i could’ve sold to russia or china

Jeremy Harding: Bradley Manning, 19 July 2012

The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in US History 
by Chase Madar.
OR, 167 pp., £10, April 2012, 978 1 935928 53 9
Show More
Show More
... and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees.’ The problem in Madar’s reading was not just censorship but torture, which ‘as Manning well knew, remained a common practice among the Iraqi authorities even six years into the American occupation’. ‘Enhanced interrogation’ was very much Rumsfeld’s bag. In 2005 ...

‘I’m English,’ I said

Christopher Tayler: Colin Thubron, 14 July 2011

To a Mountain in Tibet 
by Colin Thubron.
Chatto, 227 pp., £16.99, February 2011, 978 0 7011 8379 0
Show More
Show More
... filmmaker, and knew what he was doing: each of his books attests to a preparatory period of heavy reading, language instruction and patient bureaucratic path-clearing. When challenged by men in uniform he always has the right permit and he’s often well-supplied with addresses of friends-of-friends. But his advance arrangements are kept behind a curtain ...

Shock Cities

Susan Pedersen: The Fate of Social Democracy, 2 January 2020

Thatcher’s Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town 
by Guy Ortolano.
Cambridge, 301 pp., £29.99, June 2019, 978 1 108 48266 0
Show More
Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Postwar England 
by Jon Lawrence.
Oxford, 327 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 0 19 877953 7
Show More
Show More
... of how the Milton Keynes Development Corporation lived through that sea-change makes for painful reading. The corporation had wanted to sustain a mixed ecology of buyers and renters, but as state subsidies dried up following the 1976-77 financial crisis, the corporation had to sell in order to keep building – and, once Thatcher’s policies took hold, at a ...

Architect as Hero

David Cannadine, 21 January 1982

Lutyens: The Work of the English Architect Sir Edwin Lutyens 
Hayward Gallery, 200 pp., £15, November 1981, 0 7287 0304 1Show More
Edwin Lutyens: Architect Laureate 
by Roderick Gradidge.
Allen and Unwin, 167 pp., £13.95, November 1981, 0 04 720023 5
Show More
Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker and Imperial Delhi 
by Robert Grant Irving.
Yale, 406 pp., £20, November 1981, 0 300 02422 3
Show More
Lutyens: Country Houses 
by Daniel O’Neill.
Lund Humphries, 167 pp., £8.95, May 1980, 0 85331 428 4
Show More
Lutyens and the Sea Captain 
by Margaret Richardson.
Scolar, 40 pp., £5.95, November 1981, 0 85967 646 3
Show More
Houses and Gardens by E.L. Lutyens 
by Lawrence Weaver.
Antique Collectors’ Club, 344 pp., £19.50, January 1982, 0 902028 98 7
Show More
Show More
... superficial chapter. The text and pictures are separated, which does not make for easy reading, and the epilogue is placed at the front of the book, before the main text even begins. This may be a Lutyens-like joke: but such lack of concern for proportion and arrangement seems peculiarly out of place, given the subject of the book. Most of the ...

Blite and Whack

Paul Seabright, 19 January 1984

A Pocket Popper 
edited by David Miller.
Fontana, 479 pp., £4.95, August 1983, 0 00 636414 4
Show More
The Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery. Vol. I: Realism and the Aim of Science 
by Karl Popper, edited by W.W. Bartely.
Hutchinson, 420 pp., £20, March 1983, 0 09 151450 9
Show More
The Philosophy of Popper 
by T.E. Burke.
Manchester, 222 pp., £16, July 1983, 0 7190 0904 9
Show More
In Pursuit of Truth: Essays in Honour of Karl Popper’s 80th Birthday 
edited by Paul Levinson.
Harvester, 337 pp., £25, May 1983, 0 7108 0424 5
Show More
Science and Moral Priority 
by Roger Sperry.
Blackwell, 135 pp., £12.50, February 1983, 9780631131991
Show More
Art, Science and Human Progress 
edited by R.B. McConnell.
Murray, 196 pp., £12.50, June 1983, 0 7195 4018 6
Show More
Show More
... all should be scandalously expensive – forgetting that if it is a book it should also be worth reading. At £25 this is a pocket-popper in quite the wrong sense. A major part of the Postscript is devoted to a defence of no less than three kinds of indeterminism. Space forbids a proper discussion of them here, but since Roger Sperry’s book, Science and ...

Hillside Men

Roy Foster: Ernie O’Malley, 16 July 1998

Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual 
by Richard English.
Oxford, 284 pp., £25, March 1998, 0 01 982059 3
Show More
Show More
... dome, finding solace in its proportions. (In much the same way, comrades would remember him reading Dostoevsky while ‘on the run’ in the mountains of north Munster.) He featured in a number of celebrated Civil War incidents, and was finally captured in a shoot-out in Ailesbury Road, the heart of Dublin’s haut-bourgeois enclave. He brought mayhem ...

