The Mayor Economy

Nathan Sperber: China’s Mayor Economy, 7 March 2024

The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism 
by Keyu Jin.
Swift Press, 360 pp., £25, July 2023, 978 1 80075 384 6
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... listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018, was among them. On the brink of bankruptcy in late 2019, with shares down to $1.4, Nio’s stock shot up in the second half of 2020, briefly surpassing $60 in January 2021. By that point, the company was worth more than $90 billion, making it the fourth most valuable car firm ...

Another Country

Adam Shatz: Visions of America, 5 February 2026

... ambitious essay The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border in the Mind of America (2019), the regime of militarised, racist policing on the US-Mexico border is the all but inevitable heir to the now vanished ‘frontier’ – a physical barrier replacing a shifting and, for much of America’s existence, expanding boundary. Grandin quotes a ...

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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... version trailed in dire precursors like the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021. It’s from among such riled-up conspiracists and militiamen, according to Walter, that the next American civil war will come, as home-grown bands of right-wing terrorists and xenophobic guerrillas infest the democratic liberal order of the United ...

Among the Gilets Jaunes

Jeremy Harding, 21 March 2019

... week of December the executive caved in on fuel tax. Philippe announced that the rise, due in January, would be put on hold for six months. The news was greeted with contempt by the gilets jaunes and the following day word came down from the president’s office that the fuel tax hike was no longer part of the ...

Not War Alone

Tom Stevenson: The Price of Wheat, 12 May 2022

... by brazen corruption, set in long before Covid, not to mention the Ukraine war. Since October 2019 the country has experienced a major rise in poverty rates and a 90 per cent drop in the value of the lira. Not long after the Russian invasion Banque du Liban was failing to deliver payments for imported wheat. Supplies of bread started to run down. By ...

Diary

Luke de Noronha: At the Deportation Tribunal, 19 January 2023

... man facing deportation to Jamaica. The case rested on AB’s criminal history. He was convicted in 2019 of offences relating to the supply of heroin and cocaine and sentenced to more than four years in youth custody. While he was in prison, the Home Office made a deportation order against him. He appealed.The Home Office had a strong case. The 2014 Immigration ...

All Nerves

Ysenda Maxtone Graham: 10 Rillington Place, 7 November 2024

The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place 
by Kate Summerscale.
Bloomsbury, 296 pp., £22, October, 978 1 5266 6048 0
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... Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan, were in their twenties. They had died between January and March. All of them had their heads covered with pieces of cloth and diapers between their legs.Ethel Christie’s body was found under the floorboards (she’d died in December, aged 54), and after a bit of digging, the skeletons of two more women ...

Music Hall Lady Detectives

Ysenda Maxtone Graham, 22 May 2025

Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress and Dr Crippen 
by Hallie Rubenhold.
Doubleday, 496 pp., £25, March, 978 0 85752 731 8
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... not a murderer,’ Rubenhold writes in her prologue. She took the same approach in The Five (2019), her book about the women killed by Jack the Ripper, which concentrated on their lives before autumn 1888. Crippen may be the name forever associated with the ‘North London cellar murder’, but here he is treated by Rubenhold as one character in ‘an ...

Thought Control

Jameel Jaffer, 19 February 2026

... they had recently been active together with their usernames. This requirement was extended in 2019 to fourteen million people who apply for US visas every year, and early in 2025 the Department of Homeland Security announced that soon it would also extend to millions of people who had already been admitted to the country but were seeking ‘adjustment of ...

Diary

Long Ling: Xi Jinping Studies, 20 October 2022

... in the first half of this year, the branch secretary sent out just three notices. The first was in January, when he posted a ‘Notice seeking opinions on representatives from the Beijing branch for the Twentieth Party Congress’. This is an essential grassroots level process conducted ahead of every party congress. The Twentieth Party Congress will be held ...

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan, 6 March 2025

... Mike Johnson; the failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who called the 6 January insurrection an ‘inside job’; the former Australian prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott; the Blue Labour founder, Maurice Glasman, who attended Trump’s inauguration and in January told Steve Bannon’s ...

‘You got up and you died’

Madeleine Schwartz: After the Bataclan, 9 June 2022

... about other hostage situations. I remembered Hypercacher [an attack on a Paris supermarket in January 2015]. I thought, it’s my turn.Laura, aged 37:I was hit by six bullets. Even today reading my medical reports, I am overwhelmed … How could I comprehend that my body would lose its capacity to move?I have to relearn how to breathe, drink, pee. My hand ...

Knife, Stone, Paper

Stephen Sedley: Law Lords, 1 July 2021

English Law under Two Elizabeths: The Late Tudor Legal World and the Present 
by John Baker.
Cambridge, 222 pp., £22.99, January, 978 1 108 94732 9
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The Constitutional Balance 
by John Laws.
Hart, 144 pp., £30, January, 978 1 5099 3545 1
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... that the UK leave the EU by ministerial fiat rather than parliamentary authority, and again in 2019 when Elizabeth II was required by Boris Johnson to prorogue Parliament for no recognised reason.In his recent Hamlyn lectures, now amplified and annotated, John Baker, the doyen of historians of English law, set out to compare the laws and legal systems of ...

Replication Crisis

John Whitfield: Shoddy Papers, 7 October 2021

Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence and Hype in Science 
by Stuart Ritchie.
Bodley Head, 368 pp., £18.99, July 2020, 978 1 84792 565 7
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... free labour as authors and reviewers and made them pay through the nose to read the results. In 2019 Elsevier, the largest of these companies, had a profit margin of 37 per cent. The open access movement, begun by activist scientists around the turn of the century, makes the moral case that readers shouldn’t have to pay to see the results of science that ...

Proust and the Pet Goat

Michael Wood: The Proustian Grail, 7 October 2021

Les Soixante-Quinze Feuillets: Et autres manuscrits inédits 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer.
Gallimard, 384 pp., €21, April 2021, 978 2 07 293171 0
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... of the 1960s, all that imprinted on the “75 pages” a special mystery and aura.’Then in January 2018 de Fallois died, and his papers too went to the Bibliothèque nationale. They contained, among many other things, some stories Proust had chosen not to print – these were edited by Luc Fraisse and published in ...