Fly in the Soup

Paul Henley: Anthropology and cinema, 21 June 2001

Anthropologie et cinéma: Passage à l'image, passage par l'image 
by Marc Henri Piault.
Nathan, frs 139, April 2000, 2 09 190790 1
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Transcultural Cinema 
by David MacDougall.
Princeton, 328 pp., £11.95, December 1998, 0 691 01234 2
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... now prefers to think of an ethnographic documentary as a site at which different views of reality may be revealed and explored, allowing viewers to formulate their own interpretations. This idea of documentary entails the acceptance of a degree of ambiguity that is at odds with an anthropology aimed at demonstrating the coherence of other cultures through ...

‘Comrade Jiang Zemin does indeed seem a proper choice’

Jasper Becker: Tiananmen Square, 24 May 2001

The Tiananmen Papers 
by Zhang Liang, edited by Andrew Nathan and Perry Link.
Little, Brown, 513 pp., £20, January 2001, 0 316 85693 2
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... It leaves one thinking about what might have been in China, and fearing that such an opportunity may never come again. Modern political life has existed there only briefly, in the first part of the 20th century, when there were small-scale (but important) student protests and strikes as well as elections, independent newspapers and universities and many ...

Our God is dead

Richard Vinen: Jean Moulin, 22 March 2001

The Death of Jean Moulin: Biography of a Ghost 
by Patrick Marnham.
Murray, 290 pp., £20, June 2000, 0 7195 5919 7
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... and the Resistance movements in the Conseil National de la Résistance, which met in Paris on 27 May 1943. The following month he was arrested near Lyon, where he had organised another Resistance meeting. No one knows exactly how or when Moulin died – he was last seen semi-comatose after a horrific beating at Montluc prison; indeed, it isn’t certain that ...

Diary

Charles Glass: Israel’s occupation of Palestine, 21 February 2002

... residents, in common with Palestinians in the rest of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, may neither leave their town nor return to it without written permission from the Israeli authorities. Permits are difficult to obtain and stipulate fixed times of return, after which the holder can be arrested. Like the Israeli settlements of Har Homa and Gilo ...

Diary

Murray Sayle: The Makiko and Junichiro Show, 17 October 2002

... in 1972, assuring her an attentive hearing from Japan’s huge neighbour. Deeper calculations may have been behind her appointment, however. She was prepared to describe the Foreign Ministry, long believed to be without fault, as ‘a hotbed of corruption’. Japan’s ultra-secretive spook outfit, the Cabinet Research Office, is funded by off-budget ...

Shoot them to be sure

Richard Gott: The Oxford History of the British Empire, 25 April 2002

The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. I: The Origins of Empire 
edited by William Roger Louis and Nicholas Canny.
Oxford, 533 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924676 9
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The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. II: The 18th Century 
edited by William Roger Louis and P.J. Marshall.
Oxford, 639 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924677 7
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The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. III: The 19th Century 
edited by William Roger Louis and Andrew Porter.
Oxford, 774 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924678 5
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The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. IV: The 20th Century 
edited by William Roger Louis and Judith Brown.
Oxford, 773 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924679 3
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The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. V: Historiography 
edited by William Roger Louis and Robin Winks.
Oxford, 731 pp., £14.99, July 2001, 0 19 924680 7
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... David Richardson is more outspoken in an essay on the economics of the slave trade. Differences may exist among historians about the amount of money the slave trade made for Britain, but he has little doubt that merchants of the British Empire, the leading shippers of slaves to America, made life hell for the Africans. When slavery was abolished throughout ...

Shandying It

John Mullan: Sterne’s Foibles, 6 June 2002

Laurence Sterne: A Life 
by Ian Campbell Ross.
Oxford, 512 pp., £25, March 2001, 0 19 212235 5
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... some reviewer, next month, ‘gnash his teeth, and storm and rage at me, as some of you did last MAY, (in which I remember the weather was very hot)’, the heated critic should not be exasperated at being treated with ‘good temper’. Like the fly that buzzed around Uncle Toby’s nose all through dinner, he would be allowed to buzz off ...

