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Call me Ismail

Thomas Jones: Wu Ming, 18 July 2013

Altai 
by Wu Ming, translated by Shaun Whiteside.
Verso, 263 pp., £16.99, May 2013, 978 1 78168 076 6
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... as a form of art.1 The name offered both anonymity and solidarity to the people who used it. In May 1995, around seventy Luther Blissetts assembled in front of the register office in Rome in the early hours of the morning to protest against the ‘fetish of identity’ and for the right to call yourself whatever you want, whenever you want. The Luther ...

How Not to Invade

Patrick Cockburn: Lebanon, 5 August 2010

Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East 
by David Hirst.
Faber, 480 pp., £20, March 2010, 978 0 571 23741 8
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The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle 
by Michael Young.
Simon and Schuster, 295 pp., £17.99, July 2010, 978 1 4165 9862 6
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... neither of which can afford to let the other win uncontested control of the country. Lebanon may well be the ‘battleground of the Middle East’, as Hirst’s subtitle puts it, but this does not explain how it has become a lethal trap for its tormentors. The absence of government appears to make the country easy meat, but would-be occupiers find that ...

Whose Body?

Charles Glass: ‘Operation Mincemeat’, 22 July 2010

Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War Two 
by Ben Macintyre.
Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £16.99, January 2010, 978 0 7475 9868 8
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... from his cramped offices under the Admiralty. The surrender of the Afrikakorps in Tunisia on 13 May 1943 forced the Allies to maintain their offensive momentum by attacking the Germans somewhere in occupied Europe. But where? The tip of the Tunisian peninsula pointed straight at Sicily, only a hundred miles distant, and the island was an obvious base for ...

Mid-Century Male

Christopher Glazek: Edmund White, 19 July 2012

Jack Holmes and His Friend 
by Edmund White.
Bloomsbury, 390 pp., £18.99, January 2012, 978 1 4088 0579 4
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... and oversized penis fail to bend Will’s heterosexuality. Jack holds out hope that Will’s novel may betray affection for him, or at least an openness to sexual experimentation. Novelists, Jack believes, are under a professional obligation to be ‘odd’. And if Will’s novel turns out to be a hit and makes him a celebrity, he’ll need someone around to ...

Diary

Patrick Cockburn: Muqtada al-Sadr, 24 April 2008

... if they didn’t. George Bush called it ‘a defining moment’ for the new Iraq. This time Bush may be right; although, once again, he may not understand the seriousness of the fight he is getting into. The Shia community is splitting apart after five years of solidarity. It is a split not just between the government and ...

Family Fortunes

Helen Cooper: The upwardly mobile Pastons, 4 August 2005

Blood and Roses: The Paston Family in the 15th Century 
by Helen Castor.
Faber, 347 pp., £8.99, June 2005, 0 571 21671 4
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... the most intimately known family of the English Middle Ages. The lives of kings and princes may be more celebrated, and we may have far more records relating to the major aristocratic families, but the Paston letters supply individual voices. The correspondence extends over four generations of both men and women ...

Joining the Gang

Nicholas Penny: Anthony Blunt, 29 November 2001

Anthony Blunt: His Lives 
by Miranda Carter.
Macmillan, 590 pp., £20, November 2001, 0 333 63350 4
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... immunity had been convenient for the government of the day, and especially so for MI5 (which may also have turned a blind eye to Kim Philby’s defection in 1963), since his arrest and trial would certainly have led to a thorough investigation of British intelligence organisations, entailing drastic changes (or the expensive pretence that such changes ...

Strew the path with flowers

Bernard Porter: Cannabis and empire, 4 March 2004

Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade and Prohibition 1800-1928 
by James Mills.
Oxford, 239 pp., £25, September 2003, 0 19 924938 5
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... the Other in contrast to the West, and to justify the latter’s self-proclaimed superiority. This may be one reason drugs were so feared when they started spreading in Europe and the US in the 1960s: they threatened to reduce the superior race to the level of those it had dominated so effectively for two centuries. In particular, drugs were thought to ...

The Rendition of Abu Omar

John Foot: The trial of the kidnappers, 2 August 2007

... was of US making: a dispatch sent to the Italian police in March 2003 which claimed that Omar ‘may have travelled’ to ‘an unknown country in the Balkans’. This (vague) false trail may have encouraged the police not to take too much trouble over the investigation. The case went cold, in part because the judge then ...

A Scrap of Cloth

John Borneman: The History of the Veil, 18 December 2008

The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore and Politics 
by Jennifer Heath.
California, 346 pp., £12.95, April 2008, 978 0 520 25518 0
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... wear the veil do so in order to enter the public sphere on particular terms, though these terms may be difficult to discern. They remove the veil in private, in the company of intimates. Men veil themselves, too: the Berber-speaking Tuareg of West Africa, and resistance fighters in Mexico and Palestine, for example. Tuareg men are reported to veil even when ...

Not Just Anybody

Terry Eagleton: ‘The Limits of Critique’, 5 January 2017

The Limits of Critique 
by Rita Felski.
Chicago, 238 pp., £17, October 2015, 978 0 226 29403 2
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... of critique is closely bound up with the setting of limits, distinguishing what a form of inquiry may legitimately address from what is off-bounds to it. Rita Felski’s bold, stylish new study, however, is about critique in the less specialised sense of critical analysis. It is not a work about the limits of setting limits but a critical view of the idea of ...

Nothing Is Unmixed

Michael Wood: Shakespeare’s Vows, 28 July 2016

Shakespeare’s Binding Language 
by John Kerrigan.
Oxford, 622 pp., £35, March 2016, 978 0 19 875758 0
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... the truth so foul a lie.’ The ‘more perjured eye’ is also a more perjured ‘I’, and we may hear a faint announcement of Macbeth’s unintended verbal collusion with the witches. When he says he has never seen ‘so foul and fair a day’, he doesn’t yet know that ‘fair is foul and foul is fair.’ The sonnet is full of energy and wit in its ...

Diary

Ben Mauk: From Suspected Arson to Misplaced Cigarette, 22 September 2016

... but it’s all immaculate half-timbered houses and shivering lace curtains. I went there last May and when I arrived – it was a Saturday morning – there seemed not to be anyone outside. Somewhere the mayor’s son was getting married, and I’d been warned that no one would be available to talk to me during my visit. As I wandered past the window ...

Weaponising Paperwork

William Davies: The Windrush Scandal, 10 May 2018

... 2014 Immigration Act, which contained the flagship policies of the then home secretary, Theresa May. Foremost among them was the plan to create a ‘hostile environment’, with the aim of making it harder for illegal immigrants to work and live in the UK. By forcing landlords, employers, banks and NHS services to run immigration status checks, the policy ...

Most Famous Person in History

Christian Lorentzen, 19 November 2020

... can’t properly be counted, that the election system is corrupt, that whoever becomes president may be a thief. As its avatar and publicist, Trump is responsible for this disorder, and the fever is worse on the right, but only a few months ago liberals were pointing to the apparently routine removal and rearrangement of mailboxes as a sign of chicanery ...

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