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In a Frozen Crouch

Colin Kidd: Democracy’s Ends, 13 September 2018

How Democracy Ends 
by David Runciman.
Profile, 249 pp., £14.99, May 2018, 978 1 78125 974 0
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Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth – And How to Fix It 
by Dambisa Moyo.
Little, Brown, 296 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 1 4087 1089 0
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How Democracies Die 
by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
Viking, 311 pp., £16.99, January 2018, 978 0 241 31798 3
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Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy 
by William Galston.
Yale, 158 pp., £25, June 2018, 978 0 300 22892 2
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... in the first place.’ No democracy, we are told, has ever reverted to military rule once GDP rose above $8000 per head. The worst that might befall us is something like the experiences of Japan since the freezing of its economic miracle or of Greece in the aftermath of the debt crisis. Japan is elderly – half the population is over the age of 47 ...

At the National Gallery

Julian Bell: On Frans Hals, 30 November 2023

... Now, don’t you feel good? And so, for some fifty years from the 1610s, the burghers of Haarlem rose to the occasion and thrust themselves forwards, as swaggeringly as they could manage. Four centuries on, am I pleased to meet them thus? Not much, in many cases. So often Hals’s portrait subjects seem all too up for this charade, insufferably brash and ...

One Cygnet Too Many

John Watts: Henry VII, 26 April 2012

Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England 
by Thomas Penn.
Penguin, 448 pp., £8.99, March 2012, 978 0 14 104053 0
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... and the implications of its culture, the complexities of the international situation. Thanks to Steven Gunn, Sean Cunningham, Paul Cavill and one or two others, we are beginning to develop a convincing political narrative that joins the story of the pretenders with the innovations in government, their domestic reception and the larger diplomatic and ...

How a desire for profit led to the invention of race

Eric Foner: Slavery, 4 February 1999

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America 
by Ira Berlin.
Harvard, 512 pp., £18.50, October 1998, 0 674 81092 9
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The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 
by Robin Blackburn.
Verso, 602 pp., £15, April 1998, 1 85984 890 7
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... in which slavery, for both races, seems little more than an occasion for a prolonged party. When Steven Spielberg tried recently to update the celluloid portrayal of slavery, he chose to do so via the Amistad case, which involved not American slaves but Africans who seized control of a Spanish slave ship. The rebels ended up in the United States, but their ...

No More Victors’ Justice?

Stephen Sedley: On Trying War Crimes, 2 January 2003

... television cameras for the broadcasting of debates that the cameras were rolling as the Law Lords rose in turn to vote on the outcome of the appeal. I mention this because it has come to be believed that in a sudden rush of PR-consciousness special arrangements were made to televise the delivery of the first Pinochet judgment in the House of Lords. The truth ...
Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles 
by Irwin Gellman.
Johns Hopkins, 499 pp., $29.95, April 1995, 0 8018 5083 5
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Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley 
edited by Geoffrey Ward.
Houghton Mifflin, 444 pp., $24.95, April 1995, 0 395 66080 7
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No Ordinary Time. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War Two 
by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Simon and Schuster, 759 pp., £18, June 1995, 0 671 64240 5
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The End of Reform 
by Alan Brinkley.
Knopf, 371 pp., $27.50, March 1995, 0 394 53573 1
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... But although Welles believed the stories of death camps circulating by late 1942, he told Rabbi Steven Wise: ‘For obvious reasons you will understand, I cannot give these [facts] to the press.’ Welles may have been silenced on the genocide out of loyalty to FDR’s priorities, Hull out of his own White House ambitions and the desire not to call ...

The Medium is the Market

Hal Foster: Business Art, 9 October 2008

... executive; his counterpart in the latest upswing in the art market is a hedge-fund manager, Steven Cohen, who has used his enormous profits as founder of SAC Capital to build an extensive collection of postwar art in just a few years. (Cohen bought the first Hirst shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, for $8 ...

