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Growing Pains

Laleh Khalili: New Silk Roads, 18 March 2021

The Emperor’s New Road: China and the Project of the Century 
by Jonathan E. Hillman.
Yale, 294 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 0 300 24458 8
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... solidarity, China granted $4.7 million in hard currency to Egypt just as Britain, France and Israel were attacking it over the Suez Canal. China extended credit to a number of recently independent African states – Ghana, Mali, Tanzania, Kenya, Guinea – and gave millions to Nepal, Ceylon (soon to become Sri Lanka), Indonesia and Cambodia. It also ...

Agent Bait

Christopher Tayler: Nell Zink, 2 March 2017

Nicotine 
by Nell Zink.
Fourth Estate, 288 pp., £14.99, October 2016, 978 0 00 817917 5
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Private Novelist 
by Nell Zink.
Ecco, 336 pp., $15.99, October 2016, 978 0 06 245830 8
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... boarding schools, bricklaying, postpunk fanzine production and hand-to-mouth endeavours in Israel and Germany – to publish, in her early fifties, a pair of novels that made her the talk of Brooklyn. The first of them, The Wallcreeper (2014), was written in three weeks in order to make a point to ...

Human Rights and Wrongs

Alexander Cockburn, 9 May 1991

... of Kuwait, Amnesty put out an eighty-page document. Twenty-three years have gone by since Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Amnesty has yet to produce as comprehensive a single report on Israeli abuses against Palestinians. Why the urgency only in the case of Kuwait? Although the use of torture in the occupied territories has been ...

How to Make a Market

John Lloyd, 10 November 1994

Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev and the Mirage of Democracy 
by Jonathan Steele.
Faber, 288 pp., £17.50, March 1994, 0 571 16368 8
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Post-Communist Societies in Transition 
by John Gray.
Social Market Foundation, 45 pp., £8, February 1994, 1 874097 30 5
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... the strategies adopted by these institutions are debated more widely and more knowledgeably. Both Jonathan Steele’s book and John Gray’s essay sharpen a critique which has so far been fragmentary and diffuse. They articulate deeply-felt arguments against the type of reform Russia is undergoing and warn of the dangers of social upheaval if it continues in ...

Turtle upon Turtle

Christian Lorentzen: Nathan Englander, 22 March 2012

What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank 
by Nathan Englander.
Weidenfeld, 207 pp., £12.99, February 2012, 978 0 297 86769 2
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... that this wife believes her husband would not hide her.’ The couple in question ‘ran off to Israel twenty years ago and turned Hassidic’. They’re visiting Florida from Jerusalem to see elderly parents for Sukkot. Their hosts are irreligious parents of a teenage son – the pot’s his. The two wives were friends in high school and arranged this ...

How so very dear

Joshua Cohen: Ben Marcus, 21 June 2012

The Flame Alphabet: A Novel 
by Ben Marcus.
Granta, 289 pp., £16.99, June 2012, 978 1 84708 622 8
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... Marcus is a writer in an antique mode: the modern. Even those writers of his cohort, such as Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, who publicly cursed the prophets Gaddis, Barthelme, Barth and Coover, forsaking the structural feints and syntactical feats of the 1960s and 1970s, would be mauled by the millennium, by a bearish market more interested in ...

Kingdoms of Paper

Natalie Zemon Davis: Identity and Faking It, 18 October 2007

Who Are You? Identification, Deception and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe 
by Valentin Groebner, translated by Mark Kyburz and John Peck.
Zone, 349 pp., £18.95, April 2007, 978 1 890951 72 6
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... alone in holding this view, but it flies in the face of the evidence collected by Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton in Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion.* Texts from many sources show that ‘quasi-biological’ classifications in regard to skin colour, lineage and religion were in place in the 16th century ‘in ways that illuminate 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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... himself gained immense popularity and legitimacy in the process. But his regime lost the Sinai to Israel in 1967 and, in order to get it back, his successor, Anwar Sadat, prostrated Egypt before the United States. It has remained a depressed client state to this day. Sadat increased his own freedom of action by encouraging the army to develop its economic ...