Hoogah-Boogah

James Wolcott: Rick Moody, 19 September 2002

The Black Veil 
by Rick Moody.
Faber, 323 pp., £16.99, August 2002, 0 571 20056 7
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... of a tidy, well-organised life in these pages, a life of kisses bestowed or of novels written, may be surprised. My book and my life are written in fits, more like epilepsy than like a narrative.’ Bad analogy, and a tad tasteless. Epileptic seizures are uninvited. Moody’s fits were self-induced. Early in The Black Veil, Moody mentions his father ...

Dingy Quadrilaterals

Ian Gilmour: The Profumo Case, 19 October 2006

Bringing the House Down: A Family Memoir 
by David Profumo.
Murray, 291 pp., £20, September 2006, 0 7195 6608 8
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... been one of my favourite subjects.’ In general, of course, there is nothing wrong in that. It may even be admirable. But when writing a book in which political events are inevitably one of the most important features it has its disadvantages. For instance, he writes of ‘Little Clem’ Attlee. Attlee was small in stature but in nothing else. He was ...

Godly Mafia

Blair Worden: Aristocrats v. the King, 24 May 2007

The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I 
by John Adamson.
Weidenfeld, 742 pp., £25, March 2007, 978 0 297 84262 0
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... of the Middle Ages, whose principles they believed Charles to have broken. The Earl of Bedford may, as Adamson observes, have shown an acquaintance with the political practices of ancient and modern republics in his notebooks. So did a great many other people in theirs. But there is nothing to connect that intellectual cosmopolitanism to the schemes of the ...

Cadres

Eric Hobsbawm: Communism in Britain, 26 April 2007

The Lost World of British Communism 
by Raphael Samuel.
Verso, 244 pp., £19.99, November 2006, 1 84467 103 8
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Communists and British Society 1920-91 
by Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn.
Rivers Oram, 356 pp., £16.99, January 2007, 978 1 85489 145 7
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Bolshevism and the British Left, Part One: Labour Legends and Russian Gold 
by Kevin Morgan.
Lawrence and Wishart, 320 pp., £18.99, March 2007, 978 1 905007 25 7
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... Gold (the first of a three-volume study to be entitled Bolshevism and the British Left), which may also be read with profit by those interested in current debates about the funding of the Labour Party. In some respects the British CP, whose claim to historic significance is modest, was similar to other CPs. Its members were overwhelmingly drawn from the ...

Happy Man

Paul Driver: Stravinsky, 8 February 2007

Stravinsky: The Second Exile – France and America 1934-71 
by Stephen Walsh.
Cape, 709 pp., £30, July 2006, 0 224 06078 3
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Down a Path of Wonder: Memoirs of Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Other Cultural Figures 
by Robert Craft.
Naxos, 560 pp., £19.99, October 2006, 1 84379 217 6
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... is the motif of Stravinsky’s career. Walsh speculates in his first volume that the notion may have come from the views of the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, whose suggestion that ‘the tedium of living and willing stops at the door of every studio’ is wonderfully apt for Stravinsky, the most detached if domestically tyrannical of ...

The Precautionary Principle

David Runciman: Taking a Chance on War, 1 April 2004

... lives would have been sacrificed for little or no gain. Therefore, the precautionary principle may require the needless sacrifice of innocent life whether it is applied to war in Iraq or to the emission of carbon dioxide. In both cases, the argument must be the same: it’s worth taking a chance on the needless sacrifice of innocent lives only because the ...

Merry Kicks

Mark Ford: The Madness of Marinetti, 20 May 2004

Selected Poems and Related Prose 
by F.T. Marinetti, translated by Elizabeth Napier and Barbara Studholme.
Yale, 250 pp., £35, January 2003, 0 300 04103 9
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... theorems, equations and ‘synoptic tables of lyric values’. At a performance in London in May 1914 of Zang Toumb Toumb, he also had a telephone installed on stage, into which he barked orders to his only English disciple, the painter C.R.W. Nevinson, who would then bang two enormous drums in an adjoining room. Zang Toumb Toumb, translated into English ...

Possessed by the Idols

Steven Shapin: Does Medicine Work?, 30 November 2006

Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm Since Hippocrates 
by David Wootton.
Oxford, 304 pp., £16.99, June 2006, 0 19 280355 7
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... effectiveness of any medical intervention. That’s to say, medical therapies did little good, and may well have done much harm. And then it all changed. Medicine now ‘works’: Wootton sees no reason to qualify the claim or to mobilise a mass of evidence in its favour. So progress must be acknowledged, but failure must be specially explained. Wootton’s ...