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Guantanamo Bay

Martin Puchner: A state of exception, 16 December 2004

... argue that the protections furnished by the US constitution do not apply to Guantanamo Bay. Even John Gibbons, who argued the case on behalf of Rasul, had to admit that the legal status of Guantanamo is ‘unique’. While other naval bases have had to bring their legal position into line with the laws of the host ...

Are your fingers pointed or blunt?

P.N. Furbank: Medical myths of homosexuality, 22 July 2004

Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century 
by Graham Robb.
Picador, 342 pp., £18.99, November 2003, 0 330 48223 8
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... mental isolation and the strain of concealment. Loveless marriages cause more lasting grief than laws, and still do. Robb argues that the plight of the homosexual, as regards the law but not only the law, actually grew considerably worse during much of the 20th century. For instance, according to his statistics, arrests and convictions for ‘gross ...

Incompetence at the War Office

Simon Jenkins: Politics and Pistols at Dawn, 18 December 2008

The Duel: Castlereagh, Canning and Deadly Cabinet Rivalry 
by Giles Hunt.
Tauris, 214 pp., £20, January 2008, 978 1 84511 593 7
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... they owed to their sovereign and the example they ought to give to the country in obedience to its laws, to fight a duel’. The editorial lamented that affairs of state should be entrusted by the king ‘to persons whose intemperate passions were so little under the control of reason’. So it proved. Canning recovered from his wound but both men had to ...

Fathers Who Live Too Long

John Kerrigan: Shakespeare’s Property, 12 September 2013

Being and Having in Shakespeare 
by Katharine Eisaman Maus.
Oxford, 141 pp., £25, February 2013, 978 0 19 969800 4
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... of course, vain. That may be the legal position but not the psychological or the royal one. ‘The laws are mine, not thine,’ Goneril says when she slaps down Albany. Maus’s preoccupation with property allows her to find a way between the psychoanalytic involution of Stanley Cavell, who argues that Lear puts love up for sale because he is ashamed of the ...

Puzzled Puss

John Lahr: Buster Keaton’s Star Turn, 19 January 2023

Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life 
by James Curtis.
Knopf, 810 pp., £30, February 2022, 978 0 385 35421 9
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... characters’ heroic struggle to master the material conditions of their world (technology, the laws of physics, the elemental forces of weather) was reduced to mere clumsiness.’*Faced​ with his character’s lack of agency on screen and the lack of affection at home, Keaton retreated to his baseball (the ‘MGM Lions’), his bungalow (‘Keaton’s ...

Is the Soviet Union over?

John Lloyd, 27 September 1990

Moving the Mountain: Inside the Perestroika Revolution 
by Abel Aganbegyan, translated by Helen Szamuely.
Bantam, 248 pp., £14.95, October 1989, 0 593 01818 4
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Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform: The Soviet Reform Process 
by Anders Aslund.
Pinter, 219 pp., £35, May 1989, 0 86187 008 5
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... socialist economy, get anything from Milton Friedman – as you could, say, from Paul Samuelson or John Kenneth Galbraith, two US economists who are well-known in reformist circles and the availability of whose work in translation pre-dates Gorbachev. Does Aganbegyan not understand this? Or is he, in the Soviet way, inscribing his support for Friedman’s ...

Lucky Kim

Christopher Hitchens, 23 February 1995

The Philby Files. The Secret Life of the Master Spy: KGB Archives Revealed 
by Genrikh Borovik, edited by Phillip Knightley.
Little, Brown, 382 pp., £18.99, September 1994, 0 316 91015 5
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The Fifth Man 
by Roland Perry.
Sidgwick, 486 pp., £16.99, October 1994, 0 283 06216 9
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Treason in the Blood: H. St John Philby, Kim Philby and the Spy Case of the Century 
by Anthony Cave Brown.
Hale, 640 pp., £25, January 1995, 9780709055822
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My Five Cambridge Friends 
by Yuri Modin.
Headline, 328 pp., £17.99, October 1994, 0 7472 1280 5
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Looking for Mr Nobody: The Secret Life of Goronwy Rees 
by Jenny Rees.
Weidenfeld, 291 pp., £18.99, October 1994, 0 297 81430 3
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... bipolar Kulturkampf, it did leak out to a wide public through the fictions of Len Deighton and John Le Carré. Watching the shadow-play on the walls of the Cold War cave, and seeing the literal interpenetration of opposites as Karla penetrated ‘us’, and ‘we’ reciprocated, one could make the induction that the spy game was a thing in itself, and ...

