Good Activist, Bad Activist

Adam Mars-Jones: ACT UP grows up, 29 July 2021

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-93 
by Sarah Schulman.
Farrar, Straus, 736 pp., £30.99, June, 978 0 374 18513 8
Show More
Show More
... and shows how much autonomy could exist within the organisation. Vázquez-Pacheco, a Black Puerto Rican born in New York City, made the transition from audience member at meetings to visibility in the simplest way, by noticing that the person writing information on a whiteboard had an illegible hand, and taking over with his own neat ...

What’s in it for Obama?

Stephen Holmes: The Drone Presidency, 18 July 2013

The CIA, a Secret Army and a War at the Ends of the Earth 
by Mark Mazzetti.
Penguin, 381 pp., £22.50, April 2013, 978 1 59420 480 7
Show More
Show More
... on what look suspiciously like extrajudicial executions, faute de mieux, after shuttering Bush’s black sites and deciding not to send anyone else to Guantánamo, where approximately a third of the hundred detainees on hunger strike are receiving a macabre form of Obamacare through tubes in their noses. Mazzetti adds, as a second unspoken and perhaps ...

A Reparation of Her Choosing

Jenny Diski: Among the Sufis, 17 December 2015

... shelves like a university course: Laing, David Stafford-Clark, Erving Goffman, Vance Packard, Michael Argyle, C.J. Adcock, Viktor Frankl. And more and more. They were all over the house, on tables, on the floor. She bought them, I bought them, Peter and his friends bought them. Somehow they were cheap enough for the smallest allowance. All these were read ...

Frameworks of Comparison

Benedict Anderson, 21 January 2016

... such embarrassing things as the very high murder rate in the US, its hugely disproportionate black prison population, persistent illiteracy and significant levels of political corruption. Even so, there is no doubt in my mind that my experience as a graduate student unconsciously prepared me for later comparative work. My duties as a teaching assistant ...

Out of the Cage

Tom Nairn: Popping the bubble of American supremacy, 24 June 2004

After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order 
by Emmanuel Todd, translated by C. Jon Delogu.
Constable, 288 pp., £8.99, July 2004, 1 84529 058 5
Show More
Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting the Misuse of American Power 
by George Soros.
Weidenfeld, 207 pp., £12.99, January 2004, 0 297 84906 9
Show More
Show More
... social disaggregation at home. Nor were such warning signs confined to the White House. Persisting black-white antagonisms were aggravated by Hispanic and other immigrations, and by gnawing disquiet about elites, privatisation, and the loss of class and other communities. The weird non-election of 2000 ended by placing a question mark over the greatest ...

Brexit and Myths of Englishness

James Meek: For England and St George, 11 October 2018

... teabag nestled in a bouquet of patriotic souvenirs – a red double-decker bus, an old-fashioned black cab, an old-fashioned red phone box, a Big Ben. Threatening this pot-pourri of Englishness was a clenched fist, blue like the European flag, tattooed with a ring of yellow European stars. The Brexiteers’ strategy was successful, and not only in winning ...

The Dreamings of Dominic Cummings

James Meek, 24 October 2019

... September. The schools were coming out. The boys and girls in their neat uniforms looked happy: black, Asian and white children laughing and chatting together. But a subjective impression of happiness is not much use to political engineers. I tried to see St Albans not only through my own senses but through the apprehension of the people trying to secure ...

Mothers

Jacqueline Rose, 19 June 2014

The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women 
by Elisabeth Badinter, translated by Adriana Hunter.
Picador, 224 pp., £10.99, June 2013, 978 1 250 03209 6
Show More
Are You My Mother? 
by Alison Bechdel.
Jonathan Cape, 304 pp., £16.99, May 2012, 978 0 224 09352 1
Show More
A Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories 
by Rachel Bowlby.
Oxford, 256 pp., £20, June 2013, 978 0 19 960794 5
Show More
Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome 
by Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell.
Texas, 274 pp., £16.99, April 2013, 978 0 292 75434 8
Show More
Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in 20th-Century England 
by Pat Thane and Tanya Evans.
Oxford, 240 pp., £24.99, August 2013, 978 0 19 968198 3
Show More
I Don’t Know Why She Bothers: Guilt-Free Motherhood for Thoroughly Modern Womanhood 
by Daisy Waugh.
Weidenfeld, 240 pp., £12.99, July 2013, 978 0 297 86876 7
Show More
Show More
... is intended to make all the women who don’t conform to that image – because they are poorer or black or their lives are just more humanly complicated – feel like total failures.3 This has the added advantage of letting a government whose austerity policy has disproportionately targeted women and mothers completely off the hook. ‘Parenthood is not a ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Didn’t Do in 2007, 3 January 2008

... with swallows skimming low over the tops and it feels like a scene from the 1940s. It could be a Michael Powell film or a page from the diaries of Denton Welch. This isn’t wholly imagination either, as it turns out that there was a camp here during the war for American airborne troops, which makes the survival of these wonderfully elaborate pillars, still ...

Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

... amateur snaps, is a necrophile’s delight: photograph after photograph, in tiny, eye-straining black and white, of crosses, graves, plaques, inscriptions, bombed-out block-houses converted into monuments, decaying trench relics, dank rows of cypresses, grassed-over mine and shell craters, obscene-looking barrows, and yet more crosses and graves. Some of ...

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
... since the funding of the racket had to be concealed from the Treasury and State Departments, a black economy. The arms dealers, drug smugglers and middlemen of this dirty budget were to furnish most of the ‘colourful characters’, as Americans found to their dismay that shady Persian marchands de tapis knew more about the bowels and intestines of the ...

Attila the Hus

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 4 November 1982

Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896-1933 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 274 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 436 28849 4
Show More
Show More
... of Corfu. There are several different versions of Mosley’s political career. Fellow politicians, Michael Foot and Richard Crossman among them, took the view that, like themselves, he was interested in power but that, unlike them, unlike Foot and Crossman at any rate, he was too impatient to wait his turn. For Skidelsky, though there are signs that he may now ...

The Killing of Blair Peach

David Renton, 22 May 2014

... Bint, who admitted to this at the inquest), G (PC James Scottow), I (PC Anthony Richardson), J (PC Michael Freestone) and F (PC Raymond White, the driver). This is Cass’s ordering, starting with the most likely culprit. At first sight, Cass’s conviction that White was not responsible is surprising. Much of the press coverage focused on the medical evidence ...

The Robots Are Coming

John Lanchester, 5 March 2015

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies 
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.
Norton, 306 pp., £17.99, January 2014, 978 0 393 23935 5
Show More
Average Is Over: Powering America beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation 
by Tyler Cowen.
Plume, 290 pp., £12.99, September 2014, 978 0 14 218111 9
Show More
Show More
... of their amazing new healthcare robot, the Asimo. Asimo is short (4’3”) and white with a black facemask and a metal backpack. It resembles an unusually small astronaut. In the video Asimo advances towards a staircase and starts climbing while turning his face towards the audience as if to say, à la Bender from Futurama, ‘check out my shiny metal ...

Unwritten Masterpiece

Barbara Everett: Dryden’s ‘Hamlet’, 4 January 2001

... political theme, sees the writer as doing a ‘particularly brilliant thing’ in Amphitryon; and Michael Cordner three times reiterates the word ‘masterpiece’ when introducing his edition of the play. There is an appealing American proverb, ‘If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ It seems to throw light on the difficult case of Dryden. During ...