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Living on the Edge

R.W. Johnson: Nukes, 28 April 2011

Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb 1939-49 
by Jim Baggott.
Icon, 576 pp., £10.99, November 2009, 978 1 84831 082 7
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The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers and the Prospects for a World without Nuclear Weapons 
by Richard Rhodes.
Knopf, 366 pp., $27.95, August 2010, 978 0 307 26754 2
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Eliminating Nuclear Threats: A Practical Agenda for Global Policymakers 
by Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi.
ICNND, 294 pp., November 2009, 978 1 921612 14 5
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... of the National Nuclear Security Administration from May 2003 to January 2007, told Rhodes that Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary for defense, had once explained to him why no one in the administration was interested in arms control. He said it was because arms control was the sort of thing you can’t get when it would help, and when you can get ...

Business as Usual

J. Hoberman: Hitler in Hollywood, 19 December 2013

Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-39 
by Thomas Doherty.
Columbia, 429 pp., £24, April 2013, 978 0 231 16392 7
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The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler 
by Ben Urwand.
Harvard, 327 pp., £19.95, August 2013, 978 0 674 72474 7
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... Hollywood began to release more demurely anti-fascist fare. This caused political uproar. Joseph Kennedy, the US ambassador to Britain and a former movie executive, warned some of his former colleagues that Jews would be held accountable if America entered the war. The Senate hearings on Moving Picture Screen and Radio Propaganda in 1941 began by suggesting ...

Danger: English Lessons

R.W. Johnson: French v. English, 16 March 2017

Power and Glory: France’s Secret Wars with Britain and America, 1945-2016 
by R.T. Howard.
Biteback, 344 pp., £20, October 2016, 978 1 78590 116 4
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... about keeping its plans secret from Washington. Some Americans, including Senator John F. Kennedy, already supported Algerian independence. Oil and gas had been found in Algeria, and French intelligence had discovered that American oil companies were in correspondence with an FLN leader, Ahmed Ben Bella, about possible oil leases. This was more than ...

At the Amsterdam

Steven Shapin: A Wakefull and Civill Drink, 20 April 2006

The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffee House 
by Brian Cowan.
Yale, 364 pp., £25, January 2006, 0 300 10666 1
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Coffee House: A Cultural History 
by Markman Ellis.
Phoenix, 304 pp., £8.99, November 2005, 0 7538 1898 1
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... and recent appointments to the Supreme Court – this coffee house is adjacent to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and across the Charles River from the Business School. I did not take part in a political cabal, or think that one was being plotted around me, unless the normal conversation of Harvard elites counts as such. It did not occur to me ...

Big Six v. Little Boy

Andrew Cockburn: The Unnecessary Bomb, 16 November 2023

Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War Two 
by Evan Thomas.
Elliot & Thompson, 296 pp., £20, June, 978 1 78396 729 2
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... testimonial – which was in fact written by McGeorge Bundy, later national security adviser to Kennedy and Johnson, with input and edits from a number of senior officials intimately involved with the Manhattan Project – was an authoritative counterattack, and it was entirely successful. The message that the bomb had saved a million American lives, in the ...

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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... that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy (2013), but these shorter works concentrate on high power politics rather than the inner workings of the ...

The Murmur of Engines

Christopher Clark: A Historian's Historians, 5 December 2024

Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 373 pp., £30, November 2024, 978 1 80429 767 4
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... Galvano Della Volpe for his ‘impenetrable syntax and circular self-reference’, Jean-Paul Sartre for his ‘hermetic and unrelenting maze of neologisms’ and Louis Althusser for his ‘sibylline rhetoric of elusion’. The good cop, bad cop alternation is not a trick or a tactic, it manifests a fundamental tension between Anderson’s humane ...

Big Pod

Richard Poirier: How Podhoretz Dumped His Friends, 2 September 1999

Ex-Friends 
by Norman Podhoretz.
Free Press, 256 pp., $25, February 1999, 0 684 85594 1
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... is proud to report a sartorial victory for his class during an exchange of words with Jacqueline Kennedy in the hall of the spectacularly grand Manhattan apartment to which she moved after her husband’s assassination. They had become friendly in the course of earlier meetings, once at a state dinner in the White House and another time, while she was still ...

