Imitation Democracy

Perry Anderson: Post-Communist States, 27 August 2015

... among the Soviet republics, the RSFSR had no party or academy of its own, yet its demographic weight ensured Russian dominance of the union as a whole, in a hierarchy that was always unequal. In the 1930s, script and teaching in sister republics were Russified; yet at the same time, local languages were fostered, and a panoply of institutions created ...

Somerdale to Skarbimierz

James Meek, 20 April 2017

... the early years his cocoa got a warrant from Queen Victoria but by 1861, when his sons George and Richard took over the factory, now in different premises, the business was on the brink. A new product the Cadburys had been counting on to turn things around, a drink called Iceland Moss, made of cocoa mixed with lichen, failed to find favour with the public.The ...

Russia’s Managed Democracy

Perry Anderson: Why Putin?, 25 January 2007

... Kremlin Rising, that puts the palliators of the Financial Times to shame.2 Among historians, Richard Pipes, at one with Malia in hostility to Communism, but in temperament and outlook the all but complete opposite, has struck a characteristically dissonant note. Whereas Malia believed it was essentially the First World War that blew Russia off course ...

Different Speeds, Same Furies

Perry Anderson: Powell v. Proust, 19 July 2018

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hamish Hamilton, 509 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 241 14383 4
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... under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a ...

After Kemal

Perry Anderson, 25 September 2008

... generally held to be European racism and Islamophobia, or the prospect of the country’s future weight in the European Council as its largest member. Perhaps equally relevant, though less often mentioned, is the calculation that if Turkey is admitted, it will be difficult to refuse entry to Ukraine: not quite as large, but more democratic, with a higher per ...

You Muddy Fools

Dan Jacobson: In the months before his death Ian Hamilton talked about himself to Dan Jacobson, 14 January 2002

... an order’.So critical judgment had to give way to Air Force regulations.Very much so. The entire weight of Nato was behind him. Several years later I wrote to Harold asking for a contribution to the magazine in Oxford and mentioning that incident. He’d heard about it in the way that one would, because at that age, starting out, one hears of ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... in the flats above and below don’t even know there’s been a fire. This was something else.’ Richard Welsh is a senior officer with the London Fire Brigade. His pager went off at 1.18 a.m. ‘Initially they had six machines there,’ he said. ‘Then they asked for eight, and then ten, and then 15, 20, and then 25. I’m hearing that on the way there, so ...