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 ...

‘We’ve messed up, boys’

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Bad Blood, 16 November 2023

The Poison Line: A True Story of Death, Deception and Infected Blood 
by Cara McGoogan.
Viking, 396 pp., £20, September 2023, 978 0 241 62750 1
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Death in the Blood: The Inside Story of the NHS Infected Blood Scandal 
by Caroline Wheeler.
Headline, 390 pp., £22, September 2023, 978 1 0354 0524 4
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... have been destroyed, and victims’ medical records lost or falsified. When in the early 1990s a group of HIV-positive victims agreed to settle a case they’d brought against the government in exchange for ex-gratia payments, they had to sign away their right to sue again over any related medical problem, though officials knew what most of the litigants ...

Stuck on the Flypaper

Frances Stonor Saunders: The Hobsbawm File, 9 April 2015

... but in 1935 he went to Moscow. A year later, he resurfaced in Spain as commander of the 11th International Brigade (he is the model for Hemingway’s General Hans in For Whom the Bell Tolls). He was also, according to information received by MI5, the ‘leader of the OGPU’ – one of the KGB’s predecessors – ‘in Madrid’. In 1939, this ...

Althusser’s Fate

Douglas Johnson, 16 April 1981

The Long March of the French Left 
by R.W. Johnson.
Macmillan, 345 pp., £20, March 1981, 0 333 27417 2
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One-Dimensional Marxism 
by Simon Clarke and Terry Lovell.
Allison and Busby, 256 pp., £9.95, June 1980, 0 85031 367 8
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Communism and Philosophy 
by Maurice Cornforth.
Lawrence and Wishart, 282 pp., £8.95, July 1980, 0 85315 430 9
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The Crisis of Marxism 
by Jack Lindsay.
Moonraker, 183 pp., £7.95, March 1981, 0 239 00200 8
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Class in English History 1680-850 
by R.S. Neale.
Blackwell, 250 pp., £12, January 1981, 0 631 12851 4
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... by not being proletarians. In 1959 Althusser took more decisive action. He brought together a group of philosophers, in the Salle des Actes of the Ecole Normale, and proposed a collective work on Marx. His project was for a long and exhaustive analysis of the principal Marxist texts, an analysis which would be both philosophical and linguistic. To his ...

The German Question

Perry Anderson: Goodbye to Bonn, 7 January 1999

... new job as chief of German diplomacy has a certain piquancy: the diplomatic hypocrisies of ‘the international community’ are not his natural idiom. But he is a learner. Under Fischer’s guidance, the Greens, impervious to criticism from the left of the SPD, have welcomed the expansion of Nato to Russia’s borders. Fischer’s career can be seen as in ...