Unction and Slaughter

Simon Walker: Edward IV, 10 July 2003

Arthurian Myths and Alchemy: The Kingship of Edward IV 
by Jonathan Hughes.
Sutton, 354 pp., £30, October 2002, 0 7509 1994 9
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... typology, Edward’s chosen status could be prefigured by depictions of Moses and the burning bush or of Saul on the road to Damascus – as they are in a striking piece of surviving Yorkist poster art, now in the British Library. In historical terms, Edward was the new Constantine, the British-born Emperor whose victories were preceded by a vision of the ...

Boiling Electrons

David Kaiser, 27 September 2012

Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe 
by George Dyson.
Allen Lane, 401 pp., £25, March 2012, 978 0 7139 9750 7
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... calculation would change for ever. The unlikely setting for the transformation – as detailed in George Dyson’s engaging history – was the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The institute had been founded in 1930 with funding from the department-store magnate Louis Bamberger and his sister, Caroline Bamberger Fuld. Advised by the education ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2005, 5 January 2006

... she is accompanying the Italian president to London to meet Jack Straw and she also translated for Bush on his visit to Italy last year. The library at the British Council is busy and full of students who only leave when it closes at 8 p.m., and seeing these young Italians reading English books and magazines, watching videos and generally finding this a ...

The Fire This Time

John Sutherland, 28 May 1992

... 81 seconds of their beating of King had been videotaped by a resident in a nearby apartment, George Holliday. What Holliday did with the tape was momentous. He did not hand it over to the Police. Had he done so, there would have been an internal tribunal, and most likely some stern disciplinary action. There might also have been judicial control over the ...

Permanent Temporariness

Alastair Crooke: The Palestine Papers, 3 March 2011

... ground and President Arafat to ensure broad participation and continued momentum – were passé. We were in a new era, and it required new thinking: ‘The road to Jerusalem now passes through Baghdad,’ the official insisted. He was speaking just before the 2003 invasion. The message was clear: the Islamic resistance in Palestine was to be neutralised, and ...

A chemistry is performed

Deborah Friedell: Silicon Valley Girl, 7 February 2019

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup 
by John Carreyrou.
Picador, 320 pp., £9.99, March 2019, 978 1 5098 6808 7
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... would say into their mouthpieces: ‘Eagle One is on the move’? She would tell her investors: ‘We’re in a market for people who don’t like having a needle stuck in their arm.’ That is: her market was everyone who isn’t a masochist. She would say that doctors make treatment decisions based on blood tests – that’s inescapable. But what if you ...

Phew!

E.S. Turner, 11 June 1992

Sunny Intervals and Showers: Our Changing Weather 
by David Benedictus.
Weidenfeld, 162 pp., £14.99, April 1992, 0 297 81154 1
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... to do that sort of thing in the music halls.)Gradually, it emerges that Mr Benedictus worries, as we all do, about the way the weather is going, though he does not let it get him down. Today, he says, every journalist is a scientist and every scientist is a scaremonger. He warns against the practice of speaking airily about ‘the hottest day since ...’ or ...

In His White Uniform

Rosemary Hill: Accidental Gods, 10 February 2022

Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine 
by Anna Della Subin.
Granta, 462 pp., £20, January 2022, 978 1 78378 501 8
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... 1931 as his text, Howell announced that a white prince (the Duke of Gloucester, who represented George V at the coronation) had bowed before the Black king. ‘We of the black race are now free.’ Haile Selassie was, he said, the Black Messiah. Events unfolded from this point in a way that becomes familiar as Subin’s ...

Why did he risk it?

Ross McKibbin: Blair, Brown and the US, 3 April 2003

... Whether we agree with it or not, there was always a plausible argument for intervention in Iraq. The Prime Minister might, therefore, have fewer problems with public opinion in the future than he does now. The important political question to be asked is not whether his policy is right or wrong – that is a rather different ethical and moral question – but why a man usually so risk-averse was prepared to take so many risks with the unity of the Labour Party ...

