‘Why are you leaving?’

Lynne Mastnak: A child psychiatrist, records the daily round in Kosovo before and since the bombing, 27 May 1999

... invalid father was executed with all the men of his village; the small wooded valley where Simon’s mother, aunt, grandmother and three young cousins are buried, having been killed, along with 16 others. 18 January. It is three days since the massacre at Recak. International Medical Corps suggested I go out with them to do some kind of psycho-social ...

Informals of the world unite

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 9 November 1989

The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World 
by Hernando de Soto, translated by June Abbott.
Tauris, 271 pp., £14.95, June 1989, 1 85043 144 2
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Cocaine: White Gold Rush in Peru 
by Edmundo Morales.
University of Arizona Press, 228 pp., £17.95, August 1989, 0 8165 1066 0
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A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present 
by Rondo Cameron.
Oxford, 437 pp., £30, July 1989, 0 19 504677 3
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... his state. Each is trying to cut his civil service, to sell off state enterprises and to cancel price-freezes and automatic wage-increases. Each, it is true, is still acting more more by presidential fiat than by debate, and each has yet to do much to make capital more accessible to those with few assets. And none can be said yet to have succeeded even in ...

Strangeways Here We Come

Dave Haslam: Ecstasy, 23 January 2003

The Promised Land: Travels in Search of the Perfect E 
by Decca Aitkenhead.
Fourth Estate, 206 pp., £12.99, January 2002, 1 84115 337 0
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... Ecstasy can create in a club the sense of community often lacking in such towns, what Simon Reynolds has called ‘collective intimacy’.From these pockets of activity in Britain, dance music and Ecstasy found new territories. At the fall of the Berlin Wall a generation of Berliners embraced techno; R&S, one of the key record labels of the ...

Miracle on Fleet Street

Martin Hickman: Operation Elveden, 7 January 2016

... about a couple caught having sex outside Windsor Castle; he certainly paid a Surrey policeman, Simon Quinn, £10,000 for inside information on investigations into celebrities and serious crimes. Among the material Quinn supplied were three witness statements in a rape inquiry, along with the name of the complainant. A few days into the rape trial, Pyatt ...

Camden Town Toreros

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Corey Fah Does Social Mobility’, 4 January 2024

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility 
by Isabel Waidner.
Hamish Hamilton, 160 pp., £12.99, July, 978 0 241 63253 6
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... It’s not a radical piece of work, and makes no claims to be. Waidner might have cited Simon Shepherd’s Because We’re Queers, published by Gay Men’s Press in 1989. Shepherd argues that Lahr helped to create an Orton industry (of which Shepherd himself cannot avoid being a part), in which Halliwell was offered up as a sacrifice – not in his ...

The Reaction Economy

William Davies, 2 March 2023

... it. Among other things, this provided a whole new way of understanding and justifying markets: price signals could be understood as feedback to which traders must constantly react. In societies such as ours, the possible reactions of the financial markets hover over every political move, as Truss and Kwarteng were unceremoniously reminded.The Instagrammer ...

Subversions

R.W. Johnson, 4 June 1987

Traitors: The Labyrinths of Treason 
by Chapman Pincher.
Sidgwick, 346 pp., £13.95, May 1987, 0 283 99379 0
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The Secrets of the Service: British Intelligence and Communist Subversion 1939-51 
by Anthony Glees.
Cape, 447 pp., £18, May 1987, 0 224 02252 0
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Freedom of Information – Freedom of the Individual? 
by Clive Ponting, John Ranelagh, Michael Zander and Simon Lee, edited by Julia Neuberger.
Macmillan, 110 pp., £4.95, May 1987, 0 333 44771 9
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... not afford to let our intelligence services remain in the hands of the ‘old buffers’. If the price for that was the admission of a number of Soviet moles to the service, then, despite all the damage they did, it was a price worth paying. In fact, the reason MI5 got itself into such a disastrous mess with Kim Philby had ...

Fraudpocalypse

John Lanchester, 4 August 2022

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion-Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth 
by Dan McCrum.
Bantam, 326 pp., £20, June 2022, 978 1 78763 504 3
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... to have both low CO2 emissions and low NOx emissions while also keeping the car within a viable price range. Regulators test emissions. When the new diesel engines were hooked up to monitoring systems in test centres, they would fail.VW solved this conundrum by cheating. Instead of incurring the extra costs and inconveniences of reducing NOx emissions ...

