Opium of the Elite

Jonathan Rée: Hayek in England, 2 February 2023

Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950 
by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger.
Chicago, 840 pp., £35, November 2022, 978 0 226 81682 1
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“... offered a positive defence of capitalism, calling for a return to the ‘English’ liberalism of David Hume and Adam Smith – ‘the older liberalism’, as he called it, which was never ashamed of its links to ‘classical free-trade doctrine’. Mises admired English culture (and was happy to let it annex the Scotland of Hume and Smith) but he went on to ...”

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
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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
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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
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Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage 
by Richard Foster.
Macmillan, 316 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 333 43511 7
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Ford 
by Robert Lacey.
Heinemann, 778 pp., £15, July 1986, 0 434 40192 7
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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
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Augustine’s Laws 
by Norman Augustine.
Viking, 380 pp., £12.95, July 1986, 9780670809424
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Peak Performers: The New Heroes in Business 
by Charles Garfield.
Hutchinson, 333 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 09 167391 7
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Going for it: How to Succeed as an Entrepreneur 
by Victor Kiam.
Collins, 223 pp., £9.95, May 1986, 0 00 217603 3
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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
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The Winning Streak 
by Walter Goldsmith and David Clutterbuck.
Weidenfeld/Penguin, 224 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 297 78469 2
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The Roots of Excellence 
by Ronnie Lessem.
Fontana, 318 pp., £3.95, December 1985, 0 00 636874 3
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The New Management of Local Government 
by John Stewart.
Allen and Unwin, 208 pp., £20, October 1986, 0 00 435232 7
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“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin. As for London and Scottish Marine Oil’s Chris Greentree, all that remains of him is a severed head shining above the water as the sun goes down over drilling rigs beached by the receding North Sea tide ...”

Flann O’Brien’s Lies

Colm Tóibín, 5 January 2012

“... hero of Balzac and Stendhal, the figure in Henry James confronting her destiny, Madame Bovary or David Copperfield or even Moby Dick now became the unread or the unwritten book or the newly discovered passage, or the section where the author has lost control, or given up. In Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet our hero muses: ‘Why should I care that no one ...”

How can we live with it?

Thomas Jones: How to Survive Climate Change, 23 May 2013

The Carbon Crunch: How We’re Getting Climate Change Wrong – and How to Fix It 
by Dieter Helm.
Yale, 273 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 0 300 18659 8
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Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering 
by Clive Hamilton.
Yale, 247 pp., £20, February 2013, 978 0 300 18667 3
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The City and the Coming Climate: Climate Change in the Places We Live 
by Brian Stone.
Cambridge, 187 pp., £19.99, July 2012, 978 1 107 60258 8
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“... aren’t up to the task: he especially has it in for wind, quoting the dismaying statistic from David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air that a four-kilometre-wide belt of offshore windfarms all the way round the coast of Britain would provide less than an eighth of Britons’ average daily energy consumption (according to ...”

Cute, My Arse

Seamus Perry: Geoffrey Hill, 12 September 2019

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 148 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 19 882952 2
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“... be able to take for granted could see for himself or herself the truth of the matter,’ he told David Sexton, somewhat sternly. T.S. Eliot once said that genuine poetry could ‘communicate before it is understood’, though that doesn’t preclude understanding it too: it might seem a generous thing to say that the poetry in some way communicates its ...”

Ten Typical Days in Trump’s America

Eliot Weinberger, 25 October 2018

“... siblings of Paul Gosar, Republican congressman from Arizona, endorse his Democratic opponent, Dr David Brill. In response, Gosar tweets: ‘Like leftists everywhere, they put political ideology before family. Stalin would be proud.’ (Gosar, a former dentist, is notable for his belief that neo-Nazi groups are funded by George Soros, a Jewish Holocaust ...”

Jangling Monarchy

Tom Paulin: Milton and the Regicides, 8 August 2002

A Companion to Milton 
by Thomas N. Corns.
Blackwell, 528 pp., £80, June 2001, 0 631 21408 9
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The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography 
by Barbara K. Lewalski.
Blackwell, 816 pp., £25, December 2000, 0 631 17665 9
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“... by many readers, but it was nonetheless Milton’s founding intention in composing his epic. As David Norbrook shows in his seminal study Writing the English Republic, the language of chaos and creation briefly took on optimistic overtones during the Commonwealth, but with its disintegration the images became despairing. The Grand Concernments of England ...”

Where has all the money gone?

Ed Harriman: On the Take in Iraq, 7 July 2005

US House of Representatives Government Reform Committee Minority Office 
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US General Accountability Office 
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Defense Contract Audit Agency 
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International Advisory and Monitoring Board 
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Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General 
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Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction 
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“... while American forces were importing the same fuel for $1.57 a gallon. Halliburton’s chairman, David Lesar, who took over from Dick Cheney in July 2000, robustly defended his firm. But Waxman raised another question: if Halliburton was being allowed to rip off the Iraqi people, was the Bush administration allowing it to milk the US government as ...”

Is this fascism?

Daniel Trilling, 5 June 2025

Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilisation 
by Richard Seymour.
Verso, 280 pp., £20, October 2024, 978 1 80429 425 3
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“... raced to meet the expectations of their followers. (Unlike most governments, as the historian David Renton points out, the fascist parties in Italy and Germany became more radical once in office.) Fascism involves a form of collective behaviour that seems unaccountable. Many in the interwar period were slow to recognise the danger it posed, seeing fascism ...”

Illusions of Containment

Tom Stevenson: Versions of Hamas, 6 February 2025

Hamas: The Quest for Power 
by Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell.
Polity, 331 pp., £17.99, June 2024, 978 1 5095 6493 4
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“... or ‘patience’. The outbreak of the second intifada, in response to failed peace talks at Camp David in 2000 and Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to Temple Mount, wrong-footed Hamas. The leadership reacted by ramping up suicide bombings, but it was being led by events rather than leading them. The movement had been founded on a rejection of partition and ...”

Arrayed in Shining Scales

Patricia Lockwood: Solving Sylvia Plath, 10 July 2025

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath 
by Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg.
Faber, 812 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 571 37764 0
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“... a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is ...”

A Different Life

Thomas Laqueur: Can cellos remember?, 9 October 2025

Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound 
by Kate Kennedy.
Apollo, 468 pp., £10.99, August, 978 1 80328 704 1
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“... There are probably as many ‘how they chose their cello’ stories as there are cellists. David Finckel heard a violin in the shop of the Brooklyn luthier Sam Zygmuntowicz that sounded like a Stradivarius but was in fact Sam’s. (A sign in the shop reads ‘Stradivariuses were once new.’) He immediately ordered one of his cellos, a copy of the 1711 ...”

The World since 7 October

Adam Shatz, 24 July 2025

“... On​ 18 June, the sixth day of Israel’s attack on Iran, David Petraeus gave some unsolicited advice to Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordering him to dismantle Iran’s uranium enrichment programme or face ‘the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people ...”

Againstness

Lili Owen Rowlands: Agnès Varda’s Fruit Salad, 4 June 2026

A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda 
by Carrie Rickey.
Norton, 288 pp., £13.99, September 2025, 978 1 324 11045 3
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“... Demy took male lovers. According to Rickey, they included Gerald Ayres, the Columbia producer, and David Bombyk, a young Warner Brothers story editor. Varda appears to have quietly accommodated this; in her photobiography, Laure Adler writes that Varda granted Demy ‘his own bedroom’ at rue Daguerre. In America, though, Demy insisted on a more formal ...”

Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam

Seamus Heaney, 20 August 1981

“... was the real cause of Mandelstam’s first arrest a day or two after the face-slapping incident: David had faced Goliath with eight stony couplets in his sling. The Moscow apartment was searched by the secret police, Mandelstam was taken to their headquarters in the Lubianka Prison, interrogated, and sentenced to three years of exile in Cherdyn, where, in a ...”