Case-endings and Calamity

Erin Maglaque: Aldine Aesthetics, 14 December 2023

Aldus Manutius: The Invention of the Publisher 
by Oren Margolis.
Reaktion, 206 pp., £18, October 2023, 978 1 78914 779 7
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... not only had to be paid wages, but also fed and housed by the master printer; in Padua, a group of compositors once staged a walkout because their beds hadn’t been made. Aldus went into partnership with Andrea Torresani, an experienced printer, and Pierfrancesco Barbarigo, a Venetian patrician who was also, helpfully, the son of a doge. These men ...

It hurts, but it’s holy

Neal Ascherson: Consequences of Empire, 23 May 2024

Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe 
by Sathnam Sanghera.
Viking, 449 pp., £20, January, 978 0 241 60041 2
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... they ‘dehumanised millions of Indian labourers … through indenture and laid the foundations of international labour laws’; they ‘spread democracy to large parts of the world’, but ‘sowed discord in ways that still destabilise many … regions of the planet’. And – here comes Denison House – ‘the British Empire was an incubator and ...

Why Twice?

Rosemary Hill: Fire at the Mack, 24 October 2024

The Mack: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art 
by Robyne Calvert.
Yale, 208 pp., £35, April, 978 0 300 23985 0
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... only in 1907-09. By then Mackintosh was a full partner in the firm, a mature architect with an international reputation. He was married to his fellow artist Margaret Macdonald, and his friend Herbert McNair had married Margaret’s sister, Frances; together they became known as ‘the Four’. They worked collaboratively as artists and designers, and their ...

Charlie’s War

Jeremy Harding, 4 February 2021

... them was flagged as a gesture of support for its Danish colleagues, who had come under fierce international criticism. On the cover was a new, innocuous cartoon by ‘Cabu’ (Jean Cabut, who was murdered in his office at Charlie Hebdo in 2015), showing the Prophet in tears, ‘overwhelmed by fundamentalists’. But the Jyllands-Posten cartoons were more ...

After the Earthquake

Tim Parks: Silone and Silone, 9 July 2009

Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone 
by Stanislao Pugliese.
Farrar, Straus, 426 pp., $35, June 2009, 978 0 374 11348 3
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... the Gioventù Socialista Italiana; a few weeks after that, Silone was named to the Communist Youth International; in January 1920, he assumed direction of the Socialist weekly newspaper L’Avanguardia; at the Socialist Party congress a year later, he represented the Socialist youth wing and brought it to the newly formed Communist Party of Italy and was named ...

What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking

Jackson Lears: #Russiagate, 4 January 2018

... Both Trump and Albright assume that the United States should be able to do as it pleases in the international arena: Trump because it’s the greatest country in the world, Albright because it’s an exceptional force for global good. Nor is there anything unprecedented about Trump’s desire for détente with Russia, which until at least 2012 was the ...

Vengeful Pathologies

Adam Shatz, 2 November 2023

... primacy of the Palestinian struggle at a time when it seemed to be falling off the agenda of the international community; to secure the release of political prisoners; to scuttle an Israeli-Saudi rapprochement; to further humiliate the impotent Palestinian Authority; to protest against the wave of settler violence in the West Bank, as well as the provocative ...

When the Floods Came

James Meek: England’s Water, 31 July 2008

... Council’s director of planning. Pavey, an activist in the Severn and Avon Valley Combined Flood Group, a band of concerned citizens who believe that flooded Tewkesbury was the victim of a greedy, callous government, is one of those people you feel you could trust in a tight spot. He’s a saintly man who is forever a-doing, volunteering, raising ...

Reasons of State

R.W. Johnson, 5 June 1986

The ‘Rainbow Warrior’ Affair 
by Richard Shears and Isobelle Gidley.
Allen and Unwin, 215 pp., £2.95, January 1986, 0 04 900041 1
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Sink the ‘Rainbow’: An Inquiry into the Greenpeace Affair 
by John Dyson.
Gollancz, 192 pp., £8.95, February 1986, 9780575038561
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La Piscine: Les Services Secrets Français 1944-1984 
by R. Faligot and P. Krop.
Seuil, 431 pp., March 1985, 9782020087438
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... of the Tour de France. Kastenbaum maintained close relations with all the parties of the Socialist International and not a little ‘dirty money’ got passed on to sometimes quite unlikely clients – the early career of Salvador Allende appears to have been a major beneficiary. Even by the late Forties, however, the focus of SDECE attention had shifted to ...

The President and the Bomb

Adam Shatz, 16 November 2017

... was studying at Vandenberg Air Force Base to become a missile launch officer, a member of an elite group charged with executing the order to launch a nuclear strike. The responsibility was immense, but Hering was persuaded that, at the crew level, there were enough checks and balances to guard against rash behaviour on the part of any individual. Still, he ...
A Les Trósors Retrouvós de la ‘Revue des deux Mondes’ 
edited by Jeanne Causse and Bruno de Cessole.
Maisonneuve, 582 pp., frs 185, January 1999, 2 7068 1353 9
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La Guerre d’Algórie par les Documents. Vol. II: Les Portes de la Guerre, 10 Mars 1946 à 31 Dócembre 1954 
edited by Jean-Charles Jauffret.
Service Historique de l’Armóe de Terre, 1023 pp., September 1998, 2 86323 113 8
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De Gaulle et L’Algóerie: Mon Tómoinage 1960-62 
by Jean Morin.
Albin Michel, 387 pp., frs 140, January 1999, 2 226 10672 3
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... war are still not properly understood. One concerns its beginning: how did the French Army allow a crisis to develop into a major war, and how did it view its early stages? Another concerns the conclusion of the war: was it inevitable that it would end in independence (supposedly de Gaulle’s own belief)? To answer these questions we need access to ...

The Conspiracists

Richard J. Evans: The Reichstag Fire, 8 May 2014

Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery 
by Benjamin Carter Hett.
Oxford, 413 pp., £18.09, February 2014, 978 0 19 932232 9
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... been joined in the dock by Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Central Europe Section of the Communist International, two other Bulgarian Communists who had been in Berlin at the time of the fire, and Ernst Torgler, chairman of the German Communist Party in the Reichstag. The trial was a fiasco. Dimitrov ran rings round the prosecution, reduced Göring, who ...

Land without Prejudice

Perry Anderson: Berlusconi’s Italy, 21 March 2002

... to control violent crises in the Mediterranean periphery. In each case, there was a supervening international context for the fall of the old Republic: the end of European colonialism in the case of France, and the end of the Cold War in the case of Italy. Umberto Bossi’s Lega Lombarda, the battering-ram that weakened the struts of the traditional party ...

The Pessimist’s Optimist

Kevin Okoth: Beyond the Postcolony, 10 July 2025

Brutalism 
by Achille Mbembe, translated by Steven Corcoran.
Duke, 181 pp., £19.99, January 2024, 978 1 4780 2558 0
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... been awarded the Geschwister-Scholl Prize – named after the founders of the anti-Nazi resistance group White Rose – had suddenly become an antisemite. The accusation, it transpired, had little to do with BDS activism and was based on a wilful misreading of Mbembe’s 2016 essay ‘The Society of Enmity’, which argued that Israel is a settler colony and ...

Robinson’s Footprints

Richard Gott: Hugo Chávez and the Venezuelan Revolution, 17 February 2000

... success: he has (with a little help from his partners in Opec) secured a threefold increase in the international oil price, from 9 to 27 dollars a barrel. In consequence, he has a little breathing space, despite the disaster of the floods. Chávez has also given a few flamboyant signals. During his first month in office he sent a friendly note to the ...