Casuistries of Peace and War

Perry Anderson: The assumptions the Bush Administration and its critics share, 6 March 2003

... doctrine of Just and Unjust Wars, as set out by a distinguished philosopher of the American Left, Michael Walzer, in a work glowingly evoked by the still more eminent liberal philosopher John Rawls, in his aptly entitled The Law of Peoples. Indeed in attacking Iraq, we will be doing no more than completing the vital preventive strike against the Osirak ...

What is Labour for?

John Lanchester: Five More Years of This?, 31 March 2005

David Blunkett 
by Stephen Pollard.
Hodder, 359 pp., £20, December 2004, 0 340 82534 0
Show More
Show More
... to his being offered a chance to run for the council in 1970 at the age of 22. Ten years later the young politician had put aside his day job as a teacher and was now leader of Sheffield council, a truly astonishing rise for a man with his disadvantages. Blunkett in power in Sheffield was Blunkett Mark One. He concentrated on his particular concerns of public ...

Bring me bimagrumab

Liam Shaw: Insulin Wars, 2 April 2026

The Discovery of Insulin: Enlarged Edition 
by Michael Bliss.
Chicago, 304 pp., £25, October 2025, 978 0 226 83913 4
Show More
Show More
... that overshadowed their subsequent careers.It was this dispute that first attracted the historian Michael Bliss to the story of insulin. In the account he learned at school, its discovery was a medical fairy tale whose knight errant was a young Canadian doctor called Frederick Banting. In 1920, while reading an article on ...

The Question of U

Ian Penman: Prince, 20 June 2019

Prince: Life and Times 
by Jason Draper.
Chartwell, 216 pp., £15.99, February 2017, 978 0 7858 3497 7
Show More
The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince 
by Mayte Garcia.
Trapeze, 304 pp., £9.99, April 2018, 978 1 4091 7121 8
Show More
Show More
... in ticket sales, the largest US gross that year. Still, there was a vague sense that frisky young Prince – the latest reincarnation of the R’n’B acts the Stones venerated and in some sense owed their existence to – was being used as a heart-starter, to angry up the old (thirtysomething) troupers’ blood. As Jason Draper puts it in Prince: Life ...

The Colossus of Maroussi

Iain Sinclair: In Athens, 27 May 2010

... DVD of the firework night, it was still selling. Nobody remembered what happened after that. One young woman, a highly qualified lawyer, now working off-the-book for around €400 a month, recalled the only Olympic event she’d actually witnessed. ‘There were horses dancing. Very pretty.’ The story of the drug-cheat sprinters and their staged motorcycle ...

Diary

Craig Raine: In Moscow, 22 March 1990

... am not heart-broken. I have attended several opening ceremonies. On the flight, my brother-in-law, Michael Slater (Michael Pasternak, according to his ticket) is unable to read because the Aeroflot jumbo doesn’t have individual seat lights. He has the aisle seat – exiled to inner darkness. Speaking of darkness, what a ...

Mountain Novel, Hitler Novel

D.A.N. Jones, 1 October 1987

The Spell 
by Hermann Broch, translated by H.F. Broch de Rothermann.
Deutsch, 391 pp., £11.95, May 1987, 0 233 98049 0
Show More
Hermann Broch: A Biography 
by Paul Michael Lützeler, translated by Janice Furness.
Quartet, 329 pp., £25, June 1987, 0 7043 2604 3
Show More
Show More
... him seem excessively extravagant in future’, inclined to ‘revel in the delights of life as a young rake or “Lebebaby”, to use a term popular in the Vienna of the 1920s. He was introduced to Vienna’s night life by his uncle Rudolf.’ Armand is regularly described as ‘workshy’ in Lützeler’s book. He went to Greece in 1934 as representative of ...

