A Falklands Polemic

Tam Dalyell, 20 May 1982

... a disunited nation, a task force could not have been proposed. Yet Labour had appeared to signal green, before there had been an opportunity for reflection within the Shadow Cabinet as a whole, let alone the Parliamentary Party, or the Party in the country. Had the military occupation taken place on a Monday to Thursday when Parliament was sitting, I believe ...

The Case for Geoffrey Hill

Tom Paulin, 4 April 1985

Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work 
edited by Peter Robinson.
Open University, 259 pp., £18, March 1985, 0 335 10588 2
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... the dove takes flight, bursts through the leaves with an untidy sound, plunges its wings into the green twilight above this long-sought and forsaken ground, the half-built ruins of the new estate, warheads of mushrooms round the filter-pond. Hill’s title is straightforwardly Tennysonian and so is the poem’s dank mossy texture, its stagnant ...

Seconds from a Punch-Up

Andy Beckett: Irvine Welsh, 10 May 2012

Skagboys 
by Irvine Welsh.
Cape, 548 pp., £12.99, April 2012, 978 0 224 08790 2
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... ravers: its title was a reference to early rave music, and its original paperback jacket was a green and red concoction as garish as the sleeve of a trippy dance 12-inch. His next story collection, rushed out in 1996, was bluntly called Ecstasy. Parts of it were set at raves, but Welsh didn’t write as compellingly about taking ecstasy as he had about ...

Looking for a Way Up

Rosemary Hill: Roy Strong’s Vanities, 25 April 2013

Self-Portrait as a Young Man 
by Roy Strong.
Bodleian, 286 pp., £25, March 2013, 978 1 85124 282 5
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... mostly spent at home, where the unsatisfactory interior of Colne Road and its ‘unutterable’ green linoleum formed an ever more peculiar contrast to his bedroom, with its life-size plaster bust of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Less a cuckoo than a peacock in the parental nest, as the 1960s dawned Strong worked on his parallel project of ...

After Mubarak

Adam Shatz, 17 February 2011

... the ‘colour’ revolutions in Eastern Europe, the Lebanese protests against Syrian troops or the Green Movement in Iran, the uprising in Egypt targeted an old and trusted ally, not an enemy. Coming out in support of the Tunisian protesters made the Obama administration feel good, but it required no sacrifice. Egypt, a pillar of US strategy in the greater ...

An Urbane Scholar in a Wilderness of Tigers

Robert Irwin: Albert Hourani, 25 January 2001

A Vision of the Middle East: An Intellectual Biography of Albert Hourani 
by Abdulaziz Al-Sudairi.
Tauris, 221 pp., £12.99, January 2000, 9781860645815
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... In 1933, Hourani went up to Oxford, to read PPE: ‘a very thin young man with luminous green eyes and a diaphanous complexion’, according to his friend Charles Issawi. After graduating, he worked for Chatham House and the Foreign Office, before becoming a fellow of Magdalen and subsequently director of the Middle East Centre at St ...

Glee

Gabriele Annan, 7 September 1995

1920 Diary 
by Isaac Babel, edited by Carol Avins, translated by H.T. Willetts.
Yale, 126 pp., £14.95, June 1995, 0 300 05966 3
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Collected Stories 
by Isaac Babel, translated by David McDuff.
Penguin, 364 pp., £6.99, June 1995, 0 14 018462 7
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... on his horse. One sees how he captures flashes of beauty as he gallops past, ‘white geese on green meadows’. He’s also a specialist in nocturnes: the lamp burning on the table, the stillness outside – or else the Cossacks prowling there. The Diary makes it clearer than the stories what actually happened in 1920, and what Babel thought about the ...

How to See inside a French Milkman

Peter Campbell, 31 July 1997

Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the 20th Century 
by Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles.
Rutgers, 380 pp., $35.95, January 1997, 0 8135 2358 3
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... give us a taste of road-kill reality are glimpses on television of fluttering hearts framed in green operating-theatre linen, which go with good news about how we can be reamed, stitched and supplied with spare parts. The terror of the dark interior still lives, but we confront it now in images of war and disaster or in special effects at the ...

Diary

Christian Parenti: The opium farmers of Afghanistan, 20 January 2005

... Along the narrow tarmac road linking Kabul to Kandahar you could be in New Mexico: green valleys, with scattered trees turning orange and yellow; clusters of adobe-style walled compounds; and looming above huge barren mountains and empty blue skies. This small road is one of the few signs of progress in an appallingly underdeveloped country; indeed, it is one of only very few paved roads in the whole of Afghanistan ...

Diary

Patrick Cockburn: A report from Baghdad, 18 March 2004

... even heard of an IED before I came to Iraq.’ Outside the hut, Sgt Anderson showed off an old green-painted 155mm South African-made shell, whose TNT is wrapped around with plastic explosives; it produces razor-edged pieces of shrapnel eight to twelve inches long. The guerrillas bury several of these a few feet from the road with the nose of the shell ...

Diary

M.F. Burnyeat: The Siberian concept of theft, 19 February 2004

... travel. It is the internal passport, an instrument of state control like the identity cards that David Blunkett is planning for us. Until 2002 it recorded not only your name, age and address, but your ‘nationality’ as well. Our word ‘Russian’ does duty for two distinct adjectives, rossiski and russki. The Russian Federation, like the Russian Academy ...

Diary

Patrick Cockburn: Muqtada al-Sadr, 24 April 2008

... announced that he was going to end militia rule in the city, Iraq’s second largest. He left the Green Zone in Baghdad to take command, provoking derisive references by Iraqi politicians to ‘General Maliki’. He demanded that militiamen hand over their weapons within three days and promise to reject violence; and he threatened to crush them if they ...

Intimated Disunion

Colin Kidd, 13 July 2023

Ties That Bind? Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Union 
by Graham Walker and James Greer.
Irish Academic Press, 269 pp., £17.99, February 2023, 978 1 78855 817 4
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The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the European Order, 1750-1848 
by James Stafford.
Cambridge, 298 pp., £75, January 2022, 978 1 316 51612 6
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... at the best of times – failed to perceive their good fortune; they still don’t.Although David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had played a central role in negotiating the agreement, many unionists believed they had been conned. While the agreement won the near unanimous endorsement of nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: BP in Azerbaijan, 7 November 2024

... in the Nagorno-Karabakh war of 2020. Aliyev’s government has announced plans to establish ‘green energy zones’ across the territory it seized – territory which the UK’s current foreign secretary, David Lammy, has referred to as having been ‘liberated’. Gary Jones, BP’s regional president for ...

His Peach Stone

Christopher Tayler: J.G. Farrell, 2 December 2010

J.G. Farrell in His Own Words: Selected Letters and Diaries 
edited by Lavinia Greacen.
Cork, 464 pp., €19.95, September 2010, 978 1 85918 476 9
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... the lamps, makes it hard to rediscover what his fiancée looks like. In time, ‘the advancing green tide’ engulfs the area uncontested and roots from overgrown tropical shrubs penetrate the foundations. The beds are never changed, the food is unpleasant, whole wings are made uninhabitable by storm damage and on his first night the Major finds a rotting ...