Out of the Cage

Tom Nairn: Popping the bubble of American supremacy, 24 June 2004

After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order 
by Emmanuel Todd, translated by C. Jon Delogu.
Constable, 288 pp., £8.99, July 2004, 1 84529 058 5
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Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power 
by George Soros.
Weidenfeld, 207 pp., £12.99, January 2004, 0 297 84906 9
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... latter sees ‘globalisation as an apolitical phenomenon in which ‘nations, states and military powers do not exist’. Fuelled by missionary societies such as the American Enterprise Institute and evangelical tracts such as Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000), this religion has led to what Amy Chua has depicted as a ‘World on ...

The Dreamings of Dominic Cummings

James Meek, 24 October 2019

... they are visionaries like Victor and past military bureaucrats like the Cold War deterrence expert Michael Quinlan and Leslie Groves, who ran the project to build the first atom bomb.On the face of it, Cummings ought to have as much contempt for Boris Johnson’s Faragist Conservative Party as he does for Nigel Farage himself. And yet he appears to be doing ...
... new owners would be able to borrow money. The other was the politicians, who never gave him the powers he wanted to obstruct the anti-competitive mergers of electricity makers and electricity sellers. In 1995, Scottish Power, which was integrated from the moment of privatisation – it both sold and generated electricity from the big coal stations at ...

Nation-States and National Identity

Perry Anderson, 9 May 1991

The Identity of France. Vol. II: People and Production 
by Fernand Braudel, translated by Sian Reynolds.
Collins, 781 pp., £25, December 1990, 0 00 217774 9
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... national character had become the object of major theoretical treatises in the competing powers. Three cases exemplify this change. In France, Alfred Fouilée – a colleague of Durkheim and fellow spokesman for the Solidarist cabinets of the Nineties – published his Esquisse Psychologique des Peuples Européens in 1902, the first comprehensive ...

Loafing with the Sissies

Colm Tóibín: The Trials of Andy Warhol, 10 September 2020

Warhol: A Life as Art 
by Blake Gopnik.
Allen Lane, 931 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 00338 1
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... a popular iconography, Andy Warhol is probably the most single-minded and the most spectacular,’ Michael Fried wrote in Art International in December 1962. ‘Warhol’s beautiful, vulgar, heartbreaking icons of Marilyn Monroe … and [his] feeling for what is truly human and pathetic is one of the exemplary myths of our time.’ The architect Philip Johnson ...

What more could we want of ourselves!

Jacqueline Rose: On Rosa Luxemburg, 16 June 2011

The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg 
edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza, translated by George Shriver.
Verso, 609 pp., £25, February 2011, 978 1 84467 453 4
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... the energy and potential of the people. She is talking about aliveness – what the psychoanalyst Michael Parsons recently described as the true meaning of faith, which is also wholly unpredictable (there is no formula for the psychic conditions under which it will survive or be destroyed). Failure never diminished Luxemburg’s faith, which is why I think ...

How bad can it get?

LRB Contributors: On Johnson’s Britain, 15 August 2019

... Tory journalists who campaigned against the Good Friday Agreement, including his cabinet colleague Michael Gove.Northern Irish politics are more turbulent than at any time since the Good Friday Agreement was signed. Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party came close to an agreement for the restoration of power-sharing at the start of 2018, but the DUP ...

An Invertebrate Left

Perry Anderson, 12 March 2009

... state or aristocracy, and most of the time was subject to an array of conflicting foreign powers. The result, for long stretches, was to create an overwhelming sense of the gap between past glory and present misery among its educated elites. From Dante onwards, there developed a tradition of intellectuals with a strong sense of their calling to ...

American Breakdown

David Bromwich, 2 August 2018

... Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This began as a post-2001 innovation of Cheney and Bush, its powers were then expanded under Obama, and people who know its oppressive tactics are cheering the slogan ‘Abolish ICE’. Good, but what will you put in its place? A 1996 federal law permits the deportation of legal non-citizen residents who have committed ...

Unwritten Masterpiece

Barbara Everett: Dryden’s ‘Hamlet’, 4 January 2001

... political theme, sees the writer as doing a ‘particularly brilliant thing’ in Amphitryon; and Michael Cordner three times reiterates the word ‘masterpiece’ when introducing his edition of the play. There is an appealing American proverb, ‘If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ It seems to throw light on the difficult case of Dryden. During ...

On Giving Up

Adam Phillips, 6 January 2022

... is in the nature of Macbeth to be swift and utterly single-minded,’ the critic Michael Long writes. As though there must be no time for hesitation or revision or doubt. As though there is a danger that momentum might be lost. A change of heart – or even the possibility of giving up on the usurpation of Duncan – must not, cannot, be ...

How to Grow a Weetabix

James Meek: Farms and Farmers, 16 June 2016

... food if we drop tariffs on agricultural imports from Africa, Australasia and the Americas, as Michael Gove wants to do, and it gets even better. Just not for farmers. The spectre haunting the British farmyard is that the EU debate will turn public attention to what’s happening down on the farm, whatever the referendum result. There is, after ...

The Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, 23 March 2006

... has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents. That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships cannot account for the current level of ...

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

Jenny Turner: The Hobbit Habit, 15 November 2001

... whom are basically human (hobbits, dwarfs, the men of Gondor and Rohan), some superhuman in both powers and goodness (elves, wizards, men of royal blood), some superhuman but evil (ringwraiths), some subhuman but sturdy with it (orcs, trolls). There are no monks or monasteries; in fact there is no religious activity on Middle Earth at all.The story begins in ...