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John Lanchester: Watching the World Cup, 12 July 1990

... and an amazing composure. The downside of this is a sometime tactical rigidity that Henry Kissinger, that well-known football fan, recently made the subject of a gripping analogy with the adoption of the Schlieffen Plan in the Great War. The current side, though, looks exceptionally flexible, not just by German but by any standards: they ...

Inner Mongolia

Tony Wood: Victor Pelevin, 10 June 1999

The Life of Insects 
by Victor Pelevin, translated by Andrew Bromfield.
Faber, 176 pp., £6.99, April 1999, 0 571 19405 2
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The Clay Machine-Gun 
by Victor Pelevin, translated by Andrew Bromfield.
Faber, 335 pp., £9.99, April 1999, 0 571 19406 0
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A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia and Other Stories 
by Victor Pelevin, translated by Andrew Bromfield.
Harbord, 191 pp., £9.99, May 1999, 1 899414 35 5
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... the hail of bullets, despite the tragic (but also comical) death of his son at the hands of Henry Kissinger, he is not merely a victim of brutality, but an accomplice in his own misfortunes. The wider implication of his story might be that the victims were in place before their victimisation. Pelevin is writing in a country going through what the ...

Prussian Disneyland

Jan-Werner Müller, 9 September 2021

... Schröder probably also liked that business and ‘civil society’ – encouraged by the likes of Henry Kissinger and other prominent palace lobbyists – had promised to contribute substantial amounts.The driving force behind the reconstruction was a private individual, Wilhelm von Boddien, a Hamburg-based entrepreneur who had made his money in tractors ...

Nudged

Jamie Martin: Nudge Theory, 27 July 2017

The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World 
by Michael Lewis.
Allen Lane, 362 pp., £25, December 2016, 978 0 241 25473 8
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... In​ 1975, as Henry Kissinger was trying to negotiate a settlement to the Arab-Israeli War, he warned the Israeli government that a breakdown in the talks would bring catastrophe to the Middle East. The Israeli minister of foreign affairs, Yigan Allon, doubted this and convened a group of experts to investigate ...

What’s at Stake in Venezuela?

Greg Grandin, 7 February 2019

... it’s our move.’ It was then that Nixon said he decided ‘to give Allende the hook’. Henry Kissinger returned to a pre-FDR maturity/immaturity test of sovereignty to justify Allende’s ousting: ‘I don’t see,’ he said, ‘why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own ...

Passionate Purposes

Keith Kyle, 6 September 1984

Cyprus 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Quartet, 192 pp., £8.95, June 1984, 0 7043 2436 9
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The Cyprus Dispute and the Birth of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus 
by Necati Ertekun.
K. Rustem, Nicosia, PO Box 239, Lefkosa, via Mersin 10, Turkey, 507 pp., £12.50
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... unleashed the Turkish invasion, which in two instalments defeated the not very robust efforts of Henry Kissinger and James Callaghan to call a halt, and which had the effect of precipitating that vast shift in populations that was the requisite preliminary to the achievement of the Turkish Cypriot programme of 1964. The Cyprus crisis of 1974 was not a ...

They’re just not ready

Neal Ascherson: Gorbachev Betrayed, 7 January 2010

Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment 
by Stephen Kotkin, with Jan Gross.
Modern Library, 240 pp., $24, October 2009, 978 0 679 64276 3
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Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire 
by Victor Sebestyen.
Weidenfeld, 451 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 0 297 85223 0
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There Is No Freedom without Bread: 1989 and the Civil War that Brought Down Communism 
by Constantine Pleshakov.
Farrar, Straus, 289 pp., $26, November 2009, 978 0 374 28902 7
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1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe 
by Mary Elise Sarotte.
Princeton, 321 pp., £20.95, November 2009, 978 0 691 14306 4
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... that the Cold War might end in chaos and local conflicts. At the start of the year, Bush had sent Henry Kissinger (codenamed ‘Kitty’) to Moscow on a secret mission to make contact with Gorbachev. Kissinger, going far beyond his brief, suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union set up a joint superpower ...

Rise of the Rest

Pankaj Mishra: After America, 6 November 2008

The Post-American World 
by Fareed Zakaria.
Allen Lane, 292 pp., £20, July 2008, 978 1 84614 153 9
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The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order 
by Parag Khanna.
Allen Lane, 466 pp., £25, April 2008, 978 0 7139 9937 2
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... defining piece on the meaning of the terror attacks’ in a profile studded with praise from Henry Kissinger which also proposed Zakaria as America’s first Muslim secretary of state. Tina Brown called him ‘New York’s hot brainiac of choice’. Zakaria’s article appeared during the moment of primitive fury that overcame even ...

