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It hurts, but it’s holy

Neal Ascherson: Consequences of Empire, 23 May 2024

Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe 
by Sathnam Sanghera.
Viking, 449 pp., £20, January, 978 0 241 60041 2
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... thousand. In fact, Sanghera was born and raised in Wolverhampton, a landscape polluted by Enoch Powell and a few subsequent racists, which might have prepared him for all that online sewage. But it shook him, and why should he have to be prepared for such a reception? (He notes that his friend William Dalrymple, whose ...

New Deal at Dunkirk

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Wartime Tories, 22 May 2025

Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill and the Second World War 
by Kit Kowol.
Oxford, 336 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 19 886849 1
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... in France, but his memory inspired the character of Pilot Officer Sir George Corbett in the 1942 Powell and Pressburger flag-waver One of Our Aircraft Is Missing.Even if they had been appeasers, most Conservatives accepted the patriotic necessity of the war, but had many different ideas about what its outcome should be, some as optimistic as any socialist ...

Dadada

Vadim Nikitin: Chasing the Cybercriminals, 21 November 2024

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks 
by Scott J. Shapiro.
Penguin, 420 pp., £10.99, May 2024, 978 0 14 199384 3
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... Democratic primary, received an email with a Google logo asking him to change his password. ‘Hi William,’ the email read. ‘Someone just used your password to sign into your Google account.’ It listed an IP address located in Ukraine, a known destination for cybercriminals. ‘Google stopped this sign-in attempt,’ it continued, advising him to ...

A Company of Merchants

Jamie Martin: The Bank of England, 24 January 2019

Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England, 1694-2013 
by David Kynaston.
Bloomsbury, 879 pp., £35, September 2017, 978 1 4088 6856 0
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... demands of politics. When the bank was founded in 1694, its business was to finance the war that William of Orange waged against Louis XIV after assuming the throne in the Glorious Revolution. The government was loaned £1.2 million at an interest rate of 8 per cent; in exchange, subscribers to the loan were incorporated as a joint-stock bank with a ...

Fear in Those Blue Eyes

David Runciman: Thatcher in Her Bubble, 3 December 2015

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. II: Everything She Wants 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 821 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 7139 9288 5
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... where she intended to remind Reagan of some hard political truths. Her principal aide, Charles Powell, drafted a memo in which he laid bare the core of the argument she would need to get across to the president (the emphasis comes from Thatcher’s annotations of the text): You will cause me very real political difficulties if you pursue your proposal for ...

Subversions

R.W. Johnson, 4 June 1987

Traitors: The Labyrinths of Treason 
by Chapman Pincher.
Sidgwick, 346 pp., £13.95, May 1987, 0 283 99379 0
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The Secrets of the Service: British Intelligence and Communist Subversion 1939-51 
by Anthony Glees.
Cape, 447 pp., £18, May 1987, 0 224 02252 0
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Freedom of Information – Freedom of the Individual? 
by Clive Ponting, John Ranelagh, Michael Zander and Simon Lee, edited by Julia Neuberger.
Macmillan, 110 pp., £4.95, May 1987, 0 333 44771 9
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... moles. This seems to me wrong-headed in several different ways. The key judgment is surely that of William Strang, the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, in a paper of May 1943: We need Russian collaboration. The conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty marks our decision that this must be our policy … even if fears that Russia lay a ‘heavy ...

The Finchley Factor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Thatcher in Israel, 13 September 2018

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East 
by Azriel Bermant.
Cambridge, 274 pp., £22.99, September 2017, 978 1 316 60630 8
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... political players from the 1980s, ministers in the Thatcher government like Douglas Hurd and William Waldegrave as well as her private secretary Charles Powell, and the late Yehudi Avner, who was Israel’s ambassador in London between 1983 and 1988. When she became prime minister a number of pressing questions faced ...

