Frozenology

Tony Wood: Siberia is Melting, 9 September 2010

... generally have experienced hotter summers than this one. The severity of this summer’s wildfires may ultimately shake the complacent into changing their views. Medvedev’s statement on 30 July that the fires sweeping the country were a consequence of climate change was perhaps an early example of this, but for the moment sceptical voices are not in the ...

The Parliamentary Peloton

Peter Mair: Money and Politics, 25 February 2010

A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal and How to Save Our Democracy 
by Martin Bell.
Icon, 246 pp., £11.99, October 2009, 978 1 84831 096 4
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... in the House. This leaves roughly 300 – twice the total number in the Dutch parliament – who may well be busy with constituency matters, but are unlikely to be very engaged in parliamentary or legislative activities. They remain largely anonymous, but they usually turn up, and vote as instructed. These are the MPs who are beloved of the whips, the ...

Zhao’s Version

Andrew Nathan: Zhao Ziyang, 17 December 2009

Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang 
by Zhao Ziyang, translated by Bao Pu, Renee Chiang and Adi Ignatius.
Simon and Schuster, 306 pp., £20, May 2009, 978 1 84737 697 8
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... to the path of dialogue. When Zhao refused to participate in the declaration of martial law on 20 May, Deng sidelined him. The military crackdown on 4 June left hundreds dead in the streets of Beijing. Three weeks later, at the Fourth Plenum of the 13th Central Committee, Zhao was officially dismissed from office on charges of ‘supporting turmoil and ...

Mad Monkey

Jackson Lears: ‘Matterhorn’, 23 September 2010

Matterhorn 
by Karl Marlantes.
Corvus, 600 pp., £16.99, August 2010, 978 1 84887 494 7
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... has settled over America like morning fog over the Mekong Delta. This resurgent popular militarism may help to explain the extravagant American praise for Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn. Reviewers and publicists have missed no opportunity to point out that Marlantes is not only a Rhodes scholar from Yale but also a ‘highly decorated Vietnam vet’. His ...

Professor or Pinhead

Stephanie Burt: Anne Carson, 14 July 2011

Nox 
by Anne Carson.
New Directions, 192 pp., £19.99, April 2010, 978 0 8112 1870 2
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... says she will marry nobody but him, not even Jupiter. Catullus then says that lovers’ oaths may as well be on ‘rapida aqua’, ‘swift water’. Carson’s ‘river’ therefore flows speedily down the page, to the sea, in the shape of an L for ‘liar’, or for the turns lovers’ dialogues take. Carson’s writings show a brusque yet intimate ...

Deleecious

Matthew Bevis: William Hazlitt, 6 November 2008

New Writings of William Hazlitt: Volume I 
edited by Duncan Wu.
Oxford, 507 pp., £120, September 2007, 978 0 19 923573 5
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New Writings of William Hazlitt: Volume II 
edited by Duncan Wu.
Oxford, 553 pp., £120, September 2007, 978 0 19 923574 2
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William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man 
by Duncan Wu.
Oxford, 557 pp., £25, October 2008, 978 0 19 954958 0
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... to spirit of conversation, but I at the same time think the process of modulation and inflection may be quite as complete, or more so, without the external enunciation; and that an author had better try the effect of his sentences on his stomach than on his ear. This is Hazlitt’s way of avoiding claptrap; he’s pleased, for instance, that Shakespeare ...

After Arafat

Rashid Khalidi: Palestine’s options, 3 February 2005

... sealed by ten meetings between the two men during Bush’s first term as president. Tony Blair may see Bush just as often, but he doesn’t have the same influence over him. The military and political consequences of their collaboration, which was cemented after 9/11 and during the second intifada, have been devastating for the Palestinians. With American ...

Plan Colombia

Malcolm Deas, 5 April 2001

... in the last two centuries have been as little involved as Colombia in international wars, which may be one of the reasons Colombians have frequently fought each other, and is certainly one of the reasons for the rest of the world’s indifference towards the country. Why do Colombians fight so much among themselves? In a recent House of Lords debate one ...