After-Time

Christopher Hitchens, 19 October 1995

Palimpsest: A Memoir 
by Gore Vidal.
Deutsch, 432 pp., £17.99, October 1995, 0 233 98891 2
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... which is the lachrymose and androgynous Mourning Figure sculpted by August St Guldens for Henry Adams’s unhappy wife Clover (whose name always puts me in mind of an overworked pit pony). And there in the grass is a stone slab, bearing the names and dates of birth of Vidal and his lifelong companion Howard Austen. The hyphens that come after the ...

How to Kowtow

D.J. Enright: The thoughts of China, 29 July 1999

The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds 
by Jonathan Spence.
Penguin, 279 pp., £20, May 1999, 0 7139 9313 8
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... by a vision, possessed by it.’ Nixon subsequently came to much the same conclusion, as did Henry Kissinger: Mao led a life as ‘withdrawn and mysterious even as the emperors he disdained’, and ‘emanated vibrations of strength and power and will’. You can’t get much more exotic than that. Spence comments that Lord Macartney, face to face ...

President François Misprint

Richard Mayne, 1 April 1983

The Wheat and the Chaff: The Personal Diaries of the President of France 1971-1978 
by François Mitterrand, translated by Richard Woodward, Helen Lane and Concilia Hayter.
Weidenfeld, 284 pp., £12.50, October 1982, 0 297 78101 4
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The French 
by Theodore Zeldin.
Collins, 542 pp., £12.95, January 1983, 0 00 216806 5
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... I am wary of intuition, the wisdom of globetrotters: True knowledge is sedentary.’ On Henry Kissinger: ‘Mere ability is not sufficient to explain great destinies. The last yards are run alone.’ On Vietnam: ‘The American crime does not excuse the crime in answer to it.’ ‘My freedom has meaning only if I accept the freedom of ...

Where’s the omelette?

Tom Nairn: Patrick Wright, 23 October 2008

Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War 
by Patrick Wright.
Oxford, 488 pp., £18.99, October 2007, 978 0 19 923150 8
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... Armageddon may not yet be off the agenda, but it’s heading that way. This is a world in which Henry Kissinger has joined a group preaching the surrender and destruction of all nuclear armaments, including US ones. It shouldn’t be forgotten that dread of nuclear war was the most important factor in keeping the Iron Curtain mentality going for so ...

Touch of Evil

Christopher Hitchens, 22 October 1992

KissingerA Biography 
by Walter Isaacson.
Faber, 893 pp., £25, September 1992, 0 571 16858 2
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... Lord Macaulay so crisply profiled Frederick ‘the Great’. Walter Isaacson’s new study of Kissinger shows beyond doubt that he rose to power by intriguing for and against an ally, the South Vietnamese military junta, whom he had sworn to defend, and that in the process of covering his tracks, consolidating and extending his power and justifying his ...

The Estate Agent

Terry Eagleton: Stanley Fish, 2 March 2000

The Trouble with Principle 
by Stanley Fish.
Harvard, 328 pp., £15.50, December 1999, 0 674 91012 5
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... Fish’s appeals to history are almost always gestural. He means by history something like what Henry Kissinger means by it – that is, as far back as he can remember. This is a pity, since if he had a rather richer sense of the past he might recognise that the universalist liberal principles he abhors were once the last word in iconoclasm. In the age ...

God’s Godfather

Douglas Johnson, 6 October 1983

God’s Banker: An Account of the Life and Death of Roberto Calvi 
by Rupert Cornwell.
Gollancz, 260 pp., £8.95, September 1983, 0 575 03351 7
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A Man of Honour: The Autobiography of a Godfather 
by Joseph Bonnano and Sergio Lalli.
Deutsch, 416 pp., £9.95, September 1983, 0 233 97609 4
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The Biggest Game in Town 
by A. Alvarez.
Deutsch, 186 pp., £8.95, September 1983, 0 233 97521 7
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... revealed Gelli’s friendship with all sorts of powerful international figures: the inevitable Henry Kissinger, Mr Moon, Vice-President Bush and the President of the World Bank, Robert McNamara. More serious was the realisation that the antique-dealer, Deverini, who was accused of having helped Gelli to enter Monaco illegally, had earlier been accused ...

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