Rivonia Days

R.W. Johnson: Remembering the trial, 16 August 2007

The State v. Nelson Mandela: The Trial That Changed South Africa 
by Joel Joffe.
Oneworld, 288 pp., £16.99, July 2007, 978 1 85168 500 4
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... the Rivonia days. We can all feel proud of Mandela and Sisulu, of Fischer and, yes, of Joffe. He may be Lord Joffe these days but he played his part. What none of us can feel happy about is that Mandela invited Percy Yutar to his presidential inauguration and later went out of his way to visit him and shake his hand. Mandela explained such gestures by the ...

Diary

David Runciman: Dylan on the radio, 19 July 2007

... free lee-gal ad-vice-ah’. Who is the joke on here? Who cares? Sit back and enjoy the ride. It may be that the reason all this works is that Dylan is Dylan, and simply hearing him do something as mundane as spinning a few records and reading out a couple of emails exerts its own magnetic pull. But radio can make the most interesting people sound boring if ...

Going up to Heaven

Susan Pedersen: Before the Pill, 28 May 2009

Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain 1918-60 
by Kate Fisher.
Oxford, 294 pp., £24, May 2008, 978 0 19 954460 8
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For Their Own Good: The Transformation of English Working-Class Health Culture, 1880-1970 
by Lucinda McCray Beier.
Ohio State, 409 pp., £64.95, October 2008, 978 0 8142 1094 9
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... degree exploiting her youth and unmarried status to ask naive questions and elicit richer answers may have made her particularly sensitive to the way her woman informants had used ‘ignorance’ to their own advantage. If Beier, in the end, tells us a familiar story – mothers had power, and they lost it – Fisher gives us something more complex and ...

Sons and Heirs

Robert Vitalis: The bin Ladens and Their Money, 4 December 2008

The Bin Ladens: The Story of a Family and Its Fortune 
by Steve Coll.
Allen Lane, 671 pp., £25, April 2008, 978 1 84614 124 9
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... to upgrade bases, roads and telecommunications. After Osama left Saudi Arabia for the last time in May 1991, he followed the well-worn path of the ‘semi-independent bin Laden brothers’ by starting ventures of his own in and around Khartoum: the bin Laden organisation won the contract to build a new Saudi-funded airport in Sudan. King Fahd ordered Bakr to ...

Good at Being Gods

Caleb Crain: Buckminster Fuller’s Visions, 18 December 2008

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe 
edited by K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller.
Yale, 257 pp., £35, July 2008, 978 0 300 12620 4
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... no one does. Yet few can afford a photovoltaic cell of their own, and that’s a pity. Conditions may be ripe for a renaissance of environmental technology, but it won’t be possible to order it from a catalogue. Barack Obama, caught on tape during a debate-prep session last year, identified the need for a collective solution: ‘We can’t solve global ...

‘This is Africa, after all. What can you expect?’

Bernard Porter: Corruption and Post-Imperialism, 26 March 2009

It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower 
by Michela Wrong.
Fourth Estate, 354 pp., £12.99, February 2009, 978 0 00 724196 5
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... thought that Britain was the last country that should be pillorying Mugabe, however awful he may be, in view of its past relations with his country); and if Africans could come to regard ‘transparency, honesty and accountability’ as just as much African values – they will certainly have some African precedents – as ‘Western’ ones. You can’t ...

Berlusconi in Tehran

Slavoj Žižek: The Rome-Tehran Axis, 23 July 2009

... in them. Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’ To get a glimpse of the reality beneath this deception, call to mind the events of July 2008, when the Italian government proclaimed a state ...

All Eat All

Jenny Diski: The Cannibal in Me, 6 August 2009

An Intellectual History of Cannibalism 
by Catalin Avramescu, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth.
Princeton, 350 pp., £17.95, May 2009, 978 0 691 13327 0
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... in the 14th century: ‘The truth … is that no such people do exist as nations, though there may be an individual monster here and there.’ For Hobbes the cannibal was a very useful part of his thought experiment. The war of all against all would be at its most virulent where pre-social individuals ate each other when they met. And they ...

King shall hold kingdom

Tom Shippey: Æthelred the Unready, 30 March 2017

Æthelred: The Unready 
by Levi Roach.
Yale, 369 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 0 300 19629 0
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... fewer skulls than skeletons. The Anglo-Saxons had a word, heafod-stocc (‘head-stake’), that may explain the discrepancy: it is likely that three heads were put up on stakes along the ridge-line. Study of isotopes in the teeth indicated that most of the dead were Scandinavians, and that they were all male and mostly young. They had the well-developed ...

The Most Expensive Weapon Ever Built

Daniel Soar, 30 March 2017

... American military tradition that prefers light and agile to massive and lumbering, but it may not be insignificant that his home state, Arizona, is one of the few where Lockheed has recently shed jobs rather than piled them on. (What Arizona has instead of multiple Lockheed facilities is the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group at ...

Diary

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Andrei Platonov, 1 December 2016

... if I drink one in Australia? But actually, I realise, I won’t be there. The Russian public may be indifferent to the centenary of their Revolution, but international scholars are off on the academic pilgrimage trail, giving the Revolution a ‘deep, objective, professional evaluation’ at conferences from Sundsvall to Santiago. The title of my as yet ...

Hallelujah Times

Eric Foner: The Great Migration, 29 June 2017

A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland 
by Sydney Nathans.
Harvard, 313 pp., £23.95, February 2017, 978 0 674 97214 8
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... rescinded blacks’ right to vote almost entirely. Nathans notes these events, but not how they may have affected life on the Cameron land, or what strategies black purchasers deployed to hold onto their farms. It remains unclear how much the closing off of political participation influenced the decision to move to the North. Nathans notes that an oral ...

Down with Weathercocks

Tom Stammers: Mother Revolution, 30 November 2017

Liberty or Death: The French Revolution 
by Peter McPhee.
Yale, 468 pp., £14.99, July 2017, 978 0 300 22869 4
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... female, even slave and free, melted away in the fires of war. ‘Our fathers, husbands and sons may perhaps be the victims of our enemies’ fury,’ a petition from the Société Fraternelle des Minimes declared, signed by three hundred women. ‘Could we be forbidden the sweetness of avenging them or dying at their sides?’ The axioms of 1789 had to be ...

The Stream in the Sky

John Barrell: Thomas Telford, 22 March 2018

Man of Iron: Thomas Telford and the Building of Britain 
by Julian Glover.
Bloomsbury, 403 pp., £10.99, January 2018, 978 1 4088 3748 1
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... and landscape’. ‘He never built an ugly thing or a boring one.’ But the aqueduct at Longdon may seem to challenge this dictum. It too consists of an iron trough, but a shallow one, and only sixty yards long between the abutments. It is supported on three pairs of squat iron trestles, I would guess not more than 15 feet high, bedded into squares of ...

What did Khrushchev say?

Miriam Dobson: ‘Moscow 1956’, 2 November 2017

Moscow 1956: The Silenced Spring 
by Kathleen E. Smith.
Harvard, 448 pp., £23.95, April 2017, 978 0 674 97200 1
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... government, which has also prioritised its own survival over citizens’ democratic rights. But we may also find in this earlier period the seeds of another post-Soviet phenomenon: a longing for a mythic era in which stability and order prevailed. It was fuelled by the collapse of the Soviet social system in the 1990s, and has been strategically nurtured by ...