Les zombies, c’est vous

Thomas Jones: Zombies, 26 January 2012

Zone One 
by Colson Whitehead.
Harvill Secker, 259 pp., £14.99, October 2011, 978 1 84655 598 5
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... for weeks on end. And Benji’s father, it eventually transpires, is a violent drunk. There’s no self-pity in the way Benji tells it. His dominant feeling, when his father is on a bender, is embarrassment. He shuts the windows and hopes the neighbours won’t hear: time to put up the barricades. Benji and Reggie have an older sister. ‘I haven’t talked ...

Tocqueville anticipated me

Katrina Forrester: Karl Popper, 26 April 2012

After ‘The Open Society’: Selected Social and Political Writings 
by Karl Popper, edited by Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner.
Routledge, 493 pp., £16.99, August 2011, 978 0 415 61023 0
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... defences of his work so they could pass them off as their own. And he could appear remarkably self-important: in a lecture on Tocqueville, he noted how impressive it was that in some of his views on the paradoxes of freedom and equality, ‘Tocqueville anticipated me.’ These quirky and revealing writings show that Popper was not as consistent as he ...

Deliverology

David Runciman: Blair Hawks His Wares, 31 March 2016

Broken Vows: Tony Blair – The Tragedy of Power 
by Tom Bower.
Faber, 688 pp., £20, March 2016, 978 0 571 31420 1
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... permanently aggrieved sense of having to operate in a hostile institutional environment became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The British civil service may have many failings, but if you want to deliver lasting change it is the only instrument that can do it for you. Blair treated the administrative machinery of the UK state as though he really were in ...

Blame Robert Maxwell

Frederick Wilmot-Smith: How Public Inquiries Go Wrong, 17 March 2016

... of the report by the Major government – which took seven days to digest the report and prepare self-serving press briefings, while Robin Cook, the shadow foreign secretary, was given three hours – made it possible for the government to weather the storm. No one resigned, despite Scott’s explicit finding – explicit, but buried in four volumes and 1800 ...

Your Soft German Heart

Richard J. Evans: ‘The German War’, 14 July 2016

The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-45 
by Nicholas Stargardt.
Bodley Head, 701 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 1 84792 099 7
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... never more bombastic than in reports of the defeat at Stalingrad – on the need for self-sacrifice to keep Germany from going under. Stargardt claims that his book ‘offers a very different understanding of the effects that wartime defeats and crises had on German society’ from that offered by previous historians. The approach he adopts ...

Will there be war?

Howard W. French: China at War, 28 July 2016

China and Global Nuclear Order: From Estrangement to Active Engagement 
by Nicola Horsburgh.
Oxford, 256 pp., £55, February 2015, 978 0 19 870611 3
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China’s Military Power: Assessing Current and Future Capabilities 
by Roger Cliff.
Cambridge, 378 pp., £21.99, September 2015, 978 1 107 50295 6
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China’s Coming War with Asia 
by Jonathan Holslag.
Polity, 176 pp., £14.99, March 2015, 978 0 7456 8825 1
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... was its civilisational birthright and heritage – a position of pre-eminence in world affairs. Self-belief of this sort has always been a feature of Chinese thinking. But during Mao’s early years in power, the notion that China could make progress only by adopting imported ideas was still a relatively new and radical concept. As recently as the late 18th ...

Degoogled

Joanna Biggs: Keith Gessen, 22 May 2008

All the Sad Young Literary Men 
by Keith Gessen.
Heinemann, 242 pp., £11.99, May 2008, 978 0 434 01848 2
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... only wanted to kiss the throats of women, and who only wanted peace’. Sam may be ridiculously self-obsessed but we tuck him in and turn off the light. Keith’s summer job means he ends up meeting his intellectual hero, Morris Binkel. Keith wants Binkel to say he sees something in him. What he does say is: ‘Even the most mediocre mediocrity can make a ...

Impervious to Draughts

Rosemary Hill: Das englische Haus, 22 May 2008

The English House 
by Hermann Muthesius, edited by Dennis Sharp, translated by Janet Seligman and Stewart Spencer.
Frances Lincoln, 699 pp., £125, June 2007, 978 0 7112 2688 3
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... Then the Gothic triumphed again with the birth of Romanticism, which began in England, ‘this self-sufficient island kingdom’, where ‘the Germanic character had not allowed itself to be overrun.’ As a critic Muthesius was more subtle. The architects he singled out, Norman Shaw and Baillie Scott, Mackintosh and the very young Lutyens among them, are ...

