What Universities Owe

Vincent Brown, 24 July 2025

Yale and Slavery: A History 
by David W. Blight.
Yale, 432 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 300 28184 2
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... out that Yale had named many of its colleges after slaveholders and pro-slavery leaders, including John C. Calhoun College in 1933 and Samuel F.B. Morse College in 1961, and noted that in 1831 Yale officials had helped to block the establishment of a college for Black Americans in New Haven. They called for Yale ‘to acknowledge how it has benefited from the ...

That Damn Smooth Stuff

Jefferson Cowie: Louisiana Demagogue, 19 March 2026

American Populist: Huey Long of Louisiana 
by Thomas E. Patterson.
Louisiana State, 704 pp., £43, February 2025, 978 0 8071 8299 4
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... Can’t Happen Here); the directors Robert Rossen, Ken Burns and Stephen Zaillian; and the actors John Goodman and Sean Penn have all grappled with the Kingfish – Long’s nickname, after a black character on the radio show Amos ’n’ Andy who manipulated and cajoled his associates into various exploits. Randy Newman recorded two songs about him in ...

Winging It

Clare Jackson: Early Modern Diplomacy, 5 March 2026

Lying Abroad: Henry Wotton and the Invention of Diplomacy 
by Carol Chillington Rutter.
Manchester, 313 pp., £20, February, 978 1 5261 7206 8
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... Essex’s Irish campaign in 1599; he took with him a verse-letter from his university friend John Donne, though for Rutter ‘it’s anyone’s guess how, as a soldier headed into a guerrilla war, he read the fantastically tortured images Donne wrapped around ideas of astonishing crassness.’ By the spring of 1601, however, Wotton had abandoned his ...

Ediepus

Michael Neve, 18 November 1982

Edie: An American Biography 
by Jean Stein and George Plimpton.
Cape, 455 pp., £9.95, October 1982, 0 224 02068 4
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Baby Driver: A Story About Myself 
by Jan Kerouac.
Deutsch, 208 pp., £7.95, August 1982, 0 233 97487 3
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... returned together to America, and married in May 1929. By this time ‘Fuzzy’ was already seeing John Millet, psychiatrist, at the Austen Higgs Centre in Stockbridge. ‘Fuzzy’ was fatal. He was very handsome. He had genuine artistic talents. He insisted on the importance of extreme physical activity, but was himself fragile. He and Alice had eight ...

Raskolnikov into Pnin

Tony Wood: Betraying the People’s Will in Tsarist Russia, 4 December 2003

The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia 
by Richard Pipes.
Yale, 153 pp., £16.95, April 2003, 0 300 09848 0
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... Alexander Pell – perhaps after the Russian chemist Aleksandr Pel, or the English mathematician John Pell – and in 1895 began a doctorate in mathematics at Johns Hopkins, which he obtained two years later. He was recommended for a job at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, where he soon became a fixture of college life, popular among his ...

Defeated Armies

Scott Sherman: Castro in the New York Times, 5 July 2007

The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of the ‘New York Times’ 
by Anthony DePalma.
PublicAffairs, 308 pp., £15.99, September 2006, 1 58648 332 3
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... Spain in the 1930s. In 1969, Simon and Schuster published his political biography of Castro, which John Leonard excoriated in the Times, and in 1971 he completed the second volume of his memoirs, A World in Revolution. In the mid-1970s, he and his wife moved to Australia to be near their son. Matthews died of a haemorrhage in 1977. An obituary in the New York ...

Think Tiny

Mark Ford: Nancification, 17 July 2008

The Nancy Book 
by Joe Brainard.
Siglio, 144 pp., $39.50, April 2008, 978 0 9799562 0 1
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... an express elevator. It is a cultivated essence of shop-window shrines and Pentecostal chapels (John Wesley with tambourines, lugubrious and off-pitch). Its own particular harsh pure green is raised and reinforced until it becomes an architecture. It is to green what a snowball is to white, an impactment. Although Brainard was raised a Methodist, these ...

Not Corrupt Enough

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Whose Cold War?, 20 March 2025

To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power 
by Sergey Radchenko.
Cambridge, 760 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 1 108 47735 2
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The World of the Cold War 1945-91 
by Vladislav Zubok.
Pelican, 521 pp., £25, May, 978 0 241 69614 9
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... talking seriously to their US counterparts, including Cold War scholars such as Melvyn Leffler and John Gaddis. Radchenko, more than twenty years younger and so essentially post-Soviet, arrived in the US as an exchange student (improbably, from the island of Sakhalin in the Pacific), wrote a PhD on Sino-Soviet relations under the supervision of Odd Arne Westad ...

