What Europeans Talk about when They Talk about Brexit

LRB Contributors: On Brexit, 3 January 2019

“... naff’ (Irish Independent, 8 October 2018).Tories, historical sensitivities of: Michael Gove once characterised the peace process as a capitulation to the IRA, and then likened it to the appeasement of the Nazis. In June, Boris Johnson said concerns over the Irish border were ‘pure millennium bug stuff’. In August, Jacob Rees-Mogg ...”

The Bergoglio Smile

Colm Tóibín: The Francis Papacy, 21 January 2021

“... relationship with the new pope’. The doubts had started early. In 1977, an English Jesuit, Michael Campbell-Johnston, sent to Argentina to report on the order there, wrote that he was appalled that ‘our institute in Buenos Aires was able to function freely because it never criticised or opposed the government,’ and, according to Ivereigh, ‘he ...”

‘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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“... tax evasion and money laundering. The 353-page report produced for Fifa by the American lawyer Michael J. Garcia and his Swiss assistant, Cornel Borbély, in 2014, as Blatter sought frantically to wriggle free of a tightening net, was a grim inventory of Fifa’s systemic corruption, exposing ‘a culture of expectation and entitlement’ and endemic ...”

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

“... were growing up, the only old framed photograph my brothers and I ever saw was of my grandfather Michael, a hero of the Second World War. And that’s always the way he was described to us, a war hero, the man who tried to save his Glasgow compatriots on HMS Forfar when it was struck by two torpedoes in December 1940. Except that story wasn’t true ...”