God’s Godfather

Douglas Johnson, 6 October 1983

God’s Banker: An Account of the Life and Death of Roberto Calvi 
by Rupert Cornwell.
Gollancz, 260 pp., £8.95, September 1983, 0 575 03351 7
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A Man of Honour: The Autobiography of a Godfather 
by Joseph Bonnano and Sergio Lalli.
Deutsch, 416 pp., £9.95, September 1983, 0 233 97609 4
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The Biggest Game in Town 
by A. Alvarez.
Deutsch, 186 pp., £8.95, September 1983, 0 233 97521 7
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... up the greater part of the Italian establishment; amongst its members were the military and secret service hierarchies, the leaders of the judiciary, the police, the civil service, as well as prominent politicians and industrialists. There was a direct link between P-2 and Calvi, and it was clear that the affairs of the ...

Bob Hawke’s Australia

Michael Davie, 6 October 1983

... day that the election was called, Hayden was the Labor leader. He was dumped after years of loyal service on the grounds that he was uninspiring whereas Hawke, although he had been an MP for only three years, was a born vote-getter. Hawke’s rise has been phenomenal. Before he became an MP, with his hooded eyes firmly fixed on the Prime Minister’s job, he ...

Sahib and Son

J.I.M. Stewart, 22 December 1983

‘Oh Beloved Kids’: Rudyard Kipling’s Letters to his Children 
edited by Elliot Gilbert.
Weidenfeld, 225 pp., £10.95, October 1983, 0 297 78296 7
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... I haven’t found anybody interesting yet. There are not many young people and the small ‘Robert’ (who calls himself ‘Wob’) doesn’t mind accepting a box of bricks (bought at the barber’s) from me but he doesn’t want me to help to play with ’em. I tried yesterday. ‘Wob’ stood it as long as he could. Then he screwed up his face, and ...

Magnanimity

Richard Altick, 3 December 1981

The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman 
by Mark Girouard.
Yale, 312 pp., £12.50, September 1981, 0 300 02739 7
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... Courtesy, gentleness, honour, physical valour, mercifulness, generosity, sexual purity, devoted service to women, consideration for the oppressed – mortal man could scarcely accommodate more virtues than these. Although Burke, in his famous lament over Marie Antoinette, had declared, ‘The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and ...

Bush’s Useful Idiots

Tony Judt: Whatever happened to American liberalism?, 21 September 2006

... Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style ...

The Mild Torture Economy

Carl Elliott: Clinical Trials, 23 September 2010

Medical Research for Hire: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Clinical Trials 
by Jill Fisher.
Rutgers, 257 pp., £23.50, January 2009, 978 0 8135 4410 6
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When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects 
by Adriana Petryna.
Princeton, 258 pp., £18.95, June 2009, 978 0 691 12657 9
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The Professional Guinea Pig: Big Pharma and the Risky World of Human Subjects 
by Roberto Abadie.
Duke, 184 pp., £15.99, October 2010, 978 0 8223 4823 8
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... trial volunteer from ‘guinea pig’ to ‘medical hero’. CISCRP has produced a slick public service announcement; it is sponsoring ‘clinical research education days’ all over America; and it is distributing posters, DVDs and shiny ‘Medical Hero’ badges to research subjects. Apparently the strategy is working: subject recruitment is up in areas ...

This Guilty Land

Eric Foner: Every Possible Lincoln, 17 December 2020

Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times 
by David S. Reynolds.
Penguin, 1066 pp., £33.69, September, 978 1 59420 604 7
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The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the Struggle for American Freedom 
by H.W. Brands.
Doubleday, 445 pp., £24, October, 978 0 385 54400 9
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... He writes that Lincoln ‘associated himself’ with colonisation, a weak way of describing his service on the Board of Managers of the Illinois Colonisation Society and his numerous speeches and presidential messages promoting the policy. At a notorious 1862 meeting with a group of free African Americans, Lincoln urged his listeners to encourage emigration ...

