Defanged

Eric Foner: Deifying King, 5 October 2023

King: The Life of Martin Luther King 
by Jonathan Eig.
Simon & Schuster, 669 pp., £25, May, 978 1 4711 8100 9
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... Jr was a serious student of philosophy and theology, drawing on the writings of Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau to develop a powerful justification for disobedience to unjust laws. At a time when only 2 per cent of the Black population had graduated from college, King exemplified the ‘talented tenth’ to whom W.E.B. Du Bois looked for racial ...

In Hebron

Yitzhak Laor: The Soldiers’ Stories, 22 July 2004

... Holocaust since the end of the 1980s (the first intifada), and its return into Hebrew literature (David Grossman’s See under: Love). The Holocaust is part of the victim imagery, hence the madness of state-subsidised school trips to Auschwitz. This has less to do with understanding the past than with reproducing an environment in which we exist in the ...

When Thieves Retire

Francis Gooding: Pirate Enlightenment, 30 March 2023

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia 
by David Graeber.
Allen Lane, 208 pp., £18.99, January 2023, 978 0 241 61140 1
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... recorded by the French-Mauritian chronicler Nicolas Mayeur in 1806 and reproduced in the late David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, called for gun flints, lead balls, gunpowder and river water to be mixed in an upturned shield with the point of a knife, the draught then taken with ginger soaked in the blood of the oath-takers. Mayeur, a retired slave ...

Wartime

Alan Ryan, 6 November 1986

The Enemies Within: The Story of the Miners’ Strike 1984-5 
by Ian MacGregor and Rodney Tyler.
Collins, 384 pp., £15, October 1986, 0 00 217706 4
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A Balance of Power 
by Jim Prior.
Hamish Hamilton, 278 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 9780241119570
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... instantly hit electricity supplies and drove the Government to send for Lord Wilberforce to make peace for them. Interviewed by the BBC, Frank Chapple was asked whether he wasn’t ashamed of the misery his workers were causing. Not a bit of it, he said: here was a government which had told everyone to stand on their own two feet, and that was what his ...

The Old, Bad Civilisation

Arnold Rattenbury: Second World War poetry, 4 October 2001

Selected Poems 
by Randall Swingler, edited by Andy Croft.
Trent, 113 pp., £7.99, October 2000, 1 84233 014 4
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British Writing of the Second World War 
by Mark Rawlinson.
Oxford, 256 pp., £35, June 2000, 0 19 818456 5
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... Brigaders, Trotskyites, Communists, pacifists failed by their tribunals. The playwright David Hare declared recently that working-class conscripts now met ‘the officer class’ for the first time and rebelled; but plenty had met the people issuing orders, at least since Peterloo. Moreover, an Army largely unemployed except in training or retreat ...

You Have A Mother Don’t You?

Andrew O’Hagan: Cowboy Simplicities, 11 September 2003

Searching for John Ford: A Life 
by Joseph McBride.
Faber, 838 pp., £25, May 2003, 0 571 20075 3
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... very seriously. Only the other day he was talking about ‘riding herd’ with the Middle East peace process. Bush made Wild West philosophy a central plank of his 2000 election platform. In a documentary made by Alexandra Pelosi,2 we were able to see him spreading his most important message – the right way to wear a pair of Texan trousers, the right ...

Whose Egypt?

Adam Shatz, 5 January 2012

... are accustomed to pass at short notice. It shares a border with Israel, with which it signed a peace treaty that has allowed the Israeli army great room for manoeuvre when it has invaded its neighbours. Egypt has a very close relationship with Washington, particularly when it comes to counter-terrorism, and it has provided services that dare not speak ...

A Girl and a Gun

Jenny Turner: Revenge Feminism, 10 October 2013

Apocalypse Baby 
by Virginie Despentes, translated by Siân Reynolds.
Serpent’s Tail, 338 pp., £8.99, June 2013, 978 1 84668 842 3
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... a plus. Lucie has been working as a snooper for two years now: ‘A kid can’t smoke a joint in peace without me personally being right up behind him … The life of their children belongs to adults of my generation, who don’t want to let their youth get away from them twice.’ Her most recent assignment is Valentine Galtan, a girl of ...

No Intention of Retreating

Lorna Scott Fox: Martha Gellhorn’s Wars, 2 September 2004

Martha Gellhorn: A Life 
by Caroline Moorehead.
Vintage, 550 pp., £8.99, June 2004, 0 09 928401 4
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... Hemingway marathon, to the fling with James Gavin (hero of the 82nd Airborne), to the affair with David Gurewitsch in Cuernavaca, even the marriage to Tom Matthews in 1954 that made her so ‘plain silly happy’ at first: You see, I have chalked it up too well, and see where and how I am caught – and how tightly. Through ignorance, carelessness, pride and ...

Diary

Murray Sayle: The Makiko and Junichiro Show, 17 October 2002

... sent to Oxford to acquire British accents and a pseudo-patrician indifference to book-keeping, David Niven Oriental-style. In Mori’s time a middle-rank Foreign Ministry official was caught using secret funds to keep a string of racehorses, yachts and a mistress in a smart apartment – outraging Japanese voters worried about their jobs. Scandal followed ...

Didn’t we agree to share?

Sheila Heti: ‘The First Wife’, 13 July 2017

The First Wife 
by Paulina Chiziane, translated by David Brookshaw.
Archipelago, 250 pp., £14.99, August 2016, 978 0 914671 48 0
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... soul?’ But Luísa’s lover tells Rami he admires her for coming to her rival’s house to make peace. ‘I think all women should unite with each other against the tyranny of men. If I were a woman, I’d do that.’ Rami realises she has ‘never lifted so much as a finger’ to turn fate in her direction, and soon she begins. First, she gathers the ...

It’s not Jung’s, it’s mine

Colin Burrow: Language-Magic, 21 January 2021

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations 
edited by David Streitfeld.
Melville House, 180 pp., £12.99, February 2019, 978 1 61219 779 1
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The Carrier Bag Theory Of Fiction 
by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Ignota, 42 pp., £4.99, November 2019, 978 1 9996759 9 8
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... dream racism away. When Orr wakes up the next day everyone has turned grey. He makes Orr dream of peace on Earth. Orr’s unconscious, like a bad genie in a fairy tale, takes the instruction literally: he dreams that an alien attack on the moon unites the people of Earth against a common enemy. He asks Dr Haber: ‘What kind of monsters have you dredged up ...

Indoor Sport

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Mr Sex, 22 February 2024

Polymath: The Life and Professions of Dr Alex Comfort, Author of ‘The Joy of Sex’ 
by Eric Laursen.
AK Press, 740 pp., £27, January, 978 1 84935 496 7
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... a scholarship in classics to Highgate School, published poems in the school magazine and set up a peace society. He developed an interest in science, and after blowing three fingers off one hand while trying to make fireworks for George V’s Silver Jubilee, turned gratefully to the study of molluscs. As a teenager, he was, in his own words, an ...

Nation-building

Rosamond McKitterick: Capetian Kings, 24 October 2024

House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France 
by Justine Firnhaber-Baker.
Allen Lane, 408 pp., £30, March, 978 0 241 55277 3
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... rather than usurpation, and stresses the importance of a strong and competent king who could bring peace to the realm. Those who supported Hugh no doubt hoped for political advantage; they may also have decided that he would be the more effective ruler. The legitimacy of his rule was challenged, not least in its first years, when a rebellion by the rejected ...

The dogs in the street know that

Nick Laird: A Week in Mid-Ulster, 5 May 2005

... for the fourth time in its brief history, to prevent the resignation of the first minister, David Trimble. Just over a year later, on 26 November 2003, the much postponed Assembly election took place, with the DUP and Sinn Féin emerging as the largest parties, gaining ground from moderate unionists and nationalists. A review of the working of the Good ...