Bush’s Useful Idiots

Tony Judt: Whatever happened to American liberalism?, 21 September 2006

... The advertisement was signed by 63 prominent intellectuals, writers and businessmen: among them Daniel Bell, J.K. Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Irving Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American ...

Turning Wolfe Tone

John Kerrigan: A Third Way for Ireland, 20 October 2022

Belfast 
directed by Kenneth Branagh.
January
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Small World: Ireland 1798-2018 
by Seamus Deane.
Cambridge, 343 pp., £20, June 2021, 978 1 108 84086 6
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Irish Literature in Transition 
edited by Claire Connolly and Marjorie Howes.
Cambridge, six vols, £564, March 2020, 978 1 108 42750 0
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Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled 
by Nicholas Allen.
Oxford, 305 pp., £70, November 2020, 978 0 19 885787 7
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A History of Irish Literature and the Environment 
edited by Malcolm Sen.
Cambridge, 457 pp., £90, July, 978 1 108 49013 9
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... Some are openly LGBTQ+. They think internationally. Many would agree that ‘people are bored of Green and Orange politics.’ Although liberalisation is limited and the Stormont version of power-sharing has reinforced the Balkanisation of communities, changes long underway in the Republic have been advancing across the North.The mass of scholarship ...

Bizarre and Wonderful

Wes Enzinna: Murray Bookchin, Eco-Anarchist, 4 May 2017

Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin 
by Janet Biehl.
Oxford, 344 pp., £22.99, October 2015, 978 0 19 934248 8
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... and drafted a programme that advocated taking power away from city hall and creating hundreds of green jobs. The mayor, Gordon Paquette, a businessman, responded with a proposal to convert the city’s lakefront into a luxury development boasting three condominium towers, a 150-room hotel, a private boating club and a parking lot. Bernie Sanders, a ...

Outside the text

Marilyn Butler, 19 December 1985

The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory 
by Jerome McGann.
Oxford, 352 pp., £19.50, May 1985, 0 19 811730 2
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The Politics of Language: 1791-1819 
by Olivia Smith.
Oxford, 269 pp., £19.50, December 1984, 0 19 812817 7
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... authors. Undergraduates reading English at Cambridge may begin with an essay on Gawain and the Green Knight. At Oxford they tackle In Memoriam. O-Levellers could be confronting Romeo and Juliet and A-Levellers the poems of Herbert. The central question all of them ask of a work is what it means, and answering this question requires practice, effort, and ...

‘Where’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’

Michael Dobson: 17th-century literary culture, 11 September 2008

Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707 
by John Kerrigan.
Oxford, 599 pp., March 2008, 978 0 19 818384 6
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... feeling a bit seasick and discovered that all the postboxes and telephone booths had been painted green. But in those pre-euro days the shops still accepted ordinary money, and my mother used to say that what she liked best about the place, apart from the Mary O’Hara records, was that with its bumpy single-track roads and straying donkeys it reminded her of ...

Naderland

Jackson Lears: Ralph Nader’s novel, 8 April 2010

Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 
by Ralph Nader.
Seven Stories, 733 pp., $27.50, September 2009, 978 1 58322 903 3
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... progressive activists. ‘Both parties do the same thing, one covertly, one overtly,’ he told a Green Party gathering in 2001. ‘Which one is going to get more people mad? Which one is going to get more people organised?’ The questions depend on a familiar leftist cliché – the worse things get, the better they get. But if Nader’s dismissal of the ...

Lust for Leaks

Neal Ascherson: The Cockburns of Cork, 1 September 2005

The Broken Boy 
by Patrick Cockburn.
Cape, 312 pp., £15.99, June 2005, 0 224 07108 4
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... knew of none that would make much difference. (In this book, Patrick Cockburn concludes that Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year still offers the soundest advice for those caught in epidemics: run away.) But although this was not Cork’s first epidemic, it was the most vicious. The death toll seems to have been relatively low, as it usually is ...

