Glasnost

John Barber, 29 October 1987

Socialism, Peace and Democracy: Writings, Speeches and Reports 
by Mikhail Gorbachev.
Zwan, 210 pp., £14.95, October 1987, 1 85305 011 3
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Gorbachev 
by Zhores Medvedev.
Blackwell, 314 pp., £5.95, May 1987, 0 631 15880 4
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The Sixth Continent: Russia and Mikhail Gorbachov 
by Mark Frankland.
Hamish Hamilton, 292 pp., £12.95, June 1987, 0 241 12122 1
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Shadows and Whispers: Power Politics inside the Kremlin from Brezhnev to Gorbachev 
by Dusko Doder.
Harrap, 349 pp., £12.95, July 1987, 0 245 54577 8
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Pravda: Inside the Soviet News Machine 
by Angus Roxburgh.
Gollancz, 285 pp., £16.95, May 1987, 0 575 03734 2
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Utopia in Power: A History of the USSR from 1917 to the Present 
by Michel Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich.
Hutchinson, 877 pp., £25, August 1987, 0 09 155620 1
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... that glasnost is sweeping all before it. Taboo subjects may be fewer, but they exist and involve major features of Soviet life. The press has yet to discuss the role of the KGB in Soviet society, or the promotion and sacking of Politburo members, or the condition of the hundreds of political prisoners. It has hardly begun to reveal the substantial ...

Fathers and Sons

John Lloyd, 6 March 1997

Informer 001: The Myth of Pavlik Morozov 
by Yuri Druzhnikov.
Transaction, 200 pp., £19.95, February 1997, 1 56000 283 2
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... were still called after Pavlik Morozov, and the patriotic writer Alexander Prokhanov – a major influence on the present leadership of the Russian Communist Party – invoked his exemplary character in his famous novel of the Afghan campaign, A Tree in the Centre of Kabul, published in the early Eighties. This was the time when Druzhnikov was ...

Nonetheless

John Bayley, 2 February 1989

The Lost Voices of World War One: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets and Playwrights 
edited by Tim Cross.
Bloomsbury, 406 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 0 7475 0276 5
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Poems 
by Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger.
Anvil, 350 pp., £15.95, January 1989, 0 85646 198 9
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Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War Two Aviator 
by Samuel Hynes.
Bloomsbury, 270 pp., £13.95, November 1988, 0 7475 0333 8
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... as in old bound copies of the Sphere or Graphic magazines. ‘The war of 1914-1918 became a major cultural event,’ as the Introduction rightly observes. Some of the best excerpts are from Charles Péguy: from the Vers libre of Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc and from his attack on the ‘socialist art’ advocated by ...

Triumphalism

John Campbell, 19 December 1985

The Kitchener Enigma 
by Trevor Royle.
Joseph, 436 pp., £15, September 1985, 0 7181 2385 9
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Kitchener: The Man behind the Legend 
by Philip Warner.
Hamish Hamilton, 247 pp., £12.95, August 1985, 0 241 11587 6
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... military administration of India. He was lucky that his reputation survived South Africa. The one major engagement he fought there, at Paardeburg, he tried to win by the same methods that had worked at Omdurman. Overriding the advice of the more experienced general on the spot that the besieged Boers could more economically be starved into ...

The Elstree Story

John Gau, 7 August 1986

The Last Days of the Beeb 
by Michael Leapman.
Allen and Unwin, 229 pp., £12.95, June 1986, 0 04 791043 7
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... to which it had grown accustomed. For years now the BBC has been unable to fund by itself the major drama and documentary series. Producers must wait on tenterhooks for money to be raised from foreign broadcasters before they can see their ideas turned into reality. So it has no longer been possible to sustain the organisation and all its activities ...

What shall we look into now?

John Ziman, 21 May 1987

The Advancement of Science and its Burdens 
by Gerald Holton.
Cambridge, 351 pp., £27.50, October 1986, 9780521252447
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... On the contrary, the advancement of science and its associated technologies is seen by many as the major threat to both freedom of speech and freedom from fear – if not to freedom of worship. In any case, somebody has to decide what problems ought to be tackled. That somebody has to have a very long purse. Science is much too expensive to be undertaken out ...

