxwell, 905 pp., £124, September 2008, 978 0 421 90250 3
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... is the duty of a coroner, who is appointed under that statute (the 1988 act has been replaced by the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, but for these purposes the law remains the same). When there is reasonable cause to suspect that a person has died a violent or unnatural death, or when someone has died suddenly of an unknown cause, or died in prison or in ...

Downhill from Here

Ian Jack: The 1970s, 27 August 2009

When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies 
byAndy Beckett.
Faber, 576 pp., £20, May 2009, 978 0 571 22136 3
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... of wine gums. Growing up in Britain in the 1950s I never heard the past, however recent, specified by decade. There was ‘the war’ and ‘before the war’, and sometimes, when my parents were burrowing into their childhoods, ‘before the first war’. The 20th century lay stacked in broad layers of time: dark moorland where glistened an occasional white ...

Living with Monsters

Ferdinand Mount: PMs v. the Media, 22 April 2010

Where Power Lies: Prime Ministers v. the Media 
byLance Price.
Simon & Schuster, 498 pp., £20, February 2010, 978 1 84737 253 6
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... One of the odder political books I have read is The Abuse of Power, by James Margach, the veteran lobby correspondent of the Sunday Times. Published in 1978, the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan’. For 40 years and more, Margach had enjoyed the confidence of prime ministers ...

A City of Sand and Puddles

Julian Barnes: Paris, 22 April 2010

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris 
byGraham Robb.
Picador, 476 pp., £18.99, April 2010, 978 0 330 45244 1
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The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps 
byEric Hazan, translated byDavid Fernbach.
Verso, 384 pp., £20, February 2010, 978 1 84467 411 4
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... I would tackle the distinguished art critic John Russell’s Paris (1960), ‘with photographs by Brassaï’, but never got past the pictures. I had slightly less confidence about Maxime Du Camp’s six-volume Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (1869-76), bought partly for its Flaubertian connections, or ...