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What I Heard about Iraq

Eliot Weinberger: Watch and listen, 3 February 2005

... is unprecedented in its speed and daring and in the lightness of casualties.’ I heard Colonel David Hackworth say: ‘Hey diddle diddle, it’s straight up the middle!’ I heard the Pentagon spokesman say that 95 per cent of the Iraqi casualties were ‘military-age males’. I heard an official from the Red Crescent say: ‘On one stretch of highway ...

Upper and Lower Cases

Tom Nairn, 24 August 1995

A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of 1707 
edited by John Robertson.
Cambridge, 368 pp., £40, April 1995, 0 521 43113 1
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The Autonomy of Modern Scotland 
by Lindsay Paterson.
Edinburgh, 218 pp., £30, September 1994, 0 7486 0525 8
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... the revolutions of the later 18th century, in technology and agriculture as well as in America and France, time itself came to assume a different and more urgent meaning. The notion of measurable change entered more decidedly into mass awareness; expectations intensified and focused more clearly on futures realisable if and when social conditions were altered ...

Infisal! Infisal! Infisal!

Jonathan Littell: A Journey in South Sudan, 30 June 2011

... in South Sudan, a few hundred kilometres at most passable all year long, in a country the size of France*. But it is traversed by a major artery, the White Nile, also called Bahr el-Jebel, the ‘Sea of the Mountain’. All the country’s rivers feed it: the Bahr el-Arab, or ‘Sea of Arabs’, which the blacks call the Kiir and which marks the boundary ...

Crocodile’s Breath

James Meek: The Tale of the Tube, 5 May 2005

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City For Ever 
by Christian Wolmar.
Atlantic, 351 pp., £17.99, November 2004, 1 84354 022 3
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... subsidy. The company trying to raise money for the Metropolitan was on the verge of collapse. David Wire, the lord mayor, allowed himself to be persuaded by Pearson – then the Corporation of the City of London’s solicitor – of the case for public transport in the capital, the one that’s still being made today. Wire accepted that something needed ...

Festival of Punishment

Thomas Laqueur: On Death Row, 5 October 2000

Proximity to Death 
by William McFeely.
Norton, 206 pp., £17.95, January 2000, 0 393 04819 5
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Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment 
edited by Bonnie Bobit.
Bobit, 311 pp., $24.95, September 1999, 0 9624857 6 4
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... by a mere trickle of other deaths. There were no executions in 1978 or 1980, one in 1981, the year France abandoned capital punishment. If not de jure, then de facto, the United States seemed to have abandoned this, the most ancient and most terrible of punishments. By the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s second term, in 1984, however, something seems to have ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... Guardian. He said it would come from journalists he’d worked with there. He was obsessed with David Leigh and Nick Davies, two of the main reporters. ‘Davies is extremely hostile to me,’ Assange said. ‘The Guardian basically double-crossed the organisation in the worst way.’ (The Guardian denies this.) ‘We left them with a cache of cables – to ...

Even Immortality

Thomas Laqueur: Medicomania, 29 July 1999

The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present 
by Roy Porter.
HarperCollins, 833 pp., £24.99, February 1999, 0 00 637454 9
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... standard until after the Second World War. Still, the rivulets of blood amounted to a torrent. France imported 33 million leeches in 1837; and of course blood was drained in other ways as well. (A leech grows from 3.75 cm to 15 cm: assuming a constant diameter of 1.5 cm – the leech also gets fatter – that works out at nearly 1.3 million litres of blood ...

Fiction and E.M. Forster

Frank Kermode: At the Cost of Life, 10 May 2007

... necessarily defective consciousness, or giving it a shape like an hourglass, like James or Anatole France. Where, if not to James, could Forster have looked for a serviceable theory of fiction? Certainly not to Lubbock. In fact there was not, at the time, much of that kind of thing to be had. Since then, the situation has altered amazingly: 1969 is given as ...

The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett, 8 March 2007

... At Windsor it was the evening of the state banquet and as the president of France took his place beside Her Majesty, the royal family formed up behind and the procession slowly moved off and through into the Waterloo Chamber. ‘Now that I have you to myself,’ said the Queen, smiling to left and right as they glided through the glittering throng, ‘I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet ...

The Darwin Show

Steven Shapin, 7 January 2010

... suffering.The BBC launched its Darwin season with Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, and what David Attenborough wanted us to understand was that ‘Darwin has shown us that we are not apart from the natural world – we do not have dominion over it. We are subject to its laws and processes, as are all other animals on earth to which indeed we are ...

Stuck on the Flypaper

Frances Stonor Saunders: The Hobsbawm File, 9 April 2015

... traces, like the whiff of cordite long after the gun has been fired. When I mention this to David Cornwell/John le Carré, he says: ‘I can still feel it in my nostrils now.’ Historians, like spooks, need a sensitive nose, Orwell’s ‘Sniff, sniff’ for the detection of ‘all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our ...

What more could we want of ourselves!

Jacqueline Rose: On Rosa Luxemburg, 16 June 2011

The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg 
edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza, translated by George Shriver.
Verso, 609 pp., £25, February 2011, 978 1 84467 453 4
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... the first Marxist theorists of globalisation (or of ‘historical-geographical materialism’, in David Harvey’s more recent phrase). Her unfinished Introduction to Political Economy, based on her lectures at the Social Democratic Party school in Berlin from 1907 to 1914, included a chapter titled ‘The Dissolution of Primitive Communism: From the Ancient ...
... Conroy and Miss Ivors in Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. When Gabriel tells Miss Ivors that he goes to France and Belgium ‘partly to keep in touch with the languages’, she replies: ‘And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with – Irish?’ To which Gabriel replies: ‘Well, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.’ In A ...

The Life and Death of Juliano Mer-Khamis

Adam Shatz: A Death in Jenin, 21 November 2013

... was generating abroad made its work that much more difficult. The PA felt snubbed when in 2009 David Miliband came to the theatre without consulting them. A perception arose that the theatre was rich, though its operating annual budget never exceeded $450,000 dollars, modest for an organisation of its size. Juliano had never handed out money, but he had ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
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... Chester Kallmann can be understood in this context, or the relationship between James Merrill and David Jackson. This, more likely, was the stamp and seal of the love between Wilde and Douglas. In the years which followed their meeting we get two versions of Wilde’s feelings for Douglas. In July 1894, he wrote: ‘It is really absurd. I can’t live without ...

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