Why stop at two?

Greg Grandin: Latin America Pulls Away, 22 October 2009

Leftovers: Tales of the Latin American Left 
edited by Jorge Castañeda and Marco Morales.
Routledge, 267 pp., £17.99, February 2008, 978 0 415 95671 0
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... of Venezuela, and Latin America began another turn to the left. In one country after another, self-described socialists, from Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile to Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, came to power. In April 2008, Fernando Lugo, a priest, became president of Paraguay, ending more than six ...

Like Boiling a Frog

David Runciman: The Future of Wikipedia, 28 May 2009

The Wikipedia Revolution 
by Andrew Lih.
Aurum, 252 pp., £14.99, March 2009, 978 1 84513 473 0
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... Revolution is that both Jimmy Wales and one of his first collaborators, Larry Sanger, are self-confessed and totally earnest ‘objectivists’, meaning followers of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Sanger wrote his doctoral thesis at Ohio State University under the title ‘Epistemic Circularity: An Essay on the Problem of Meta-Justification’. He and ...

A View of a View

Marina Warner: Melchior Lorck, 27 May 2010

Melchior Lorck 
edited by Erik Fischer, Ernst Jonas Bencard and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen.
Royal Library Vandkunsten, 808 pp., €300, August 2009, 978 87 91393 61 7
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... brothers were called Casper and Balthasar), Melchior was slender and angelic looking (if his self-portrait is accurate), well educated, peripatetic and versatile. He trained as a goldsmith in Lübeck, and was polished in Italy on a Grand Tour subsidised by the Danish king. He liked to turn his hand to all kinds of ...

Diary

Hilary Mantel: Meeting the Devil, 4 November 2010

... them so I try and make my pain to their requirements. Illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false. Then all our defences are knocked down in one sweep. In sickness we can’t avoid knowing about our body and what it does, its ...

Smarter, Happier, More Productive

Jim Holt: ‘The Shallows’, 3 March 2011

The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember 
by Nicholas Carr.
Atlantic, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2010, 978 1 84887 225 7
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... has been invoked to explain depression, tinnitus, pornography addiction and masochistic self-mutilation (this last is supposedly a result of pain pathways getting rewired to the brain’s pleasure centres). Once new neural circuits become established in our brains, they demand to be fed, and they can hijack brain areas devoted to valuable mental ...

No Crying in This House

Jackson Lears: The Kennedy Myth, 7 November 2013

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy 
by David Nasaw.
Allen Lane, 896 pp., £12.35, September 2013, 978 0 14 312407 8
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Rose Kennedy: The Life and Times of a Political Matriarch 
by Barbara Perry.
Norton, 404 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 393 06895 5
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... of kids in a Frank Capra film. They are presided over by Joseph Kennedy, a fabulously successful self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links or the ski slopes as in Windsor Castle. After making millions in banking, real ...

No Theatricks

Ferdinand Mount: Burke, 21 August 2014

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: from the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence 
by David Bromwich.
Harvard, 500 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 0 674 72970 4
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Moral Imagination: Essays 
by David Bromwich.
Princeton, 350 pp., £19.95, March 2014, 978 0 691 16141 9
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... slow, anonymous sedimentation of immemorial custom; the constitution is no gift but the continuous self-defining public activity of the nation.’ Burke is a sedimentalist, just as he is, in a non-pejorative sense, a sentimentalist. The sentiments of the people, himself included, are political facts accreted over time, which cannot be ignored or easily ...

First Person

Tony Wood: Putin’s Russia, 5 February 2015

‘Sistema’, Power Networks and Informal Governance 
by Alena Ledeneva.
Cambridge, 327 pp., £19.99, February 2013, 978 0 521 12563 5
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The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin 
by Masha Gessen.
Granta, 314 pp., £9.99, January 2013, 978 1 84708 423 1
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Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? 
by Karen Dawisha.
Simon and Schuster, 464 pp., £11.50, September 2014, 978 1 4767 9519 5
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... barrel of Urals crude in June to $67 in December. All this has been exacerbated by the Kremlin’s self-destructive decisions. In August, Putin introduced retaliatory sanctions against countries that had mandated measures against Russia, the main effect of which has been drastically to reduce food imports and raise prices, helping to push inflation to an ...