Ruthless and Truthless

Ferdinand Mount: Rotten Government, 6 May 2021

The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism 
by Peter Oborne.
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 3985 0100 3
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Political Advice: Past, Present and Future 
edited by Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose.
I.B. Tauris, 240 pp., £21.99, February 2021, 978 1 83860 120 1
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... whatever fun might be had.The stage was set for what Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, claimed would be ‘a change from a feudal system of barons to a more Napoleonic system’. The staff at Number Ten used, notoriously, to be no larger than the staff of a mayor in a middle-sized German town. Over the last decades, it has swelled to a cast ...

Wrong Again

Bruce Cumings: Korean War Games, 4 December 2003

... before the 50th anniversary of the end of the Korean War in 1953, the former Defense Secretary William Perry gave a harrowing interview to the Washington Post. He had just finished extensive consultations with senior officials in the Bush Administration, the South Korean President and senior officials in China. ‘I think we are losing control’ of the ...

The Gatekeeper

Adam Tooze: Krugman’s Conversion, 22 April 2021

Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics and the Fight for a Better Future 
by Paul Krugman.
Norton, 444 pp., £13.99, February, 978 0 393 54132 8
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... how we arrived in our current situation, with three centrists – Biden, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell – undertaking an experiment in economic policy of historic proportions.In the 1970s Krugman belonged to a generation of young lions at MIT, then the pre-eminent economics department in the US. The prevailing model at MIT was the so-called neoclassical ...

Who’s in charge?

Chalmers Johnson: The Addiction to Secrecy, 6 February 2003

Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers 
by Daniel Ellsberg.
Viking, 498 pp., $29.95, October 2002, 0 670 03030 9
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... North Vietnamese were ‘reacting defensively’. Nonetheless, Johnson personally lied to Senator William Fulbright, the highly respected chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in order to get him to sponsor the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in Congress. Ellsberg took all this calmly. He accepted Johnson’s campaign slogan for the 1964 Presidential ...

Pallas

R.W. Johnson, 7 July 1988

The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy 
by Tom Nairn.
Radius, 402 pp., £25, June 1988, 0 09 172960 2
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... did. Even the most full-throated monarchical warblers – the purest example in Nairn’s book is William Rees-Mogg – do not wish to argue that the Americans or, say, the Swiss ought to have a king. And many would probably be embarrassed to have the Windsors bracketed with the House of Saud or the Sultan of Brunei – although these are the only two ...

Subduing the jury

E.P. Thompson, 18 December 1986

... The defence of the subject against the over-mighty state was once regarded – by such men as Sir William Blackstone and Thomas Jefferson – as a crucial function of the jury, elevating it to a high place among the defining institutions of a political democracy. For Alexis de Tocqueville the American jury was an ‘eminently republican element in ...

Birditis

Ian Penman: The Obsession with Charlie Parker, 23 January 2014

Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker 
by Gary Giddins.
Minnesota, revised edition, 195 pp., £15, October 2013, 978 0 8166 9041 1
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Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker 
by Stanley Crouch.
Harper, 365 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 06 200559 5
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Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker 
by Chuck Haddix.
Illinois, 188 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 252 03791 7
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... to ‘Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe’ (see also Lady Sings the Blues by ‘Billie Holiday with William Duffy’). Depending on mood, ethnicity, ideology, drug of choice, an oral biography can strike the reader as an authentic reproduction of voice, in all its self-contradictory rhythm and curl – or borderline racist, like some Victorian ...

Scoop after Scoop

Ian Jack: Chapman Pincher’s Scoops, 5 June 2014

Dangerous to Know: A Life 
by Chapman Pincher.
Biteback, 386 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 1 84954 651 5
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... jet airliners, worried about what the Russians were up to, and comforted by the Giles cartoon, the William Hickey column and The Adventures of Rupert Bear. As with most newspapers, the torrent these days has become a trickle – a trickle supervised in the Express’s case by an owner, Richard Desmond, who made a lot of his money from masturbatory aids such as ...

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