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How to Measure Famine

Alex de Waal, 6 February 2025

... families’ food consumption, child malnutrition and other indicators of distress has been a niche field staffed by specialists, who are skilled at reading the human tragedies in the numbers. And with painstaking caution a series of reports by international and US humanitarian analysts have explained that there is indeed starvation in Gaza, despite Israel’s ...

Poison is better

Kevin Okoth: Africa’s Cold War, 15 June 2023

White Malice: The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa 
by Susan Williams.
Hurst, 651 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 1 78738 555 9
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Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-75 
by Natalia Telepneva.
North Carolina, 302 pp., £37.95, June, 978 1 4696 6586 3
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... after graduating in 1950, and worked as an agronomist for the colonial government. He made regular field trips not only to study Guinea’s social structure and soil – he conducted its first agricultural census – but to assess the readiness of the population for a war of liberation. Cabral’s anti-colonial activism angered the Portuguese secret police: he ...

Toots, they owned you

John Lahr: My Hollywood Fling, 15 June 2023

Hollywood: The Oral History 
edited by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson.
Faber, 739 pp., £25, November 2022, 978 0 571 36694 1
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... musicians, runaways, stuntmen, failed vaudevillians and stage actors, Hollywood was an open field on which to play. The film industry offered all comers a singular opportunity: the promise of a living and a new life. ‘I directed a picture when I was twenty,’ Lillian Gish said. ‘The opportunity was there for a woman if you wanted it.’ Edith Head ...

Great Power Politics

Adam Tooze: What was Bidenomics?, 7 November 2024

... its long aftermath. In response he passed not just a major cyclical stimulus, but also the Dodd-Frank Act, to regulate finance, and Obamacare, the single most significant domestic policy reform in decades. But Obama was enough of a man of the 1990s to believe that crisis was temporary and normality was just that, the norm. It would return.That assumption ...

A Degree of Light-Heartedness

Christopher Clark: Merkel’s Two Lives, 20 February 2025

Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021 
by Angela Merkel with Beate Baumann, translated by Alice Tetley-Paul et al.
Macmillan, 709 pp., £35, November 2024, 978 1 0350 2075 1
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... and nuclear safety, she became the first woman in the CDU ever to hold a ministry outside the field of women and family. During these years, Kohl routinely referred to her as ‘mein Mädchen’. It sounds belittling, and it was; in this case the condescension that still came naturally to male politicians of Kohl’s generation was affectionate. And ...

Ways to Be Pretentious

Ian Penman, 5 May 2016

M Train 
by Patti Smith.
Bloomsbury, 253 pp., £18.99, October 2015, 978 1 4088 6768 6
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Collected Lyrics 1970-2015 
by Patti Smith.
Bloomsbury, 303 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 1 4088 6300 8
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... and their multicoloured worlds of sauciness and sorcery – then switch to the stark monochrome field of Horses, and other images waiting in the wings: Richard Hell, Iggy Pop, the Ramones. It really was, as the old cliché has it, that black and white. There was no commando unit of primpy stylists for Smith in 1975 – just her, Mapplethorpe and (as related ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2005, 5 January 2006

... into the darkness, light as a commodity squandered as I had never known it before. 22 May. Reading Frank Kermode’s review of John Haffenden’s life of Empson makes me regret a little that Empson was cut out of The History Boys. In the first version of the play Hector sings the praises of Sheffield where he had been taught by Empson, then recounts to the ...

A Lazarus beside Me

Avies Platt: An Encounter with Yeats, 27 August 2015

... I neither worshipped nor condemned. I admired him in parts, his skill, his knowledge in his own field, and for the rest I liked him and disliked him by turns. There were times, indeed, and these I fear were the most, when I disliked him very heartily. The speaker this evening was to be Dr Harry Benjamin, the famous Berlin endocrinologist, who had foreseen ...

No Grand Strategy and No Ultimate Aim

Stephen Holmes: US policy in Iraq, 6 May 2004

Incoherent Empire 
by Michael Mann.
Verso, 278 pp., £15, October 2003, 1 85984 582 7
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... of America’s relatively insignificant (and in any case divided) ‘Jewish lobby’. Mann’s frank admission that he cannot explain Israeli-American relations should encourage readers to ponder some of the less-than-rational forces that may underlie US devotion to, even obsession with, Israel. What we can say with some confidence is that this unusual ...

Enemies For Ever

James Wolcott: ‘Making It’, 18 May 2017

Making It 
by Norman Podhoretz.
NYRB, 368 pp., £13.98, May 2017, 978 1 68137 080 4
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... In December​ 1963, the literary critic, essayist and lyrical memoirist Alfred Kazin filed a field report from an after party for a Commentary magazine symposium ‘on the Negro’. (Symposia on the Negro were popular in the 1960s, helping to keep white liberal panellists occupied and furrowed until the ferocious later phase of Black Power made them all squirm ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: A Shameful Year, 8 January 2004

... on the north side, some for a family called Secker who seem to live in the manor house across the field, a romantic rambling house that looks unrestored and has oddly in its grounds an ornate seaside-looking Edwardian clock tower.The Windrush tumbles through the weir on this mild winter morning, but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen ...

Delirium

Jeremy Harding: Arthur Rimbaud, 30 July 1998

Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91 
by Charles Nicholl.
Vintage, 336 pp., £7.99, May 1998, 0 09 976771 6
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A Season in Hell and Illuminations 
by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Mark Treharne.
Dent, 167 pp., £18.99, June 1998, 0 460 87958 8
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... as though writing were a question of pressing forward over one brow after another in the rolling field of the imagination – make him just as much a Modern as Baudelaire. And more fashionably, they deny the poet any tenure at the centre of the poem. Mark Treharne’s superb English versions of the Illuminations catch these shifts and transections ...

Nothing he hasn’t done, nowhere he hasn’t been

Adam Shatz: Claude Lanzmann, 5 April 2012

The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir 
by Claude Lanzmann, translated by Frank Wynne.
Atlantic, 528 pp., £25, March 2012, 978 1 84887 360 5
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... Gestapo. Paulette, pretending to be Arab, pointed to a photograph of Goering: ‘Look, your own field marshal looks more Jewish than I do!’ They were released. Later, on what he remembers with shame as the Day of the Boot, he and his mother were in a shoeshop when he became terrified that her nose might tip off the Gestapo. He ran out, ready to leave his ...

Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity

James Meek, 18 February 2016

... is Robin Hood, who defies the system, who stands up for the little people, who levels the playing field. He takes from the rich to give to the poor. It’s a plan. Taking from the rich to give to the poor has been, is and should be the way forward for an exploited majority against remote, unaccountable concentrations of extreme wealth and power. One word for ...

Whirligig

Barbara Everett: Thinking about Hamlet, 2 September 2004

... or any other playwright.”’ And a similarly recommendable though much briefer introduction, Frank Kermode’s to his Riverside edition, confines itself to an elegant review of the play’s problems, chronological, textual and critical. Kermode calls Hamlet ‘the first great tragedy Europe had produced for two thousand years’, but he declines the ...

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