Enrique of the Silver Tongue

Christopher Tayler: A ‘Novel without Fiction’, 22 March 2018

The Impostor 
by Javier Cercas, translated by Frank Wynne.
MacLehose Press, 429 pp., £20, November 2017, 978 0 85705 650 4
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... founding a Barcelona cell of the Unión de Juventudes Antifascistas, a short-lived insurrectionary group set up by Catalan teenagers. After the UJA was rolled up, Marco’s story went on, he headed to France, only to get picked up by the Pétainist police and transferred to German custody. In truth, as Cercas shows, and got Marco to admit, the war wound was ...

After Gibraltar

Conor Gearty, 16 November 1995

... only on the practical ground that adherence to a set of standards enforceable on the state by an international tribunal but not by its own citizens in its own courts makes no sense at all’ (LRB, 11 May). Others have chosen to present the reform in romantic rather than pragmatic terms, as the means whereby Britain finally achieves its own charter of human ...

Shall we tell the children?

Paul Seabright, 3 July 1986

Melanie Klein: Her World and her Work 
by Phyllis Grosskurth.
Hodder, 516 pp., £19.95, June 1986, 0 340 25751 2
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Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924-1925 
edited by Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick.
Chatto, 360 pp., £14.95, February 1986, 0 7011 3051 2
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... was aiming at,’ and entered into analysis with Ferenczi. She attended the Fifth Congress of the International Psycho-Analytic Association in Budapest in 1918, and in 1919 presented her first paper to the Hungarian Society. The identity of the patient analysed was suppressed in published versions of the paper, but in fact it was her own son Erich, then five ...

Rejoicings in a Dug-Out

Peter Howarth: Cecil, Ada and G.K., 15 December 2022

The Sins of G.K. Chesterton 
by Richard Ingrams.
Harbour, 292 pp., £20, August 2021, 978 1 905128 33 4
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... the act of an insecure and unsuccessful journalist inserting himself into ‘the little governing group which has the salaries and places in its gift’. They issued scurrilous leaflets during the 1911 Bethnal Green by-election, which Masterman narrowly won, and joined the Daily Express in smearing him again in 1914, when he lost two by-elections (one after ...

Imitation Democracy

Perry Anderson: Post-Communist States, 27 August 2015

... less room for immigration – and because the Catholic Church could give the movement an immediate international support that was not available in the same way in Latvia or Estonia. But after independence. the roles were reversed, Lithuania becoming by economic and cultural indicators the laggard of the trio, and Estonia the lead. Compared with ...

Depicting Europe

Perry Anderson, 20 September 2007

... Tony Judt exclaims at ‘Europe’s emergence in the dawn of the 21st century as a paragon of the international virtues: a community of values … held up by Europeans and non-Europeans alike as an exemplar for all to emulate’.1 The reputation, he assures us, is ‘well-earned’. The same vision grips the seers of New Labour. Why Europe Will Run the 21st ...

Europe at Bay

Jeremy Harding: The Immigration Battle, 9 February 2012

... we fail to acknowledge, we issue the invitation and map their journeys towards us.In Calais, a group of Eritrean asylum seekers talks about the war for independence from Ethiopia. They have a good sense of the history though the oldest would have been ten when the war ended in 1991. Their destination is the UK, but nobody seems to be making a connection ...

Love that Bird

Francis Spufford: Supersonic, 6 June 2002

... of militancy there. But unlike his colleagues, Benn had started to see a silver lining to the crisis, a promise glimmering amid the confusion: he thought he was witnessing a social revolution.And this was probably why he was sitting in the cabin of Concorde on 3 August 1974 with his wife, two aides, a reporter from BBC Radio Bristol and fifty shop ...

‘Death is not a stranger in our house’

Zain Samir: In Lebanon, 26 December 2024

... of white smoke. A few minutes later, a voice message from Hadi arrived in the family WhatsApp group: ‘They hit the building … they’re all gone … they’re all under the rubble.’Beneath the collapsed roof, Wafiq was lying in foetal position. He tried to move, but his body was wedged between the stove and the fridge, which had fallen on his right ...

Illusions of Containment

Tom Stevenson: Versions of Hamas, 6 February 2025

Hamas: The Quest for Power 
by Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell.
Polity, 331 pp., £17.99, June 2024, 978 1 5095 6493 4
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... tenure lasted just a month before he too was assassinated. Mishal, born in the year of the Suez Crisis, was the first Hamas leader to live, as a precaution, outside the occupied territories. From Amman, Doha and Damascus, he led Hamas to a resounding victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections. In 2017 he was succeeded by Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar, both ...

Ronbo

Michael Rogin, 13 October 1988

Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North 
by Ben Bradlee.
Grafton, 572 pp., £14.95, September 1988, 0 246 13364 3
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For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington 
by Donald Regan.
Hutchinson, 397 pp., £16.95, June 1988, 0 09 173622 6
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... took place, after American student ‘hostages’ were rescued from Grenada. He told a church group that he briefed Reagan twice a week, and implied to co-workers that he was often alone with ‘the boss’. Reagan may not have stuck with the Contras for the reason North claimed – that ‘the old man loves my ass’ – but in insisting that he was ...

Diary

E.P. Thompson: On the NHS, 7 May 1987

... hoof. For in mid-January I had just flown out as a guest of the Indian Government to an exalted international conference in New Delhi in memory of Indira Gandhi. A little group of us flew out together, Air India, first class: Michael Foot, Jean Floud, William Radice, with Sir Richard Attenborough in pursuit. It was my ...

Neanderthals, Denisovans and Modern Humans

Steven Mithen: Denisovans meet Neanderthals, 13 September 2018

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past 
by David Reich.
Oxford, 368 pp., £20, March 2018, 978 0 19 882125 0
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... who developed much of the technology for extracting DNA from ancient skeletal remains. Pääbo’s group were primarily concerned with the Neanderthals. At first they focused on extracting mtDNA, partly because its relative abundance increased the chances of successful extraction, and partly because of the frequency of mutations in this part of the genome, all ...

Revolution must strike twice

Slavoj Žižek: Lenin’s Breakthrough, 25 July 2002

Lenin 
by Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, translated by George Holoch.
Holmes & Meier, 371 pp., £35, November 2001, 0 8419 1412 5
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... made possible the key Leninist Event: the overcoming of the evolutionary historicism of the Second International. The kernel of the Leninist ‘utopia’ – the radical imperative to smash the bourgeois state and invent a new communal social form without a standing army, police force or bureaucracy, in which all could take part in the administration of social ...

Diary

August Kleinzahler: Drinking Bourbon in the Zam Zam Room, 8 August 2002

... both of them are gone: San Francisco and Shanghai. They had intrigue and class. They were international and everyone dressed right.’ Dressing right was big with Bruno. He always wore a jacket, specially made to accommodate his girth, a tie and monogrammed shirt, also custom-made, with cufflinks. He wanted his bar to have class, like in the old ...