The Shoah after Gaza

Pankaj Mishra, 21 March 2024

... claimed that the Jewish state, which sold arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa, embodied white supremacy not democracy. Muhammad Ali saw Palestine as an instance of gross racial injustice. So, today, do the leaders of the United States’s oldest and most prominent Black Christian denominations, who have accused Israel of genocide and asked Biden to ...
... Keep your hair on! in which Jocelyn Stevens, my boss, had invested some money. The sets were by Tony Armstrong-Jones, who was also on the magazine and became a great friend of mine. And I was vaguely given to understand that a good review would be welcome: but I needn’t have worried, because Gallery Nell booed it off the stage. Then I became literary ...

Who will get legal aid now?

Joanna Biggs: Legal Aid, 20 October 2011

... so many of whose front bench were lawyers, consistently attacked solicitors and barristers. Tony Blair (called to the Bar 1976) wanted to ‘derail the gravy train of legal aid’ and Jack Straw (called to the Bar 1972) complained of ‘BMW-driving civil liberties lawyers’. But New Labour’s attack wasn’t on the gravy train: it was on the ...

The Person in the Phone Booth

David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010

... of privacy in public which includes rather than excludes the acknowledgment of strangers. Tony Harrison’s ‘Changing at York’ takes place in a phone booth in York railway station, where he has gone to inform his son that his train has been delayed. The booth is replete with phobic objects and sensations: a vandalised directory, the smell of ...

I’m a Surfer

Steven Shapin: What’s the Genome Worth?, 20 March 2008

A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life 
by Craig Venter.
Allen Lane, 390 pp., £25, October 2007, 978 0 7139 9724 8
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... celebrated Venter as one of America’s ‘Great Innovators’, they elected to pose him wearing a white lab coat on one side and a businessman’s jacket on the other, an admired chimera of scientific knowledge and capitalist entrepreneurship. Venter grew rich through these manoeuvres. In November 1993, he had over 700,000 shares in HGS, worth $9.2 million ...

Hizbullah’s War

Zain Samir, 30 November 2023

... saw fighters in military jeeps or off-road motorbikes. As I approached Aalma El Chaeb, columns of white smoke rose from another Israeli strike, and later, in Dhayra, I could hear the woosh-woosh of an outgoing salvo of rockets. At night, my small hotel in Naqoura shook when an Israeli airstrike targeted a nearby position.The inhabitants of Aalma El Chaeb and ...

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan, 6 March 2025

... and a congregation that includes Geri Halliwell, Bear Grylls, the former John Lewis chair Sharon White and the multi-millionaire Conservative donor Ken Costa.HTB’s approach is rooted less in exegesis than in religious conviction. ‘Enthusiasm is a big part of it,’ according to the writer Andrew Graystone. ‘You believe that your brand of Christianity ...

Quickening, or How to Plot an Abortion

Clair Wills: The Abortion Plot, 16 March 2023

... campaign. But it was also personal. Behind the statistic of 35 deaths a year was the mother of Tony Garnett, Up the Junction’s story editor. She had died of septicaemia following a backstreet abortion in the early 1940s, when Tony was five years old. Nineteen days later his father committed suicide.One of the ...

Diary

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

... in the back garden of a council house a small pavilion has been set up and two figures in the white suits of forensic experts are lumbering in and out of the house. It’s a crime scene, though Jamie, the cheeky grips, suggests it could be quite a small wedding. When we reach the school they tell us it’s a 30-year-old man, an old boy of the school, who ...

Looking Away

Stephen Holmes: Questions of Intervention, 14 November 2002

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide 
by Samantha Power.
Basic Books, 640 pp., £21.99, January 2002, 0 465 06150 8
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War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals 
by David Halberstam.
Bloomsbury, 540 pp., £20, April 2002, 0 7475 5946 5
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... according to Power, the influential American Jewish lobby, galvanised by TV images of emaciated white men behind barbed wire, set to work and put irresistible domestic pressure on the White House. Not universal morality but group politics cut the ice: ‘Jewish survivors and organisations put aside Israel’s feud with ...

Dazed and Confused

Paul Laity: Are the English human?, 28 November 2002

Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 
by Richard Weight.
Macmillan, 866 pp., £25, May 2002, 0 333 73462 9
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Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom 
by Tom Nairn.
Verso, 176 pp., £13, September 2002, 1 85984 657 2
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Identity of England 
by Robert Colls.
Oxford, 422 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 19 924519 3
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Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, October 2002, 1 85619 716 6
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... British state now doomed? No wars against Continental enemies are in prospect; even geography – white cliffs, island fortress – means a lot less than it did. In the absence of any unitary racial or religious self-definition, old loyalties and alignments – Scottishness, Welshness – have emerged from under the ragged counterpane of British ...

The Framing of al-Megrahi

Gareth Peirce: The Death of Justice, 24 September 2009

... bear no trace of explosives. A second suitcase, opened by a Scottish farmer, contained packets of white powder which a local police officer told him was undoubtedly heroin; no heroin was ever recorded as having been discovered. All but two of the labels that Dr Fieldhouse attached to the bodies he found were removed and have never been found. Although the ...

The sea is the same sea

Adam Shatz: Bibi goes to Washington, 30 August 2018

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu 
by Anshel Pfeffer.
Hurst, 423 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 84904 988 7
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... The problem​ with Israel,’ Tony Judt wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2003, is not – as is sometimes suggested – that it is a European ‘enclave’ in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-19th-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law ...

‘J’accuse’: Dreyfus in Our Times

Jacqueline Rose: A Lecture, 10 June 2010

... For Tony Judt What is a collective passion? And is it something we should want, or get excited about? Today the political climate across the Western world is marked, we are told, by a curious and disabling atrophy or disaffection. We do not care enough. The election of Obama would be the exception. His election was of course inspirational, notably in terms of collective life: the mass registration of black voters was close to what might be called the forging of a new political constituency across generation and race ...

Just Two Clicks

Jonathan Raban: The Virtual Life of Neil Entwistle, 14 August 2008

... Engineering with Business Management from York. Rowed throughout my degree – proud to be that white rose. Showed those public school $%^&’s how to do it properly. Making bombs and other stuff for a living – would tell you more but I’d have to kill you. [A reference to his work for QinetiQ.] Getting married to the most amazing woman in the world ...