At the Venice Biennale

Alice Spawls: All the World’s Futures, 18 June 2015

... in 1907, followed by Hungary, Britain and Bavaria (now the German pavilion) in 1909, and the French and Swedish pavilions in 1912 (the latter was given to the Netherlands when the Swedes failed to pay). After the First World War came Spain, Czechoslovakia, the US, Greece and Austria and the site was expanded across the canal to incorporate the gardens of ...

Café No Problem

Victor Mallet, 28 May 1992

The Tragedy of Cambodian History: Politics, War and Revolution since 1945 
by David Chandler.
Yale, 396 pp., £25, February 1992, 0 300 04919 6
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... that Cambodia will follow a system of liberal democracy on the basis of pluralism.’ To read David Chandler’s painstakingly researched history of Cambodia and its turbulent politics since 1945, and to visit present-day Cambodia, is to understand the enormity of the task facing the United Nations as it attempts to bring peace to the country and to ...

1966 and all that

Michael Stewart, 20 December 1984

The Castle Diaries. Vol. II: 1964-70 
by Barbara Castle.
Weidenfeld, 848 pp., £20, October 1984, 0 297 78374 2
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... times have changed, incidentally: Hattersley bobs up all over the place in these pages, and David Steel gets a couple of footnotes, but Margaret Thatcher, Neil Kinnock, David Owen and Arthur Scargill make no appearance.) Mrs Castle was generally rated a highly effective departmental minister, and from these diaries ...

Soldier’s Soldier

Brian Bond, 4 March 1982

Auchinleck: The Lonely Soldier 
by Philip Warner.
Buchan and Enright, 288 pp., £10.50, November 1981, 9780907675006
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Das Reich: Resistance and the March of the 2nd SS Panzer Division through France, June 1944 
by Max Hastings.
Joseph, 264 pp., £9.95, November 1981, 0 7181 2074 4
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... report did not endear him to the War Cabinet. He compared the British troops unfavourably with the French, and used words like ‘callow’ and ‘effeminate’ to describe their poor performance. A minor incident which may have had far-reaching consequences was Auchinleck’s sacking of the CO of the 1st Scots Guards, Lt-Col Trappes-Lomax, for abandoning a ...

What’s in the bottle?

Donald MacKenzie: The Science Wars Revisited, 9 May 2002

The One Culture? A Conversation about Science 
edited by Jay Labinger and Harry Collins.
Chicago, 329 pp., £41, August 2001, 0 226 46722 8
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... do not come from sociologists of science, post-structuralist literary critics, feminist theorists, French philosophers or any of the other varied targets of ‘science wars’ criticism. They actually come from scientists: Erwin Chargaff, Jacob Bronowski, Gunther Stent, Brian Petley, and the trio of Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin. In a modest ...

No Looking Away

Tom Stammers: Solo Goya, 16 December 2021

Goya: A Portrait of the Artist 
by Janis Tomlinson.
Princeton, 388 pp., £28, October 2020, 978 0 691 19204 8
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... and the invention of painting in antiquity (a motif Goya may have derived from the Scottish artist David Allan, one of whose paintings was on board the frigate The Westmoreland when it was captured by French warships in 1779, its contents dispersed in Spain).In 1786, Carlos III appointed Goya a court painter. The ...

Unhappy Man

P.N. Furbank, 22 July 1993

The Lives of Michel Foucault 
by David Macey.
Hutchinson, 599 pp., £20, June 1993, 0 09 175344 9
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The Passion of Michel Foucault 
by James Miller.
HarperCollins, 491 pp., £18, June 1993, 0 00 255267 1
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... desperately unhappy. (But then, what a mass of confusion springs from the simple fact that, in French, the same word denotes both ‘madman’ and ‘fool’.) For happiness (only possible if you posit a ‘true self’) the substitute in Foucault’s system is pleasure. He liked to play with the idea that pleasure – for instance, the pleasures of hard ...