Kindred Spirits

Chloe Hooper: To be Tasmanian, 18 August 2005

In Tasmania 
by Nicholas Shakespeare.
Harvill, 320 pp., £20, November 2004, 1 84343 157 2
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... On the final turn-off a car full of teenagers gave one-fingered salutes, honking their horn until we were out of sight. One of the strengths of Nicholas Shakespeare’s In Tasmania is that he comes from an island far away. He can play the part of a baffled British visitor, asking awkward questions which land him right at the heart of the most sensitive ...

Diary

Robin Blackburn: In Haiti, 8 October 2009

... shacks. His distrust of the police, someone said, was disturbing, but our fears proved groundless. We eventually reached our hotel, a palace of light, without any problem. Port-au-Prince is obviously very poor – more than half the population live in bidonvilles – but it is also vibrant and colourful, in the way such places often are, with kerbside ...

How much is he to blame?

John Lloyd, 7 July 1994

The View from the Kremlin 
by Boris Yeltsin, translated by Catharine Fitzpatrick.
HarperCollins, 316 pp., £18, May 1994, 0 00 255544 1
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... done unless it would be useful to someone in high position. The normal processes of government as we understand them in the West do not exist. Yeltsin benefits from this: as long as he has the Army and the intelligence services on his side, he can disappear from view for long periods almost as easily as Leonid Brezhnev could, claiming ill-health or ...

The Edges of Life

Jeremy Waldron, 12 May 1994

Life’s Dominion: An Argument about Abortion and Euthanasia 
by Ronald Dworkin.
HarperCollins, 273 pp., £17.50, May 1993, 0 394 58941 6
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... rain forests, sometimes claim that they do. The forests, they say, have been here much longer than we have, and have as much right to exist as the rapacious human species that is destroying them. Arguing that trees have rights is their way of insisting that there is something to be said on the trees’ behalf in environmental disputes, quite apart from what ...

Keys to the World

Tom Stevenson: Sea Power, 8 September 2022

The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans 
by David Bosco.
Oxford, 320 pp., £22.99, April, 978 0 19 026564 9
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Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order In World War Two 
by Paul Kennedy.
Yale, 521 pp., £25, May, 978 0 300 21917 3
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... freedom at sea, just as Britain once did. Under the Proliferation Security Initiative launched by George Bush in 2003, the US Navy has interdicted, boarded and searched ships as a matter of course. In December 2020, the US military published an official strategy document titled ‘Advantage at Sea’ which claimed that American sea power had assured ...

Beijing Envy

Joshua Kurlantzick: China in Africa, 5 July 2007

China and Africa: Engagement and Compromise 
by Ian Taylor.
Routledge, 233 pp., £75, August 2006, 0 415 39740 5
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China and the Developing World: Beijing’s Strategy for the 21st Century 
edited by Joshua Eisenman, Eric Heginbotham and Derek Mitchell.
Sharpe, 232 pp., $29.95, April 2007, 978 0 7656 1713 2
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China’s African Policy 
Foreign Ministry of the People’s Republic of China, January 2006Show More
China’s Expanding Role in Africa: Implications for the United States 
by Bates Gill, Chin-hao Huang and J. Stephen Morrison.
Centre for Strategic and International Studies, February 2007
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Friends and Interests: China’s Distinctive Links with Africa 
by Barry Sautman.
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, April 2006
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African Perspectives on China in Africa 
edited by Firoze Manji and Stephen Marks.
Fahamu, 174 pp., £11.95, March 2007, 978 0 9545637 3 8
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Africa’s Silk Road: China and India’s New Economic Frontier 
by Harry Broadman.
World Bank, 391 pp., $20, November 2006, 0 8213 6835 4
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... peacekeepers now serve there. Senior Chinese leaders have been making two visits a year to Africa (George Bush has not visited the continent during his second term), and last November nearly every African leader attended a major summit in Beijing. China’s poor labour standards, environmental policies and human rights failings were once issues only for ...