Search Results

Advanced Search

406 to 420 of 492 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

What I heard about Iraq in 2005

Eliot Weinberger: Iraq, 5 January 2006

... there were 120,000 Iraqi troops trained to take over the security of the country; I heard Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat from Delaware, say that the number was closer to 4000; I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: ‘The fact of the matter is that there are 130,200 who have been trained and equipped. That’s a fact. The idea that that number’s wrong is just not ...

Rogue Socialists

Michael Mason, 1 September 1988

Francis Place, 1771-1854: The Life of a Remarkable Radical 
by Dudley Miles.
Harvester, 206 pp., £40, April 1988, 0 7108 1225 6
Show More
Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 
by Iain McCalman.
Cambridge, 338 pp., £27.50, March 1988, 0 521 30755 4
Show More
Show More
... my impression of their radicalism is that it is fairly tongue-in-check. Cases in point are John Joseph Stockdale and ‘Baron’ Renton Nicholson. Dr McCalman touches only on the latter, but he promises a sequel to Radical Underworld, to deal with the Victorian period: this, to judge by his present achievement, will be a study of quite exceptional ...

War and Peace

A.J.P. Taylor, 2 October 1980

Humanity in Warfare: the Modern History of the International Law of Armed Conflicts 
by Geoffrey Best.
Weidenfeld, 400 pp., £15, September 1980, 0 297 77737 8
Show More
Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945: the Defining of a Faith 
by Martin Caedel.
Oxford, 342 pp., £12.50, August 1980, 0 19 821882 6
Show More
Show More
... many people ignored and which yet proved more powerful. Best has found a wonderful quotation from Joseph Conrad, who described the Hague Tribunal as ‘a solemnly official recognition of the Earth as a House of Strife’. Conrad continued: ‘War has made peace altogether in its own image; a martial, overbearing, war-lord sort of peace ... eloquent with ...

The British Way

H.C.G. Matthew: Devolution, 5 March 1998

... class of Edinburgh and Glasgow was much less worried about having a British base. Moreover, North Sea oil, though never quite the vote-winner the SNP hoped it would be, emphasised the lack of control which the Scots had over their own affairs; and the Scottish military tradition, so important an element of Unionism, was undermined by amalgamations among ...

You can’t prove I meant X

Clare Bucknell, 16 April 2020

Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820 
by Thomas Keymer.
Oxford, 352 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 0 19 874449 8
Show More
Show More
... prosecuted for reprinting Wilkes’s seditious attack on George III in the 45th number of the North Briton in 1765, a vast crowd cheered Williams, passed him flowers and orchestrated a public ‘execution’ of clothing intended to symbolise the hated former prime minister Lord Bute. For the arch-Tory John Shebbeare, whose Sixth Letter to the People of ...

Inquisition Mode

Tariq Ali: Victor Serge’s Defective Bolshevism, 16 July 2020

Notebooks: 1936-47 
by Victor Serge, translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman.
NYRB, 651 pp., £17.99, April 2019, 978 1 68137 270 9
Show More
Show More
... by the earth for the use of man.’) One of the few non-communists to defend the trials was Joseph Davies, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, who claimed to find the confessions persuasive. Serge regarded them as a consequence of the insistence that party decisions had to be supported whether ‘right or wrong’. For him, the result was an ...

Bigger Crowds, More Roses

James Lasdun: Best Fascist Face, 3 June 2021

The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy 
by Victoria de Grazia.
Harvard, 517 pp., £28.95, August 2020, 978 0 674 98639 8
Show More
Show More
... The plot​ sounds like Joseph Roth at his most cynically extravagant: a demobbed soldier, down on his luck, has a chance meeting with a political agitator on the rise, and the two forge an alliance that propels the soldier onto the world stage. He marries a rich American opera singer, governs an African colony, conducts an epic legal battle with the Vatican, embroils himself in the darkest villainies of his exceptionally brutal era, is executed multiple times without realising it, and ends his days on an island in the Mediterranean ...

Let us breakfast in splendour

Charles Nicholl: Francis Barber, 16 July 2015

The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir 
by Michael Bundock.
Yale, 282 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 20710 1
Show More
Show More
... and prizes in the Seven Years’ War, he was disappointed; much of his time was spent guarding North Sea fisheries. He served as a ‘landman’ – essentially a trainee sailor – aboard various ships, received regular pay and good but not glowing reports, saw the coast of Britain from Leith to Torbay, and acquired a taste for tobacco. He was discharged ...

Beware Biographers

Jackson Lears: Kennan and Containment, 24 May 2012

George Kennan: An American Life 
by John Lewis Gaddis.
Penguin, 784 pp., £30, December 2011, 978 1 59420 312 1
Show More
Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War 
by Frank Costigliola.
Princeton, 533 pp., £24.95, January 2012, 978 0 691 12129 1
Show More
Show More
... compounds the difficulty: could it be used to justify Nixon and Kissinger’s carpet-bombing of North Vietnam, or the overthrow of Salvador Allende? To his credit, Kennan understood that most definitions of reality were rooted in emotions and beliefs that might or might not match up with facts on the ground. Kennan’s own emotions and beliefs created a ...