Clashes and Collaborations

Linda Colley, 18 July 1996

Empire: The British Imperial Experience, from 1765 to the Present 
by Denis Judd.
HarperCollins, 517 pp., £25, March 1996, 9780002552370
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Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire 
edited by P.J. Marshall.
Cambridge, 400 pp., £24.95, March 1996, 0 521 43211 1
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Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500-c.1800 
by Anthony Pagden.
Yale, 244 pp., £19.95, August 1995, 0 300 06415 2
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... English, Welsh and Germans) might never have won had they not secured aid and auxiliaries from the French, Spanish and Dutch empires. Conversely, British troops (who were also a medley of Scots, Irish, English, Welsh and Germans) fought alongside large numbers of indigenous Indians and Southern blacks who viewed the local white settlers and slave-owners as ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2012, 3 January 2013

... Wales and France. The train is very crowded and he sits in Weekend First next to a middle-aged French couple who he assumes to be fans, but with nothing in their behaviour that gives any clue. However, just before the train arrives at Cardiff the very proper bourgeois lady takes out her compact and with her lipstick carefully draws the ...

Operation Product

Vincent Bevins: Revolution in Indonesia, 20 February 2025

Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World 
by David Van Reybrouck, translated by David Colmer and David McKay.
Bodley Head, 639 pp., £30, February 2024, 978 1 84792 704 0
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... banned groups advocating for an Islamic caliphate in the country.In his new book, Revolusi, David Van Reybrouck puts the creation of the republic at the centre of the story. Indonesia was the first country to declare independence in the wake of the Second World War, shortly after the surrender of Japan, which had occupied what was then known as the ...

Criollismo

Benedict Anderson, 21 January 1988

Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 
edited by Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden.
Princeton, 290 pp., £22, September 1987, 0 691 05372 3
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... we watch the crioulo Portuguese in Brazil, the criollo Spanish in ‘Latin America’, the créole French in Quebec, and the creole ‘English’ in Ireland, Barbados and the Thirteen Colonies, attempting to work out ‘who’ and just how ‘new/old’ they were during centuries unhaunted by the spectre of nationalism. What were the conditions for ...

Chef de Codage

Brian Rotman: Codes, 15 July 1999

Between Silk and Cyanide: The Story of SOE’s Code War 
by Leo Marks.
HarperCollins, 614 pp., £19.99, November 1998, 0 00 255944 7
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... units – one for each occupied country except France, which had two, one for de Gaulle’s Free French and another for those loyal to Giraud – each recruiting and running its own partisans, SOE was an intelligence professional’s bad dream. June 1942: enter young Leo Marks. Having failed to convince the cryptographic services that he was suitable for the ...

At the Barbican

Liz Jobey: Strange and Familiar , 2 June 2016

... purposes of this exhibition, is cast as a royal reporter. In 1937, his first year working for the French communist daily Ce Soir, he covered the coronation of George VI, turning his back on the royals to capture the event through the reactions of the crowd. He was back for Ascot in 1953, for Churchill’s funeral in 1965, for Princess Anne’s wedding in ...

Your mission is to get the gun

Theo Tait: Raoul Moat, 31 March 2016

You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] 
by Andrew Hankinson.
Scribe, 204 pp., £12.99, February 2016, 978 1 922247 91 9
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... his former partner, Samantha Stobbart, her new boyfriend, Chris Brown, and a traffic policeman, David Rathband, setting in motion a massive manhunt. You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] is written in the Capote tradition, and Hankinson mentions Gordon Burn in his acknowledgments. The basic strategy of the genre, as Tom Wolfe ...

The End

Angela Carter, 18 September 1986

A Land Apart: A South African Reader 
edited by André Brink and J.M. Coetzee.
Faber, 252 pp., £9.95, August 1986, 0 571 13933 7
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Where Sixpence lives 
by Norma Kitson.
Chatto, 352 pp., £9.95, September 1986, 0 7011 3085 7
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... cent.The John Matthews of the poem ends up with a sentence of 15 years. Norma Kitson’s husband, David Kitson, was sentenced to 20 years for work connected with the early days of the ANC. Like Dulcie, she was a hundred per cent behind him and remained so. Her spirit is unquenchable, even if she is something like the little boy in ‘The Emperor’s New ...