Friends with Benefits

Tom Stevenson: The Five Eyes, 19 January 2023

The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the Shadowy International Spy Network, through Its Targets, Traitors and Spies 
by Richard Kerbaj.
John Blake, 416 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 1 78946 503 7
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Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena 
by Clinton Fernandes.
Melbourne, 176 pp., £35.95, October 2022, 978 0 522 87926 1
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... will continue to follow the US’s lead. Fernandes quotes a former Australian minister of defence, Peter Dutton, to the effect that Australian participation in any potential conflict between the US and China is seen as preordained.Australia’s future military plans put considerable emphasis on submarine warfare. The AUKUS deal, signed between Australia, the ...

What’s so good about Reid?

Galen Strawson, 22 February 1990

Thomas Reid’s ‘Inquiry’: The Geometry of Visibles and the Case for Realism 
by Norman Daniels.
Stanford, 160 pp., £25, May 1989, 0 8047 1504 1
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Common Sense 
by Lynd Forguson.
Routledge, 193 pp., £30, November 1989, 0 415 02302 5
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Thomas Reid and the ‘Way of Ideas’ 
by Roger Gallie.
Reidel, 287 pp., £42, July 1989, 0 7923 0390 3
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Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment 
edited by Peter Jones.
John Donald, 230 pp., £20, October 1989, 0 85976 225 4
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Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment 
edited by M.A. Stewart.
Oxford, 328 pp., £37.50, January 1990, 0 19 824967 5
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Thomas Reid 
by Keith Lehrer.
Routledge, 311 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 415 03886 3
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... Victor Cousin enlisted him in his campaign against the extreme empiricism which surrounded him in France, and he enjoyed a vogue among the ‘Ontologists’ in Italy and Belgium. Sidgwick had a high regard for him, but he was always more popular in the United States than in England, being particularly admired by C.S. Peirce, and more recently by Roderick ...
Wagner in Performance 
edited by Barry Millington and Stewart Spencer.
Yale, 214 pp., £19.95, July 1992, 0 300 05718 0
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Wagner: Race and Revolution 
by Paul Lawrence Rose.
Faber, 304 pp., £20, June 1992, 9780571164653
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Wagner Handbook 
edited by Ulrich Müller and Peter Wapnewski, translated by John Deathridge.
Harvard, 711 pp., £27.50, October 1992, 0 674 94530 1
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Richard Wagner’s Visit to Rossini and An Evening at Rossini’s in Beau-Séjour 
by Edmond Michotte, translated by Herbert Weinstock.
Quartet, 144 pp., £12.95, November 1992, 9780704370319
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... be sure that only Jews were intended; surely a case could be made for not performing his work in France, or warning husbands not to listen, and so on. Yet Rose’s comparison of Beethoven and Wagner shouldn’t go unnoticed: four ounces of ennoblement in Beethoven as against two in Wagner. It’s like a drunk-driving test. And how, listening to Wagner, does ...

Was Weber wrong?

Malise Ruthven, 18 August 1994

The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World 
by Gilles Kepel.
Polity, 200 pp., £39.50, December 1993, 0 7456 0999 6
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Pious Passion: The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran 
by Martin Riesebrodt.
California, 272 pp., £30, September 1993, 0 520 07463 7
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... secularisation of politics. Commenting on the growth of evangelical and fundamentalist churches, Peter Berger, doyen of Weberian theorists, was forced to admit that ‘serious intellectual difficulties’ had been created ‘for those (like myself) who thought that modernisation and secularisation were inexorably linked phenomena.’ Brushing aside the ...

At the Hydropathic

T.J. Binyon, 6 December 1984

Agatha Christie 
by Janet Morgan.
Collins, 393 pp., £12.95, September 1984, 0 00 216330 6
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... at a ball at Chudleigh. In August 1914 Archie, who had transferred to the RFC, was posted to France with his squadron. He returned to England on leave in December, and they were married by special licence on Christmas Eve. During the war Agatha worked first as a VAD, then as a dispenser in the hospital at Torquay. In September 1918 Archie was posted to ...

What is a tribe?

Mahmood Mamdani, 13 September 2012

... subjects were politically conscious, active and disaffected. In Roman Imperial Themes (1990), Peter Brunt reminds us that ‘in the very century when Roman rule was to vanish in Gaul, a Gallic poet celebrated Rome as the city which had unified the world by giving the conquered a share in rights.’ Brunt adds: ‘What a contrast with the jubilation that ...

Don’t wear yum-yum yellow

Theo Tait: Shark Attack!, 2 August 2012

Demon Fish: Travels through the Hidden World of Sharks 
by Juliet Eilperin.
Duckworth, 295 pp., £18.99, January 2012, 978 0 7156 4291 7
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... of fish and chips.’ (But it’s true: ‘rock salmon’ in Britain, or ‘saumonette’ in France, is spiny dogfish, once one of the most abundant shark species in the world and now critically endangered in the north-east Atlantic.) Personally, I’ll read pretty much any old rubbish about sharks and absolutely anything about shark attacks. We shark ...

