After Kemal

Perry Anderson, 25 September 2008

... with Menderes’s, Demirel’s brand of populism ended in larger deficits, higher inflation, wider black markets and lower growth. Deteriorating economic conditions were compounded by increasing civil violence, as the far right stepped up its campaign against the left, and a medley of revolutionary groups hit back. Worst affected were Alevis – communities ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... from far away, except that these ‘outsiders’ were born far away in time, rather than space. Ian McEwan openly expressed the motif last year when he looked forward to a more liberal future Britain in 2019, cleansed of ‘1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves’. It’s odd, and not just because McEwan, at 69, isn’t exactly a ...

The Satoshi Affair

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 June 2016

... my independence. This would become an issue later on with MacGregor and Matthews, or the men in black, as I’d taken to calling them, but for those first few months, nobody asked me to sign anything and nobody refused me access. Mysteries would open up, and some would remain, but there seemed no mystery about the fact that these people were confident that ...

The Price of Safety

Clair Wills: Constance Marten’s Defiance, 14 August 2025

... their baby: Constance Marten, a white woman aged 35, and her partner, Mark Gordon, a 48-year-old black man. The story became headline news. Photographs of the couple and appeals for information were broadcast on the BBC, Sky and ITV, and published in all the national papers. As Gordon’s defence barrister later put it, the story ‘captivated the ...

Where are we now?

LRB Contributors: Responses to the Referendum, 14 July 2016

... John Knox’s church drew its theological ideas from constant European travel, the movement of black-clad divines between Edinburgh and the Calvinist centres in Geneva, the Netherlands and Germany.The third attempt to turn the white cliffs into a red line is the farce we are watching now. The battle of Brexit came about not because of any serious demand ...

The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett, 8 March 2007

... reaches of the palace or wherever so that it could be satisfyingly torn apart. The James Tait Black prize notwithstanding Ian McEwan had ended up like this and even A.S. Byatt. Patron of the London Library though she was Her Majesty regularly found herself on the phone apologising to the renewals clerk for the loss of ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... him – its editor, Alan Rusbridger, showed concern for his position, as did the then deputy, Ian Katz, and others – but he talked about its journalists in savage terms. The Guardian felt strongly that the secret material ought to be redacted to protect informants or bystanders named in it, and Julian was inconsistent about that. I never believed he ...