Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
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The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
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... a dizzying subplot, he also involved himself intimately in the quarrel between Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion over the project of a Jewish National Home, and in the attempts by both to play off the British against the Americans. And, though he showed himself able to take risks in leaking classified material that favoured the Zionist cause, he also found ...

One Summer in America

Eliot Weinberger, 26 September 2019

... development, logging, drilling and mining in natural habitats. The secretary of the interior, David Bernhardt, a former oil industry lobbyist, announces that the act will be ‘modernised’: economic factors, rather than exclusively scientific ones, will be used to determine eligibility for protection. The ‘foreseeable future’, written in the ...

I’m an intelligence

Joanna Biggs: Sylvia Plath at 86, 20 December 2018

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. I: 1940-56 
edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil.
Faber, 1388 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 0 571 32899 4
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The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. II: 1956-63 
edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil.
Faber, 1025 pp., £35, September 2018, 978 0 571 33920 4
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... too slow and polite to speak up … the couple are coming to supper this week.’ The couple was David and Assia Wevill. In September they moved and began furnishing their fourth home in as many years. It turned cold, another record-breaking winter, and it was months until they could afford carpets. ‘I am dying for a Bendix!’ Sylvia wrote to her ...

Towards the Precipice

Robert Brenner: The Continuing Collapse of the US Economy, 6 February 2003

... oversight. But the crimes of Global Crossing and Qwest are peccadillos compared with the grand larceny carried out by WorldCom, which has effectively rewritten the book on corporate fraud. At the most recent count WorldCom had overstated its earnings between 1999 and 2001 by some $9 billion. It accomplished this largely (though not entirely) through ...

Every Field, Every Yard

James Meek: Return to Kyiv, 10 August 2023

... aviatsii,’ the driver said. ‘We don’t have the air power.’The Ukrainian House, a grand late 20th-century building between a palace and a shrine in appearance, faced and lined with white marble, has a large open ground floor and circular galleries rising up, Guggenheim-style, though separate and connected by stairs rather than a single ...

Too Close to the Bone

Allon White, 4 May 1989

... and seems a trifle embarrassed now, surrounded by a dozen neat neo-Georgian family homes. Too grand and expansive for its surroundings, the cedar is humiliated by its size, an arboreal Gulliver towering above the Lilliputian privet and suburban forsythia.When I was a young boy, however, this rather spiritless village had one wonderful compensation. Have ...

Market Forces and Malpractice

James Meek: The Housing Crisis, 4 July 2024

... the flat where he lived affected his breathing.Rochdale was also one of the places it’s thought David Cameron had in mind in 2016 when he launched his attack on ‘sink estates’, as if bad architecture, rather than multigenerational deprivation, was the root cause of council estate problems. The Rochdale estates in question were badly in need of ...

The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett, 8 March 2007

... More Cecil Beaton?’ Norman showed her the book he was looking at, this time something on David Hockney. She leafed through it, gazing unperturbed at young men’s bottoms hauled out of Californian swimming-pools or lying together on unmade beds. ‘Some of them,’ she said, ‘some of them don’t seem altogether finished. This one is quite ...

The Divisions of Cyprus

Perry Anderson, 24 April 2008

... asked by the Foreign Office to become the United Kingdom’s special representative on Cyprus. Sir David – now Lord – Hannay, who began his career in Iran and Afghanistan, was Britain’s foremost European diplomat, with some thirty years of involvement in EU affairs behind him. His summons came from Jeremy Greenstock, soon to become famous for his ...

After Kemal

Perry Anderson, 25 September 2008

... response was to modify the charge in the penal code under which Dink had been prosecuted, with a grand alteration from ‘denigrating Turkishness’ to ‘denigrating the Turkish nation’. Twenty-four hours after that change had been made, on May Day 2008, police launched an all-out assault on workers attempting to commemorate the killing of trade unionists ...

NHS SOS

James Meek, 5 April 2018

... population over the million mark. There’s a lot of accumulated wealth in its pretty villages and grand manor houses. Five hunts – the Atherstone, the Belvoir, the Cottesmore, the Quorn and the Fernie – still go through the motions of chasing foxes within the bounds of the law. In bleaker districts of small post-industrial towns like Coalville and ...