Search Results

Advanced Search

586 to 600 of 846 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Here for the crunch

R.W. Johnson, 28 April 1994

... have Jesse Jackson like we’re gonna have here.’ I asked how the funding worked. ‘Well, Washington has this idea that democracy is something you can sorta buy. They say: will it be free and fair? If we say no, not really, they say: well how much more do we have to allocate to get it free and fair?’ I was called to the phone. It was my ...

Return to Nowhere

Charles Glass: Yasser Arafat, 18 March 1999

Arafat: From Defender to Dictato 
by Said Aburish.
Bloomsbury, 352 pp., £20, September 1998, 0 7475 3629 5
Show More
Show More
... Revolution (1990), found Cairo University records giving Arafat’s birthplace as Cairo. Janet and John Wallach, who wrote Arafat: In the Eyes of the Beholder (1990), came up with his Egyptian birth certificate. Arafat shrugged off the disclosure. Said Aburish, a Palestinian whose biography is the best available in English, sympathises with Arafat’s original ...

Only in the Balkans

Misha Glenny: The Balkans Imagined, 29 April 1999

Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination 
by Vesna Goldsworthy.
Yale, 254 pp., £19.95, May 1998, 0 300 07312 7
Show More
Imagining the Balkans 
by Maria Todorova.
Oxford, 270 pp., £35, June 1997, 9780195087505
Show More
Show More
... going on’, 1914 wiped out any ambivalence. The immensely popular Inside Europe (1940) of John Gunther summarised feelings on this side of the Atlantic: ‘It is an intolerable affront to human and political nature that these wretched and unhappy little countries in the Balkan peninsula can, and do, have quarrels that cause world wars. Some hundred ...

Touch of Evil

Christopher Hitchens, 22 October 1992

Kissinger: A Biography 
by Walter Isaacson.
Faber, 893 pp., £25, September 1992, 0 571 16858 2
Show More
Show More
... pop shrinks call ‘transference’. But there is a limit, imposed by the tradition of New York-Washington ‘objectivity’, on his willingness to call things by their right names. It became very plain to me, as I finished the book, that if I were to employ the argot of popular psychology I could say that I had been reading the profile of a serial ...

Jade and Plastic

Andrew Nathan: How bad was Mao?, 17 November 2005

Mao: The Unknown Story 
by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday.
Cape, 814 pp., £25, June 2005, 0 224 07126 2
Show More
Show More
... presidential and foreign ministry archives, and other archives in Albania, Bulgaria, London and Washington DC. They even tried – and failed – to get access to the Chinese war memorial in Pyongyang.The book cites by name 363 interviewees in 38 countries, including two former US presidents; Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of Singapore; the ...

The Age of Detesting Trump

David Bromwich, 13 July 2017

... as an intermittent reminder. The Times speculation was prompted by an earlier report in the Washington Post: Kushner wanted special Russian facilities to prevent intrusion by US intelligence, in order to conduct transitional discussions with Russia. A strategic misfire on Kushner’s part; but no less questionable was the assumption guiding the ...

Double V

Eric Foner: Military Racism, 2 March 2023

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War Two at Home and Abroad 
by Matthew F. Delmont.
Viking, 374 pp., £25.69, October 2022, 978 1 9848 8039 0
Show More
An Army Afire: How the US Army Confronted its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era 
by Beth Bailey.
North Carolina, 360 pp., £36.95, May, 978 1 4696 7326 4
Show More
Show More
... apartheid’.A. Philip Randolph, the Black labour leader and civil rights activist, described Washington DC as not only the capital of the United States but also the capital of ‘Dixie’. Roosevelt and Congress were largely indifferent to Black demands for equality in the army and civilian life. While Blacks were fighting for the Double V, the federal ...

