When Bitcoin Grows Up

John Lanchester: What is Money?, 21 April 2016

... companies, retail stores and other entities’.1 There is an interesting discussion of US money in Edward Castronova’s overview Wildcat Currency: he explains that states didn’t have the right to issue currency themselves, but they did have the right to regulate the issuance of money on their territory.2 This was a system prone to unintended ...

A Feeling for Ice

Jenny Diski, 2 January 1997

... experience, children don’t.I remember Jennifer with about the same clarity that I remember the young Jane Eyre, Mary from The Secret Garden, Peter Pan and Alice. Rather less clarity, in fact, since the last four are readily available on my bookshelves and I have reacquainted myself with them quite regularly. Jennifer, I’ve merely remembered from time to ...

Bitchy Little Spinster

Joanne O’Leary: Queens of Amherst, 3 June 2021

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet 
by Julie Dobrow.
Norton, 448 pp., £13.99, January 2020, 978 0 393 35749 3
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... not have any Emily Dickinson at all.Born in Cambridge in 1856, Mabel Loomis was convinced from a young age of her own ‘all-embracing genius’. Polly Longsworth, who has edited her love letters to Austin, writes that for Mabel ‘a public parlour or dining room comprised a small stage which she learned to dominate with her conversational and artistic gifts ...

Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
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The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
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... the story, and from other evidence, that it was the disturbance to the natural order that made the young Isaiah tremble and flinch. Other members of his family, including a much-loved uncle and aunt, were quite active supporters of the SR (Socialist Revolutionary) movement. Neither then nor in retrospect did he register any allegiance of that sort. Ignatieff ...

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

... Sharples team. The first is a photocopy of the original handwritten note of an interview with a young Irishman named John McGuinness, one of several friends and acquaintances of Armstrong, Hill, Conlon and Richardson taken into custody in December 1974. Although he was later cleared of any involvement, at the time of his detention the police seemed to think ...

It’s already happened

James Meek: The NHS Goes Private, 22 September 2011

... was pioneered. To make the first machine to mass produce polyethylene cups, Harry Craven, a young craftsman who worked for Charnley, scavenged odds and ends from a local scrapyard. In their book A Transatlantic History of Total Hip Replacement Julie Anderson, Francis Neary and John Pickstone argue that by putting surgeons on state salaries, the NHS ...

Last Exit

Murray Sayle, 27 November 1997

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong 
by Jonathan Dimbleby.
Little, Brown, 461 pp., £22.50, July 1997, 0 316 64018 2
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In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major 
by Percy Cradock.
Murray, 228 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 7195 5464 0
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Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule: The Economic and Political Implications of Reversion 
edited by Warren Cohen and Li Zhao.
Cambridge, 255 pp., £45, August 1997, 0 521 62158 5
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The Hong Kong Advantage 
by Michael Enright, Edith Scott and David Dodwell.
Oxford, 369 pp., £20, July 1997, 0 19 590322 6
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... had come about, not through vile Occidental cunning, but by chance. When the Governor, Sir Mark Young, emerged from a Japanese prison camp in 1945, he brought out a plan to empower Hong Kong to run some of its own affairs, on a basis of one ratepayer (literate in English or Chinese), one vote, as part of the leisurely run-up to self-rule that was normal in ...

Responses to the War in Gaza

LRB Contributors, 29 January 2009

... may face serious consequences at home for having aligned themselves with Israel.Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia. Yitzhak Laor We’ve been here before. It’s a ritual. Every two or three years, our military mounts another bloody expedition. The enemy is always smaller, weaker; our military is always larger, technologically ...

A Ripple of the Polonaise

Perry Anderson: Work of the Nineties, 25 November 1999

History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the Nineties 
by Timothy Garton Ash.
Allen Lane, 441 pp., £20, June 1999, 0 7139 9323 5
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... the Prime Minister at its head, Urban noted of his neighbour: Tim is an excellent analyst; he is young and has already made a name for himself. I can see in him a future R.W. Seton-Watson or a politician of the first water. He is rational, can think on his feet and his heart is in the right place – with one or two exceptions: he made misjudgments about ...

Ghosting

Andrew O’Hagan: Julian Assange, 6 March 2014

... supporters: Tony Benn, Jemima Khan, Bianca Jagger, James Fox and Bella Freud, and the five or so young people I associated with WikiLeaks. We were led up to seats in the gallery they’d saved for friends. As soon as I sat down and looked down at the court I saw Esther Addley of the Guardian. She saw me, smiled, and I smiled back and she lifted her ...

Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... share price based on the number of letters they’d posted over their lifetime. According to Hugo Young, Thatcher had to be talked into Right to Buy by a desperate Edward Heath, then her leader, who’d been persuaded by his friend Pierre Trudeau after his electoral defeat in February 1974 that he needed a fistful of ...

Somerdale to Skarbimierz

James Meek, 20 April 2017

... abandoned the requirement that Friends observe ‘plainness of speech, behaviour and apparel’. Edward Fry accepted the previously unthinkable worldly honour of a knighthood. George Cadbury moved into a mansion with thirty servants. In the 1930s, when Rowntree scandalised the Cadburys and the Frys by trying to patent industrial processes – some Victorian ...