Mystery and Imagination

Stephen Bann, 17 November 1983

The Woman in Black 
by Susan Hill and John Lawrence.
Hamish Hamilton, 160 pp., £7.95, October 1983, 0 241 10987 6
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Legion 
by William Peter Blatty.
Collins, 252 pp., £8.95, October 1983, 0 00 222735 5
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The Lost Flying Boat 
by Alan Sillitoe.
Granada, 288 pp., £8.95, October 1983, 0 246 12236 6
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Snow, and Other Stories 
by Antony Lambton.
Quartet, 134 pp., £6.95, September 1983, 0 7043 2407 5
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New Islands, and Other Stories 
by Maria Luisa Bombal, translated by Richard Cunningham, Lucia Cunningham and Jorge Luis Borges.
Faber, 112 pp., £8.50, October 1983, 0 571 12052 0
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The Antarctica Cookbook 
by Crispin Kitto.
Duckworth, 190 pp., £7.95, October 1983, 0 7156 1762 1
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Sole Survivor 
by Maurice Gee.
Faber, 232 pp., £7.95, October 1983, 0 571 13017 8
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... never wrote as a ship, ‘a veritable three-decker out of chosen and long-stored timber – teak, green-heart, and ten-year-old oak knees – each curve melting deliciously into the next ...’ Sillitoe’s evidently well-informed portrayal of The Lost Flying Boat goes beyond the reminiscences of the former member of the RAFVR, who has done his homework, and ...

Diary

Paul Henley: The EU, 14 January 2002

... such as Michel Rocard and Charles Pasqua, Mario Soares, formerly Prime Minister of Portugal, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the most celebrated soixantehuitard of all. Troops of British Tories displaced at the 1997 general election have found it a convenient refuge while other politicians use it as a way of supporting their ongoing projects elsewhere: Jean-Marie Le ...

Summarising Oneself

Julian Barnes: Degas’s Vanity, 19 November 2020

The Letters of Edgar Degas 
edited by Theodore Reff.
Wildenstein Plattner Institute, 1464 pp., £150, June, 978 0 9988175 1 4
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... were exempt.) More to the point, he preferred to spend his money feeding what his friend Daniel Halévy called his ‘great and terrible passion’ of collecting. At the lower end, his eye was caught by printed calico headdresses and traditional Normandy handkerchiefs, up through Gavarni prints (of which he had two thousand or so by the time he ...

Mishal’s Luck

Adam Shatz: The Plot against Hamas, 14 May 2009

Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas 
by Paul McGeough.
Quartet, 477 pp., £25, May 2009, 978 0 7043 7157 6
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... murder of a Palestinian leader in Amman would be sure to fuel speculation that Mossad had got the green light, and perhaps some helpful tips, from Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID). This was no way to treat a friend – at least not one you respected – and the Israelis knew it. Unlike the flamboyant assassinations of the PFLP spokesman ...

‘The Meeting of the Waters’

John Barrell, 27 July 2017

... so much as seas, which, bearing ‘the liquid weight of half the globe’, crash muddily into the green Atlantic. I am thinking of favourite walks, or rather favourite places to sit when out walking, like the confluence of the Nidd and the Ouse at Nun Monkton near York, or of the streamlet behind our local pub and the River Wye, where sometimes at twilight ...

Obama v. Clinton: A Retrospective

Eliot Weinberger: A Tale of Two Candidates, 3 July 2008

... with the teleprompter and grinning weirdly at random moments. Standing in front of a hideous green backdrop, he looked, as one blogger wrote, like the cottage cheese on a lime Jello salad. Apparently no longer an officer and a gentleman, he took the occasion of this extraordinary moment in American history not to congratulate the first African-American ...

Diary

David Denby: Deaths on Camera, 8 September 2016

... for back-up, Tensing pulls in behind DuBose, who has stopped his car on Rice St, a pleasant green road outside the university campus. Tensing walks to the car, and the men have a seemingly amiable conversation. The officer is insistent but polite, DuBose vague and indistinct (at one point, he hands over a small bottle of gin). Tensing, addressing DuBose ...

I grew a beard

Christian Lorentzen: Biden on Crack, 3 June 2021

Beautiful Things: A Memoir 
by Hunter Biden.
Gallery, 272 pp., £20, April, 978 1 3985 0719 7
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... apart at school. Many of the boys’ earliest memories were of palling around with senators like Daniel Inouye and Jesse Helms. They mowed lawns together and worked at a cold-storage warehouse, where Beau managed the deliveries and Hunter unloaded trucks. At high school Beau was called ‘the sheriff’ because he kept people in line in a friendly ...