Diary

Tom Paulin: Ulster’s Long Sunday, 24 August 1995

... We’re filming a history teacher read from Lorimer’s New Testament in Scots, the passage where Peter denies Christ and a servant quean says: ‘yer Galille twang outs ye.’ The interior of the church seems very military. I count 11 crowns among the regimental crests in the war memorial window, two British Legion flags, a drum in a glass case near the ...

Perfect Companions

C.K. Stead, 8 June 1995

Christina Stead: A Biography 
by Hazel Rowley.
Secker, 646 pp., £12.99, January 1995, 0 436 20298 0
Show More
Show More
... Moby Dick – a masterpiece which at the time of publication ‘nobody praised and nobody read’. Reading Jarrell’s praise, Stead wept. She wrote to him: ‘It is quite the loveliest thing that has happened to me in “my literary life”. That is only an expression. I do not have a literary life.’ The republication was a great success. Stead was to have ...

Body Parts

Lawrence Stone, 24 November 1994

The Making of Victorian Sexuality 
by Michael Mason.
Oxford, 338 pp., £17.95, April 1994, 0 19 812247 0
Show More
The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes 
by Michael Mason.
Oxford, 256 pp., £17.99, October 1994, 0 19 812292 6
Show More
Show More
... its linkages to belief, if one only chooses to investigate it.’ Shortly afterwards, in 1984, Peter Gay, in The Bourgeois Experience: Education of the Senses, published new evidence of sexual hedonism in practice, especially in the record of one joyously sensual upper-middle-class threesome living in the Connecticut Valley at the height of Victorian ...

Politics and the Prophet

Malise Ruthven, 1 August 1996

Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society 
by Michael Gilsenan.
Tauris, 377 pp., £14.95, February 1996, 1 85043 099 3
Show More
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World 
edited by John L. Esposito.
Oxford, 480 pp., £295, June 1995, 0 19 506613 8
Show More
Unfolding Islam 
by P.J. Stewart.
Garnet, 268 pp., £25, February 1995, 9780863721946
Show More
Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East 
by Fred Halliday.
Tauris, 256 pp., £35, January 1996, 1 86064 004 4
Show More
Show More
... lamely that ‘many Muslims have failed to respect these limitations.’ His book, based on a reading of the original Arabic sources, offers no explanation as to why some contemporary Muslims have deviated so far from these original principles beyond arguing that Western governments are largely to blame. They have failed to accept the Muslim nation-states ...
Djuna Barnes 
by Philip Herring.
Viking, 416 pp., £20, May 1996, 0 670 84969 3
Show More
Show More
... her papers, and rush round when anything went wrong. He brought her recordings of Dylan Thomas (reading Nightwood) and James Joyce – she had never seen a tape-recorder before. After his meetings with her he wrote a diary – published as Life is Painful, Nasty and Short (1990) – in which he would report the conversations they had just had. When O’Neal ...

Hey, Mister, you want dirty book?

Edward Said: The CIA, 30 September 1999

Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War 
by Frances Stonor Saunders.
Granta, 509 pp., £20, July 1999, 1 86207 029 6
Show More
Show More
... of the shifts and retractions she comments on.) Several faculty members (including Daniel Bell and Peter Gay) left Columbia because of the student uprising and the generally benign faculty response to it, while the Congress for Cultural Freedom sputtered on for I don’t know how long. Most of the ‘liberal anti-Communists’ of the Fifties and Sixties soon ...

Double Duty

Lorna Scott Fox: Victor Serge, 22 May 2003

Victor Serge: The Course Is Set on Hope 
by Susan Weissman.
Verso, 364 pp., £22, September 2001, 1 85984 987 3
Show More
Show More
... the ramifications and interrelations of the European secret police . . . Listening to him was like reading a Russian novel.’ Mary Jayne Gold, a contributor to the Committee, was a bit shocked that both Breton and Serge ‘had almost courtly old-school manners . . . so ancien régime’. Lévi-Strauss, meeting him afterwards on the Capitaine Paul ...

High-Meriting, Low-Descended

John Mullan: The Unpolished Pamela, 12 December 2002

Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded 
by Samuel Richardson, edited by Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely.
Oxford, 592 pp., £6.99, June 2001, 0 19 282960 2
Show More
Show More
... Whether they intervened or not, the text is a long way from the original version of Pamela; reading this polished and sometimes decorous narrative, it is hard for the modern reader to see why it ever had such an impact. During Richardson’s lifetime, it had already gone through many revisions. As its printer, Pamela’s author was in an unusually good ...

You Dying Nations

Jeremy Adler: Georg Trakl, 17 April 2003

Poems and Prose 
by Georg Trakl, translated by Alexander Stillmark.
Libris, 192 pp., £40, March 2001, 1 870352 51 3
Show More
Show More
... Knussen recognised the affinity, and coupled poems by Trakl and Plath in his Second Symphony, and Peter Maxwell Davies has also set Trakl to music. This new collection is the most substantial so far published in England, and should finally win Trakl wider recognition. Alexander Stillmark’s selection of around 125 poems, including most of the major ones, is ...