Peace without Empire

Perry Anderson, 2 December 2021

Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union 
by Stella Ghervas.
Harvard, 528 pp., £31.95, March, 978 0 674 97526 2
Show More
Show More
... became an instrument of it, a convenient façade for military and political operations run by Washington around the world, from Korea to the Congo, down to the current blockades of Iran and the DPRK. Truman is praised for the creation of Nato and the launching of the Marshall Plan, as respectively defensive and constructive contributions to postwar ...

‘Rip their skin off’

Alexander Clapp: Montenegro’s Pivot, 25 April 2024

... though the OSCE said that the election had generally been ‘well conducted’.) After a visit to Washington in March 1997, Đukanović presented himself as a knight-errant willing to defend human rights against ‘ancient hatreds’. Over the coming years, he pushed a version of Montenegrin identity based on civic, not ethnic, grounds. He rolled out the ...

Sexual Tories

Angus Calder, 17 May 1984

The Common People: A History from the Norman Conquest to the Present 
by J.F.C. Harrison.
Croom Helm and Flamingo, 445 pp., £12.95, March 1984, 0 7099 0125 9
Show More
British Society 1914-45 
by John Stevenson.
Allen Lane/Penguin, 503 pp., £16.95, March 1984, 0 7139 1390 8
Show More
The World We Left Behind: A Chronicle of the Year 1939 
by Robert Kee.
Weidenfeld, 369 pp., £11.95, April 1984, 0 297 78287 8
Show More
Wigan Pier Revisited: Poverty and Politics in the Eighties 
by Beatrix Campbell.
Virago, 272 pp., £4.50, April 1984, 0 86068 417 2
Show More
Show More
... sex or ability, they came and went when they chose, working-class mothers were admirably assisted. John Pounds, a crippled Portsmouth cobbler, ran one such, carrying on his trade while his pupils did the work he set them. A visitor suggested that he needed some new books – ‘those under that birdcage seem to be coming to pieces.’ Pounds: ‘So much the ...

The President and the Bomb

Adam Shatz, 16 November 2017

... the US ‘on the path to World War Three’. Corker is one of a handful of Republicans, along with John McCain and Jeff Flake, who now seem more afraid of what Trump might do to the world than of what he might do to them. What sort of war does Trump risk detonating? The most frightening scenario is war between ‘Rocket Man’ and ‘the Dotard’ (as Kim ...

Think outside the bun

Colin Burrow: Quote Me!, 8 September 2022

The New Yale Book of Quotations 
edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
Yale, 1136 pp., £35, October 2021, 978 0 300 20597 8
Show More
Show More
... Post Review of 1945) and ‘get a life’ (which it’s hard to believe wasn’t used before the Washington Post of 23 January 1983). ‘Sayings’ occupy the indefinable hinterland between proverbs and the kind of thing usually called ‘quotations’, which are remarks like ‘the golden rule is that there are no golden rules,’ made by people like George ...

A Family of Acrobats

Adam Mars-Jones: Teju Cole, 3 July 2014

Every Day Is for the Thief 
by Teju Cole.
Faber, 162 pp., £12.99, April 2014, 978 0 571 30792 0
Show More
Show More
... sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolised by the very slow washing of dishes. Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. The absolute distinction made here between a writer and the ...

Suspicious

Tariq Ali: Richard Sorge’s Fate, 21 November 2019

An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent 
by Owen Matthews.
Bloomsbury, 448 pp., £25, March 2019, 978 1 4088 5778 6
Show More
Show More
... Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur. Owen Matthews – whose new biography of Sorge is the fifth to appear in English – is well qualified to write this book: his Ukrainian maternal grandfather was Boris Bibikov, a factory worker in Kharkov who ...

In Your Face

Evgeny Morozov: Surveillance Technology, 5 April 2012

Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance 
by Kelly Gates.
NYU Press, 261 pp., £15.99, March 2011, 978 0 8147 3210 6
Show More
Show More
... even imperfect FRT can be useful. Suppose you have just photographed a man who claims to be John Smith. How can a computer establish whether he is the same John Smith who exists in your database? First, it needs to find the man’s face in the picture – by looking for blob-like regions with consistent brightness and ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences