After George W. Bush, the Deluge

Murray Sayle: Back to the Carboniferous, 21 June 2001

Draft Report of the 17th Session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Nairobi, 4-6 April 2001 
Show More
Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability 
Show More
The Collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and the Struggle to Slow Global Warming 
by David Victor.
Princeton, 192 pp., £12.95, April 2001, 0 691 08870 5
Show More
Managing the Planet: The Politics of the New Millennium 
by Norman Moss.
Earthscan, 232 pp., £16.99, September 2000, 1 85383 644 3
Show More
Show More
... designer gas Freon, properly chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), developed in 1930 by the American chemist Thomas Midgley for General Motors Frigidaire as a substitute for the poisonous liquid ammonia previously used in refrigerators. Freon is almost chemically inert, non-poisonous; it boils at room temperature. It did a great job in the air conditioners that were ...

Warmer, Warmer

John Lanchester: Global Warming, Global Hot Air, 22 March 2007

The Revenge of Gaia 
by James Lovelock.
Allen Lane, 222 pp., £8.99, February 2007, 978 0 14 102597 1
Show More
Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis Summary for Policymakers: Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 
IPCC, February 2007Show More
Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning 
by George Monbiot.
Allen Lane, 277 pp., £17.99, September 2006, 0 7139 9923 3
Show More
The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies 
by Richard Heinberg.
Clairview, 320 pp., £12.99, October 2005, 1 905570 00 7
Show More
The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review 
by Nicholas Stern.
Cambridge, 692 pp., £29.99, January 2007, 978 0 521 70080 1
Show More
Show More
... is also the best means of establishing a controversy.’ Or, as the Republican pollster Frank Luntz put it in a memo to party activists during W.’s first midterms, ‘Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack ...

Book of Bad Ends

Paul Keegan: French Short Stories, 7 September 2023

The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol I 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 483 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46199 0
Show More
The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol II 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 352 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46205 8
Show More
Show More
... of what precedes or comes after it. Its heroine is a servant, Félicité, one of the excluded whom Frank O’Connor invoked in discussing the genre (‘the short story has never had a hero. What it has instead is a submerged population group’). Flaubert describes the arc of her life – a canvas as broad as a novel – with extreme concision. Large nuances ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... But the three officers connected with these documents – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – had signed witness statements in December 1974 stating that the manuscript notes were contemporaneous, and they had repeated this on oath in the trial in 1975. If the rough typed notes were indeed a draft from which the manuscript notes were ...

The Health Transformation Army

James Meek: What can the WHO do?, 2 July 2020

... the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, were to blame for the severity of the pandemic. ‘We must be frank about one of the primary reasons this outbreak spun out of control,’ Azar said.There was a failure by this organisation to obtain the information that the world needed, and that failure cost many lives … In an apparent attempt to conceal this ...

The Bergoglio Smile

Colm Tóibín: The Francis Papacy, 21 January 2021

... Moreno Air Base, to teach. He seemed unaware of any of the teachings of Vatican II. It was all St Thomas Aquinas and the old Church Fathers. We didn’t study a single book by Gutiérrez, Boff or Paulo Freire’ (the main theorists of liberation theology). In his first interview as pope, Bergoglio spoke of these years: ‘I had to deal with difficult ...

Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

... Famine.In a lecture delivered on Irish radio in 1995 and published in The Great Irish Famine: The Thomas Davis Lecture Series, James Donnelly remarked thatthroughout the rest of the Famine years, the Gregory clause or ‘Gregoryism’ became a byword for the worst miseries of the disaster – eviction, exile, disease and death. When in 1874 Canon John ...

The Breakaway

Perry Anderson: Goodbye Europe, 21 January 2021

... lay close at hand, all but universally ignored. The world’s two leading authorities on Thomas Hobbes, the foremost modern theorist of sovereignty, are at different ends of the political spectrum: Noel Malcolm of All Souls, editor of Leviathan for Oxford, on the right; Richard Tuck of Harvard, author of the finest contextualisation of Hobbes’s ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... person yet,’ he said. ‘It will be the book you can write now.’ He wanted his book to be like Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. I noticed he tended to eat pretty much with his hands. People in magazine articles say he doesn’t eat, but he had three helpings of lasagne that night and he ate both the baked potato and the jam pudding with his hands. He turned ...

The Price

Dan Jacobson: The concluding part of Dan Jacobson’s interview with Ian Hamilton, 21 February 2002

... CIA involvement in its finances, another idea came up. Some of those figures like Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode and Stuart Hampshire wanted to start a counter-magazine.I don’t think ‘Encounter’ had folded by then.No, it hadn’t but Spender had left. Spender was a big figure in the CIA controversy. So the projected magazine would be a counter-Encounter ...

Bloody Sunday Report

Murray Sayle: Back to Bloody Sunday, 11 July 2002

... in British captivity down the years, from (as I read my rain-stained notes) Vol. – Volunteer – Thomas Ashe, who died in Mountjoy Prison 25 September 1917, to Vol. Michael Devine, INLA, who died in the Maze 20 August 1981. Above is a dove of peace caged in barbed wire; below the quote: ‘I’ll wear no convict’s uniform, nor meekly serve my time.’ Less ...

Who do you think you are?

Jacqueline Rose: Trans Narratives, 5 May 2016

... Arthur Cameron Corbett’, as he introduced himself to Ashley after initially using the alias ‘Frank’ – presented himself as a frequenter of male brothels and a cross-dresser who, when he looked into the mirror, never liked what he saw: ‘You want the fantasy to appear right. It utterly failed to appear right in my eyes.’ He then explained how, from ...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

... his colleague said. Wright was soon 30,000 feet above the Tasman Sea watching the programmer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) being chased by unknowable agents in The Matrix. Wright found the storyline strangely comforting; it was good to know he wasn’t alone. At Auckland Airport, Wright kept his phone on flight mode, but turned it on to use the ...