Do what you wish, du Maurier

E.S. Turner, 31 March 1988

Maxwell 
by Joe Haines.
Macdonald, 525 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 356 17172 8
Show More
Maxwell: The Outsider 
by Tom Bower.
Aurum, 374 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 948149 88 4
Show More
Maxwell: A Portrait of Power 
by Peter Thompson and Anthony Delano.
Bantam, 256 pp., £12.95, February 1988, 0 593 01499 5
Show More
Goodbye Fleet Street 
by Robert Edwards.
Cape, 260 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 224 02457 4
Show More
Show More
... who supported him; to help find peace in the country which is the Jewish national home; to the young who need the chance he had to make for himself; and to promoting for others the education which he never had.’ The rival biographers do not see the Liechtenstein connection in the same rosy light. Tom Bower, observing that the Principality is the ideal ...

Wounds

Stephen Fender, 23 June 1988

Hemingway 
by Kenneth Lynn.
Simon and Schuster, 702 pp., £16, September 1987, 0 671 65482 9
Show More
The Faces of Hemingway: Intimate Portraits of Ernest Hemingway by those who knew him 
by Denis Brian.
Grafton, 356 pp., £14.95, May 1988, 0 246 13326 0
Show More
Show More
... have recently encouraged some considerable biographical studies. Among these are three books by Michael Reynolds on aspects of Hemingway’s life and reading, and the comprehensive Hemingway (1985) by the indefatigable English biographer Jeffrey Meyers. Reynolds and Meyers stepped outside the ring where the mythographers and debunkers had slugged it ...

Northern Irish Initiatives

Charles Townshend, 5 August 1982

... advocate of realism, Dr FitzGerald, is a statesman who, in the Fine Gael mould effectively cast by Michael Collins and Kevin O’Higgins, seems to share British attitudes to the politics of the possible. His views on the future of Ireland are therefore of particular significance in connection with the new initiative. In the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, under the ...

‘You’d better get out while you can’

Charles Wheeler, 19 September 1996

... had bowed to the inevitable, had settled for Hungarian neutrality and had gone for good. A young woman, a teacher, was sure that the revolution would change her life: ‘We’ll be able to read Western books and newspapers; we’ll even be able to travel.’ At our next stop, Magyaróvár, the people were still in shock. They took us to a park ...

Journey to Arezzo

Nicholas Penny: The Apotheosis of Piero, 17 April 2003

Piero della Francesca 
by Roberto Longhi, translated by David Tabbat.
Sheep Meadow, 364 pp., £32.50, September 2002, 1 878818 77 5
Show More
Show More
... to place it in the National Gallery. In the following year he consoled himself with Piero’s St Michael, which entered the Gallery after his death. On returning from his Italian travels in 1858, Eastlake would have found his friend Austin Henry Layard working on the proofs of a long article on fresco painting which appeared that October in the Quarterly ...

Don’t pick your nose

Hugh Pennington: Staphylococcus aureus, 15 December 2005

... century has Staphylococcus aureus, as MRSA, attracted much attention from British politicians. Michael Howard’s mother-in-law died from a hospital infection and he made its control an issue in the 2005 general election campaign. Risk theorists say that top-level support for safety spending is much greater for air travel than for oil refineries because ...

Bugger everyone

R.W. Johnson: The prime ministers 1945-2000, 19 October 2000

The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders since 1945 
by Peter Hennessy.
Allen Lane, 686 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 7139 9340 5
Show More
Show More
... Geoffrey Fisher, called on Macmillan to tell him that whatever he did, he must not appoint Michael Ramsey as his successor, adding that he knew Ramsey well, had indeed been his headmaster at Repton. ‘Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice,’ Macmillan replied. ‘You may have been Dr Ramsey’s headmaster, but you were not mine.’ Some years ...

Each Cornflake

Ben Lerner: Knausgaard, Vol. 3, 22 May 2014

My Struggle: Vol. 3. Boyhood Island 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Don Bartlett.
Harvill Secker, 490 pp., £12.99, March 2014, 978 1 84655 722 4
Show More
Show More
... next volume like crack,’ Zadie Smith writes. As the literary critic – and former junkie – Michael Clune has pointed out, we tend to reach for drug metaphors when we find ourselves taking pleasure in a book without being able to ascribe our interest to respectable literary values. Is Knausgaard, despite all the comparisons to Proust, more like reality ...