World Policeman

Colin Legum, 20 November 1986

With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua 
by Christopher Dickey.
Faber, 327 pp., £12.50, September 1986, 9780571146048
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Jonas Savimbi: A Key to Africa 
by Fred Bridgland.
Mainstream, 513 pp., £14.95, October 1986, 0 906391 99 7
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... changed in pendulum swings. In the post-Vietnam/post-Nixon mood which brought Jimmy Carter to the White House, it swung quite a long way against interventionism, and even conservative Republicans like California’s Governor, Ronald Reagan, fulminated against the idea of America being expected to act as policeman for the world. Sickened by exposures of ...

On Richard Hamilton

Hal Foster, 6 October 2011

... Guardsman on the Ohio campus. In his installation Treatment Room (1983-84), a clinical room with a white gurney and a bleak blanket, Hamilton returns us to the nasty surgeries performed on the body politic by Thatcher. He also reflected on the comic-tragic Anglo-American adventure in Iraq in paintings from War Games (1991), where we see a TV image of toy tanks ...

Only foam comes out

Michael Hofmann: Vallejo in English, 4 December 2025

The Eternal Dice: Selected Poems 
by César Vallejo, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
New Directions, 155 pp., £13.99, May, 978 0 8112 3766 6
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... an Andean town in the north of Peru. Using the word for a child of mixed heritage (his father was white, his mother was Indigenous), he referred to himself as ‘your unforgettable cholo’; ‘machetón’ (‘big machete’) is what his schoolmates called him, on account of his beaky nose. Later, he was just ‘un drôle d’étranger’. The few ...
The Dialectic of Change 
by Boris Kagarlitsky, translated by Rick Simon.
Verso, 393 pp., £29.95, January 1990, 0 86091 258 2
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... rally in Central Hall, Westminster, unironically billed as ‘The Debate of the Decade’, between Tony Benn and the leaders of the supposed British extra-parliamentary opposition. At this event, the motion for the debate was reform versus revolution. On the cusp of the Eighties and Nineties, New Left Books offers us a discourse of positive revolutionary ...

Can you feel it?

Rose Boyt, 28 September 1989

... was working on the door of the Café de Paris. A new drug called Extasy arrived from New York, Fat Tony started playing some new records from Chicago. That was house music. It was called house music because you could make it in your house – it was supposed to be home-made. It shared the egalitarian gesture of DIY with punk but was no artless three-chord ...

Shakers

Denis Donoghue, 6 November 1986

Write on: Occasional Essays ’65-’85 
by David Lodge.
Secker, 211 pp., £12.95, September 1986, 0 436 25665 7
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... sensibility’ of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Blake Morrison’s The Movement, Martin Amis’s Success, Tony Tanner’s Adultery in the Novel, Graham Greene’s Ways of Escape, Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons, the Oxford American Dictionary, two books – by Dan Jacobson and Robert Alter – on Biblical ...

‘The Sun Says’

Paul Laity, 20 June 1996

... government’ and law and order have long been crusades of British tabloids, but now Tony Blair, sensitive to popular priorities after Labour’s four successive electoral defeats, also feels that Sun readers need courting. Not for nothing did he travel to Hayman Island, Australia to address News Corporation executives; and not for nothing is he ...

Diary

Andy Beckett: In Chile, 25 January 2001

Pinochet and Me: A Chilean Anti-Memoir 
by Marc Cooper.
Verso, 143 pp., £15, December 2000, 1 85984 785 4
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... arrest in October 1998 and subsequent troubles, all over again – in juddering, iconic black and white. The political experiences of Chile in the 1970s have long acquired symbolic weight abroad (at home they remain understandably more concrete) according to ideological taste, either as the obliteration of a brave left-wing experiment by right-wing ...

Do it in Gaelic

Jeremy Harding: Australia’s Boat-People, 26 September 2013

... in a finger and tried to create a gaping hole. But when they proclaimed a $10 billion shortfall in Tony Abbott’s budget plans, two senior figures at the Treasury and the Finance Ministry cast doubt on their sums. Whatever voters thought about the last six years of Labor government on the eve of the election, the civil service seemed to have reached a ...

