All change. This train is cancelled

Iain Sinclair: The Dome, 13 May 1999

... ESCAPE, GAS RELATED EMERGENCY, ELLIS & EVERARD CHEMICALS. There are pictures of ferocious German shepherd wolf-dogs, red cone roads, and a vista of churned slurry (future parkland). In a few short months, just imagine, all this will be leafy avenues, multi-choice entertainment complexes and eco-friendly superstores. Sainsbury’s are already excavating the ...

Homer Inc

Edward Luttwak, 23 February 2012

The Iliad by Homer 
translated by Stephen Mitchell.
Weidenfeld, 463 pp., £25, October 2011, 978 0 297 85973 4
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... of Skopelos to the chariots often depicted on pots. But until the 1952 decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick, the ruling orthodoxy was that a hypothesised ‘Minoan’ was the (un-Greek) language of the palace culture of Crete and the Mycenaean settlements, so that the origins of the Iliad must come after that, not earlier than the ...

The Hijackers

Hugh Roberts: What will happen to Syria?, 16 July 2015

From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-Revolution and Its Jihadi Legacy 
by Jean-Pierre Filiu.
Hurst, 328 pp., £15.99, July 2015, 978 1 84904 546 9
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Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising 
by Jonathan Littell.
Verso, 246 pp., £12.99, April 2015, 978 1 78168 824 3
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The Rise of Islamic State: Isis and the New Sunni Revolution 
by Patrick Cockburn.
Verso, 192 pp., £9.99, January 2015, 978 1 78478 040 1
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Isis: Inside the Army of Terror 
by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan.
Regan Arts, 288 pp., £12.99, February 2015, 978 1 941393 57 4
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... didn’t at first take over the government but used the army’s capacity for persuasion to shepherd civilian politicians before assuming overall political control – though still operating behind civilian front-men – in November 1951. To consolidate his authority he did what Nasser was soon to do in Egypt: he banned all political parties and set up ...

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 ...

The Divisions of Cyprus

Perry Anderson, 24 April 2008

... of the democratic will, its local functionaries dismissing it as ‘meaningless’. But in the shepherd of the referendum, Michael Mouskos, it had met with more than it reckoned. Five months later, he was elected head of the church, at the age of 37, as Archbishop Makarios III. Son of a goatherd, he had gone from a ...