The Great Lie

Charles Glass: Israel, 30 November 2000

The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World 
by Avi Shlaim.
Allen Lane, 670 pp., £25, April 2000, 9780713994100
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Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 
by Benny Morris.
Murray, 752 pp., £25, January 2000, 0 7195 6222 8
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A Blood-Dimmed Tide: Dispatches from the Middle East 
by Amos Elon.
Allen Lane, 354 pp., £20, August 2000, 0 7139 9368 5
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Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians’ 
by Efraim Karsh.
Frank Cass, 236 pp., £39.50, May 2000, 0 7146 5011 0
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From Herzl to Rabin: The Changing Image of Zionism 
by Amnon Rubinstein.
Holmes & Meier, 283 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 8419 1408 7
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... become what Wittgenstein said philosophy was: a ladder that, once used to reach the destination, may be safely discarded. Having established a state and gathered most of the Jewish diaspora within it, Zionist ideology, in their eyes, has no further purpose and should be jettisoned, along with the unwelcome burdens it entails: further colonisation of occupied ...

It’s a playground

Gilberto Perez: Kiarostami et Compagnie, 27 June 2002

Close-Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future 
by Hamid Dabashi.
Verso, 302 pp., £15, November 2001, 1 85984 332 8
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... has suddenly given way to the mechanical.The burner, with its central circle of reflective metal, may be taken as a metaphor for the camera with its central lens; and, like the burner it ends up facing, the camera is an inanimate machine yet an instrument of animation, utterly lifeless yet impinging on the stuff of life. Kiarostami’s most frequent metaphor ...

To the Sunlit Uplands

Richard Rorty: A reply to Bernard Williams, 31 October 2002

Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy 
by Bernard Williams.
Princeton, 328 pp., £19.95, October 2002, 0 691 10276 7
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... any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs ...

Too Much

Barbara Taylor: A history of masturbation, 6 May 2004

Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation 
by Thomas Laqueur.
Zone, 501 pp., £21.95, March 2003, 1 890951 32 3
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... into his diary after a sermon spent mentally fornicating with a friend’s teenage daughter. In May 1667, 18 months after the no-hands episode, Pepys recorded another delicious hour spent alone in a boat. This time, however, it was not the thought of pretty girls that diverted him but his friend John Evelyn’s ‘pretty’ new book ‘against ...

Give or take a dead Scotsman

Liam McIlvanney: James Kelman’s witterings, 22 July 2004

You Have to Be Careful in the Land of the Free 
by James Kelman.
Hamish Hamilton, 437 pp., £12.99, June 2004, 0 241 14233 4
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... and so the old Philip Roth line – that American reality will outstrip anything the novelist may imagine – is borne out once more. As a result, this whole section seems not just pallid and unadventurous but insufficiently novelistic. It brings a kind of ‘news’ that is better told by others: if you want to know about American penal culture and the ...

Things Keep Happening

Geoffrey Hawthorn: Histories of Histories, 20 November 2008

A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the 20th Century 
by John Burrow.
Allen Lane, 553 pp., £25, December 2007, 978 0 7139 9337 0
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What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe 
by Anthony Grafton.
Cambridge, 319 pp., £13.99, March 2007, 978 0 521 69714 9
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The Theft of History 
by Jack Goody.
Cambridge, 342 pp., £14.99, January 2007, 978 0 521 69105 5
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Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History 
by Darien Shanske.
Cambridge, 268 pp., £54, January 2007, 978 0 521 86411 4
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... a strange paradox if narrative and history turned out to be incompatible. But the example of Homer may teach us not to take the paradox too tragically. The Iliad has a climax, the fall of Troy, but it has many perspectives, and it would be a drastically impoverished reading of Homer’s epic that saw as its ‘point’ an explanation of Troy’s fall. The ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2016, 5 January 2017

... I say I don’t know what they call people from Wakefield. ‘Desperate,’ says the son.20 May. On his way round here Antony Crolla comes across the railway bridge at the top of Gloucester Crescent, where an old lady is feeding the pigeons. Rounding the corner he finds a man at the edge of the flock of birds who, without any concealment at all, is ...