Just Like Cookham

Neal Ascherson: Stanley Spencer in China, 19 May 2011

Passport to Peking: A Very British Mission to Mao’s China 
by Patrick Wright.
Oxford, 591 pp., £20, October 2010, 978 0 19 954193 5
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... China’ was about to rejoin the world. The Geneva Accords on Indochina, which ended France’s colonial wars in South-East Asia and partitioned Vietnam, had been a personal triumph for the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai. Urbane, amusing and fluent in their languages, Zhou charmed foreign diplomats and journalists off their feet. Perhaps, they began ...

Cooked Frog

David Edgar: Orbán’s Hungary, 7 March 2024

Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary 
by Zsuzsanna Szelényi.
Hurst, 438 pp., £25, November 2022, 978 1 78738 802 4
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... in Italy, is gaining ground in Scandinavia and has all but wiped out the social-democratic left in France. Last year, the Alternative für Deutschland overtook the ruling Social Democrats in the polls. It’s easy to see why Orbán said in 2017 that ‘27 years ago here in Central Europe we believed that Europe was our future; today we feel that we are the ...

Body Parts

Lawrence Stone, 24 November 1994

The Making of Victorian Sexuality 
by Michael Mason.
Oxford, 338 pp., £17.95, April 1994, 0 19 812247 0
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The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes 
by Michael Mason.
Oxford, 256 pp., £17.99, October 1994, 0 19 812292 6
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... suffocating blanket of prudery had for nearly a century characterised ‘Victorian’ England – France, too, for that matter. Mason agrees that, as defined by Foucault, sex ‘was certainly not repressed in the English 19th century’. ‘In fact’, he adds, the point, ‘like much in Foucault, emerges as something of a platitude when expressed in a ...

One-to-One

Thomas Nagel: What We Owe to Each Other by T.M. Scanlon, 4 February 1999

What We Owe to Each Other 
by T.M. Scanlon.
Harvard, 480 pp., £21.95, February 1999, 0 674 95089 5
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... of view that combines the frustration of all those viewers (a billion watched the Final between France and Brazil last summer), and by reference to which Jones’s pleas for rescue can be reasonably rejected – or even be counted unreasonable. If, on the other hand, Jones could be rescued immediately only by a manoeuvre that would kill Smith, also pinned ...

Merry Companies

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: The Golden Age of Dutch painting, 20 January 2005

Dutch 17th-century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution 
by Wayne Franits.
Yale, 328 pp., £45, June 2004, 0 300 10237 2
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... Christopher Brown’s Images of a Golden Past: Dutch Genre Painting of the 17th Century and Peter Sutton’s exhibition catalogue, Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Genre Painting, both appeared in 1984.) The text is supplemented with nearly 250 images, many in colour, as well as more than forty pages of triple-column notes and an extensive ...

Doing Some Measuring ahead of Time

Richard Davenport-Hines: Sade in Prison, 9 August 2001

Letters from Prison 
by the Marquis de Sade, translated by Richard Seaver.
Harvill, 401 pp., £20, October 2000, 1 86046 807 1
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De Sade's Valet 
by Nikolaj Frobenius, translated by Tom Geddes.
Marion Boyars, 242 pp., £9.95, November 2000, 0 7145 3060 3
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... in social issues, and he used sex in his writings as a way of describing power relations. As Peter Wagner demonstrated in Eros Revived (1988), politicised pornography was an 18th-century commonplace. Sade’s pornography, as one would expect from a man who so calamitously lacked the power to refrain, is boringly exaggerated. The interminable and ...

Fraud Squad

Ferdinand Mount: Imposters, 2 August 2007

The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation 
by Rohan McWilliam.
Continuum, 363 pp., £25, March 2007, 978 1 85285 478 2
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A Romanov Fantasy: Life at the Court of Anna Anderson 
by Frances Welch.
Short Books, 327 pp., £14.99, February 2007, 978 1 904977 71 1
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The Lost Prince: The Survival of Richard of York 
by David Baldwin.
Sutton, 220 pp., £20, July 2007, 978 0 7509 4335 2
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... massive proportions, 28 stone 4 lbs, by 1871. Though Roger was half-French and had grown up in France, the Claimant couldn’t speak a word of the language. Roger later attended Stonyhurst College; the Claimant was barely literate. The best that could be said for him was that he waggled his eyebrows in a way that reminded his supporters of Roger. Nor was ...

Not My Fault

John Lanchester: New Labour’s Terrible Memoirs, 17 July 2008

Speaking for Myself: The Autobiography 
by Cherie Blair.
Little, Brown, 421 pp., £18.99, May 2008, 978 1 4087 0098 3
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Prezza, My Story: Pulling No Punches 
by John Prescott, with Hunter Davies.
Headline, 405 pp., £18.99, May 2008, 978 0 7553 1775 2
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A Question of Honour: Inside New Labour and the True Story of the Cash for Peerages Scandal 
by Michael Levy.
Simon and Schuster, 310 pp., £18.99, May 2008, 978 1 84737 315 1
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... books. Prescott failed the 11-plus and is stinging about the experience. His father came back from France an amputee and thereafter became an accomplished cadger and skiver, an energetic seeker of free admission and free drinks; also a trade-union official and a JP. Prescott had next to no education, and left school at 15 to work in hotels, before getting a ...