The Browse Function

John Sutherland, 27 November 1997

Webonomics: Nine Essential Principles for Growing Your Business on the World Wide Web 
by Evan Schwartz.
Penguin, 244 pp., £11.99, October 1997, 9780140264067
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... leader by traditional, and legitimately predatory, commercial practices over many decades. Its major expansion came with the ‘chaining’ of US bookshops in the Eighties. The UK usually lags behind America in retail bookselling so this process is only now underway in Britain, with Waterstone’s assault on W.H. Smith. In historical terms, a late ...

Exaggerated Ambitions

Stefan Collini: The Case for Studying Literature, 1 December 2022

Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organisation of Literary Study 
by John Guillory.
Chicago, 391 pp., £24, November 2022, 978 0 226 82130 6
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... Middlemarch, this ‘line of work is very deep indeed’.Few are better suited to this work than John Guillory, the deep man’s deep man. His Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, published in 1993, is one of the most admired and influential studies in the humanities in recent decades. The hallmark of his work has been to engage ...

Post-Humanism

Alex Zwerdling, 15 October 1987

The Failure of Theory: Essays on Criticism and Contemporary Theory 
by Patrick Parrinder.
Harvester, 225 pp., £28.50, April 1987, 0 7108 1129 2
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... of working assumptions that enables critical commentary? In Patrick Parrinder’s account of this major change in contemporary culture, the theorist is seen as a presumptuous upstart who has forgotten his place. The traditional role of the critic is to act as middleman between author and reader – ‘making sense’ of difficult or elusive novels, poems and ...

Famous Four

R.W. Johnson, 30 November 1995

SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party 
by Ivor Crewe and Anthony King.
Oxford, 611 pp., £25, November 1995, 0 19 828050 5
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... indeed a general disassembling of Labour’s old class coalition, and the possibility of a major schism as the successful meritocrats inevitably broke away. Even allowing for the fact that they represented a more substantial group of meritocrats in the electorate at large, could Labour’s meritocrats possibly provide the basis for a new party? One ...

Introspection and the Body

P.N. Johnson-Laird, 5 March 1987

William James: His Life and Thought 
by Gerald Myers.
Yale, 628 pp., £30, October 1986, 0 300 03417 2
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... his children. During a period in England, he introduced them to the likes of Carlyle, Tennyson and John Stuart Mill. He expressed himself in a characteristically Jamesian way: ‘I will not attempt to state the year in which I was born, because it is not a fact embraced in my own knowledge, but content myself with saying instead, that the earliest event of my ...
The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes: Vols I-II 
edited by Thomas Hobbes and Noel Malcolm.
Oxford, 592 pp., £60, September 1994, 0 19 824065 1
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... Huygens. In them he dismisses Hobbes’s claim to have transformed geometry by a number of major discoveries, such as that the value of pi is the square root of ten, as ‘absurd childish nonsense’. Hobbes believed geometry was the queen of sciences because nobody contested the truth of geometrical proofs. It must have been deeply embarrassing for ...

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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... about our recent cyber incident’.As you may be aware, we are currently experiencing a major technology outage as a result of a cyber attack. Following confirmation that this was a ransomware attack, we’re aware that some data have been leaked. While this appears to be from our internal HR files, we recommend that if you have a British Library ...

Read it on the autobahn

Robert Macfarlane: Vanishing Victorians, 18 December 2003

The Discovery of Slowness 
by Sten Nadolny, translated by Ralph Freedman.
Canongate, 311 pp., £10.99, September 2003, 1 84195 403 9
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... John Franklin (1786-1847) was the most famous vanisher of the Victorian era. He joined the Navy as a midshipman at the age of 14, and fought in the battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar. When peace with the French broke out, he turned his attention to Arctic exploration, and in particular to solving the conundrum of the Northwest Passage, the mythical clear-water route which would, if it existed, link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans above the northern coast of the American continent ...

The Vice President’s Men

Seymour M. Hersh, 24 January 2019

... In May 1983 he was promoted to assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey, and over the next couple of years he oversaw a secret team – operating in part out of the office of Daniel Murphy, Bush’s chief of staff – which quietly conducted at least 35 covert operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and, most ...