The Lady in the Back Seat

Thomas Jones: Robert Harris’s Alternative Realities, 15 November 2007

The Ghost 
by Robert Harris.
Hutchinson, 310 pp., £18.99, October 2007, 978 0 09 179626 6
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... to publish it as soon as possible: Tony Blair’s topicality is on the wane. The Ghost is self-consciously concerned with the logic of publicity and sales, the pressure to get the former prime minister’s memoirs out there as soon as possible. It also acknowledges the short shelf-life of most satire. Discussing an old Cambridge Footlights comic ...

Zero Is a Clenched Fist

Donald MacKenzie: Trading from the Pit, 1 November 2007

Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London 
by Caitlin Zaloom.
Chicago, 224 pp., £18.50, November 2006, 0 226 97813 3
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... job helped you not only to learn practical skills such as arb, but also to witness the exercise of self-discipline. Traders could assess whether a clerk or runner who wanted to start trading was the kind of person it might be worth backing financially. Chicago’s tightly-knit neighbourhoods seem to have helped, by providing recruits who would already be known ...

Beatrix and Rosamond

Daniel Soar: Jonathan Coe, 18 October 2007

The Rain before It Falls 
by Jonathan Coe.
Viking, 274 pp., £17.99, September 2007, 978 0 670 91728 0
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... problem. This is one short section in a book that, industry by industry, systematically uncovers self-servingness wherever it exists. But Dorothy’s experiments in efficiency come about partly as a reaction to the weakness of her husband, a gentleman farmer of the old school who doesn’t like to see animals suffer. She realised something had to be done on ...

Praise for the Hands

Jeremy Harding: Rugby’s Early Years, 18 October 2007

The Original Rules of Rugby 
edited by Jed Smith.
Bodleian, 64 pp., £5.99, September 2007, 978 1 85124 371 6
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... Twickenham, 1954 The New Zealanders handled the countdown with more aggression and a lot more self-importance. The selector, John Hart, on their arrival in the changing room: ‘It’s going to be a long wait, boys. Time to concentrate.’ Then the coach Brian Lochore, voice breaking with emotion: ‘You’re a good team but you’re not yet a great ...

In Praise of Spiders

Caleb Crain: Wilkie Collins’s Name Games, 11 September 2008

The Woman in White 
by Wilkie Collins.
Vintage, 609 pp., £5.99, October 2007, 978 0 09 951124 3
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... give me a power of control over her, even if I had known how to exercise it. I trace these lines, self-distrustfully, with the shadows of after-events darkening the very paper I write on; and still I say, what could I do? Of course he helps her. What Victorian man of feeling wouldn’t? But there’s something odd here, not apparent on a first reading, about ...

Wine Flasks in Bordeaux, Sail Spires in Cardiff

Hal Foster: Richard Rogers, 19 October 2006

Richard Rogers: Architecture of the Future 
by Kenneth Powell.
Birkhäuser, 520 pp., £29.90, December 2005, 3 7643 7049 1
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Richard Rogers: Complete Works, Vol. III 
by Kenneth Powell.
Phaidon, 319 pp., £59.95, July 2006, 0 7148 4429 2
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... Too often iconic buildings are asked somehow to stand in for the civic realm, as if imagistic self-promotion were all that citizens can safely expect from politicians and designers today. Rogers, like Foster and Piano (with whom, for better or worse, he will always be triangulated), emerged in the interregnum between the engineered abstraction of modern ...

This Is Not That Place

Thomas Jones: David Eggers escapes from Sudan, 21 June 2007

What Is the What 
by Dave Eggers.
Hamish Hamilton, 475 pp., £18.99, June 2007, 978 0 241 14257 8
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... the UN for everything.’ And these are people who lost everything in the course of a struggle for self-determination. Do not think it was lost on us that the Kenyans, and every international body that monitors or provides for the displaced, customarily places its refugees in the least desirable regions on earth. There we become utterly dependent – unable ...