The Bergoglio Smile

Colm Tóibín: The Francis Papacy, 21 January 2021

... 2005 papal conclave, when he was the main contender against Joseph Ratzinger after the death of John Paul II. It centred on the arrest and torture of two Jesuit priests, Oswaldo Yorio and Franz Jalics. Bergoglio had known both of them since the early 1960s – they had been his teachers. By the time Bergoglio took over as provincial of Argentina and ...

The Suitcase: Part Two

Frances Stonor Saunders, 13 August 2020

... two daughters to a flat near the British Legation in Bucharest. Everybody was taking precautions. John Treacy, the owner of an oil-well supply business, and his wife, Esther, had moved bedrooms after an incendiary bomb was thrown through their window, and slept with a loaded service revolver on the bedside table. Percy Clark had taken a room at the Athénée ...
... of an F15 or a smart missile. Note also that with the sudden disappearance of April Glaspie and John Kelly, the present war-making Administration has been run without a single professional who has any real knowledge or experience of the Middle East, its languages or its peoples. Such as it was, Iraq’s case against Kuwait – a case to some degree ...

At least they paid their taxes

Linda Colley, 25 July 1991

Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorised Biography 
by Kitty Kelley.
Bantam, 532 pp., £16.99, April 1991, 0 593 02450 8
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... Chief of Staff, has claimed that she influenced the sacking of Reagan’s campaign chairman, John Sears, in 1980; Larry Speakes has argued that she kept Lynn Nofzinger from becoming Press Secretary: while Donald Regan, the former Secretary of the Treasury, has accused her of a host of similar sins, including campaigning for the resignation of William ...

National Myths

Rosalind Mitchison, 20 November 1986

Domesday Economy: A New Approach to Anglo-Norman History 
by John McDonald and G.D. Snooks.
Oxford, 240 pp., £27.50, July 1986, 0 19 828524 8
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Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity: Illiteracy and Society in Scotland 
by R.A. Houston.
Cambridge, 352 pp., £27.50, December 1985, 0 521 26598 3
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A History of the Highland Clearances. Vol. II: Emigration, Protest, Reasons 
by Eric Richards.
Croom Helm, 543 pp., £25, October 1985, 0 7099 2259 0
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... These well-worn lines of Kipling’s encapsulate an enduring feature of the popular English concept of national history – its cosiness. Because of the remarkable quantity and quality of local documentary sources covering more than nine centuries, the historian of England is able to identify with them, and to throw the mantle of Victorian law-abiding domesticity over the past ...

Molehunt

Christopher Andrew, 22 January 1987

Sword and Shield: Soviet Intelligence and Security Apparatus 
by Jeffrey Richelson.
Harper and Row, 279 pp., £11.95, February 1986, 0 88730 035 9
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The Red and the Blue: Intelligence, Treason and the University 
by Andrew Sinclair.
Weidenfeld, 240 pp., £12.95, June 1986, 0 297 78866 3
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Inside Stalin’s Secret Police: NKVD Politics 1936-39 
by Robert Conquest.
Macmillan, 222 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 333 39260 4
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Conspiracy of Silence: The Secret Life of Anthony Blunt 
by Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman.
Grafton, 588 pp., £14.95, November 1986, 0 246 12200 5
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... too much of a digest: the notes to Chapter Two contain 27 consecutive references to two books by John Barron. Despite the enormous Soviet investment in technical intelligence, Richelson considers its importance smaller than in the United States, because of inferior Soviet technology and the much greater opportunities in the West for both humint operations ...

The Strangeness of Socrates

T.H. Irwin, 21 November 1991

Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher 
by Gregory Vlastos.
Cambridge, 334 pp., £35, April 1991, 0 521 30733 3
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... of scepticism about constructive moral argument) enjoys renewed favour among moral philosophers. John Rawls has remarked that the ideal method of moral philosophy is Socratic; and Vlastos’s account shows why a Socratic method deserves to be taken seriously and examined critically. Much of the best work on Socratic and Platonic ethics that has been done in ...