The Two Jacobs

James Meek: The Faragist Future, 1 August 2019

... of the 18th century – might as well have been answering the question ‘Which politician called Boris Johnson would you like to lead Britain?’ But the true winners in a Johnson victory are the insurgents who have worked inside and outside Parliament to make their version of the ideas propelling the Brexit cause into a ruling ethos for the nation. The new ...

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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... full military and diplomatic support.There were also opportunities for internationalists such as Boris Ponomarev, head of the International Department, or Ivan Potekhin, the first director of the Institute for African Studies. Potekhin and Ponomarev belonged to a small but influential group of party officials known as the ‘Cominternians’, who ...

What are you willing to do?

James Meek, 26 May 2022

How Civil Wars Start – And How to Stop Them 
by Barbara F. Walter.
Viking, 289 pp., £18.99, January 2022, 978 0 241 42975 4
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... loved one taken away by masked good old boys with customised AR-15s, death’s head armbands and Ford F-150 technicals. Walter’s act of homebringing also involves a more subliminal journey from the past back to the American present. After all, to Americans, the country’s own four-year 19th-century shriek of bifurcated patriotism, murderous ingenuity and ...

Into the Underworld

Iain Sinclair: The Hackney Underworld, 22 January 2015

... A dowser and ley line tracker called Alan Hayday, formerly employed on the assembly line of the Ford Motor Company in Dagenham, contacted me to pass on his research into a tunnel he claimed to have discovered running from Sutton House, a Tudor mansion on the ridge above the culverted Hackney Brook, to a church on the other side of the River Lea. There was ...

Ten-Foot Chopsticks

James Meek: The North-East Transition, 4 December 2025

... had a name. In 2019, when he stood down, his would-be successor was beaten by a Conservative in Boris Johnson’s get-Brexit-done landslide. A picture from the night shows Johnson pounding the air with his fists and gurning in triumph at the Blyth result, the first time Labour had lost the seat since it was established in 1950. Labour won it back last ...

One Summer in America

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2019

... incredible. They gave it to you for what reason?’*The president comments on the election of Boris Johnson: ‘Good man. He’s tough and he’s smart. They’re saying “Britain Trump”. They call him “Britain Trump”, and there’s people saying that’s a good thing. They like me over there.’*The president tweets: ‘Chairman Kim has a great ...