What’s in it for Obama?

Stephen Holmes: The Drone Presidency, 18 July 2013

The CIA, a Secret Army and a War at the Ends of the Earth 
by Mark Mazzetti.
Penguin, 381 pp., £22.50, April 2013, 978 1 59420 480 7
Show More
Show More
... a favourite conceit of conservatives. Before he became attorney general in Bush’s second term, Michael Mukasey informed civil libertarians that they, and not those who illegally tortured prisoners of war, were going to have blood on their hands. The offence of the liberals, he claimed bizarrely in the Wall Street Journal, was to advocate judicial oversight ...

Frameworks of Comparison

Benedict Anderson, 21 January 2016

... old Jewish community of Baghdad, moved to London as a young man, and came under the influence of Michael Oakeshott, then Britain’s best-known conservative political philosopher. On the moderate right was Anthony Smith, a British-born practising Orthodox Jew, who taught history in London throughout a long career. Convinced that the Jews were the most ...

Seeing Stars

Alan Bennett: Film actors, 3 January 2002

... twice a week and we generally went on a Monday and a Saturday. Comedies were best, particularly George Formby, but we took what was on offer, never knowing whether a film had any special merit. Some came with more of a reputation than others, Mrs Miniver for instance with Greer Garson, Dangerous Moonlight (with the Warsaw Concerto) and Now, Voyager with the ...
... in government at the age of 76 under his fellow Etonian David Cameron, alongside his son-in-law George Osborne.) The 1979 Conservative manifesto barely mentioned privatisation, or denationalisation, as it was sometimes called. In 1968, when an internal party think-tank called the public sector of industry ‘a millstone round our necks’ and proposed some ...

Permission to narrate

Edward Said, 16 February 1984

Israel in Lebanon: The Report of the International Commission 
by Sean MacBride.
Ithaca, 282 pp., £4.50, March 1984, 0 903729 96 2
Show More
Sabra et Chatila: Enquête sur un Massacre 
by Amnon Kapeliouk.
Seuil, 117 pp.
Show More
Final Conflict: The War in the Lebanon 
by John Bulloch.
Century, 238 pp., £9.95, April 1983, 0 7126 0171 6
Show More
Lebanon: The Fractured Country 
by David Gilmour.
Robertson, 209 pp., £9.95, June 1983, 0 85520 679 9
Show More
The Tragedy of Lebanon: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventures and American Bunglers 
by Jonathan Randal.
Chatto, 320 pp., £9.50, October 1983, 0 7011 2755 4
Show More
God cried 
by Tony Clifton and Catherine Leroy.
Quartet, 141 pp., £15, June 1983, 0 7043 2375 3
Show More
Beirut: Frontline Story 
by Salim Nassib, Caroline Tisdall and Chris Steele-Perkins.
Pluto, 160 pp., £3.95, March 1983, 0 86104 397 9
Show More
The Fateful Triangle: Israel, the United States and the Palestinians 
by Noam Chomsky.
Pluto, 481 pp., £6.95, October 1983, 0 86104 741 9
Show More
Show More
... directly competitive with American counterparts. Presidential candidates, with the exception of George McGovern and Jesse Jackson, outbid each other in paeans of praise for Israel. The Administration has refurbished the strategic ‘understanding’ it made with Israel during Alexander Haig’s time as Secretary of State, as if the invasion had never ...

The Suitcase

Frances Stonor Saunders, 30 July 2020

... recruits, they were required to hold a Bible and take the oath of allegiance to His Majesty King George the Fifth, his heirs and successors. According to Joe’s army record, he was demobilised three years later with ‘good character’, and no medals to suggest that his intention was anything other than to stay alive.I sent a copy of Joe’s naturalisation ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were innocent, a huge conspiracy to pervert the course of justice must have taken place. Where did this leave Havers’s conspiracy? Had the Court of Appeal ...

In Praise of Mess

Richard Poirier: Walt Whitman, 4 June 1998

With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. VIII: 11 February 1891-30 September 1891 
by Horace Traubel, edited by Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac.
Bentley, 624 pp., $99.50, November 1996, 0 9653415 8 5
Show More
With Walt Whitman in Camden. Vol. IX: 11 February 1891-30 September 1891 
by Horace Traubel, edited by Jeanne Chapman and Robert MacIsaac.
Bentley, 624 pp., £99.50, November 1996, 0 9653415 9 3
Show More
Show More
... he had moved from Washington to live with and be cared for in the Camden home of his brother George and his wife Louisa. These years also marked the death of his favourite sister-in-law, Jeffe’s wife Mattie, and the devastating blow of his mother’s death. ‘The only staggering, staying blow & trouble I have had – but unspeakable – my physical ...