What the Twist Did for the Peppermint Lounge

Dave Haslam: Club culture, 6 January 2000

Adventures in Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture 
by Sheryl Garratt.
Headline, 335 pp., £7.99, May 1999, 0 7472 7680 3
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Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey 
by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton.
Headline, 408 pp., £14.99, November 1999, 0 7472 7573 4
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Saturday Night For Ever: The Story of Disco 
by Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen.
Mainstream, 223 pp., £9.99, April 1999, 9781840181777
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DJ Culture 
by Ulf Poschardt.
Quartet, 473 pp., £13, January 1999, 0 7043 8098 6
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Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture 
by Simon Reynolds.
Picador, 493 pp., £12.99, July 1998, 0 330 35056 0
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More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction 
by Kodwo Eshun.
Quartet, 208 pp., £10, March 1998, 0 7043 8025 0
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... music. One of these venues – on the rue Huchette – called itself La Discothèque. Then Paul Pacine opened the Whiskey a Go-Go, where dancers would hit the floor accompanied by records played by disc jockeys on a phonograph. Pacine went on to open other clubs in Europe, while in Paris Chez Régine opened in 1960, catering to the self-styled ...

The Reviewer’s Song

Andrew O’Hagan: Mailer’s Last Punch, 7 November 2013

Norman Mailer: A Double Life 
by J. Michael Lennon.
Simon and Schuster, 947 pp., £30, November 2013, 978 1 84737 672 5
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... juice. When we sat down he said something nice about a book of mine. It was a trick he got from Kennedy: always praise the book by an author that other people find difficult. ‘I’ll never win the Nobel Prize, you know,’ he said. ‘Why are you so sure?’ ‘Because I stabbed my wife.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘No, they won’t give it to me.’ He wanted to talk ...

Acts of Violence in Grosvenor Square

Christopher Hitchens: Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 4 June 1998

1968: Marching in the Streets 
by Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins.
Bloomsbury, 224 pp., £20, May 1998, 0 7475 3763 1
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The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968 
by Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn.
Verso, 175 pp., £10, May 1998, 1 85984 290 9
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The Love Germ 
by Jill Neville.
Verso, 149 pp., £9, May 1998, 1 85984 285 2
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... administered a spanking. (For all I know, this is one of the many triggers that may have set Paul Johnson off.)Tariq Ali was the moving spirit of that rally and this book – which includes the spanking picture – brings it all back with exquisite vividness. It’s hard to recall what a hate-figure he was in those days. I had a friend, a moustachioed ...

Beefcake Ease

Miranda Carter: Robert Mitchum and Steve McQueen, 14 January 2002

Robert Mitchum: Solid, Dad, Crazy 
by Damien Love.
Batsford, 208 pp., £15.99, December 2001, 0 7134 8707 0
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Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don’t Care 
by Lee Server.
Faber, 590 pp., £20, October 2001, 0 571 20994 7
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McQueen: The Biography 
by Christopher Sandford.
HarperCollins, 497 pp., £16.99, October 2001, 0 00 257195 1
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... story. McQueen didn’t enjoy his success much. He was ill-humouredly envious of other actors – Paul Newman, an early rival, was christened ‘Fuckwit’ – and, in the 1960s at least, combative with almost everyone who worked on a film with him. When Richard Attenborough asked James Coburn why McQueen was so rude to him and all the other British actors on ...

On Not Going Home

James Wood, 20 February 2014

... trees, the unkempt willow down at the end, an old white Cadillac with the bumper sticker ‘Ted Kennedy has killed more people than my gun,’ and I feel … nothing: some recognition, but no comprehension, no real connection, no past, despite all the years I have lived there – just a tugging distance from it all. A panic suddenly overtakes me, and I ...

The Shock of the Pretty

James Meek: Seventy Hours with Don Draper, 9 April 2015

... alone in silence in her bath; the young priest, sitting alone on his single bed, playing a Peter, Paul and Mary song on his nylon-stringed guitar; and finally Don in the office kitchen, alone in a patch of light that recedes as the camera pulls back into the darkness of the deserted typing pool. In one arena the chauvinism of the era is played out with zeal ...

Blackberry Apocalypse

Nicholas Guyatt: Evangelical Disarray, 15 November 2007

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America 
by Chris Hedges.
Cape, 254 pp., £12.99, February 2007, 978 0 224 07820 7
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... since they support preachers who sound ‘more like Dr Phil or Sigmund Freud than St Paul’. Tim LaHaye, doyen of the modern prophecy movement, told me that he took ‘vicious exception’ to Hagee’s suggestion that it might be easier for Jews to be saved by God than for other potential believers to win salvation. I heard Jerry Falwell attack ...

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