Heroes of Our Time

Karl Miller, 19 May 1988

The Monument 
by T. Behrens.
Cape, 258 pp., £11.95, May 1988, 0 224 02510 4
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The Passion of John Aspinall 
by Brian Masters.
Cape, 360 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 0 224 02353 5
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... They include Mr Gerald Albertini, The Rt Hon. Peter Archer MP, Miss Amanda Aspinall, Dr Robert Aspinall, The Duke of Atholl, Miss Julie Battersea, Mr Tom Begg, Dr Kurt Benirschke, Mr Robin Birley, Mr Anthony Blond, Mr Robert Boutwood, Mr Claus von Bülow, Mr Timothy Cassel, The Hon. Mr Alan Clark, Sir David Crouch ...

Female Bandits? What next!

Wendy Doniger: The incarnations of Robin Hood, 22 July 2004

Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography 
by Stephen Knight.
Cornell, 247 pp., £14.50, May 2003, 0 8014 3885 3
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... And I guess the "robin” means he stole birds.’ Robin is more likely to be a nickname for Robert, though the resonance with ‘robber’ may also count for something, and Hood may suggest his frequent disguises, for Robin is a great trickster whose masquerades inevitably bamboozle his foolish oppressors: he specialises in pretending to help people ...

Iwo Jima v. Abu Ghraib

David Simpson: The iconic image, 29 November 2007

No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture and Liberal Democracy 
by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites.
Chicago, 419 pp., £19, June 2007, 978 0 226 31606 2
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... photographs, have been commonplace since at least the American Civil War. In No Caption Needed, Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites are less concerned with these debates than with the ways in which iconic images have been used to propose and renegotiate various kinds of ‘democratic citizenship’ and ‘civic identity’. Here original truths matter ...

Hate Burst Out

Kim Phillips-Fein: Chicago, 1968, 15 August 2024

The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 
by Luke A. Nichter.
Yale, 370 pp., £35, October 2023, 978 0 300 25439 6
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... McCarthy and facing dissent in his party, he became convinced he wasn’t going to win. Then Robert F. Kennedy, one of three main Democratic contenders (alongside McCarthy and the vice president, Hubert Humphrey), was assassinated, only two months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. The former governor of Alabama George Wallace ran a ferocious ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Didn’t Do in 2007, 3 January 2008

... fucked in 46 of the 50 states. I wish I’d known this in 1952, when in my first weeks of National Service Basic Training I was in the next bed to a boy called Huggins, a steelworker from Sheffield whose frequent boast was that he had ‘had his hole’ in six or seven towns and cities, which he would then list. At the time I was less than impressed and ...

What are judges for?

Conor Gearty, 25 January 2001

... Lord Chief Justices. The memory is not a warm one. This whole question of extra-curricular public service by judges – in public inquiries, commissions and so on – is one that has not been properly explored. Increasingly in recent years, judges have been asked to perform all manner of public duties way beyond the confines of the courtroom, sometimes ...

A Very Low Birth Rate in Kakania

Nicholas Spice, 16 October 1997

The Man without Qualities 
by Robert Musil, translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike.
Picador, 1774 pp., £40, November 1995, 0 330 34682 2
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The Man without Qualities 
by Robert Musil, translated by Sophie Wilkins.
Picador, 1130 pp., £15, October 1997, 0 330 34942 2
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... is Rachel, maid to Ermelinda Tuzzi who is the wife of Section Chief Tuzzi, a bureaucrat in the service of the Imperial Austrian Government in Vienna. The year is 1913: Rachel was 19 and believed in miracles. She had been born in a squalid shack in Poland, where a mezuzah hung on the doorpost and the soil came up through the cracks in the floorboards. She ...

Miracle on Fleet Street

Martin Hickman: Operation Elveden, 7 January 2016

... Journalists paid between £250 and £5000 a time to police officers, prison guards, health service workers, civil servants and other public officials in return for tip-offs, copies of records and photographs taken in the course of their duties. At least a dozen officers from four different police forces were taking bribes, including two in the ...

