After Nasrallah

Adam Shatz: Israel’s Forever War, 24 October 2024

... party, both started out as ‘terrorists’. Begin was behind the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed nearly a hundred civilians; Shamir planned the 1948 kidnapping and assassination of the UN representative Folke Bernadotte. Yitzhak Rabin, revered among liberal Zionists as a peacemaker, oversaw the deportation of tens of thousands of ...
... presumably, many straight readers. Perhaps a few more gay male writers – Paul Monette, David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin in the US, Alan Hollinghurst, Paul Bailey, Adam Mars-Jones in Britain – enjoy this crossover status. International comparisons, however, can be misleading, since they disguise the very different ways in which each country is ...

Discord and Fuss

Clare Bucknell: Robert Frost’s Ugly Feelings, 4 December 2025

Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry 
by Adam Plunkett.
Farrar, Straus, 500 pp., £30, March 2025, 978 0 374 28208 0
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... that would make up his second collection, North of Boston (1914); he approached a publishing firm, David Nutt, as represented by Mrs M.L. Nutt, ‘a woman dressed all in black, as if she had just risen from the sea’, who bought the first book and an option to publish the next four.Through the Imagist F.S. Flint, he secured an introduction to Pound, who did ...

Who said Gaddafi had to go?

Hugh Roberts, 17 November 2011

... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...

The South

Colm Tóibín, 4 August 1994

One Art: The Selected Letters of Elizabeth Bishop 
Chatto, 668 pp., £25, April 1994, 0 7011 6195 7Show More
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... letters, packed with insight and wonderful phrases, are quoted in Brett Millier’s biography, in David Kalstone’s Becoming a Poet and in Lorrie Goldensohn’s Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. ‘What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless ...

Germans and the German Past

J.P. Stern, 21 December 1989

The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity 
by Charles Maier.
Harvard, 227 pp., £17.95, November 1988, 0 674 92975 6
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Historikerstreit 
Piper, 397 pp., DM 17.80, July 1987, 3 492 10816 4Show More
In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past 
by Richard Evans.
Tauris, 196 pp., £12.95, October 1989, 1 85043 146 9
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Why did the heavens not darken? 
by Arno Mayer.
Verso, 510 pp., £19.95, October 1989, 0 86091 267 1
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A German Identity, 1770-1990 
by Harold James.
Weidenfeld, 240 pp., £16.95, March 1989, 9780297795049
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Die Republikaner: Phantombild der neuen Rechten 
by Claus Leggewie.
Rotbuch, 155 pp., May 1989, 3 88022 011 5
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Ich war dabei 
by Franz Schönhuber.
Langen Müller, 356 pp., April 1989, 3 7844 2249 7
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... the Israeli historian Saul Friedländer has claimed, is based on an argument advanced by David Irving.) Nolte does not explain how the president of an international organisation without a state, or government, or army – an organisation whose purpose in 1939 was to advise the British on the question of Palestine and offer relief to the persecuted ...

Tolerant Repression

Blair Worden, 10 May 1990

Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal 
by Tom Mayer.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £32.50, April 1989, 0 521 36104 4
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Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII 
by Alistair Fox.
Blackwell, 317 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 631 13566 9
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The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Portraits at the Court of Henry VIII 
by Retha Warnicke.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 521 37000 0
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English Travellers Abroad 1604-1667 
by John Stoye.
Yale, 448 pp., £12.95, January 1990, 0 300 04180 2
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... which broadly complements the illuminating recent sketches of Henrician politics by the historian David Starkey. Thomas Starkey’s proposals are rooted in the Lancastrian conciliarism of the Middle Ages, when the peerage had kept the crown in check. The nostalgic or reactionary component of the Dialogue is repeatedly evident. We see it in Starkey’s ...
... year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David Marquand, who was at Magdalen and who told me how he had been scared out of his wits one dark night in the cloisters when Bruce had swept past him in his Spanish cloak. I must have written to him and been told to come down to Magdalen, though I remember ...

