Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat

David Runciman: Thatcher’s Rise, 6 June 2013

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. Vol. I: Not for Turning 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 859 pp., £30, April 2013, 978 0 7139 9282 3
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... leader of the opposition she had had a bad experience at a briefing with the director of the IMF, Pierre-Paul Schweitzer, ‘a languid, cigarette-smoking French intellectual of the type she had probably never encountered before’. He condescended to her and treated her like an ignorant housewife. She also got on very badly with Giscard d’Estaing, another ...

Wouldn’t you like to be normal?

Lucie Elven: Janet Frame’s Place, 8 May 2025

The Edge of the Alphabet 
by Janet Frame.
Fitzcarraldo, 296 pp., £12.99, August 2024, 978 1 80427 118 6
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... system that took her feeling for language as evidence of madness. When she compared herself to Pierre in War and Peace, her doctors thought she was describing a schizophrenic delusion. ‘I inhabited a territory of loneliness,’ she later wrote, ‘which I think resembles that place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who ...

Devotion to the Cut

Adam Thirlwell: Gertrude Stein makes it plain, 25 September 2025

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife 
by Francesca Wade.
Faber, 472 pp., £20, May, 978 0 571 36931 7
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... Faÿ had offered Stein assurances in 1940, his influence would have diminished significantly when Pierre Laval – who distrusted Faÿ, and tried to have him fired from the library – replaced Pétain as leader of France. After November 1942, Stein had to survive on her own.’ The argument that Malcolm and others have advanced against Stein by association ...

Dynasty

Sherry Turkle: Lacan and Co, 6 December 1990

Jacques Lacan and Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985 
by Elisabeth Roudinesco, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman.
Free Association, 816 pp., £25, December 1990, 9781853431630
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... to the referee mode, faulting Lacan for making anonymous use of an anecdote about Derrida’s son Pierre that the philosopher told Lacan at a dinner in Paris a year after the Baltimore conference: ‘Lacan’s role in the affair was not a good one, and Derrida felt wounded. Understandably so.’ She then returns to her therapeutic voice, telling us that Lacan ...
... the sail disappear, like Dido. In an essay on Greek perception of space, the French scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests that Western culture has always divided space by gender, so that inferiority, inner fixedness, is female: it is summed up by Hestia, goddess of the hearth. Mobility is male, incarnated by Hermes, the lord of messages and roads. This ...

Operation Backfire

Francis Spufford: Britain’s space programme, 28 October 1999

... uniform. His International Space Force was supposed to be a global outfit, but ‘Hank’ and ‘Pierre’ had only bit-parts; Sir Hubert called the shots. ‘Eee, I wish I’d stayed in Wigan,’ quavered Digby, as they confronted the green-skinned hordes of Venusopolis. By the mid-Sixties, the fantasy of flying Spitfires to other planets had almost faded ...

Made by the Revolution

Perry Anderson: Mao’s Right Hand, 12 September 2024

Zhou Enlai: A Life 
by Chen Jian.
Harvard, 817 pp., £29.95, May, 978 0 674 65958 2
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... them – when he could all but certainly have wrested them from Paris, where the prime minister, Pierre Mendès France, was desperate to quit Indochina after the debacle of Dien Bien Phu.5 Vietnam would have been spared the millions of dead in the American war to prevent what should have occurred more peacefully in the mid-1950s.To this the objection can be ...

Land without Prejudice

Perry Anderson: Berlusconi’s Italy, 21 March 2002

... the traditional party system in Italy, even had its petty-bourgeois precursor in the movement of Pierre Poujade, whose emergence hastened the final crisis of the Fourth Republic. In all these respects, a French reference could seem to make much sense in the Italian situation of the early 1990s, legitimating hopes of a cathartic purge of the accumulated ills ...

