Turning Wolfe Tone

John Kerrigan: A Third Way for Ireland, 20 October 2022

Belfast 
directed by Kenneth Branagh.
January
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Small World: Ireland 1798-2018 
by Seamus Deane.
Cambridge, 343 pp., £20, June 2021, 978 1 108 84086 6
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Irish Literature in Transition 
edited by Claire Connolly and Marjorie Howes.
Cambridge, six vols, £564, March 2020, 978 1 108 42750 0
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Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled 
by Nicholas Allen.
Oxford, 305 pp., £70, November 2020, 978 0 19 885787 7
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A History of Irish Literature and the Environment 
edited by Malcolm Sen.
Cambridge, 457 pp., £90, July, 978 1 108 49013 9
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... Ireland Protocol. Nationalists and republicans also had a concern (or in the case of dissidents a hope) that the DUP’s preference for a full-on Brexit would have the contrary effect of pushing the six counties back towards the border infrastructure that had proved divisive before the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Loyalism is now adrift and frustrated, with ...

Call me Ahab

Jeremy Harding: Moby-Dick, 31 October 2002

Moby-Dick, or, The Whale 
by Herman Melville, edited by Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker.
Northwestern, 573 pp., £14.95, September 2001, 0 8101 1911 0
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Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live in 
by C.L.R. James.
New England, 245 pp., £17.95, July 2001, 9781584650942
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Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival 
by Clare Spark.
Kent State, 744 pp., £46.50, May 2001, 0 87338 674 4
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Lucchesi and the Whale 
by Frank Lentricchia.
Duke, 104 pp., £14.50, February 2001, 9780822326540
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... while those with reservations, including the Popular Front critic F.O. Matthiessen and the poet Charles Olson, preferred to align him with Shakespeare, his revolutionary Miltonic essence giving way to a more properly tragic register, with its evocations of madness and fallibility (Lear is Olson’s big parallel) and over-reaching. This was, in a sense, to ...

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Adam Shatz: Mass Incarceration, 4 May 2017

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America 
by James Forman.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp., £21.98, April 2017, 978 0 374 18997 6
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... campaign, Jesse Jackson proclaimed himself ‘the general in this war to fight drugs’; Charles Rangel, Harlem’s longest-serving congressional representative and one of the most powerful figures in New York’s black political machine, was second to none in his opposition to drug decriminalisation. There were 130 police departments led by black ...

What I Heard about Iraq

Eliot Weinberger: Watch and listen, 3 February 2005

... sheer size of this has never been seen before, never contemplated.’ I heard Major-General Charles Swannack promise that his troops were going to ‘use a sledgehammer to smash a walnut’. I heard the Pentagon spokesman say: ‘This is not going to be your father’s Persian Gulf War.’ I heard that Saddam’s strategy against the American invasion ...

The Fatness of Falstaff

Barbara Everett, 16 August 1990

... decisions and exclusions. The superb dawn scene before Gadshill in 1 Henry IV, with its ‘Charles waine ... over the new Chimney’, its country dankness and its fleas, its smell of urine, its gammon of bacon and its roots of ginger, is where it is to serve as a quizzical alternative to ‘Gadshill’ itself, juxtaposing to the systematic thieveries ...

Riding the Night Winds

Ron Ridenhour, 22 June 1995

Derailed in Uncle Ho’s Victory Garden: Return to Vietnam and Cambodia 
by Tim Page.
Touchstone, 248 pp., £14.99, April 1995, 0 671 71926 2
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In the Lake of the Woods 
by Tim O’Brien.
Flamingo, 306 pp., £5.99, April 1995, 0 00 654395 2
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In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam 
by Robert McNamara.
Random House, 432 pp., $27.50, April 1995, 0 8129 2523 8
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... of the New Republic. In ‘The Legend of Colin Powell: Anatomy of an Establishment Career’, Charles Lane examined Powell’s ascent to power during April 1969, when the Army’s official investigation into the My Lai massacre was reluctantly creaking to life. Powell, it turns out, was assigned to Americal Division headquarters at Chu Lai. Charlie ...