Toots, they owned you

John Lahr: My Hollywood Fling, 15 June 2023

Hollywood: The Oral History 
edited by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson.
Faber, 739 pp., £25, November 2022, 978 0 571 36694 1
Show More
Show More
... in, the movies imported everybody from the theatre who knew anything at all about how to speak,’ George Cukor said. ‘It was like the parting of the Red Sea and they allowed a lot of people in.’ This expansion of personnel and technological innovation required a huge investment and major reorganisation of the business model into the much more hierarchical ...

The Israel Lobby

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, 23 March 2006

... secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in ...

Just one more species doing its best

Richard Rorty, 25 July 1991

The Later Works 1925-1953. Vol. XVII: Miscellaneous Writings, 1885-1953 
by John Dewey, edited by Jo Ann Boydston.
Southern Illinois, 786 pp., $50, August 1990, 0 8093 1661 7
Show More
Dewey 
by J.E. Tiles.
Routledge, 256 pp., £35, December 1988, 0 415 00908 1
Show More
John Dewey and American Democracy 
by Robert Westbrook.
Cornell, 608 pp., $32.95, May 1991, 0 8014 2560 3
Show More
Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford 
by Casey Blake.
North Carolina, 370 pp., $38.45, November 1990, 0 8078 1935 2
Show More
Show More
... the employees of the vast ‘realism v. anti-realism’ industry founded by his Oxford colleague Michael Dummett) when, following Locke, he insists that physical science is less bound up with human interests and needs than are, say, chess, novel-writing or the munitions industry. The question of whether any area of human culture could be less bound up with ...

Collected Works

Angus Calder, 5 January 1989

Men, Women and Work: Class, Gender and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910 
by Mary Blewett.
Illinois, 444 pp., $29.95, July 1988, 0 252 01484 7
Show More
Men’s Lives 
by Peter Matthiessen.
Collins Harvill, 335 pp., £15, August 1988, 0 00 272519 3
Show More
On Work: Historical, Comparative and Theoretical Approaches 
edited by R.E. Pahl.
Blackwell, 752 pp., £39.95, July 1988, 9780631157625
Show More
Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour 
edited by Léonie Archer.
Routledge, 307 pp., £28, August 1988, 0 415 00203 6
Show More
The Historical Meanings of Work 
edited by Patrick Joyce.
Cambridge, 320 pp., £27.50, September 1987, 0 521 30897 6
Show More
Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century 1590-1710 
by David Stevenson.
Cambridge, 246 pp., £25, November 1988, 0 521 35326 2
Show More
Show More
... illness’ and quotes this entry: ‘went berrying, done some shoes, scot to breakfast and dinner George went away today but O dear what a life to live God help me to do my duty baked 5 pies drove cow.’ And could Carlyle have approved of the ocean-haul seine fishermen of Long Island whose way of life was being extinguished in the mid-1980s, just as Peter ...

Notes on a Notebook

Andrew O’Hagan, 30 September 1999

... the public eye, although she saw the necessity of it.’ The two women went to the same school, St Michael’s Grammar, and they knew each other’s families from way back. Lurgan is the sort of place where everyone can seem to know everyone else. Dara finished a PhD in politics a few years ago at Queen’s University in Belfast – on community groups – and ...

Holocaust History

Geoff Eley, 3 March 1983

... exploring its symbolic and mythical dimensions, from the best-selling fiction of Elie Wiesel to George Steiner’s ruminations in In Bluebeard’s Castle and Richard Rubenstein’s The Cunning of History. But to insist on the uniqueness of the event is a short step to insisting on the exclusiveness of interpretation which asserts an empathetic privilege and ...

Ruthless and Truthless

Ferdinand Mount: Rotten Government, 6 May 2021

The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism 
by Peter Oborne.
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 3985 0100 3
Show More
Political Advice: Past, Present and Future 
edited by Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose.
I.B. Tauris, 240 pp., £21.99, February 2021, 978 1 83860 120 1
Show More
Show More
... who were purged by Johnson. No supposedly dictatorial previous prime minister, not Lloyd George, not Churchill, certainly not Thatcher, came anywhere close to this Stalinist ruthlessness.As we are now seeing, any centralisation of power tends also to centralise corruption. The lobbyists gather like flies or vultures round Number Ten, because no other ...