The Mayor Economy

Nathan Sperber: China’s Mayor Economy, 7 March 2024

The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism 
by Keyu Jin.
Swift Press, 360 pp., £25, July 2023, 978 1 80075 384 6
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... there is another explanation for economic statism in today’s China. It has to do with the self-propelling dynamic of capital accumulation. The most recent data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics put the number of state-controlled enterprises at 362,000 in 2022 (up from 227,000 in 2013). A recent study cited in Jin’s work, led by an ...

That Damn Smooth Stuff

Jefferson Cowie: Louisiana Demagogue, 19 March 2026

American Populist: Huey Long of Louisiana 
by Thomas E. Patterson.
Louisiana State, 704 pp., £43, February 2025, 978 0 8071 8299 4
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... is only rarely about class in a direct way. Its left-wing version does not necessarily entail self-organisation by the working classes but their mobilisation by a populist champion. Patterson honours Long’s work for the people, but he fails to recognise the effectiveness of populism at filling the gaps in periods and places where class representation is ...

Short Cuts

Jan-Werner Müller: Orbán’s Fall, 7 May 2026

... and just 52 of the 199 seats in the National Assembly.Over the past sixteen years, Orbán’s self-declared ‘illiberal’ regime had pioneered methods for entrenching far-right populism in power. In 2010, Hungary’s electoral system had delivered Fidesz a two-thirds parliamentary majority, which he used to pass a new constitution, staff the state ...

Bumper Book of Death

Frank Kermode, 1 October 1981

The Hour of Our Death 
by Philippe Ariès, translated by Helen Weaver.
Allen Lane, 651 pp., £14.95, July 1981, 0 7139 1207 3
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... to die without knowing it – for example, in sleep. The second phase is that of the Death of the Self. The individual begins to conceive of his death as personal, and as preceding an intimate accounting with God. Elaborate wills, giving among other things detailed instructions for the disposal of the body, for masses, tombs and epitaphs, accompanied a new ...

Good Books

Marghanita Laski, 1 October 1981

The Promise of Happiness 
by Fred Inglis.
Cambridge, 333 pp., £17.50, March 1981, 0 521 23142 6
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The Child and the Book 
by Nicholas Tucker.
Cambridge, 259 pp., £15, March 1981, 0 521 23251 1
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The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction 
by J.S. Bratton.
Croom Helm, 230 pp., £11.95, July 1981, 0 07 099777 2
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Children’s Literature. Vol. IX 
edited by Francelia Butler, Samuel Pickering, Milla Riggio and Barbara Rosen.
Yale, 241 pp., £17.35, March 1981, 0 300 02623 4
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The ‘Signal’ Approach to Children’s Books 
edited by Nancy Chambers.
Kestrel, 352 pp., £12.50, September 1980, 0 7226 5641 6
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... of conformity glorifying physical power, simplicity of speech and mind, softness of feeling, and self-satisfaction with the state not of manliness, but of being a boy’. Again, we must bear fashion in mind. These childish readers, when grown to rule the Empire, seemed to Santayana the sweetest young boyish masters the world had ever seen. The critics ...

Wordsworth in Love

Jonathan Wordsworth, 15 October 1981

... for her ‘sunny benignity’ and ‘graceful radiance’, and even referred to her as ‘a second self of the poet’, but biographers have until now had little to put beside the colourful relationships with Annette and Dorothy. Mary, it is true, was credited by Wordsworth with the two best lines of his best-known poem – They flash upon that inward eye ...

Garret’s Crusade

Roy Foster, 21 January 1982

... a damn what they want. We have always called the shots ... The Irish Republic is no more than a self-governing annexe of rich men’s dubious neocolonialism. We want a democratic socialist republic for all Ireland. The IRA follow the Moran line, and embrace a racialist view of Irish history based on attitudes of the late 19th century (and, ironically ...

Breeding too fast

John Ziman, 4 February 1982

The Nuclear Barons 
by Peter Pringle and James Spigelman.
Joseph, 578 pp., £12.95, January 1982, 0 7181 2061 2
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... it could be marginally cheaper than other forms of energy, but that it could be made effectively self-renewing and effectively harmless to man, beast or plant. None of the proposed self-renewing alternatives – solar, geothermal, winds, waves, tides, ocean thermal gradients, satellite collectors etc – comes anywhere ...

Genes and Memes

John Maynard Smith, 4 February 1982

The Extended Phenotype 
by Richard Dawkins.
Freeman, 307 pp., £9.95, December 1981, 0 7167 1358 6
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... biologist arguing passionately that, of course, genes are not selfish, because they are not self-aware beings, to which alone the term ‘selfish’ can properly be applied. I found it impossible to respond to his passion. I suppose that Dawkins referred to genes as selfish because he imagined that no one would take him literally. I do not regard genes ...

Poor Devils

Peter France, 2 December 1982

The Literary Underground of the Old Regime 
by Robert Darnton.
Harvard, 258 pp., £11.55, November 1982, 0 674 53656 8
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... by no means an unknown figure. His pre-Revolutionary career is generally known through his own self-justifying memoirs, written not long before his execution. The archives of the STN, together with the Paris police records, tell a different story. They show us not so much the pure and persecuted apostle of Enlightenment as a man deeply engaged in the shady ...

Sour Notes

D.A.N. Jones, 17 November 1983

Peter Hall’s Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle 
edited by John Goodwin.
Hamish Hamilton, 507 pp., £12.95, November 1983, 0 241 11047 5
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... for two days’ work directing a television commercial – and the same day his other self, the loony-left personality, is admiring Edward Bond’s play exposing Shakespeare as ‘a man who Sold Out to the Bourgeoisie and no longer stood up for the Progressive Currents of his Time’. (My capitals.) He then makes two commercials for the Royal ...

Canons

Frank Kermode, 2 February 1984

Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism 
by James Barr.
Oxford, 181 pp., £13, June 1983, 0 19 826323 6
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Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth 
by Edmund Leach and D. Alan Aycock.
Cambridge, 170 pp., £15, September 1983, 0 521 25491 4
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... to the contrary is simply wrong. The point isn’t argued; the rival view is simply treated as self-evidently absurd and repellent in itself and in its consequences, one of which is the practice of treating the Bible as a ‘separate cognitive zone’. That it was so treated for centuries is dismissed as an error one should no longer endorse. Barr remarks ...

All Her Nomads

Helen Vendler: Amy Clampitt, 5 February 1998

Collected Poems 
by Amy Clampitt.
Faber, 496 pp., £25, May 1998, 0 571 19349 8
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... Immersion in landscape seemed to return Clampitt to that pre-subjective moment of joy before self and object become two things. Consequently, nothing made her happier as a writer than the challenge to make the physical world appear to others as it seemed to her. The tornados of her childhood, for ...

The First Emperor

T.H. Barrett, 10 November 1988

Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times 
by Morris Rossabi.
California, 322 pp., £12.50, May 1988, 0 520 05913 1
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Searches for an Imaginary Kingdom: The Legend of the Kingdom of Prester John 
by L.N. Gumilev, translated by R.E.F. Smith.
Cambridge, 403 pp., £37.50, February 1988, 0 521 32214 6
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... of three centuries later so cunningly used by Jonathan Spence to construct his Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K’ang-hsi. If we had to judge Khubilai on the basis of his appearance in later Chinese historical writings we might never be tempted to read a full biography of him at all. Many of them cheat by taking a narrow view of legitimacy and not ...

Southern Discomfort

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, 8 June 1995

The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism 
by Eugene Genovese.
Harvard, 138 pp., £17.95, October 1994, 0 674 82527 6
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... learned to appreciate one another’s talents. Genovese concludes: ‘Educated Southerners, as self-proclaimed heirs to medieval chivalry, understood true nobility to rest on personal virtue, concluding that men, therefore, faced each other as equals.’ The last remark gives a clue about what is suspect in Genovese’s argument. Were Southern slaveholders ...