Peace without Empire

Perry Anderson, 2 December 2021

Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union 
by Stella Ghervas.
Harvard, 528 pp., £31.95, March, 978 0 674 97526 2
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... first time in the treaty – between the rival realms of Europe, an idea developed in England by Charles Davenant and Jonathan Swift; on the other, in the ideal of a federation of states to secure the peaceful unity of the continent, as proposed by the Abbé de Saint-Pierre in France. The first became canonical in the diplomatic chancelleries of the ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2000, 25 January 2001

... was never absent in this last decade of their lives. 14 August. Listen to the last programme in Charles Wheeler’s Radio 4 series on National Service, a discussion with, among others, Neal Ascherson, Michael Mates and Arnold Wesker. Though my own experiences (basic training in the Infantry, then the Joint Services Russian Course) were hardly typical, I ...

Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... that socialism would come (so we’d better show the workers that a capitalist society cares) and hope that socialism would come (and this is what it will look like).After 1945, as the scale of council house building increased in the hopeful atmosphere of the budding welfare state, the builders’ masters voiced more ambitious aims. In 1946, Aneurin ...

How to Grow a Weetabix

James Meek: Farms and Farmers, 16 June 2016

... in East Anglia might spread over ten hectares, or 24 acres. In a good year in Norfolk you could hope to get 85 tonnes of wheat out of a field that size, which would probably be used for animal feed. While 85 tonnes might sound like a lot, as I write, a tonne of wheat for delivery after the 2016 harvest is selling for just £111. The entire field would yield ...

The European Coup

Perry Anderson, 17 December 2020

... to a political order that, without fearing conflict, would prove as stable as any such order could hope to be. In this, he prefigured a problematic that would in different ways haunt Western thought down to our own time. What, Ankersmit asked, is the appropriate definition of representation? Is it a resemblance to what is represented, or a substitute for ...

Prejudice Rules

LRB Contributors: After Roe v. Wade, 21 July 2022

... Agency. This can only benefit power plants, the fossil fuel industry and energy executives like Charles Koch, whose net worth of $59 billion has been accrued from refineries, petrochemical plants, and thousands of miles of oil and gas pipelines, to the detriment of clean air and water and the ability of the federal government to regulate and limit ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... of Public Prosecutions with a view to criminal proceedings being brought. We earnestly express the hope that nothing will be allowed to stand in the way of a speedy progress of those proceedings.’ I felt the need to pinch myself. Was this the same Lord Lane I had watched over the course of several weeks in 1987 when he presided over the appeal of the ...

Why the bastards wouldn’t stand and fight

Murray Sayle: Mao in Vietnam, 21 February 2002

China and the Vietnam Wars 1950-75 
by Qiang Zhai.
North Carolina, 304 pp., $49.95, April 2000, 0 8078 4842 5
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None so Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam 
by George Allen.
Ivan Dee, 296 pp., $27.50, October 2001, 1 56663 387 7
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No Peace, No Honour: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam 
by Larry Berman.
Free Press, 334 pp., $27.50, November 2001, 0 684 84968 2
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... country’ as opposed to ‘The World’; ‘VC’, ‘Charlie’, or even, respectfully, ‘Sir Charles’, as stubbornly opposed to ‘friendlies’, subdivided into US, ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) and ‘Free World’ – South Koreans, Thais, Filipinos, Australians, New Zealanders and, keeping low profiles somewhere, 30 each from Chiang ...

The Playboy of West 29th Street

Colm Tóibín: Yeats’s Father in Exile, 25 January 2018

... son Isaac Butt Yeats. Among Yeats’s best friends at school were two brothers from Sligo, Charles and George Pollexfen, whose family owned a shipping and milling business. Yeats, who was charming and open in his manner, found their seriousness beguiling and made a visit to them in Sligo while at Trinity. The town of Sligo, he later wrote, ‘was ...