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The Sacred Dead

Helen Graham: Franco, 5 March 2015

Franco: A Personal and Political Biography 
by Stanley Payne and Jesús Palacios.
Wisconsin, 632 pp., £27.95, November 2014, 978 0 299 30210 8
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... the Fallen, the mausoleum Franco had built outside Madrid to commemorate his victory in the Civil War.* They are accompanied by 86-year-old Andrés Iniesta, who became a political prisoner in 1939 when he was 17, spent nearly twenty years in prison and was one of the 20,000 forced labourers who built the mausoleum. The filmmakers wanted him to meet the ...

In Myrtle Bowers

Blair Worden: Cavaliers, 30 June 2011

Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War 
by John Stubbs.
Viking, 549 pp., £25, February 2011, 978 0 670 91753 2
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... John Stubbs never grips. We are two-thirds of the way through before we reach ‘the English civil war’ of the 1640s. The bulk of the book is set in the generation before it, from the years around the accession of Charles I to the outbreak of fighting in 1642. ‘Cavalier’ meant more things after 1642 than before it. It was in the mid-winter of 1641-42, in ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Memories of Underdevelopment’, 25 January 2018

Memories of Underdevelopment 
directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea.
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... empty shop-shelves, montages of violent action from Cuban history and the Spanish Civil War (including Robert Capa’s famous photo of a dying soldier). The base at Guantánamo Bay opens, or rather encloses itself. Sergio is confused. ‘Everything is the same,’ he says, looking around him. And then: ‘I have changed, and the city has ...

He knew he was right

John Lloyd, 10 March 1994

Scargill: The Unauthorised Biography 
by Paul Routledge.
HarperCollins, 296 pp., £16.99, September 1993, 0 300 05365 7
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... a ‘voyage of disillusionment’, that the strike, far from representing an upsurge of working-class militancy, was ‘all about one man’ (as the Queen said to Routledge when visiting the Times) is nonetheless to be surprised, both by the apostasy of a man whose views I had assumed to be rigid, and by its tardiness. Scargill was the only child of an ...

Revolution must strike twice

Slavoj Žižek: Lenin’s Breakthrough, 25 July 2002

Lenin 
by Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, translated by George Holoch.
Holmes & Meier, 371 pp., £35, November 2001, 0 8419 1412 5
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... reified notion of social necessity (‘it’s too early for the socialist revolution, the working class isn’t yet mature’), or of a normative, democratic legitimacy (‘the majority of the population isn’t on our side, so the revolution would not really be democratic’). It is as if the revolutionary agent requires the permission of some representative ...

Sinomania

Perry Anderson, 28 January 2010

When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World 
by Martin Jacques.
Allen Lane, 550 pp., £30, June 2009, 978 0 7139 9254 0
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Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State 
by Yasheng Huang.
Cambridge, 348 pp., £15.99, November 2008, 978 0 521 89810 2
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Against the Law: Labour Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt 
by Ching Kwan Lee.
California, 325 pp., £15.95, June 2007, 978 0 520 25097 0
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... For we are entering a time in which the political and ideological conflicts that marked the Cold War are giving way to an ‘overarching cultural contest’, in which ‘alternative modernities’ will end the dominance of the West. In that emancipation a distinctively Chinese modernity, rooted in the Confucian values of devotion to the family and respect ...

Frameworks of Comparison

Benedict Anderson, 21 January 2016

... looks pretty dead – modernisation theory. Needless to say, there was often an openly stated Cold War objective behind this kind of theory. Namely, to prove that Marxism was fundamentally wrong. In its innocence, this kind of ‘look at me’ theory typically ignored such embarrassing things as the very high murder rate in the US, its hugely disproportionate ...

A General Logic of Crisis

Adam Tooze, 5 January 2017

How Will Capitalism End? 
by Wolfgang Streeck.
Verso, 262 pp., £16.99, November 2016, 978 1 78478 401 0
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... inequality, the plundering of the public domain, corruption and the escalating risk of major war, all of this accompanied by a pervasive erosion of social order, generalised social entropy. Indeed, according to Streeck we have at least since the 1970s been living in what he refers to as a ‘post-social society … a society lite’. We cope individually ...