Paradise Syndrome

Sukhdev Sandhu: Hanif Kureishi, 18 May 2000

Midnight All Day 
by Hanif Kureishi.
Faber, 224 pp., £9.99, November 1999, 0 571 19456 7
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... to exploit this insight. Since childhood he’s been a fan of another chameleon and shape-shifter, David Bowie, who was raised, like the author, in Bromley. Similarly, Kureishi’s next novel The Black Album was named after a bootleg LP by Prince to whom the main character, Shahid, is devoted. Prince plunders freely from various musical genres, from rock or ...

A Walk with Kierkegaard

Roger Poole, 21 February 1980

Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age– A Literary Review 
by Søren Kierkegaard, edited and translated by Howard Hong and Edna Hong.
Princeton, 187 pp., £7.70, August 1978, 0 691 07226 4
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Kierkegaard: Letters and Documents 
translated by Henrik Rosenmeier.
Princeton, 518 pp., £13.60, November 1978, 0 691 07228 0
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... had already retired from the ministry when he began the vast task of translating Kierkegaard, and David Swenson died in the middle of translating the great Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which was, however, completed by Lowrie, and first appeared in 1941. But in 1941, there were other, more pressing things to think about, and it was not until Sartre and ...

The Matljary Diary

J.P. Stern, 7 August 1980

... valley with my field glasses. One of our chaps, a carpenter, made two crosses and three stars of David from the sweet-smelling wood of the mountain pine. No names. The CO spoke at some length, first on the ‘no difference of race or creed’ line, then on ‘death to the Fascists’, the word ‘German’ was never mentioned. Every inch the professional ...

Subversions

R.W. Johnson, 4 June 1987

Traitors: The Labyrinths of Treason 
by Chapman Pincher.
Sidgwick, 346 pp., £13.95, May 1987, 0 283 99379 0
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The Secrets of the Service: British Intelligence and Communist Subversion 1939-51 
by Anthony Glees.
Cape, 447 pp., £18, May 1987, 0 224 02252 0
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Freedom of Information – Freedom of the Individual? 
by Clive Ponting, John Ranelagh, Michael Zander and Simon Lee, edited by Julia Neuberger.
Macmillan, 110 pp., £4.95, May 1987, 0 333 44771 9
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... the Pinochet coup. Was there any contact between the Thatcher entourage and such groups as Colonel David Stirling’s GB 75? Did Mrs Thatcher know that Airey Neave had been involved in discussions about raising a ‘resistance army’ if Labour were returned in 1979? 3. Airey Neave was later killed by a car bomb outside the House of Commons. It has always been ...

God’s Own

Angus Calder, 12 March 1992

Empire and English Character 
by Kathryn Tidrick.
Tauris, 338 pp., £24.95, August 1990, 1 85043 191 4
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Into Africa: The story of the East African Safari 
by Kenneth Cameron.
Constable, 229 pp., £14.95, June 1990, 0 09 469770 1
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Burton: Snow upon the Desert 
by Frank McLynn.
Murray, 428 pp., £19.95, September 1990, 0 7195 4818 7
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From the Sierras to the Pampas: Richard Burton’s Travels in the Americas, 1860-69 
by Frank McLynn.
Barrie and Jenkins, 258 pp., £16.99, July 1991, 0 7126 3789 3
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The Duke of Puddle Dock: Travels in the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles 
by Nigel Barley.
Viking, 276 pp., £16.99, March 1992, 0 670 83642 7
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... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...

Good New Idea

John Lanchester: Universal Basic Income, 18 July 2019

... for a great range of thinkers, including Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a moment.Guy Standing is a long-standing member of BIEN, the Basic Income Earth ...

The Habit of War

Jeremy Harding: Eritrea, 20 July 2006

I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation 
by Michela Wrong.
Harper Perennial, 432 pp., £8.99, January 2005, 0 00 715095 4
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Unfinished Business: Ethiopia and Eritrea at War 
edited by Dominique Jacquin-Berdal and Martin Plaut.
Red Sea, 320 pp., $29.95, April 2005, 1 56902 217 8
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Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa 
edited by Robert Rotberg.
Brookings, 210 pp., £11.99, December 2005, 0 8157 7571 7
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... parties remains activated in the present stand-off. Economic tensions, carefully explained by David Styan in Unfinished Business, have continued to simmer, while old ideological grievances between the Tigrayan and Eritrean movements, exacerbated by the TPLF’s constitution for a post-Cold War Ethiopia, have given way to something like hatred. One of the ...