Lessons of Zimbabwe

Mahmood Mamdani: Mugabe in Context, 4 December 2008

... Jesse Helms, previously a supporter of UDI, sponsored the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery bill (another sponsor was Hillary Clinton) and it became law in December that year. Part of the act was a formal injunction on US officials in international financial institutions to ‘oppose and vote against any extension by the respective institution of any ...

Regime Change in the West?

Perry Anderson, 3 April 2025

... of the Gipper, the Indian American banker Ruchir Sharma, formerly chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley, in What Went Wrong with Capitalism.4 Its leitmotif is that ‘the periodic financial crises – erupting in 2001, 2008 and 2020 – now unfold against the background of a permanent, daily crisis of colossal capital misallocation,’ the result of ...

Into the Underworld

Iain Sinclair: The Hackney Underworld, 22 January 2015

... and plotted; he interpreted the stages of the Hole’s active life as a future manifesto. Mark Morgan, an excavation theorist, biding his time on the edge of the gathering in the candlelit room, revealed that he had made a calculation, based on the value per square metre of towers going up in Hackney, and basements being hacked out, that every pint of ...

Magnifico

David Bromwich: This was Orson Welles, 3 June 2004

Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life 
by Peter Conrad.
Faber, 384 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 571 20978 5
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... minutes out of the running time: half of the second half of the film. It was released on a double bill with Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost, and Welles was never again welcomed by the people in Hollywood with the money to back projects of much size. The torso that is the first hour of The Magnificent Ambersons remains a great historical film, the only thing by ...

When Bitcoin Grows Up

John Lanchester: What is Money?, 21 April 2016

... a recurring theme. In How Would You Like to Pay, a lucid short book on new money technologies, Bill Maurer points out that as recently as the 1860s the United States had eight thousand private currencies in circulation, issued by ‘banks, railroad companies, retail stores and other entities’.1 There is an interesting discussion of US money in Edward ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... His relationship with the New York Times was every bit as toxic. He believed its editor, Bill Keller, was determined to treat him as a ‘source’ rather than a collaborator – which was true – and that Keller wanted to hang him out to dry, which was not true. Keller wrote a long piece in his own paper saying Julian was ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... to grow by 187 per cent by the late 2030s. All seven of its MPs are Conservative, among them Nicky Morgan, the chair of the Treasury Select Committee. It voted, narrowly, for Leave. If there is to be a transformation in the way Leicestershire’s million people are to be helped to good health, there has to be a plan, and an organisation to carry it out. One of ...