Resistance from Elsewhere

Kevin Okoth: Black Marxism, 7 April 2022

Black Marxism 
by Cedric Robinson.
Penguin, 436 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 0 241 51417 7
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Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition 
by Joshua Myers.
Polity, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2021, 978 1 5095 3792 1
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... the political was a social fantasy, constructed not just to maintain order, but also to enforce class rule. This meant it was historically contingent and could be challenged. But, Robinson claimed, radical movements such as European anarchism were too attached to the idea to do so. Resistance must come from elsewhere. The expansion of the political to the ...

Seen through the Loopholes

David Simpson: ‘War at a Distance’, 11 March 2010

War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime 
by Mary Favret.
Princeton, 262 pp., £18.95, January 2010, 978 0 691 14407 8
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... When and where does modern war begin? With tanks or gas warfare in 1914-18? With the aerial bombardment of civilians in Mesopotamia in 1920? At Guernica in 1937? With the general conscription, guerrilla campaigns and worldwide conflict of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars between France and Britain and their allies between 1793 and 1815? Or with the destruction of civilian lives and ecosystems in the Thirty Years War of 1618-48 that depopulated a good part of Central Europe? Scholars and writers tend to claim transformational status for the war they happen to be writing about, as Paul Fussell did for the Great War – which was also declared exceptional by those who thought of it as the war to end all wars ...

What are you willing to do?

James Meek, 26 May 2022

How Civil Wars Start – And How to Stop Them 
by Barbara F. Walter.
Viking, 289 pp., £18.99, January 2022, 978 0 241 42975 4
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... bifurcated patriotism, murderous ingenuity and suicidal mass charges over open ground is the civil war, and it is the prospect of a 21st-century rerun that gives the book its kick. Even in her denials that a new American civil war would look anything like the first, Walter links the two, with the future version trailed in ...

Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity

James Meek, 18 February 2016

... money to finance the conceptual rich – that is, the unemployed, the disabled, refugees, working-class single mothers, dodgers, scroungers, chavs, chisellers and cheats. In this version of the myth, Robin Hood is a tax-cutter and a handout-denouncer. He’s Jeremy Clarkson. He’s Nigel Farage. He’s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He’s by your elbow ...

Washed White

Michael Rogin, 10 June 1993

The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America 
by Sacvan Bercovitch.
Routledge, 424 pp., £40, November 1992, 9780415900140
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Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America 
by Garry Wills.
Simon and Schuster, 315 pp., £17.99, April 1993, 0 671 76956 1
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... single most cohesive culture in the modern world’. Americans share not a common middle-class way of life, writes Bercovitch, but rather a suffocating, uniform way of thought. Unable to choose between genuine alternatives in order to enact dialectical history, writers interpret symbols instead. American symbology, as Bercovitch labels ...

Bangs and Stinks

James Buchan, 22 December 1994

Test of Greatness: Britain’s Struggle for the Atom Bomb 
by Brian Cathcart.
Murray, 301 pp., £19.99, September 1994, 0 7195 5225 7
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... on 3 October 1952 also dramatises the yearning and anxiety in British self-consciousness after the war. Soon after the test, the Daily Graphic apostrophised William Penney, the project’s leader: ‘Britain and the Commonwealth owe a debt – almost impossible to repay – to you ... the fact that you and your team have made it possible for Britain to make ...

Playing Fields, Flanders Fields

Paul Delany, 21 January 1982

War Diary 1913-1917: Chronicle of Youth 
by Vera Brittain, edited by Alan Bishop.
Gollancz, 382 pp., £8.50, September 1981, 0 575 02888 2
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The English Poets of the First World War 
by John Lehmann.
Thames and Hudson, 144 pp., £6.95, August 1981, 0 500 01256 3
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Voices from the Great War 
by Peter Vansittart.
Cape, 303 pp., £7.95, November 1981, 0 224 01915 5
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The Little Field-Marshal: Sir John French 
by Richard Holmes.
Cape, 427 pp., £12.50, November 1981, 0 224 01575 3
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... those in England who felt, as she did, that their youth had been ‘smashed up’ by the Great War. Nearly a million men of their generation lay buried in Flanders and Gallipoli; many of those who remained felt condemned to hollow lives, haunted by loss and grief. They believed that those sacrificed had been men of special grace, the irreplaceable flower ...

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