Bill and Dick’s Excellent Adventure

Christopher Hitchens, 20 February 1997

Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties 
by Dick Morris.
Random House, 382 pp., $25.95, January 1997, 9780679457473
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... I will do and what I won’t do. Fourthly, he’s full of new ideas all the time. And, finally, we’ve been together so long that he not only understands me, I understand him. This says a good deal about both men. One is a big Babbitt; a Babbitt on a global scale. The other is a Babbitt more in the Osric mould: a tenth-rater who knows how to make himself ...

Poor Khaled

Robert Fisk, 3 December 1992

... Khaled was important. For the Gulf War, after massive arms purchases from the West had discredited George Bush’s promise to reduce the level of weapons in the Middle East, ended as a net profit to the Western alliance, fought by young men from Glasgow and Detroit but paid for by the man who likes to call himself the ‘Guardian of the Two Holy ...

Savage Rush

David Trotter: The Tube, 21 October 2010

Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf 
by David Welsh.
Liverpool, 306 pp., £70, May 2010, 978 1 84631 223 6
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... you to wonder where you might be. The bit of the journey with not a lot to look at is the bit we tend to remember (55 per cent of the London Underground system runs above ground). Dull, unforgiving tunnels exacerbate our awareness of the time that still remains before space will once again resume with a welcome savage rush. And there’s a further, even ...

What Nanny Didn’t Tell Me

Bernard Porter: Simon Mann, 26 January 2012

Cry Havoc 
by Simon Mann.
John Blake, 351 pp., £19.99, November 2011, 978 1 84358 403 2
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... now likes to call herself’ – while he was in jail. Mann’s account doesn’t add much to what we know about the attempted coup; in some respects it tells us less than Adam Roberts’s excellent The Wonga Coup.* Roberts names more names than Mann does, including Jeffrey Archer’s (he may have donated money), and gives some broad hints as to the identity ...

Diary

Andrew Saint: Foscolo’s Grave, 20 September 2007

... is no sculpture to it, and Marochetti died in 1867. As for those undisciplined evergreens, neither bush nor tree, bickering and collapsing shapelessly into one another, were they really cypresses, deformed from their true Italian straightness and nobility? The church was open but the verger could not tell me: ‘To me a tree is just a tree.’ Chaotic in ...

Give me the man

Stephen Holmes: The pursuit of Clinton, 18 March 1999

Sexual McCarthyism: Clinton, Starr and the Emerging Constitutional Crisis 
by Alan Dershowitz.
Basic Books, 275 pp., £15.95, January 1999, 0 465 01628 6
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The Case against Lameduck Impeachment 
by Bruce Ackerman.
Seven Stories, 80 pp., $8, February 1999, 1 58322 004 6
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... will inevitably collapse.’ So what would yesterday’s doomsayers have us expect today? Must we now kiss goodbye to the deterrent value of perjury law? Should we really pack our bags, fold our tents and prepare for American liberty to expire and the American legal system to crumble into dust? However preposterous this ...

Not No Longer but Not Yet

Jenny Turner: Mark Fisher’s Ghosts, 9 May 2019

k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 
edited by Darren Ambrose.
Repeater, 817 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 1 912248 28 5
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... ball, but once you leave hospital, the GP becomes your access to any help,’ she explained. ‘We fell foul of a lot of reforms that have taken place.’ Fisher was 48 when he died, ‘an influential writer, music blogger and university lecturer’, the Ipswich Star reported, who taught in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths in South-East ...

What are judges for?

Conor Gearty, 25 January 2001

... Stewart Parnell before the Special Commission set up after publication in the Times of what we now know as the Pigott forgeries. (These were documents which quite wrongly linked Parnell to the murder in 1882 of two leading members of the British Administration in Ireland.) The Commission was a ruse devised to destroy Parnell’s reputation, and one into ...

Pavilion of Heaven

Ferdinand Mount: Adventures of Raffles, 2 April 2026

Raffles, Gentleman Thief 
by E.W. Hornung.
Penguin, 304 pp., £10.99, January, 978 0 241 79022 9
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Writers in Whites: How a Group of Literary Cricketers Changed English Culture 
by Ollie Randall.
Fairfield, 288 pp., £22, May, 978 1 915237 74 3
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... ever since he was his fag at school. Raffles calms him down and tells him that he is broke too: ‘We’re in the same boat, Bunny; we’d better pull together.’ And so begins their rackety partnership in crime, with repeatedly calamitous results: the rewards of their villainy are scant, the fences with whom they deal ...

Secrets are best kept by those who have no sense of humour

Alan Bennett: Why I turned down ‘Big Brother’, 2 January 2003

... doctor (Roger Livesey) had been shot at Shere, a picturesque hamlet below Newlands Corner where we’d sometimes go on walks. Livesey watches the goings-on in the village via a camera obscura, though why he does this isn’t explained or the workings of the device either, which must have mystified most people at the time. The notion of eavesdropping keeps ...

What does China want?

Jonathan Steele: China in the Stans, 24 October 2013

Restless Valley: Revolution, Murder and Intrigue in the Heart of Central Asia 
by Philip Shishkin.
Yale, 316 pp., £20, June 2013, 978 0 300 18436 5
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The Chinese Question in Central Asia: Domestic Order, Social Change and the Chinese Factor 
by Marlène Laruelle and Sébastien Peyrouse.
Hurst, 271 pp., £40, October 2012, 978 1 84904 179 9
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... excitement but were then alarmed at the chaotic transition to crony capitalism under Yeltsin: ‘We came to Moscow as political correspondents. We leave as crime reporters.’ The ex-Soviet Central Asian republics travelled a similar path from one-party authoritarianism to a highly corrupt form of the market but – with ...

Diary

Tom Stevenson: Human Remains 629667, 19 November 2015

... and ruled by repressive regimes. Washington has sponsored one military coup after another. George Kennan sketched out the programme in 1950, promising ‘coercive measures which can impress other governments with the danger of antagonising us’. In 1961 a strategy note prepared for Kennedy by the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised: ‘Latin Americans must ...

Into the Future

David Trotter: The Novel, 22 March 2007

The Novel: Vol. I: History, Geography and Culture 
edited by Franco Moretti.
Princeton, 916 pp., £65, June 2006, 0 691 04947 5
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The Novel: Vol. II: Forms and Themes 
edited by Franco Moretti.
Princeton, 950 pp., £65, June 2006, 0 691 04948 3
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... the Great Tradition, texts as unlike each other, and as unlike Emma, as Pilgrim’s Progress and W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. No one’s arguing about Emma. But Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegorical dream-vision; while Green Mansions (a story set in the forests of western Guyana featuring a female spirit-presence, a lost tribe, and enough ...

Whoosh

Jenny Turner: Eat the Document, 7 June 2007

Eat the Document 
by Dana Spiotta.
Picador, 290 pp., £12.99, April 2007, 978 0 330 44828 4
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... find this sort of avoidance common. Also, the narrative stops at around the millennium, short of Bush, Iraq, 9/11, the war on terror. This gives it a peculiar time-lapse quality, as noticeable in its pop references as in its thoughts on bombs and bombing: who, since the massive record release and tour of 2004, could now think of Smile as ‘lost’? An even ...

In New York

Hal Foster: Plans for Ground Zero, 20 March 2003

... for New Yorkers: an empathic connection was forged with many families of the victims, and Governor George Pataki, perhaps the biggest fish in this particular pond (he controlled the selection of the LMDC), also swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. Eventually, two finalists were announced: Libeskind and Think (Viñoly, Frederick Schwartz, Ken Smith and Shigeru ...