Reality Instruction

James Lasdun: In Court and on the Road, 23 April 2026

... and deep distrust of law enforcement never far from the surface. It wasn’t the repartee of David Milch’s cod-Shakespearean TV series Deadwood, but it was impressive. These people were unafraid to state the obvious, or to test established principles against their own instincts. It seemed to me that the traditional regard for civic responsibility was ...

The Price

Dan Jacobson: The concluding part of Dan Jacobson’s interview with Ian Hamilton, 21 February 2002

... had enough younger people whom I admired, and still had my old chums from the Review, Colin, Hugo, David Harsent; they just carried over and became part of this larger thing.Did you get any help from the eminenti who’d tried to float a magazine?None at all. I didn’t really know them. And didn’t admire them, particularly. There was a whole social aspect ...

Depicting Europe

Perry Anderson, 20 September 2007

... since it is the Commission – the EU’s unelected executive – alone that can propose the laws on which the Council and (more notionally) the Parliament deliberate. The violation of a constitutional separation of powers in this dual authority – a bureaucracy vested with a monopoly of legislative initiative – is flagrant. Alongside this hybrid ...

Somerdale to Skarbimierz

James Meek, 20 April 2017

... Sir John Sunderland, Roger Carr, Rick Braddock, Ellen Marram, Guy Elliott, Rosemary Thorne, David Thompson, Sanjiv Ahuja, Wolfgang Berndt, Lord Patten and Raymond Viault. Only Berndt replied (Chris Patten’s assistant told me he was in ‘rural Asia’ without email, then, when the deadline was extended, too ill to respond). Berndt told me he ...

After Kemal

Perry Anderson, 25 September 2008

... own half-Kurdish origins – he came from Malatya in the east – and to loosen the most draconian laws against the use of Kurdish as a language. But on his sudden death in 1993, Demirel grabbed the presidency, and torture and repression intensified. The rest of the 1990s saw a succession of weak, corrupt coalitions that reproduced the trajectory of the ...

Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Perry Anderson, 7 February 2019

... border control and white-collar crime. Promotion depends on arrest rates, which are assisted by laws that no longer distinguish between the sale and the consumption of drugs, nor require witnesses for apprehension on the spot, offering a quick route to the criminalisation of poverty, as the young and black – pardo (‘mixed race’) and preto ...

‘I wouldn’t pay it either’

Simon Skinner: World Cup Wallcharts, 25 June 2026

The Power and the Glory: A New History of the World Cup 
by Jonathan Wilson.
Little Brown, 608 pp., £12.99, May, 978 0 349 14573 0
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... rooms); the Battle of Santiago (hosts Chile against Italy in 1962, characterised by the BBC’s David Coleman as ‘the most stupid, appalling, disgusting and disgraceful exhibition of football in the history of the game’); die Wasserschlacht (the water battle) of 1974, when West Germany, the hosts, beat Poland on a waterlogged pitch that nullified the ...