Salt Spray

Ferdinand Mount: When Britannia Ruled the Waves, 5 December 2024

The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1815-1945 
by N.A.M. Rodger.
Allen Lane, 934 pp., £40, October 2024, 978 0 7139 9412 4
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... full liberty to deal with the interests of the country according to your own fancy.’ Enter Sir William Parker, who proved equally headstrong, pushed up the Yangtse to capture Nanking and compelled the Chinese to more humiliating terms, including the permanent surrender of Hong Kong. In the Second Opium (or Arrow) War, the British bombarded and captured ...

Where could I emote?

Bee Wilson: Looking for Al Pacino, 26 June 2025

Sonny Boy: A Memoir 
by Al Pacino.
Century, 369 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 1 5299 1262 3
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... what sounds like a much more interesting production, staged in Central Park and directed by Daniel Sullivan. Pacino says he had developed what he brought to the character: ‘Night after night, I’d show up, go on that stage, and say: tonight, I will play this role, and I will play it without knowing what I will do next.’Pacino says his love of Shakespeare ...

Flailing States

Pankaj Mishra: Anglo-America Loses its Grip, 16 July 2020

... budgets’. In a cover story, the Atlantic described torture as a ‘necessary evil’. Andrew Sullivan called for the ‘extermination of the enemy in all its forms – relentlessly, constantly, insistently’. Time, Newsweek and the Spectator, as well as the Murdoch-owned media, fervently promoted fantasies of Anglo-American supremacism. In ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... 282, who controlled the cement trucks and was an associate of the Gambino family. There was Daniel Sullivan, Trump’s labour ‘consultant’, who in partnership with the Philadelphia crime boss Nicodemos ‘Nicky’ Scarfo’s financier, sold Trump a property in Atlantic City that became his casino. There was Salvatore ‘Salvie’ Testa, ‘crown ...