Let us breakfast in splendour

Charles Nicholl: Francis Barber, 16 July 2015

The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir 
by Michael Bundock.
Yale, 282 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 20710 1
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... book. Boswell was always grateful for a leg-up to the moral high ground, so here is another little service ‘honest Francis’ has done him. Barber was noticed by his eminent contemporaries, his life brushes against theirs, and yet there is a missing dimension in their descriptions of him. They wish him good day as they hand him their coats and their walking ...

A Pox on the Poor

Steven Shapin: The First Vaccine, 4 February 2021

The Great Inoculator: The Untold Story of Daniel Sutton and His Medical Revolution 
by Gavin Weightman.
Yale, 216 pp., £16.99, August 2020, 978 0 300 24144 0
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... routinisation of inoculation was, however, a provincial affair, led by a Suffolk surgeon called Robert Sutton and, especially, by Daniel Sutton (1735-1819), the second of his six sons. The Suttons were a family firm: all the sons, and some other relatives, were involved in one way or another. It was the Suttons who industrialised the practice of smallpox ...

A Tiny Sun

Tom Stevenson: Getting the Bomb, 24 February 2022

The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War 
by Fred Kaplan.
Simon and Schuster, 384 pp., £15, April 2021, 978 1 9821 0729 1
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The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age 
by Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press.
Cornell, 180 pp., £23.99, June 2020, 978 1 5017 4929 2
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... non-nuclear states from acquiring nuclear weapons, but the existing powers had only paid lip service to disarmament. Now the US could focus on non-proliferation as a tool of power politics. It often failed. The Clinton administration sought to prevent North Korea getting the bomb, and with the 1994 Agreed Framework succeeded in temporarily hindering its ...

Communism’s Man of Letters

J.P. Stern, 26 September 1991

Georg Lukács: Life, Thought and Politics 
by Arpad Kadarkay.
Blackwell, 538 pp., £45, June 1991, 1 55786 114 5
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... and on his return to Budapest he used his father’s influence to secure exemption from military service, though he worked briefly in the government censorship. By 1917 Lukács’s friends had formed an ideological nucleus in the form of a ‘Free School of the Humanities’, but his actual conversion to Communism only took place in December 1918, in ...

Degrees of Not Knowing

Rory Stewart: Does anyone know how to govern Iraq?, 31 March 2005

What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building 
by Noah Feldman.
Princeton, 154 pp., £12.95, November 2004, 0 691 12179 6
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Blinded by the Sunlight: Surviving Abu Ghraib and Saddam’s Iraq 
by Matthew McAllester.
Harper Perennial, 304 pp., $13.95, February 2005, 0 06 058820 9
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The Fall of Baghdad 
by Jon Lee Anderson.
Little, Brown, 389 pp., £20, February 2005, 0 316 72990 6
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The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq 
by Christian Parenti.
New Press, 211 pp., £12.99, December 2004, 1 56584 948 5
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... shooting, revenge for a killing he instigated, something connected with the Iranian secret service, or simply an attack by one of the two main groups which I know oppose him. ‘Perhaps,’ he concedes, ‘it is because of my criticism of the corruption.’ The Coalition gave $2 million directly to the provincial council to spend on local ...

Plan A

Jamie Martin: Economic Warfare, 7 May 2026

Chokepoints: How the Global Economy Became a Weapon of War 
by Edward Fishman.
Elliott and Thompson, 538 pp., £10.99, January, 978 1 78396 893 0
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... high-quality counterfeit $100 bills began to appear around the world. The United States Secret Service, the agency responsible for investigating fraudulent currency, claimed that these ‘supernotes’ were printed in North Korea, though it wasn’t clear how the intaglio printer, cotton-linen paper and colour-shifting ink had ended up there. Even ...

Glaswegians

Andrew O’Hagan, 11 May 1995

... to inform you,’ it said, ‘that your husband Michael O’Hagan is reported missing on war service.’ Others had known of the ship’s sinking before then, and word had spread, but no one could face telling Molly or any of the women who had men on the boats. They left her pretty much alone with the telegram that day, but gathered round the day ...