Superior Persons

E.S. Turner, 6 February 1986

Travels with a Superior Person 
by Lord Curzon, edited by Peter King.
Sidgwick, 191 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 283 99294 8
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The Ladies of Castlebrae 
by A. Whigham Price.
Alan Sutton, 242 pp., £10.95, October 1985, 0 86299 228 1
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Lizzie: A Victorian Lady’s Amazon Adventure 
by Tony Morrison, Anne Brown and Ann Rose.
BBC, 160 pp., £9.95, November 1985, 0 563 20424 9
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Miss Fane in India 
by [author], edited by John Pemble.
Alan Sutton, 246 pp., £10.95, October 1985, 0 86299 240 0
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Explorers Extraordinary 
by John Keay.
Murray/BBC Publications, 195 pp., £10.95, November 1985, 0 7195 4249 9
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A Visit to Germany, Italy and Malta 1840-41 
by Hans Christian Andersen, translated by Grace Thornton.
Peter Owen, 182 pp., £12.50, October 1985, 0 7206 0636 5
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The Irish Sketch-Book 1842 
by William Makepeace Thackeray.
Blackstaff, 368 pp., £9.95, December 1985, 0 85640 340 7
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Mr Rowlandson’s England 
by Robert Southey, edited by John Steel.
Antique Collectors’ Club, 202 pp., £14.95, November 1985, 0 907462 77 4
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... triumphant. It describes how wealthy twin sisters from Ayrshire, blue-stockings who in fact wore white stockings, travelled to St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai and discovered an early version of the Gospels, which was being used, a page at a time, to serve pats of butter. Not every well-bred Scots lady can identify a greasy Syriac palimpsest at ...

People Like You

David Edgar: In Burnley, 23 September 2021

On Burnley Road: Class, Race and Politics in a Northern English Town 
by Mike Makin-Waite.
Lawrence and Wishart, 274 pp., £17, May, 978 1 913546 02 1
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... subsequently analysed in official reports: the former trade-unionist and chair of the Labour Party Tony Clarke was harsh on the Burnley rioters, insisting that ‘what was described as a “race riot” was in fact a series of criminal acts.’ Makin-Waite rejects the labelling of rioters as mob-like but is wary of romanticising the participants: ‘Those who ...

The Strandperle Notebook

James Sheard, 27 May 2010

... But a voice that scorns chorales is yelling ‘Wanker!’ Tony Harrison, ‘V’ 1. There’s oil and backwash from these boats departing Hamburg’s morning wharves. There’s stalking cranes. Men pull and tote. One street back the sleepy whores lean out from clubs. They clutch their towels. They call for milk and fresh-bagged rolls, their wigs in sun like lacquered cowls as Hamburg’s one-note church bells toll ...

Short Cuts

Adam Shatz: Israel and Iran, 23 September 2010

... to pursue a more muscular punishment, he warns, an Israeli attack is a ‘near certainty’. Tony Blair, we must assume, would agree. The risks involved, Goldberg conceded, are enormous: ‘a full-blown regional war’; the end of the special relationship between Tel Aviv and Washington; a ‘cataclysmic’ rise in oil prices; terrorist attacks on Jews ...

At the Design Museum

Brian Dillon: ‘Cycle Revolution’, 18 February 2016

... pizzazz to the urban get-around. (One of these even bruits its modernity with a horizontal white lightning flash.) But Moulton’s real innovations were hiding under the bike’s Eagle-era sci-fi skirts: when it went into production in 1962, the bike had a low frame, small wheels and front and rear suspension. Moulton’s was not the first attempt at a ...

Red Stars

John Sutherland, 6 December 1984

Wild Berries 
by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Antonia Bovis.
Macmillan, 296 pp., £8.95, September 1984, 0 333 37559 9
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The Burn 
by Vassily Aksyonov, translated by Michael Glenny.
Hutchinson, 528 pp., £10.95, October 1984, 0 09 155580 9
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Fellow Travellers 
by T.C. Worsley.
Gay Men’s Press, 249 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 907040 51 9
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The Power of the Dog 
by Thomas Savage.
Chatto, 276 pp., £9.95, October 1984, 0 7011 3939 0
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The Fourth Protocol 
by Frederick Forsyth.
Hutchinson, 448 pp., £8.95, September 1984, 0 09 158630 5
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The Set-Up 
by Vladimir Volkoff, translated by Alan Sheridan.
Bodley Head, 397 pp., £8.95, September 1984, 0 370 30583 3
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... its wet, warm arms, showering her with thousands of greedy, rough kisses, blinding her with the white zigzag explosions of uncountable lightning bolts, deafening her with ear-splitting rolls of thunder ... Then already hopelessly soaked, she stood up straight, offering her body to the powerful surge of water. For an instant the thought crossed her mind to ...