Pint for Pint

Thomas Laqueur: The Price of Blood, 14 October 1999

Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce 
by Douglas Starr.
Little, Brown, 429 pp., £20, February 1999, 0 316 91146 1
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“... that strand of blood’s history which winds most directly to the beginnings, in 1982, of the Aids crisis. His Part I, ‘Blood Magic’, thus takes the story quickly from magic and mystery to the early 20th-century achievements of Karl Landsteiner, who identified the ABO blood groups; Richard Lewisohn, who discovered that sodium citrate would keep blood from ...”

Next Door to War

Tariq Ali: After Benazir, 17 July 2008

Descent into Chaos: How the War against Islamic Extremism Is Being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia 
by Ahmed Rashid.
Allen Lane, 484 pp., £25, July 2008, 978 0 7139 9843 6
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Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars within 
by Shuja Nawaz.
Oxford, 655 pp., £16.99, May 2008, 978 0 19 547660 6
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“... has turned to anger. Old Corruption is back. The country is in the grip of a food and power crisis. Inflation is approaching 15 per cent. The price of gas (used for cooking in many homes) has risen by 30 per cent and the price of wheat by more than 20 per cent since November 2007. Food and commodity prices are rising all over the world, but there is an ...”

Propaganda of the Deed

Steve Fraser: Emma Goldman, 26 February 2009

Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years Vol I: Made for America, 1890-1901 
edited by Candace Falk.
Illinois, 659 pp., $35, August 2008, 978 0 252 07541 4
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Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years Vol. II: Making Speech Free, 1902-1909 
edited by Candace Falk.
Illinois, 641 pp., £35, August 2008, 978 0 252 07543 8
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“... violent frontier culture; in the legacies of slavery and the nativism that treated every immigrant group, beginning with the Irish, with fear and loathing, and in memories of the Civil War which were refreshed with every outbreak of class warfare. But it expressed, above all, how poorly prepared the country’s new business elite was to deal with the social ...”

A Man without Frustration

Raymond Williams, 17 May 1984

Record of a Life: An Autobiography 
by Georg Lukacs, edited by Istvan Eörsi.
Verso, 204 pp., £15, March 1984, 0 86091 071 7
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Lukacs Revalued 
edited by Agnes Heller.
Blackwell, 204 pp., £17.50, September 1983, 0 631 13159 0
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The Young Lukacs 
by Lee Congdon.
North Carolina, 235 pp., £15.75, May 1983, 0 8078 1538 1
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“... of Marxism which is still relatively uncommon in our language. The intricacy of the current international discussion of various phases of his thought contrasts very sharply with the few relatively general impressions which most of us have been able to register, even through careful study of those more readily accessible works which are said to be his ...”

New Deal at Dunkirk

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Wartime Tories, 22 May 2025

Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill and the Second World War 
by Kit Kowol.
Oxford, 336 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 19 886849 1
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“... formed when the second Labour administration collapsed in the wake of the 1931 financial crisis was ‘national’ in name only. It was an example of the sinuous adaptability and capacity for reacting to circumstance that have made the Tories so effective at attaining and retaining power. There has been something called a Tory Party in England since ...”

After the May Day Flood

Seumas Milne, 5 June 1997

“... new powers to choke off such profligacy with higher interest rates. None of this is very new on an international scale. Welfare cuts, privatisation and financial austerity have become the small change of left-of-centre governments over the past 15 years. From the early Eighties, Western European socialist-led administrations – in France, Spain and ...”

Secrets are like sex

Neal Ascherson, 2 April 2020

The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain 
by Richard Norton-Taylor.
I.B. Tauris, 352 pp., £20, March 2019, 978 1 78831 218 9
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“... is very far from won. Why haven’t the complete papers on the 1914 Curragh mutiny – when a group of British officers threatened to resign rather than impose Home Rule on Ulster by force – been made public? Or the papers on the Suez crisis, or on Rudolf Hess’s 1941 flight to Britain? Or on the royal family’s ...”

Imperial Graveyard

Samuel Moyn: Richard Holbrooke, 6 February 2020

Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century 
by George Packer.
Cape, 592 pp., £25, May 2019, 978 1 910702 92 5
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“... of the Soviet Union, when some State Department officials were urging that the US scale down its international involvement, Holbrooke led the charge for doubling down on US hegemony. The centrepiece of his career was the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s. The Western press, following Holbrooke’s own script, anointed him peacemaker of the Balkans, the man ...”

How the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 gave birth to a memorial industry

Norman Finkelstein: Uses of the Holocaust, 6 January 2000

The Holocaust in American Life 
by Peter Novick.
Houghton Mifflin, 320 pp., £16.99, June 1999, 0 395 84009 0
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“... in 1996 and hailed as Time’s ‘most talked about’ book of the year. It has become an international bestseller and its author has become a ubiquitous presence on the Holocaust ‘circuit’.In A Nation on Trial, a book written with Ruth Bettina Birn, I sought to expose the shoddiness of Goldhagen’s book. Birn, an authority on the archives ...”

Dig, Hammer, Spin, Weave

Miles Taylor: Richard Cobden, Class Warrior, 12 March 2009

The Letters of Richard Cobden. Vol. I: 1815-47 
edited by Anthony Howe.
Oxford, 529 pp., £100, November 2007, 978 0 19 921195 1
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“... Hailed as a ‘little Englander’ before the First World War, by 1920 he had become an ‘international man’. In the 1950s, A.J.P. Taylor retrospectively enlisted him as a member of CND, but a decade later he was being pulled in the opposite direction by the free marketeers of the Mont Pélérin Society in Europe and the Foundation for Economic ...”

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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“... the splendours of the court 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 ...”

Low-Hanging Fruit

Francis FitzGibbon: An American Show Trial, 22 January 2015

“... US law and ensure that its funds were not being used for terrorism, or for any specific party or group, but for purely humanitarian purposes. No one at the trial disputed the extent of the human crisis that the HLF sought to alleviate. On the contrary, the former US consul general in Jerusalem (the de facto ambassador to ...”

At Pallant House

Rosemary Hill: On William Nicholson, 7 May 2026

“... is a jewel-like study of a young woman, Bertha, poised unknowingly at a moment of crisis in her life. (It’s interesting not least for what it prefigures of Mrs Dalloway.) Bertha, preparing for a dinner party she will give that evening, arranges the fruit she has ordered: tangerines, ‘apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow ...”

No. 1 Scapegoat

John Foot: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 7 February 2002

Senior Service 
by Carlo Feltrinelli, translated by Alastair McEwen.
Granta, 464 pp., £20, November 2001, 1 86207 456 9
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“... known) also brought together a variety of scholars to discuss the history of the Italian and international working classes. Major figures on the Italian Left, such as Angelo Tasca, a companion of Gramsci in Turin in the early 1920s, and Pietro Secchia, the hard man of the PCI in the 1940s and 1950s, left their papers and even their libraries to the ...”

How Things Should Go

Christine Okoth: Margaret Busby’s Books, 9 July 2026

Part of the Story: Writings from Half a Century 
by Margaret Busby.
Hamish Hamilton, 480 pp., £22, March, 978 0 241 68678 2
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“... how things should go and who should be publicised as important members of this (his) select group’.In a review of Marcy Knopf’s The Sleeper Wakes (1993), a collection of short stories written by African American women in the 1920s and 1930s, Busby points out that women were often excluded from accounts of the Harlem Renaissance. The stories in ...”