Even My Hair Feels Drunk

Adam Mars-Jones: Joy Williams, 2 February 2017

The Visiting Privilege 
by Joy Williams.
Tuskar Rock, 490 pp., £16.99, November 2016, 978 1 78125 746 3
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Ninety-Nine Stories of God 
by Joy Williams.
Tin House, 220 pp., £16.95, July 2016, 978 1 941040 35 5
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... in series or clusters: ‘There were five weekends that August, and for each one of them Steven invited a different woman up – Tracy, India, Yvette, Aster and Bronwyn.’ The impulse seems less to show off a remarkable ability to particularise character than almost to burlesque it, notably when in another story she dips below the surface of ...

Diary

Sherry Turkle: Tamagotchi Love, 20 April 2006

... responds to caretaking by developing different states of mind, bears a resemblance to his ex-wife Rose: it’s ‘something in the eyes’. He likes chatting with the robot about events of the day. ‘When I wake up in the morning and see her face over there, it makes me feel so nice, like somebody is watching over me.’ In the 1980s, debates in artificial ...

What is there to celebrate?

Eric Foner: C. Vann Woodward, 20 October 2022

C. Vann Woodward: America’s Historian 
by James Cobb.
North Carolina Press, 504 pp., £39.50, October, 978 1 4696 7021 8
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... During the​ 1950s and 1960s, a generation of academics rose to prominence in the United States with books and essays that breached the wall separating the university and the broader public. Many of them were historians, including Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Invocations of history punctuated debates over the Cold War, civil rights and Vietnam ...

Doomed to Draw

Ben Jackson: Magnus Carlsen v. AI, 6 June 2019

The Grandmaster: Magnus Carlsen and the Match that Made Chess Great Again 
by Brin-Jonathan Butler.
Simon and Schuster, 211 pp., £12.99, November 2018, 978 1 9821 0728 4
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Game Changer: AlphaZero’s Groundbreaking Chess Strategies and the Promise of AI 
by Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan.
New in Chess, 416 pp., £19.95, January 2019, 978 90 5691 818 7
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... by many chess prodigies. His trajectory was extraordinary. In a single year, his Elo rating rose from 904 – only slightly better than moving the pieces at random – to 1907, enough to be among Norway’s top four hundred or so players. When he was 12, his father requested a year’s leave of absence to take him on a chess-playing tour of ...

Whose Egypt?

Adam Shatz, 5 January 2012

... Islamism of today is very different from the Islamism of the 1980s and 1990s, when radical jihadis rose up against secular-nationalist regimes in Syria, Algeria and Egypt, turning Hama, Algiers and Cairo into war zones. Their interpretation of majority rule doesn’t always make room for minority rights, but aside from al-Qaida and a fringe of ...

Flat-Nose, Stocky and Beautugly

James Davidson: Greek Names, 23 September 2010

A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names. Vol. V.A Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia 
edited by T. Corsten.
Oxford, 496 pp., £125, March 2010, 978 0 19 956743 0
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... the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and Dorothy, soon to be supplemented by endless Geoffreys. This remarkable efflorescence has been described as a ‘personalisation’ of ...

Putting the Silicon in Silicon Valley

John Lanchester: Making the Microchip, 16 March 2023

Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology 
by Chris Miller.
Simon and Schuster, 431 pp., £20, October 2022, 978 1 3985 0409 7
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... in Top Gun, which in turn led to the 2022 sequel which was such a big-screen success that Steven Spielberg recently told Tom Cruise his movie had ‘saved the entire theatrical industry’. It’s the Thanh Hóa Bridge’s world – we’re just living in it.)From this point on, the US military was committed to the microchip as a central part of its ...

Unintended Consequences

Rory Scothorne: Scotland’s Shift, 18 May 2023

Politics and the People: Scotland, 1945-79 
by Malcolm Petrie.
Edinburgh, 218 pp., £85, October 2022, 978 1 4744 5698 2
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... capacity of the SNP during the 1960s; the discovery of North Sea oil; or David McCrone and Steven Kendrick’s elegant theory, which emphasises the role of television in a distinctly Scottish news media, producing a ‘Scottish frame of reference’ for contentious state planning decisions that could be exploited by the SNP.The story of the right’s ...

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