Dreamtime with Whitlam

Michael Davie, 4 September 1986

The Whitlam Government 1972-1975 
by Gough Whitlam.
Viking, 788 pp., £17.95, July 1986, 0 670 80287 5
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... voters in 1945; or a better comparison might be with the United States in 1960, when the dazzling John F. Kennedy seemed to represent the beginning of a new age after what his supporters saw as the suffocating and mediocre years of President Eisenhower. The under-forties in particular, in Australia in 1972 as in the United States in 1960, suddenly felt ...

The Common Law and the Constitution

Stephen Sedley, 8 May 1997

... World War One to stop rack-renting of small tenements; the race, sex and disability discrimination laws and so forth. Legislation has been needed, too, to bring into being systems of adjudication and distribution of public funds in schemes of social provision such as the national insurance and social security systems. On all of these, however, the common law ...

What did happen?

David Edgar: Ukraine, 21 January 2016

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine 
by Serhii Plokhy.
Allen Lane, 381 pp., £25, December 2015, 978 0 241 18808 8
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In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine 
by Tim Judah.
Allen Lane, 256 pp., £20, January 2016, 978 0 241 19882 7
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Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West 
by Andrew Wilson.
Yale, 236 pp., £12.99, October 2014, 978 0 300 21159 7
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Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands 
by Richard Sakwa.
I.B. Tauris, 297 pp., £9.99, January 2015, 978 1 78453 527 8
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... The police attack the protesters, and their numbers swell. The president pushes through draconian laws against the demonstrators. Evoking a heroic tradition of resistance to occupation by Nazis and communists, militant protesters attempt to march on parliament, battling the police, who respond by murdering more than a hundred people. Despite reaching an ...

Rights, Wrongs and Outcomes

Stephen Sedley, 11 May 1995

... public services and then in 1954 forbade it? How does it come about that not dissimilar abortion laws have in recent years been struck down by Canada’s Supreme Court as too restrictive and by Germany’s Constitutional Court as too permissive? On our own patch, how did it come to be self-evident to the Court of Appeal in 1925 that it was perfectly all ...

Ireland’s Invisibilities

Owen Dudley Edwards, 15 May 1980

Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution 1760-1801 
by R.B. McDowell.
Oxford, 740 pp., £28, December 1979, 9780198224808
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... from the belatedly respectful capitalisation of ‘Board’) in the ensuing footnote; John Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, is variously Clared and Fitzgibboned all over pages 602-3 with maximum confusion for readers who do not know he was both; and, as Bertie Wooster would say, so the long day wore on, so to speak. Occasionally the text is in flat ...

Lights On and Away We Go

Keith Thomas: Happy Thoughts, 20 May 2021

The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 
by Ritchie Robertson.
Allen Lane, 984 pp., £40, November 2020, 978 0 241 00482 1
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... thousand people. The disaster, all the preachers said, was God’s punishment for sinfulness. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, saw it as divine vengeance for the cruelties of the Portuguese Inquisition. He had identified a minor earthquake near a racecourse in Yorkshire as another such intervention: God ‘purposely chose such a place, where there ...

If you don’t swing, don’t ring

Christopher Turner: Playboy Mansions, 21 April 2016

Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics 
by Beatriz Preciado.
Zone, 303 pp., £20.95, October 2014, 978 1 935408 48 2
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Down the Rabbit Hole: Curious Adventures and Cautionary Tales of a Former Playboy Bunny 
by Holly Madison.
Dey Street, 334 pp., £16.99, July 2015, 978 0 06 237210 9
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... The inaugural issue of Playboy had no date on the cover; because of the strict obscenity laws, Hefner wasn’t sure there would be a second. He is now 90, and still editor-in-chief. Prone to self-mythology, Hefner claimed he was Kinsey’s ‘pamphleteer, spreading the news of sexual liberation through a monthly magazine’. For all this supposed ...

Break their teeth, O God

Colin Kidd: The Trial of Sacheverell, 21 August 2014

Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell 
edited by Mark Knights.
Wiley-Blackwell, 132 pp., £19.99, February 2012, 978 1 4443 6187 2
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The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell 
edited by Brian Cowan.
Wiley-Blackwell, 307 pp., £22.99, November 2012, 978 1 4443 3223 0
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... With the queen herself in attendance at the trial, a torpid caution inhibited several counsel. Sir John Hawles seemed to divorce Whiggery from resistance altogether, arguing that there was indeed a supreme power in the state which required absolute obedience: not the monarch, but the Crown-in-Parliament. More conventionally, Sir ...

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