‘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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... Jacob Zuma, admitted that at $2.1 billion, ‘an estimated $765 million of which was the result of price-fixing and corruption within the construction industry’, the World Cup had cost ten times more and delivered ten times less benefit than anticipated; white elephant stadiums were its most conspicuous legacy, as in Brazil four years later. For all of ...

Jihad

James Wood, 5 August 1993

The New Poetry 
edited by Michael Hulse, David Kennedy and David Morley.
Bloodaxe, 352 pp., £25, May 1993, 1 85224 244 2
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Who Whispered Near Me 
by Killarney Clary.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £5.95, February 1993, 1 85224 149 7
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Sunset Grill 
by Anne Rouse.
Bloodaxe, 64 pp., £5.95, March 1993, 1 85224 219 1
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Half Moon Bay 
by Paul Mills.
Carcanet, 95 pp., £6.95, February 1993, 9781857540000
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Shoah 
by Harry Smart.
Faber, 74 pp., £5.99, April 1993, 0 571 16793 4
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The Autonomous Region 
by Kathleen Jamie.
Bloodaxe, 79 pp., £7.95, March 1993, 9781852241735
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Collected Poems 
by F.T. Prince.
Carcanet, 319 pp., £25, March 1993, 1 85754 030 1
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Stirring Stuff 
by Selwyn Pritchard.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 145 pp., £8.99, April 1993, 9781856193085
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News from the Brighton Front 
by Nicki Jackowska.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 86 pp., £7.99, April 1993, 1 85619 306 3
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Translations from the Natural World 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 67 pp., £6.95, March 1993, 1 85754 005 0
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... Hattersley). And it is true that a fighting politics seethes in poets like Sean O’Brien and Simon Armitage. One feels, however, that the best and most interesting poets in this large anthology are not the writers that fit inside the editorial fist. For instance, the introduction makes much of the ballad-writers like Paul Durcan and Geoff Hattersley, and ...

Last Leader

Neal Ascherson, 7 June 1984

Citizen Ken 
by John Carvel.
Chatto, 240 pp., £8.95, May 1984, 0 7011 3929 3
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... way ... The hunter-gatherer is what humanity is.’ So far, so Fourier, or Rousseau or St-Simon. The most interesting question about state-of-nature utopian thinkers is where they insert the Fall and what they consider to have played the serpent. Ken Livingstone has no doubts. It was the introduction of agriculture, the Neolithic revolution ‘twenty ...

Diary

Edward Luttwak: Just across the Water, 24 April 1997

... the grassland to trot just ahead of our jeep. Listed as rare (worse than ‘endangered’) in the Simon and Schuster Guide to Mammals, they were in imminent danger of becoming rarer: bewitched by the headlights, they would not get out of the way, and often we had to brake to avoid hitting them. When we finally reached the tranca, the barrier that each ...

Close Cozenage

David Wootton, 23 May 1996

Astrology and the 17th-Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars 
by Ann Geneva.
Manchester, 298 pp., £40, June 1995, 0 7190 4154 6
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... is often hard to discern without the benefit of hindsight. In this tradition, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have defended the first critics of Boyle’s famous air-pump experiments, which are supposed to have established the vacuum as a laboratory entity, on the grounds that their arguments were as good as any Boyle produced. So, if good science is hard ...

Mon Charabia

Olivier Todd: Bad Duras, 4 March 1999

Marguerite Duras 
by Laure Adler.
Gallimard, 627 pp., frs 155, August 1998, 2 07 074523 6
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No More 
by Marguerite Duras.
Seven Stories, 203 pp., £10.99, November 1998, 1 888363 65 7
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... rightly) to be associated with the Nouveau Roman. She felt much too superior to Claude Simon, Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor. Nathalie Sarraute was almost the only living French writer she approved of. These were the years of Sartre’s ascendancy. MD, however, steered clear of the arch-guru and despised Camus. At the same time she ...

God’s Will

Leofranc Holford-Strevens: Do you speak Punic?, 22 May 2003

Bilingualism and the Latin Language 
by J.N. Adams.
Cambridge, 836 pp., £100, January 2003, 0 521 81771 4
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... in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Word, edited by Adams, Marc Janse and Simon Swain.* Together with Bruno Rochette’s Le Latin dans le monde grec (1997), which is mainly concerned with literature, these books have placed the study of language in the Roman Empire on a far firmer footing. Until recently, most classical scholars had ...