Along the Divide

Nathan Thrall: Israel’s Allies, 5 November 2015

Periphery: Israel’s Search for Middle East Allies 
by Yossi Alpher.
Rowman and Littlefield, 196 pp., £23.95, January 2015, 978 1 4422 3101 6
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... would be a partial Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza; Palestinian elections for a self-governing body to replace the Israeli military government and civil administration; and negotiations over a final peace treaty to be concluded by the end of the transitional period. In his useful book Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin and Sadat at ...

Even My Hair Feels Drunk

Adam Mars-Jones: Joy Williams, 2 February 2017

The Visiting Privilege 
by Joy Williams.
Tuskar Rock, 490 pp., £16.99, November 2016, 978 1 78125 746 3
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Ninety-Nine Stories of God 
by Joy Williams.
Tin House, 220 pp., £16.95, July 2016, 978 1 941040 35 5
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... probably nice. She will tell the child this, at any rate.’ Her amnesia isn’t straightforwardly self-protective, since one of the things she does remember is her husband saying, when she was in hospital to give birth: ‘Now you are going to have to learn to love something, you wicked woman.’ The unnamed ‘yard boy’ who gives another story its title is ...

A Peacock Called Mirabell

August Kleinzahler: James Merrill, 31 March 2016

James Merrill: Life and Art 
by Langdon Hammer.
Knopf, 913 pp., £27, April 2015, 978 0 375 41333 9
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... setting of Merrill’s childhood,’ Hammer writes. ‘It showed him that a house could be a self-enclosed world, expressive of its owner. It left him both attracted to and resistant to everything that was grand.’ While Merrill’s adulthood was filled with privilege, fun, friendship, sex and poetry, his childhood appears to have been unhappy. A sickly ...

Brexit Blues

John Lanchester, 28 July 2016

... The Referendum Party contested 547 seats and lost all of them. The story of how that idea, self-evidently ridiculous in 1997, came to be a reality in 2016 is going to be often retold as we live through its consequences over the next few decades. One of the characteristics of the story is a distinctly British unseriousness: tragedy and farce, as so ...

He was the man

Robert Crawford: Ezra Pound, 30 June 2016

Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and his Work: Vol. III: The Tragic Years, 1939-72 
by A. David Moody.
Oxford, 654 pp., £30, September 2015, 978 0 19 870436 2
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... of Pound in Vol. I, ‘a genuine representative of both its more enlightened impulses and its self-destructive contradictions.’ Leaving aside the question of what Moody may mean here by ‘his culture’, to grant Pound heroic status from the outset is unwise. Moody nowhere says that Pound read Thomas Carlyle, but Carlyle’s notion of a church of ...

How complex is a lemon?

Stephen Mulhall: Object-Oriented Ontology, 27 September 2018

Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything 
by Graham Harman.
Pelican, 295 pp., £8.99, March 2018, 978 0 241 26915 2
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... by his own lights it must be entirely fictional. And even if that account were true, it does not self-evidently legitimate the metaphysical conclusions he draws from it. Many philosophers would deny that human beings are really model-building theorists of their own experience at every moment of their lives, as distinct from, say, engaging in such refined ...

In the Superstate

Wolfgang Streeck: What is technopopulism?, 27 January 2022

Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics 
by Christopher J. Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti.
Oxford, 256 pp., £75, February 2021, 978 0 19 880776 6
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... of various sorts in the populism of the right. While elite rule divides the people into self-seeking factions, populism unites them, in a struggle against those who claim to know better than the masses what the masses need.In their attempt to understand today’s post-democratic politics, Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti note ...