Are we there yet?

Seamus Perry: Tennyson, 20 January 2011

The Major Works 
by Alfred Tennyson, edited by Adam Roberts.
Oxford, 626 pp., £10.99, August 2009, 978 0 19 957276 2
Show More
Show More
... his essay is full of admiration, and shows a deep acquaintance with his works. The critic Gerhard Joseph once suggested that Auden might have had in mind the old sense of ‘stupid’ as ‘stunned’ or ‘benumbed’ – as when Satan in Paradise Lost, momentarily struck as he gazes upon Eve, stands ‘Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed’. It was not ...

A Rage for Abstraction

Jeremy Harding, 16 June 2016

The Other Paris: An Illustrated Journey through a City’s Poor and Bohemian Past 
by Luc Sante.
Faber, 306 pp., £25, November 2015, 978 0 571 24128 6
Show More
How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People 
by Sudhir Hazareesingh.
Allen Lane, 427 pp., £20, June 2015, 978 1 84614 602 2
Show More
Show More
... Afrikaners. Among the sins it couldn’t forgive the British was the deadpan expression of Joseph Chamberlain, secretary of state for the colonies, when he toured the battlefields of South Africa. The paper had a point: the Boers fought – and lost – one of the first modern anti-imperialist struggles in Africa. Britain’s concentration camps in ...

The Suitcase: Part Three

Frances Stonor Saunders, 10 September 2020

... lost his childhood.Before leaving for Palestine, Joe took a flat at Regent House, Zamalek, just north of the Gezira Club. This was the most popular residential area for the Inglizi (two nearby blocks of flats were known as Elephant and Castle), so rents were high and, since their Egyptian owners tended to remove most of the furniture and rugs, the flats ...

Excellence

Patrick Wright, 21 May 1987

Creating excellence: Managing corporate culture, strategy and change in the New Age 
by Craig Hickman and Michael Silva.
Allen and Unwin, 305 pp., £12.50, April 1985, 0 04 658252 5
Show More
Intrapreneuring: Why you don’t have to leave the corporation to become an entrepreneur 
by Gifford Pinchot.
Harper and Row, 368 pp., £15.95, August 1985, 0 06 015305 9
Show More
The IBM Way: Insights into the World’s Most Successful Marketing Organisation 
by Buck Rodgers.
Harper and Row, 224 pp., £12.95, April 1986, 0 06 015522 1
Show More
Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage 
by Richard Foster.
Macmillan, 316 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 333 43511 7
Show More
Ford 
by Robert Lacey.
Heinemann, 778 pp., £15, July 1986, 0 434 40192 7
Show More
Company of Adventurers: The Story of the Hudson’s Bay Company 
by Peter Newman.
Viking, 413 pp., £14.95, March 1986, 0 670 80379 0
Show More
Augustine’s Laws 
by Norman Augustine.
Viking, 380 pp., £12.95, July 1986, 9780670809424
Show More
Peak Performers: The New Heroes in Business 
by Charles Garfield.
Hutchinson, 333 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 09 167391 7
Show More
Going for it: How to Succeed as an Entrepreneur 
by Victor Kiam.
Collins, 223 pp., £9.95, May 1986, 0 00 217603 3
Show More
Take a chance to be first: The Secrets of Entrepreneurial Success 
by Warren Avis.
Macmillan, 222 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 02 504410 9
Show More
The Winning Streak 
by Walter Goldsmith and David Clutterbuck.
Weidenfeld/Penguin, 224 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 297 78469 2
Show More
The Roots of Excellence 
by Ronnie Lessem.
Fontana, 318 pp., £3.95, December 1985, 0 00 636874 3
Show More
The New Management of Local Government 
by John Stewart.
Allen and Unwin, 208 pp., £20, October 1986, 0 00 435232 7
Show More
Show More
... head shining above the water as the sun goes down over drilling rigs beached by the receding North Sea tide. The magazine Management Today has developed a distinctive style of portrait photography in recent years. Here is a constant stream of successful business figures, but here also is a problematic redundancy of appearance: how can one promote the ...

The Gatekeeper

Adam Tooze: Krugman’s Conversion, 22 April 2021

Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics and the Fight for a Better Future 
by Paul Krugman.
Norton, 444 pp., £13.99, February, 978 0 393 54132 8
Show More
Show More
... of the status quo and instead become its critic. In this respect his closest analogue is Joseph Stiglitz, also once of MIT, a member of the Clinton administration and chief economist to the World Bank. Both men have indisputable standing as members of the elite club of New Keynesians: Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel in 2001, Krugman in 2008. Where ...

The Strange Death of Municipal England

Tom Crewe: Assault on Local Government, 15 December 2016

... relief package: Surrey gets a vastly bigger pay-off than Teesside. Misery is concentrated. In the North-East, the poorest region in England, nearly a billion pounds has been sucked out of the economy since 2010. Middlesbrough – described as an ‘infant Hercules’ by Gladstone in 1862 – has its bright future long behind it. The council has the highest ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences