Nation-States and National Identity

Perry Anderson, 9 May 1991

The Identity of France. Vol. II: People and Production 
by Fernand Braudel, translated by Sian Reynolds.
Collins, 781 pp., £25, December 1990, 0 00 217774 9
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“... falls across them was felt already in the Enlightenment. The first major writer on the subject, David Hume, introduced it with the caveat that ‘the vulgar are apt to carry all national characters to extremes.’ But that was not a reason to deny their existence. ‘Men of sense condemn these undistinguishing judgments; though, at the same time, they allow ...”

The Force of the Anomaly

Perry Anderson: Carlo Ginzburg, 26 April 2012

Threads and Traces: True False Fictive 
by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi.
California, 328 pp., £20.95, January 2012, 978 0 520 25961 4
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“... Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...”

What more could we want of ourselves!

Jacqueline Rose: On Rosa Luxemburg, 16 June 2011

The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg 
edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza, translated by George Shriver.
Verso, 609 pp., £25, February 2011, 978 1 84467 453 4
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“... the first Marxist theorists of globalisation (or of ‘historical-geographical materialism’, in David Harvey’s more recent phrase). Her unfinished Introduction to Political Economy, based on her lectures at the Social Democratic Party school in Berlin from 1907 to 1914, included a chapter titled ‘The Dissolution of Primitive Communism: From the Ancient ...”

What Europeans Talk about when They Talk about Brexit

LRB Contributors: On Brexit, 3 January 2019

“... as the valet’s perspective on the future of the continent. Thomas Meaney GreeceTwo years ago, David Cameron saw himself out of office, respecting the result of the referendum he had unwisely called. For three years now, Alexis Tsipras has clung to power in Athens by disrespecting the results of his own referendum. The Eurozone’s one-time guerrilla ...”

Travels with My Mom

Terry Castle: In Santa Fe, 16 August 2007

“... drive any more and hasn’t been out of her house in San Diego for quite a while: this Santa Fe trip is a huge and somewhat nerve-wracking adventure for her. I seem to have been spared: restaurant clatter and the boomy voices of Fox News emanating from the big-screen TV at the bar, thank god, have clearly flooded out her hearing aids. Justice served ...”

The Health Transformation Army

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

“... data, suggested that the first identifiable case was actually in mid-November. In May Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDCP), said no trace of the virus had been found in any animal samples from the market. Adding to the origin mystery are reports of early cases, or possible cases, in other countries. A ...”

I’m an intelligence

Joanna Biggs: Sylvia Plath at 86, 20 December 2018

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. I: 1940-56 
edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil.
Faber, 1388 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 0 571 32899 4
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The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. II: 1956-63 
edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil.
Faber, 1025 pp., £35, September 2018, 978 0 571 33920 4
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“... too slow and polite to speak up … the couple are coming to supper this week.’ The couple was David and Assia Wevill. In September they moved and began furnishing their fourth home in as many years. It turned cold, another record-breaking winter, and it was months until they could afford carpets. ‘I am dying for a Bendix!’ Sylvia wrote to her ...”

One Summer in America

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2019

“... development, logging, drilling and mining in natural habitats. The secretary of the interior, David Bernhardt, a former oil industry lobbyist, announces that the act will be ‘modernised’: economic factors, rather than exclusively scientific ones, will be used to determine eligibility for protection. The ‘foreseeable future’, written in the ...”

Towards the Precipice

Robert Brenner: The Continuing Collapse of the US Economy, 6 February 2003

“... he would justify the company’s treatment of expense to the SEC, the WorldCom company controller, David Myers, acknowledged that he ‘had hoped it would not have to be explained’. On the other hand, he countered, if WorldCom’s reported costs weren’t somehow reduced and its profits enhanced, ‘the company might as well shut its doors.’ Crucial to ...”

The Life and Death of Juliano Mer-Khamis

Adam Shatz: A Death in Jenin, 21 November 2013

“... was generating abroad made its work that much more difficult. The PA felt snubbed when in 2009 David Miliband came to the theatre without consulting them. A perception arose that the theatre was rich, though its operating annual budget never exceeded $450,000 dollars, modest for an organisation of its size. Juliano had never handed out money, but he had ...”

Where Life Is Seized

Adam Shatz: Frantz Fanon’s Revolution, 19 January 2017

Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté 
by Frantz Fanon, edited by Robert Young and Jean Khalfa.
La Découverte, 688 pp., £22, October 2015, 978 2 7071 8638 6
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“... by psychiatric symptoms. Fanon’s most reliable biographers – Cherki and the British historian David Macey, whose book also appeared in 2000 – have tended to dismiss the dissertation, but Young and Khalfa make a strong case for its importance. In the very last line of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon wrote: ‘O my body, make of me always a man who always ...”

When Bitcoin Grows Up

John Lanchester: What is Money?, 21 April 2016

“... should also be said that some bitcoiners believe more in the technology than in its use as money. David Birch is the author of a fresh, original and fascinatingly wide-ranging short book about developments in the field, Identity Is the New Money.6 His is the best book on general issues around new forms of money, and new possibilities generated by blockchain ...”

Issues of Truth and Invention

Colm Tóibín: Francis Stuart’s wartime broadcasts, 4 January 2001

The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart 
edited by Brendan Barrington.
Lilliput, 192 pp., £25, September 2000, 1 901866 54 8
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“... a book called Hitler’s Irish Voices: The Story of German Radio’s Wartime Irish Service by David O’Donoghue appeared and made clear that Stuart had had a meeting with the IRA leadership late in 1939 before he went to Berlin and that he had operated as a messenger for the IRA, which was interested in obtaining German assistance for its ...”

Every Field, Every Yard

James Meek: Return to Kyiv, 10 August 2023

“... tapering sides marked with corrugated rings, like a rocket engine scratched from the final cut of David Lynch’s Dune. The concert was at the top, and in order to get to it I passed through an exhibition of art created since the invasion, Ty Yak? How Are You? One of the curators, the artist Katya Libkind, had left a comment on the walls: ‘Basically it’s ...”

Hated and Loved in a Breath

Jenny Turner: On Lewis Grassic Gibbon, 23 July 2026

History of a Revoluter: The Life of James Leslie Mitchell/Lewis Grassic Gibbon 
by William K. Malcolm.
Jetstone, 580 pp., £24.99, February 2025, 978 1 910858 36 3
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“... but was forever, you were close to it and it to you … Oh, she hated and loved in a breath!’For David Craig in the early 1970s, Sunset Song was one of a ‘cluster’ of ‘absolutely outstanding … novels of peasant crisis’ published in the 1930s, with Sholokhov his index, plus Steinbeck, plus Silone: ‘It has a wholeness … based on the rhythm of ...”