Permission to narrate

Edward Said, 16 February 1984

Israel in Lebanon: The Report of the International Commission 
by Sean MacBride.
Ithaca, 282 pp., £4.50, March 1984, 0 903729 96 2
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Sabra et Chatila: Enquête sur un Massacre 
by Amnon Kapeliouk.
Seuil, 117 pp.
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Final Conflict: The War in the Lebanon 
by John Bulloch.
Century, 238 pp., £9.95, April 1983, 0 7126 0171 6
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Lebanon: The Fractured Country 
by David Gilmour.
Robertson, 209 pp., £9.95, June 1983, 0 85520 679 9
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The Tragedy of Lebanon: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventures and American Bunglers 
by Jonathan Randal.
Chatto, 320 pp., £9.50, October 1983, 0 7011 2755 4
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God cried 
by Tony Clifton and Catherine Leroy.
Quartet, 141 pp., £15, June 1983, 0 7043 2375 3
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Beirut: Frontline Story 
by Salim Nassib, Caroline Tisdall and Chris Steele-Perkins.
Pluto, 160 pp., £3.95, March 1983, 0 86104 397 9
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The Fateful Triangle: Israel, the United States and the Palestinians 
by Noam Chomsky.
Pluto, 481 pp., £6.95, October 1983, 0 86104 741 9
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... regimes. Gideon Spiro, an Israeli, testified to the MacBride Commission: We don’t pay the price of anything that we are doing, not in the occupied territories, because Israel is in this a unique miracle. There is no country in the world which has over 100 per cent inflation, which is occupying the West Bank, occupying another people, and building all ...

Different Speeds, Same Furies

Perry Anderson: Powell v. Proust, 19 July 2018

Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time 
by Hilary Spurling.
Hamish Hamilton, 509 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 241 14383 4
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... under a thousand apiece from Jean-Yves Tadié and William Carter; Joyce, at 59, eight hundred from Richard Ellmann. Moving down the scale to medium or lightweights, there is little reduction in size. If we confine ourselves to Britain, Martin Stannard produced a thousand pages on Evelyn Waugh, who died when he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a ...

The Arrestables

Jeremy Harding: Extinction Rebellion, 16 April 2020

... founding activists, have been exemplary arrestables. Arrests, they argue, are the necessary price for refusing a police order to move, and if enough people are detained, police stations and magistrates’ courts, perhaps even prisons, may eventually come under stress; sympathisers will flock to the movement. XR actions, one member told me, aim to ...

A Rumbling of Things Unknown

Jacqueline Rose: Marilyn Monroe, 26 April 2012

... ascendancy of the machine. ‘Once I slangily asked her how “she cranked up” to do a scene,’ Richard Meryman, who interviewed her for Life, reported. ‘“I don’t crank anything,” she replied: “I’m not a Model T … An actor is not a machine, no matter how much they want to say you are.”’ By the time Arthur Miller met her, the rift Steffens ...

I Could Sleep with All of Them

Colm Tóibín: The Mann Family, 6 November 2008

In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story 
by Andrea Weiss.
Chicago, 302 pp., £14.50, May 2008, 978 0 226 88672 5
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... to Erika, who took him with her on what became joint lecture tours. Their titles included ‘What Price Peace?’, ‘What Does the Youth of Europe Believe in Today?’ and ‘Our Father and His Work’. They wrote two books together. Soon, Thomas and Katia Mann arrived in America as well, and, with their 14 suitcases in tow, began to tour the country ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... more than 16 hours to be admitted. An A&E consultant at the Royal Stoke University Hospital, Dr Richard Fawcett, broadcast his frustration on Twitter. ‘It breaks my heart,’ he wrote, ‘to see so many frail and elderly patients in the corridor for hours and hours … I personally apologise to the people of Stoke for the Third World conditions of the ...

Bournemouth

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bournemouth Set, 21 May 2020

... become embedded in a new way in the English capital, with an interest in what might be called the price of political idealism. He composed the essay after a brief holiday in France, where he met several old literary confrères – Daudet, Goncourt and Zola. Their discussions appear to have gripped him. ‘We take less pains with our style than the ...

West End Vice

Alan Hollinghurst: Queer London, 8 May 2025

Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945-59 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 445 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 241 37060 5
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Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-67 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 416 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 241 68370 5
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... wonders what percentage of the original audience knew, or guessed, that two of the actors, Dennis Price and Bogarde himself, were queer too. It must have been a curious scene to shoot, with actors openly discussing matters that in their real lives they were obliged to keep very quiet about.How far​ were people, gay or straight, prepared to stick their necks ...

Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
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The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
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... no less than the assumed and bogus Late Roman stoicism. A ‘terrific domino man’ indeed! What price ‘negative liberty’ now? And what of the sceptical humanist who warned incessantly about the sacrifice of living people to abstract ends, or totemic dogmas?As against all that, the pleadings of Alsop to Mac Bundy did succeed in getting the latter to ...

Imitation Democracy

Perry Anderson: Post-Communist States, 27 August 2015

... way – to a liberal democracy whose unfolding was happily resumed at the turn of the century: Richard Pipes and Martin Malia the emblematic spokesmen of each. Furman’s construction avoided these alternatives. The strength of his conception of a ‘spiral’ peculiar to Russia was to link repetition and innovation in a single historical movement that was ...

You Muddy Fools

Dan Jacobson: In the months before his death Ian Hamilton talked about himself to Dan Jacobson, 14 January 2002

... This is the first part of a two-part interview. Part 2: ‘The Price’.Ian Hamilton died of cancer on 27 December 2001, aged 63. It was a death that the ‘LRB’ has especial cause to lament. He was a great support to this paper, helping to get it going in 1979, serving ever since on its editorial board, and above all contributing many exact, unsparing and funny pieces on poetry, on novels – and on football ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... in the flats above and below don’t even know there’s been a fire. This was something else.’ Richard Welsh is a senior officer with the London Fire Brigade. His pager went off at 1.18 a.m. ‘Initially they had six machines there,’ he said. ‘Then they asked for eight, and then ten, and then 15, 20, and then 25. I’m hearing that on the way there, so ...