Staying Alive in the Ruins

Richard J. Evans: Plato to Nato, 22 April 2021

Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after World War Two 
by Paul Betts.
Profile, 536 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 1 78816 109 1
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... German race, such as one ought not to expect to find in a people who for generations have paid lip-service to Western culture and civilisation’. When the surviving German war criminals were put on trial at Nuremberg, the American prosecutor Robert Jackson told the judges that ‘the real complaining party at your bar is ...

What’s Good for India

Akshi Singh: Good for Tata, 4 April 2024

Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism 
by Mircea Raianu.
Harvard, 291 pp., £35.95, July 2021, 978 0 674 98451 6
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... the Tata conglomerate from its origins in 19th-century trade to its primacy in the manufacturing, service and trade sectors in postcolonial India, Raianu paints a more ambiguous portrait. The business was started by Nusserwanji Tata, the son of a revenue clerk in Bombay. He was a Parsi – Zoroastrians whose ancestors migrated to India from the Persian Gulf ...

So South Kensington

Julian Bell: Walter Sickert, 20 September 2001

The Complete Writings on Art 
by Walter Sickert, edited by Anna Gruetzner Robins.
Oxford, 699 pp., £90, September 2000, 0 19 817225 7
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... over what might properly be sold as etchings; after Whistler’s death he offered an advisory service, through the Times correspondence columns, as to the authenticity of canvases put forward with Whistler’s signature. Ferociously confident in his technicalities and trenchant in his definitions, Sickert must have made a nasty adversary. A more amenable ...

Dadada

Vadim Nikitin: Chasing the Cybercriminals, 21 November 2024

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks 
by Scott J. Shapiro.
Penguin, 420 pp., £10.99, May 2024, 978 0 14 199384 3
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... that hacked the British Library, represent a booming cybercrime industry known as ransomware as a service (RAAS). Healthcare facilities are popular targets because of the enormous amount of personal data they hold. In August 2023, Rhysida attacked Prospect Medical Holdings, a US company operating sixteen hospitals and 166 outpatient clinics. Having stolen ...

To Serve My Friends

Jonathan Parry, 27 January 2022

Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and Its Empire, 1600-1850 
by Mark Knights.
Oxford, 488 pp., £35, December 2021, 978 0 19 879624 4
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... 1600, political offices were usually seen as the property of the monarch, bestowed as a reward for service. Many offices were unpaid, but most conferred social capital of various kinds and also carried the expectation of profit, to be obtained through the collection of fees and opportunities for patronage.The aim of Mark Knights’s book is to explain why ...

I came with a sword

Toril Moi: Simone Weil’s Way, 1 July 2021

The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas 
by Robert Zaretsky.
Chicago, 181 pp., £16, February 2021, 978 0 226 54933 0
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... the pain of others. They are, rather, about the complete eradication of the self in the service of the afflicted, who, precisely because of their affliction, have already had their own subjectivity obliterated. Weil’s only loving interlocutor is God.What about​ Weil’s ideas? There is no disputing their importance. Her thinking about ...

When Ireland Became Divided

Garret FitzGerald: The Free State’s Fight for Recognition, 21 January 1999

Documents on Irish Foreign Policy. Vol. I: 1919-22 
edited by Ronan Fanning.
Royal Irish Academy and Department of Foreign Affairs, 548 pp., £30, October 1998, 1 874045 63 1
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... engaged in these efforts later became prominent members of the new Irish state’s diplomatic service. Joe Walshe, for example, who was Secretary of the Department of External Affairs from 1922 until 1946; Michael MacWhite, who had served in the French Foreign Legion during the Great War and was Irish Permanent Representative to the League of Nations in ...

Peeping Tam

Karl Miller, 6 August 1981

... Robert Burns wrote about art, friendship, religion, animals, drink, marriage and love. The First two and the last of these themes – poetry, sociability and sexual adventure, to call them by other names – commemorate activities which enabled him in youth, as did his drinking, to face the prospect of a lifetime’s hard labour on the land ...