London Review of Books

Radical Aliens

David Cole: The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair, 22 October 2009

The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial
by Moshik Temkin.
Yale, 316 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 0 300 12484 2Show More

“... reviewed the deportation orders resulting from the raids and reversed most of them; and Judge George Anderson, who declared the raids illegal in 1920, writing in his decision that ‘a mob is a mob, whether made up of government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals, loafers and the vicious classes.’ In ...”

Why Bull was killed

Victor Mallet, 15 August 1991

Arms and the Man: Dr Gerlad Bull, Iraq and the Supergun
by William Lowther.
Macmillan, 298 pp., £15.99, July 1991, 0 333 56069 8Show More

“... Iran-Iraq war in 1988 and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 The ninth child of George L. Toussaint Bull (‘a bibulous solicitor’), Gerald was three years old when his mother died. At school he built model aeroplanes and felt lonely. He was to become a temperamental mathematical and scientific genius and a sentimental lover of poetry, a ...”

Taxphobia

Edward Luttwak, 19 November 1992

The Culture of Contentment
by J.K. Galbraith.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 195 pp., £14.95, April 1992, 1 85619 147 8Show More

“... reflect very justifiable future fears), the American electorate rejected the zero-change candidate Bush only to vote for the minimum-change candidate Clinton. True, the radical-change candidate Perot was simply too bizarre to be widely acceptable. But during the earlier Democratic primaries the American public did have serious alternatives, who variously ...”

Cuba or the Base?

Piero Gleijeses: Guantánamo, 26 March 2009

Guantanamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution
by Jana Lipman.
California, 325 pp., £17.95, December 2008, 978 0 520 25540 1Show More

“... the intervention: it was ‘the most honourable single war in all history’, in the words of George Hoar, Republican senator from Massachusetts, ‘a war in which there does not enter the slightest thought or desire of foreign conquest, or of national gain, or advantage’. European diplomats and journalists were less impressed. ‘These high-minded ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... Scotland has long been a nation. We shall soon find out whether its citizens now wish that nation to become a state. I hope they do. It will not only open up new opportunities for their own country but will break up the atrophied, decaying British state and reduce its efficacy as a US vassal. Hence the appeals from Obama and Hillary Clinton to vote ‘No’, a sentiment Blair fully shares but dare not admit to, fearing that his intervention might tip the balance in the opposite direction ...”

Wanting to Be Something Else

Adam Shatz: Orhan Pamuk, 7 January 2010

The Museum of Innocence
by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely.
Faber, 720 pp., £18.99, December 2009, 978 0 571 23700 5Show More

“... in a mirror together and the Italian realises: ‘The two of us were one person!’ By the end, we’re not sure the sailor ever existed, or whether he is an invention of the Turkish savant, who claims in the final chapter to have written the story. The dialectic of East and West appears as a constantly shifting dreamscape inhabited, and endlessly ...”

Who removed Aristide?

Paul Farmer, 15 April 2004

“... there was plenty they could do to undermine him. The most effective method, adopted by the first Bush administration, was to fund both the opposition – their poor showing at the polls was no reason, it appears, to cut off aid to them – and the military. Declassified records now make it clear that the CIA and other US groups helped to create and fund a ...”

Overtaken by Events

Avi Shlaim, 30 November 1995

Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land
by Meron Benvenisti.
California, 260 pp., £20, September 1995, 0 520 08567 1Show More

“... disputes and escape the intercommunal conceptual conundrum.’ The peace process initiated by George Bush and James Baker in the aftermath of the Gulf War was different, in Benvenisti’s view, from previous American initiatives in that this time it was the Americans who badly needed progress. Shamir, however, failed to discern the fundamental ...”

Doctor Feelgood

R.W. Johnson, 3 March 1988

Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home
by Garry Wills.
Heinemann, 488 pp., £14.95, February 1988, 0 434 86623 7Show More

“... backers were so righteously indignant about all their tax money going to all those layabouts. But we haven’t answered the question: would you believe it? Well no, actually – the real figure was 5.1 per cent. Unfazed, Ronnie’s backers simply redoubled their efforts and their campaign contributions. The expert handler put in to manage him discovered that ...”

Longing for Mao

Hugo Young: Edward Heath, 26 November 1998

The Curse of My Life: My Autobiography
by Edward Heath.
Hodder, 767 pp., £25, October 1998, 0 340 70852 2Show More

“... are visible in his text. Distance lends proportion and thoroughness at least to parts of the view. We learn quite a lot about how the working-class boy from Broadstairs eased with remarkable speed into an Establishment that was much more rigorously stratified in the Fifties than it is today. Oxford was the class-solvent and the 1939 war the social ...”

How Dirty Harry beat the Ringo Kid

Michael Rogin, 9 May 1996

John Wayne: American
by Randy Roberts and James Olson.
Free Press, 738 pp., £17.99, March 1996, 0 02 923837 4Show More

“... Thatcher crush the miners, is ‘John Wayne with a Scottish brogue and a pinstripe suit’. ‘Now we don’t want to see no John Wayne performances out here,’ a sergeant tells his platoon in Vietnam. We see them anyway, collected in Slotkin’s book and in Warrior Dreams (1994) by James William Gibson. When Philip Caputo ...”

Imagined Territories

Yonatan Mendel: Designing the Occupation, 2 August 2007

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation
by Eyal Weizman.
Verso, 318 pp., £19.99, June 2007, 978 1 84467 125 0Show More

“... right. Yet as Eyal Weizman explains, architecture is more than just sketches; architecture is what we see, architecture is everywhere. Focusing on the Occupied Territories, Weizman takes his readers on a tour of the visible and invisible ways in which Israel implements its control over Palestinians. This journey leads from the streets of Jenin to the view over ...”

Praise Yah

Eliot Weinberger: The Psalms, 24 January 2008

The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary
by Robert Alter.
Norton, 518 pp., £22, October 2007, 978 0 393 06226 7Show More

“... Book of Psalms – and of course of the entire Bible – is so deep in the English language that we no longer know when we are repeating its phrases. Inextricable from the beliefs and practices of its faithful for four hundred years, it has been transformed from the translation of a holy book into a holy book ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: A Shameful Year, 8 January 2004

“... they call it heavenly love;And the other a spook or a birdOr possibly merely a Word.Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinityBy this highly dysfunctional Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of ...”

Christian v. Cannibal

Michael Rogin: Norman Mailer and American history, 1 April 1999

The American Century
by Harold Evans.
Cape, 710 pp., £40, November 1998, 0 224 05217 9Show More

The Time of Our Time
by Norman Mailer.
Little, Brown, 1286 pp., £25, September 1998, 0 316 64571 0Show More

“... and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (both 1968); the undervalued fictional masterpiece, Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), where Faulkner’s ‘Bear’ provides the model, rather than the Hemingway grace under pressure so alien to Mailer; and The Executioner’s Song (1979), which takes the killer Gary Gilmore as the subject for a ‘true-life’ novel. If ...”

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