Pistols in His Petticoats

Neal Ascherson: The Celebrated Miss Flora, 15 December 2022

Pretty Young Rebel: The Life of Flora MacDonald 
by Flora Fraser.
Bloomsbury, 285 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 1 4088 7982 5
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... England especially, had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with loyalty: the self-sacrificing loyalty expected by a man from a true woman. Flora is supposed to have said that she would have tried to rescue anybody she found in such distress, not just a rebel prince. It was a remark that thrilled her sympathisers, Jacobites or ...

Friends with Benefits

Tom Stevenson: The Five Eyes, 19 January 2023

The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the Shadowy International Spy Network, through Its Targets, Traitors and Spies 
by Richard Kerbaj.
John Blake, 416 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 1 78946 503 7
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Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena 
by Clinton Fernandes.
Melbourne, 176 pp., £35.95, October 2022, 978 0 522 87926 1
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... in the invasion and destruction of East Timor and its opposition to West Papuan demands for self-determination. The Australian contingent in the Five Eyes put considerable resources into intelligence operations in East Timor in the early 2000s, and successive governments have refused to negotiate a maritime boundary there, wanting to continue to reap ...

You call that a breakfast?

Adam Phillips, 17 February 2000

Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters 
by Ted Cohen.
Chicago, 99 pp., £10.50, November 1999, 0 226 11230 6
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... that Cohen wants to get back into philosophy but without too much of the sentimentality and self-importance that such I’s usually collect around themselves these days. Though Cohen doesn’t say this in so many words, a joke that fails is a form of madness. If you want to know what scepticism feels like, if you want to feel it really kick in, tell ...

Big toes are gross

Hal Foster: Surrealism's Influence, 6 June 2024

Why Surrealism Matters 
by Mark Polizzotti.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 25709 0
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... the end ‘ethnographic Surrealism’ (to borrow a term from James Clifford) aimed to estrange the self rather than to understand the other; in L’Afrique fantôme, for example, we learn far more about its author, Michel Leiris, than we do about Africa. Contemporary exhibitions such as Surrealism beyond Borders at Tate Modern and Surrealism and Us: Caribbean ...

Give your mom a gun

Geoff Mann: America’s Favourite Gun, 7 March 2024

American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 
by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson.
Farrar, Straus, 473 pp., £25, September 2023, 978 0 374 10385 9
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Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America 
by Andrew C. McKevitt.
North Carolina, 319 pp., £24.95, November 2023, 978 1 4696 7724 8
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... to westward conquest to cops keeping the streets safe, guns are the tools of America’s self-creation. ‘This country was born with a rifle in its hand,’ Philip Sharpe wrote in The Rifle in America (1938). ‘As a matter of fact, the rifle brought about the birth of these United States. The United States and the rifle are inseparable.’ They ...

Diary

Dani Garavelli: Election Night in Glasgow, 18 July 2024

... and clumsy handling of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill (which would have allowed people to self-identify their legal sex but was blocked by the Tory government in Westminster) further alienated voters. Even more damaging was the creeping realisation that the SNP, like Labour before it, had failed to deliver on council tax reform, education or ...

Diary

Patricia Lockwood: Encounters with Aliens, 5 December 2024

... Shouldn’t I be the first to receive the news of what they found? If we had donated her whole self, what would we know now? Everything.Gage’s blood made an inkblot, he had to be read. It is known that he was literate. It is also known that the moment before the accident occurred he opened his mouth to speak. And he did speak again soon afterwards.How ...

Slim for Britain

Susan Pedersen: Solidarity Economy, 23 January 2025

The Solidarity Economy: Non-Profits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire 
by Tehila Sasson.
Princeton, 298 pp., £35, July 2024, 978 0 691 25038 0
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... on her book; it would be better if it were less critical of ‘non-profits’ and more self-reflective about the academy and its disciplining work. Admittedly, nothing is harder than clearing your mind of the frameworks and paradigms of the moment, but it is crucial to try. We want to address issues relevant to our time, of course, but to what ...

Diary

Alexander Clapp: Inside Golden Dawn, 4 December 2014

... international governing bodies. Merkel is the mistress of that order. Golden Dawn stands for Greek self-sufficiency; other parties – even those who claim the mantle of the far right – are conspiring with the Order to sell Greece’s assets to foreign competitors. I became a Dawner in order to find out more about the party than I could from reading the ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: On failing to impress the queen, 5 January 2023

... had urged me to tone down the offending sketch, particularly the erection/reaction gag but (rather self-righteously) I refused. There wasn’t much laughter that night in the rest of the show, which normally went by in gales of hilarity, but with the audience only concerned with what the Royal Party was thinking, much of it passed in awkward silence.It’s ...

This place is pryson

Mary Wellesley: Living in Her Own Grave, 23 May 2019

Hermits and Anchorites in England, 1200-1550 
edited by E.A. Jones.
Manchester, 232 pp., £18.99, January 2019, 978 1 5261 2723 5
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... herself with nettles, nor beat the front of her body, nor lacerate herself with cuts’. These self-inflicted tortures are like treats to be rationed, and are permissible only with authorisation. The​ Ancrene Wisse is unsettling in a number of ways. The experience of reading it is sensuous. Its rhythmic, alliterative language delights the ear and ...

The Little Man’s Big Friends

Eric Foner: Freedom’s Dominion, 1 June 2023

Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power 
by Jefferson Cowie.
Basic, 497 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 1 5416 7280 2
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... which drew on images of workers in popular culture to argue that organised labour is no longer a self-conscious power in American life. In both, he was able to weave class, culture, politics and ideology into a consistent narrative and to connect local histories with national and global events. The same qualities are evident in Freedom’s Dominion. The book ...

I going England tomorrow

Mendez: ‘The Lonely Londoners’, 7 July 2022

The Lonely Londoners 
by Sam Selvon.
Penguin, 138 pp., £16.99, June 2021, 978 0 241 50412 3
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... a house, ‘Gallows make the sign of the cross with his forefingers and kiss it. “Tomorrow self please God I going to look for a work, whatever it is, if is not executiving I won’t mind directing a bank or something. I will give up the search for that fiver that I lost one day and concentrate on reality.”’They plan to raise money by organising a ...

Eating animals is wrong

Colin McGinn, 24 January 1991

Animal Liberation 
by Peter Singer.
Cape, 320 pp., £15.95, October 1990, 0 224 03018 3
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... genetic make-up or evolutionary history of the organism that does the suffering. If this is not self-evident, then consider the following hypothetical cases. Martians invade earth and proceed to enslave and exploit human beings: they do to us all the things we now do to our fellow species on earth. Our lives accordingly become a hell of ...

Smoke and Lava

Rosemary Hill: Vesuvius Observed, 5 October 2023

Volcanic: Vesuvius in the Age of Revolutions 
by John Brewer.
Yale, 513 pp., £30, October, 978 0 300 27266 6
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... entries. Robert Pike took the opportunity to mention that he was ‘from London’ and a ‘patent self-adjusting truss manufacturer and merchant’.The book is a rare survival that brings us close to contemporary experience, but its scope is necessarily limited. Brewer’s plan to use it as ‘a database and as a finding aid’ works – up to a ...