Red Power

Thomas Meaney: Indigenous Political Strategies, 18 July 2024

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hämäläinen.
Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History 
by Ned Blackhawk.
Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
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Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance 
by Nick Estes.
Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
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“... across their ancient homeland. Hämäläinen relates the account given to the English explorer David Thompson by one of the Blackfeet Indians, Saahkómaapi. In around 1730, the Blackfeet heard that there were horses in Snake Indian country and that not far away was the body of a horse that had been killed by an arrow. They found the dead horse and gathered ...”

‘This looks absolutely rubbish’

Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin: Palantir and the NHS, 23 July 2026

“... grail,’ according to a former Global Counsel employee. At this point, the UK’s health data was held in thousands of places – doctor’s surgeries, NHS trusts, pharmacies, third-party providers – and in a variety of file formats. Creating a single digital system for NHS data had been a government objective for decades, but previous efforts had ended ...”

Stuck on the Flypaper

Frances Stonor Saunders: The Hobsbawm File, 9 April 2015

“... measured strokes. Driven wild with pain I repeatedly screamed at the top of my voice. Then they held my mouth shut for a while and hit me in the face, and with a whip across chest and back. I then collapsed.2‘Arrests upon arrests,’ Joseph Goebbels noted with satisfaction. ‘Now the Red pest is being thoroughly rooted out.’ By April, 25,000 communists ...”

Bizarre and Wonderful

Wes Enzinna: Murray Bookchin, Eco-Anarchist, 4 May 2017

Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin 
by Janet Biehl.
Oxford, 344 pp., £22.99, October 2015, 978 0 19 934248 8
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“... dismissed him as ‘spit in the horrible communitarian soup’ and one of his former acolytes, David Watson, wrote a book, Beyond Bookchin, ridiculing him. Bookchin replied to Öcalan that he was too ill to correspond with him. Öcalan wasn’t put off. He believed Bookchin’s work showed a way for failed national-liberation struggles to transform ...”

Fire or Earthquake

Thomas Powers: Joan Didion’s Gaze, 3 November 2022

Let Me Tell You What I Mean: A New Collection of Essays 
by Joan Didion.
Fourth Estate, 149 pp., £8.99, January 2022, 978 0 00 845178 3
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“... But Noel kept me in the loop, dropped by a couple of times a month with news about the agent David Obst or the director Peter Bogdanovich, both dying to do Mallory. He drank bourbon, and when his glass was empty he held it high and rattled the ice cubes for a refill. He stayed until the bottle was empty and it was time ...”

Diary

Andrew Brighton: On Peter Fuller, 7 November 1991

“... Aesthetic (Ruskin). In the event, the conference was called ‘The State of British Art’. It was held in February 1978, ran from Friday night through to Sunday evening, and was packed out. It did not include figures to argue for Royal Academy traditionalism, nor popular painting, which had both been included in Towards Another Picture. Nevertheless each ...”

The Precarious Rise of the Gulf Despots

Nicolas Pelham: Tyrants of the Gulf, 22 February 2018

“... tolerance and his establishment of an anti-terror coalition of 41 Islamic states – the alliance held its first meeting in November in Riyadh – are hard to take in for those who were taught that jihad was a fundamental pillar of Islam. ‘No to terrorism and wayward thoughts,’ a government banner on a flyover in the Salafist stronghold of Buraydah ...”

His Own Sort of Outsider

Philip Clark: Tippett’s Knack, 16 July 2020

Michael Tippett: The Biography 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 750 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4746 0602 8
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“... as the trial approached, his attitude changed perceptibly. Writing to his friend the journalist David Ayerst, Tippett declared himself ‘very much at peace and ready to go’.On 21 August 1943, at 7.30 a.m. precisely, after serving two months of his three-month sentence, Tippett was released from Wormwood Scrubs. He was met by Britten and Pears, who would ...”

Salt Spray

Ferdinand Mount: When Britannia Ruled the Waves, 5 December 2024

The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1815-1945 
by N.A.M. Rodger.
Allen Lane, 934 pp., £40, October 2024, 978 0 7139 9412 4
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“... to an age of lost naval greatness, ‘when no fleet was ever heard of except of our own people who held this land’. That was Aelfric in about 1000 ad, looking back to the glories of King Edgar’s day. After the Spithead Mutiny of 1797, Edmund Burke moaned: ‘Our only hope is a submission to the enemy … as to our navy, that has already perished with its ...”

Heir to Blair

Christopher Tayler: Among the New Tories, 26 April 2007

“... being the buzzword for the shearing off of voter-unfriendly associations. Before David Cameron, or ‘DC’, as he’s known, took over in December 2005, Conservative strategists had noted anxiously that focus groups would turn against almost anything – even, or especially, tax cuts – as soon as they were told it was Tory ...”

Loafing with the Sissies

Colm Tóibín: The Trials of Andy Warhol, 10 September 2020

Warhol: A Life as Art 
by Blake Gopnik.
Allen Lane, 931 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 00338 1
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“... him as ‘quite miserable-looking … so thin, so little, so miserable’. The art critic David Bourdon thought his art collection ‘stank’ and took the view that Warhol was nothing more than ‘a window trimmer and chichi East Side gadabout who hung around with trashy people’. In the world of commercial art, as photography began to overtake ...”

Slow Waltz

Daniel Trilling: Trouble with the Troubles Act, 6 June 2024

“... last year of the South East Fermanagh Foundation, a prominent Northern Irish victims’ group, David Hallawell, the son of a police officer killed by the IRA, said that ‘innocent victims and survivors have been betrayed and forgotten … for the sake of the government and votes on the mainland.’The main point of contention is that the offer of ...”

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2014, 8 January 2015

“... for the first day of his trial at Preston Crown Court; he is seemingly handcuffed with his hands held in front of him, but thus shackled has to negotiate the quite steep steps from the police van. At 84, he manages this without much help, which is more than I would be able to do even with free hands and four years younger. But why is he handcuffed in the ...”

Renters v. Rentiers

Jack Shenker, 8 May 2025

Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis 
by Nick Bano.
Verso, 232 pp., £15.99, April, 978 1 80429 833 6
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“... as close as we came to the death of the private landlord,’ Bano writes, ‘we never held up a mirror to that hungry maw’ to check that the beast ‘had breathed its last’. British landlordism has not only survived, but prospered. Today, HMRC estimates that there are 2.8 million landlords in the UK: more than 5 per cent of the adult ...”

Mr Toad’s Wild Ride

Jessica Olin: Leaving Graceland, 5 December 2024

From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir 
by Lisa Marie Presley with Riley Keough.
Macmillan, 281 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 1 0350 5104 5
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“... was in shock: ‘I don’t remember how long the viewing went on, but there was so much drama. I held it all in. I would think: Wow, look at that person, they’re totally losing their shit.’ For years, she had dreams she believed were visitations from her father.The move back to LA to live with her mother full-time was brutal. ‘It was a one-two ...”