A Tiny Sun

Tom Stevenson: Getting the Bomb, 24 February 2022

The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War 
by Fred Kaplan.
Simon and Schuster, 384 pp., £15, April 2021, 978 1 9821 0729 1
Show More
The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age 
by Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press.
Cornell, 180 pp., £23.99, June 2020, 978 1 5017 4929 2
Show More
Show More
... Victims vomit, and suffer ataxia and delirium. Less is known about longer lasting nuclear fallout. Marshall Islanders subjected to fallout in 1954 suffered ‘beta-burns’ within 24 hours and nuclear testing rendered their atolls uninhabitable.The usual fate of revolutionary weapons is for their startling effects to be quickly nullified, or at least ...

The Great Fear

William Lamont, 21 July 1983

Charles I and the Popish Plot 
by Caroline Hibbard.
North Carolina, 342 pp., £21, May 1983, 0 8078 1520 9
Show More
Charles I: The Personal Monarch 
by Charles Carlton.
Routledge, 426 pp., £14.95, June 1983, 9780710094858
Show More
The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County 
by William Hunt.
Harvard, 365 pp., £24, April 1983, 0 674 73903 5
Show More
Show More
... religious dimension? We still lack biographies in depth of key religious figure such as Stephen Marshall, Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Edmund Calamy, Henry Burton and others. They flit tantalisingly through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of petitioning on ...

Blood Relations

J.I.M. Stewart, 1 December 1983

Diversity and Depth in Fiction: Selected Critical Writings of Angus Wilson 
edited by Kerry McSweeny.
Secker, 303 pp., £15, August 1983, 0 436 57610 4
Show More
Show More
... and current topics: Osbert and Sacheverell, James Agate, ‘Uncle’ Desmond MacCarthy, the Arthur Marshall girl, the Prince of Wales at Fort Belvedere, ‘I’ve worked with Whicker,’ ‘brown sauce straight from old Harold at Number Ten’. T.S. Eliot is said to be well-disposed to the Vardon Hall scheme in Hemlock and After. Another pointer to a certain ...

Poor Stephen

James Fox, 23 July 1987

An Affair of State: The Profumo Case and the Framing of Stephen Ward 
by Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy.
Cape, 268 pp., £12.95, May 1987, 0 224 02347 0
Show More
Honeytrap: The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward 
by Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril.
Weidenfeld, 264 pp., £12.95, May 1987, 0 297 79122 2
Show More
Show More
... against Ward. Policemen and witnesses have since confessed to what went on. The judge, Sir Archie Marshall, is alleged to have said on the telephone: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get him on the immoral earnings charge.’ Stephen Ward committed suicide the day before the verdict because, as his letters reveal, it was clear to him, after the judge’s ...

Pull as archer, in lbs

Mary Beard, 5 September 1996

Cambridge Women: Twelve Portraits 
edited by Edward Shils and Carmen Blacker.
Cambridge, 292 pp., £30, February 1996, 0 521 48344 1
Show More
A Woman in History: Eileen Power 1889-1940 
by Maxine Berg.
Cambridge, 292 pp., £45, April 1996, 0 521 40278 6
Show More
Show More
... One of the very first Newnham students, for example, Mary Paley, married the economist Alfred Marshall, who in the 1890s led the opposition against allowing women to use the title BA (apparently changing his mind since the earliest days, when he had persuaded his future wife to sit the examination in Moral Sciences). And even the most radical men could on ...

I want to be the baby

Kasia Boddy: Barthelme’s High Jinks, 18 August 2022

Collected Stories 
by Donald Barthelme, edited by Charles McGrath.
Library of America, 1004 pp., £40, July 2021, 978 1 59853 684 3
Show More
Show More
... about publishing everyone he admired, including Walker Percy, William Gass and the not yet famous Marshall McLuhan. In 1960, he joined the board of Houston’s Contemporary Arts Association and the following year became the museum’s temporary director. He remained there for just over a year. It was a period of extraordinary activity during which the museum ...

It’s alive!

Christopher Tayler: The cult of Godzilla, 3 February 2005

Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters 
by William Tsutsui.
Palgrave, 240 pp., £8.99, December 2004, 1 4039 6474 2
Show More
Show More
... showering 7000 square miles of the Pacific with fallout. Along with 28 military personnel and 239 Marshall Islanders, 23 men on a Japanese tuna boat – the Lucky Dragon No. 5 – were exposed. Their contaminated catch had already been sold when they were hospitalised with radiation sickness. Not surprisingly, there were vigorous protests in Japan (even the ...