Why the bastards wouldn’t stand and fight

Murray Sayle: Mao in Vietnam, 21 February 2002

China and the Vietnam Wars 1950-75 
by Qiang Zhai.
North Carolina, 304 pp., $49.95, April 2000, 0 8078 4842 5
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None so Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam 
by George Allen.
Ivan Dee, 296 pp., $27.50, October 2001, 1 56663 387 7
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No Peace, No Honour: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam 
by Larry Berman.
Free Press, 334 pp., $27.50, November 2001, 0 684 84968 2
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... day, an international conference on Indochina opened in Geneva. While the Geneva talks dawdled, Pierre Mendès-France was elected Prime Minister of France, promising a settlement by 20 July. Meeting privately in Berne, Mendès-France told Mao’s Prime Minister, Zhou Enlai, that France was anxious to withdraw but wanted to seem to do so ...

The Ribs of Rosinante

Richard Gott, 21 August 1997

Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life 
by Jon Lee Anderson.
Bantam, 814 pp., £25, April 1997, 0 593 03403 1
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Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara 
by Jorge Castañeda, translated by Marina Castañeda.
Bloomsbury, 480 pp., £20, October 1997, 0 7475 3334 2
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... in New Left Review last year. Others, including Castañeda and Anderson, rely on it no less.Pierre Kalfon, too, has a good sense of the internationalist dimension to Guevara’s career. For many years a French cultural attaché in Latin America, Kalfon was caught up in the Guevarist enthusiasms of the Sixties. He has now written a rather measured ...

Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... Right to Buy by a desperate Edward Heath, then her leader, who’d been persuaded by his friend Pierre Trudeau after his electoral defeat in February 1974 that he needed a fistful of populist policies. No wonder Thatcher baulked. Right to Buy violated basic Thatcherite values: that self-reliance was good, state handouts bad. Right to Buy was a massive ...

Apartheid’s Last Stand

Jeremy Harding, 17 March 2016

Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola since the Civil War 
by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira.
Hurst, 291 pp., £25, March 2015, 978 1 84904 284 0
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A Short History of Modern Angola 
by David Birmingham.
Hurst, 256 pp., £17.99, December 2015, 978 1 84904 519 3
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Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa 
by Piero Gleijeses.
North Carolina, 655 pp., £27.95, February 2016, 978 1 4696 0968 3
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A General Theory of Oblivion 
by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn.
Harvill, 245 pp., £14.99, June 2015, 978 1 84655 847 4
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In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre 
by Lara Pawson.
I.B. Tauris, 271 pp., £20, April 2014, 978 1 78076 905 9
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Cuito Cuanavale: Frontline Accounts by Soviet Soldiers 
by G. Shubin, I. Zhdarkin et al, translated by Tamara Reilly.
Jacana, 222 pp., £12.95, May 2014, 978 1 4314 0963 1
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... no longer existed. The hunt was on for fixers. Before long Dos Santos and his diplomats found Pierre Falcone, the French billionaire ‘consultant’, and the Russian-Israeli ‘import-export’ maverick Arkady Gaydamak, who arranged for a series of unauthorised arms deliveries to the MPLA. The ‘Angolagate’ deal was powered by the French, whose thirst ...

Bites from the Bearded Crocodile

G. Cabrera Infante, 4 June 1981

... de Beauvoir, ltalo Calvino, Marguerite Duras, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Juan Goytisolo, André Pierre de Mandiargues, Alain Jouffroy, Joyce Mansour, Alberto Moravia, Octavio Paz and some others who couldn’t even pronounce the name of Padilla correctly, much less read his poems. It was a case of tit for tat. The European and Latin American intellectuals ...

The Suitcase: Part Two

Frances Stonor Saunders, 13 August 2020

... Fifty British and French engineers and their families were swiftly expelled, among them Pierre Angot, identified in the captured documents as a member of the co-ordinating ‘general staff’ of the Deuxième Bureau (the equivalent of MI6), which was working alongside British intelligence.Angot was the technical director of Steaua Romana, and worked ...

Ever Closer Union?

Perry Anderson, 7 January 2021

... the court, setting an energetic example himself.In all this he was seconded from 1967 onwards by Pierre Pescatore, another kin appointment, brother-in-law of the prime minister of Luxembourg and a more outspoken and prolific champion of federalism even than Lecourt – his legal opinions serving in the words of one witness as the ‘shock troops’ of ...