Thank God for Traitors

Bernard Porter: GCHQ, 18 November 2010

GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency 
by Richard Aldrich.
Harper, 666 pp., £30, June 2010, 978 0 00 727847 3
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... trusted the other, and they did not always co-operate as they were supposed to. Over Palestine/Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, for example, Britain held intelligence back from the Americans because the two countries were ‘at loggerheads’. There were frequent personality clashes, the most serious of them in the 1980s between Peter Marychurch of GCHQ and ...

No one hates him more

Joshua Cohen: Franzen on Kraus, 7 November 2013

The Kraus Project 
by Jonathan Franzen.
Fourth Estate, 318 pp., £18.99, October 2013, 978 0 00 751743 5
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... Holocaust, by letting Kehlmann apostrophise it, leaving Franzen himself free to pontificate about Israel/Palestine with a sophistication that would barely pass muster on a local network affiliate, let alone on CNN. But I’m prepared to forgive him all this, as readers have to forgive Franzen everything, only because no one can ever hate him as much as he ...

Riots, Terrorism etc

John Lanchester: The Great British Press Disaster, 6 March 2008

Flat Earth News 
by Nick Davies.
Chatto, 408 pp., £17.99, February 2008, 978 0 7011 8145 1
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... than an hour on a story.’ The emphasis is on catching what people say accurately. As its editor, Jonathan Grun, puts it, ‘our role is attributable journalism – what someone has got to say. What is important is in quote marks.’ If the government says Saddam has WMD, that’s what the PA will report. Because the PA is the basis for such a huge proportion ...

Why use a Novichok?

Tom Stevenson, 6 May 2021

Toxic: A History of Nerve Agents from Nazi Germany to Putin’s Russia 
by Dan Kaszeta.
Hurst, 408 pp., £25, July 2020, 978 1 78738 306 7
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... much to the published research of two Russian chemists, Lev Fedorov and Vil Mirzayanov, and to Jonathan Tucker’s 2006 book War of Nerves. Tabun and sarin were manufactured at factories in Beketovka, but the Soviet programme lagged behind that of the US. The Soviet equivalent of Porton Down and the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland was the State Scientific ...

Cancelled

Amia Srinivasan: Can I speak freely?, 29 June 2023

... refused to hire a first-rate mathematician just because she was a Tory, or a vocal critic of Israel. But much of what is under attack in the new Act, and the broader political onslaught on universities of which it is a part, is not the abuse of academic freedom, but academic freedom itself. My hypothetical example of a climate change sceptic applying for ...

Masters of Art

John Sutherland, 18 December 1980

Loon Lake 
by E.L. Doctorow.
Macmillan, 258 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 0 333 30641 4
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Alice fell 
by Emma Tennant.
Cape, 124 pp., £5.50, November 1980, 0 224 01872 8
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The Covenant 
by James Michener.
Secker, 873 pp., £8.95, November 1980, 0 436 27966 5
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Ancesteral Vices 
by Tom Sharpe.
Secker, 231 pp., £6.50, November 1980, 0 436 45809 8
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... in modern fiction. In other respects, the novel is a disappointing performance. Jonathan Cape would apparently have us take Alice fell as a condition-of-England novel. Yet this national portentousness is refracted at the reader by fictional techniques which are distractingly mal à propos. Superficially, Alice fell is, in fact, scarcely a ...

Diary

Dani Garavelli: Searching for the ‘Bonhomme Richard’, 25 January 2024

... Alexandre Dumas in his novel Le Capitaine Paul, for example, and by Herman Melville, who wrote in Israel Potter about Jones’s capture of the British sloop-of-war HMS Drake:It was … such a scheme as only could have inspired a heart which held at nothing at all the prescribed prudence of war, and every obligation of peace – combining in one breast the ...

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