Snobs, Swots and Hacks

Jonathan Parry, 23 January 2025

Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite 
by Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman.
Harvard, 317 pp., £20, September 2024, 978 0 674 25771 9
Show More
Show More
... by asking them how they spent the leisure time that the magazines of the 1890s loved to celebrate. George Bernard Shaw listed his recreations as ‘cycling and showing off’.Today’s Who’s Who remains a child of the 1890s. The editorial board stands by the book’s original intention, to recognise people whose ‘prominence is inherited, or depending upon ...

Bush’s Choice

Tom Farer, 12 October 1989

... In the early months of George Bush’s Presidency, before his reassuringly innocuous pronouncements and prudent compromises at the Nato summit had allowed the American media to discover prophetic qualities in him, editorial pages were much occupied by pundits clashing over what Bush, during the electoral campaign, had plaintively labelled ‘the vision thing ...

Self-Deceptions of Empire

David Bromwich: Reinhold Niebuhr, 23 October 2008

The Irony of American History 
by Reinhold Niebuhr.
Chicago, 174 pp., £8.50, June 2008, 978 0 226 58398 3
Show More
Show More
... in looking to achieve its ends ‘by moral attraction and imitation’. In the years of the Marshall Plan, this was true to a degree that subsequent policies have made easy to forget. Niebuhr alludes just once to a darker possibility: ‘Only occasionally does an hysterical statesman suggest that we must increase our power and use it in order to gain ...

On the imagining of conspiracy

Christopher Hitchens, 7 November 1991

Harlot’s Ghost 
by Norman Mailer.
Joseph, 1122 pp., £15.99, October 1991, 0 7181 2934 2
Show More
A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs 
by Theodore Draper.
Hill and Wang, 690 pp., $27.95, June 1991, 0 8090 9613 7
Show More
Show More
... Oliver North recruited convicted narcotics smugglers to run the secret war against Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the CIA. As the Watergate hounds closed in, Henry Kissinger was implored to sink to his Jewish knees and join Richard Nixon in prayer on the Oval Office carpet, and complied. Klaus Barbie was plucked from the SS ‘Most ...
Modernity and Identity 
edited by Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman.
Blackwell, 448 pp., £45, January 1992, 0 631 17585 7
Show More
Fundamentalisms Observed 
edited by Martin Marty and Scott Appleby.
Chicago, 872 pp., $40, November 1991, 0 226 50877 3
Show More
The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial 
by Margaret Rose.
Cambridge, 317 pp., £35, July 1991, 0 521 40131 3
Show More
Under God: Religion and American Politics 
by Garry Wills.
Simon and Schuster, 445 pp., £17.99, February 1992, 0 671 65705 4
Show More
Show More
... in Weber’s interpretation, the cloak a cage) and what, if anything, lies within. Some, like Marshall Berman, in his naive and strangely inspiring study, All that is solid melts into air (1982), have reversed the paradigm and argued that the process was one of evaporation rather than condensation. But this (as Berman admits in Modernity and Identity) is ...

Diary

Deborah Friedell: The Heart and the Fist, 24 May 2018

... how Sheena and I came to England together, on a plane with all the other Americans who’d won a Marshall Scholarship. Some of them were politically ambitious: ‘No photos!’ they’d say at parties. Sheena and I weren’t like that, but then I don’t remember going to many parties. Instead, we drove around Scotland, and went to a lot of plays – my ...

Something Fine and Powerful

Thomas Laqueur: Pearl Harbor Redux, 25 August 2011

Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq 
by John Dower.
Norton/The New Press, 596 pp., £22, October 2010, 978 0 393 06150 5
Show More
Show More
... al-Qaida and state actors share a common language that is part of the ‘cultures of war’. Both George Bush and Sayyid Qutb, the ‘philosopher of Islamic terror’ in the eyes of many Western observers, oppose tyranny, support ‘true social justice’ and are in favour of the alleviation of suffering. In the name of these abstract ideals they perpetrate ...

Not Corrupt Enough

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Whose Cold War?, 20 March 2025

To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power 
by Sergey Radchenko.
Cambridge, 760 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 1 108 47735 2
Show More
The World of the Cold War 1945-91 
by Vladislav Zubok.
Pelican, 521 pp., £25, May, 978 0 241 69614 9
Show More
Show More
... advantage, this never happened. Instead, the US, having bailed out Britain, came in with the Marshall Plan in 1948, making itself the linchpin of (Western) European recovery for the foreseeable future. As Churchill had said in 1946, an ‘iron curtain’ had descended on Europe, separating West from East along the lines of military control established in ...