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Ian Hamilton: The World Cup, 30 July 1998

... or to devise a perfect forward line for France, or to imagine discussing such matters with, say, Kevin Keegan. You may not have allowed the bleached Romanians to get to you, but surely no one can deny that throughout this 1998 World Cup there was an altogether unsettling preoccupation with hairstyle. Maybe it was all to do with the world’s supposedly best ...

On the Threshold

Tom Nairn, 23 March 1995

Frameworks for the Future 
Northern Ireland Office, 37 pp., February 1995Show More
Northern Ireland: The Choice 
by Kevin Boyle and Tom Hadden.
Penguin, 256 pp., £6.99, May 1994, 0 14 023541 8
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... and commented on in another admirable analysis which appeared just before the Framework Document, Kevin Boyle and Tom Hadden’s Northern Ireland: The Choice. The authors point out that any new agreement on governing Northern Ireland hinges on a choice between fully acknowledging this existing separation or trying to wish it away by administrative ...
State of Exception 
by Giorgio Agamben, translated by Kevin Attell.
Chicago, 104 pp., £8.50, January 2005, 0 226 00925 4
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... minted liberal constitutions. If the constitution already gives the sovereign plenipotentiary powers there is no need to suspend it, and over time officially declared states of emergency may become less common as governments absorb their emergency powers within the constitutional order. Agamben refers to this process as ...

Keith Middlemas on the history of Ireland

Keith Middlemas, 22 January 1981

Ireland: Land of Troubles 
by Paul Johnson.
Eyre Methuen, 224 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 0 413 47650 2
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Acts of Union 
by Anthony Bailey.
Faber, 221 pp., £4.95, September 1980, 0 571 11648 5
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Neighbours 
by Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Faber, 96 pp., £2.95, November 1980, 0 571 11645 0
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Ireland: A History 
by Robert Kee.
Weidenfeld, 256 pp., £9.95, December 1980, 0 297 77855 2
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... to the subsequent history of Ulster. Protestant hegemony was established by law (the Special Powers Act, 1922), force (mainly the B-Specials, resident in each locality) and the gerrymandering (here always ‘alleged’) of local government boundaries. But because Johnson conceives of developments in Northern Ireland in terms of an all-Irish history, he ...

Draining the Whig bathwater

Conrad Russell, 10 June 1993

The Personal Rule of Charles I 
by Kevin Sharpe.
Yale, 983 pp., £40, November 1992, 0 300 05688 5
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... greater than it is thought to have been. This undoubtedly contains some truth, since Continental powers never knew for certain that Charles would not risk war. Yet this is a limited truth, and it should not be pushed too far. The Personal Rule of Charles I could have been written as a political narrative, which is still much needed for the 1630s, or as a ...

Steaming like a Pie

Theo Tait: ‘Going Postal’, 4 December 2003

Mailman 
by J. Robert Lennon.
Granta, 483 pp., £15.99, October 2003, 1 86207 625 1
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... withdrawal, from the life of the Republic, from its machinery.’ Another, sillier example is Kevin Costner’s dire and bloated vanity movie The Postman. Over the course of three hours of hallucinatory badness, Costner’s Shakespeare-spouting drifter reunites the scattered communities of post-apocalypse America by convincing them that the national ...

Too Big to Shut Down

Chal Ravens: Rave On, 7 March 2024

Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain 
by Ed Gillett.
Picador, 464 pp., £20, August 2023, 978 1 5290 7064 4
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... account for less than half the text. The remainder is dedicated to listing increased police powers, including legislation to remove criminal defendants’ right to silence, expanded provision for the retention of DNA and CCTV evidence, and the creation of new powers to stop and search people without suspicion of a ...

Feasting on Power

John Upton: David Blunkett’s Criminal Justice Bill, 10 July 2003

... Middle England by a Home Secretary who does not accept the need to preserve a balance between the powers of the state and the rights of defendants. It signals that those accused of crime do not deserve our protection. The Bill is 374 pages long and its stated aim is ‘the rebalancing of the criminal justice system in favour of victims, witnesses and ...

Victor Ludorum

Julian Symons, 20 December 1990

The Complete Short Stories 
by V.S. Pritchett.
Chatto, 1220 pp., £25, November 1990, 0 7011 3712 6
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Lasting Impressions 
by V.S. Pritchett.
Chatto, 171 pp., £15.99, November 1990, 0 7011 3606 5
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... father Walter in the autobiographical volumes A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil shows his powers at full stretch. Walter Pritchett, as seen by his eldest son, was a figure of Micawberian optimism, opening a newsagent and stationer’s shop in the Ipswich area at the age of 22 without knowing the trade or having any capital, and to his astonishment ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: At NatCon London, 1 June 2023

... the US were handing out pamphlets on ‘How to speak up about gender identity’. Its president, Kevin Roberts, would later decry ‘the woke industrial complex’ in a speech about the death of ‘global Europe’. On the opposite side of the hall, a man from the Danube Institute gave me back copies of the Hungarian Conservative. He had come straight from a ...

The Power of Sunshine

Alexander Cockburn, 10 January 1991

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles 
by Mike Davis.
Verso, 462 pp., £18.95, November 1990, 0 86091 303 1
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... Marlowe, in his stale office in Downtown, snarling alternately at the punk scum and the powers-that-be, was a political time-bomb waiting to explode. In their agony and panic no less than 100,000 bedrock Republicans crossed the lines in 1934 to vote for the socialist Upton Sinclair in his gubernatorial campaign conducted under the slogan ‘End ...

Each Scene for Itself

David Edgar: The Brecht Centenary, 4 March 1999

War Primer 
by Bertolt Brecht, edited by John Willett.
Libris, 170 pp., £35, February 1998, 1 870352 21 1
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Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches 
by John Willett.
Methuen, 320 pp., £12.99, February 1998, 0 413 72310 0
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Brecht and Method 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 184 pp., £19, November 1998, 1 85984 809 5
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... cutting the dialectical knot by cunning and quick-thinking rather than by recourse to unearthly powers. If there is a Brecht for our times, it is not the utopian visionary, but the practical saboteur of the supposedly eternal. In this, he relates most clearly to a Modernism of which Post-Modernism is essentially a degeneration, Mannerism to Modernism’s ...

Northern Irish Initiatives

Charles Townshend, 5 August 1982

... for progressive devolution, it does not break entirely new ground: the concept of ‘reserved powers’ goes back to Gladstone’s Home Rule Bills, and a multi-stage process was built into the 1920 Government of Ireland Act with its provision for a Council of Ireland. The mechanics of the new proposals, however, are more sophisticated, and allow workable ...

Blackberry Apocalypse

Nicholas Guyatt: Evangelical Disarray, 15 November 2007

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America 
by Chris Hedges.
Cape, 254 pp., £12.99, February 2007, 978 0 224 07820 7
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... have appeared from major publishers in the last year: the list includes polemics by the likes of Kevin Phillips as well as alarmed reporting by American journalists like Salon’s Michelle Goldberg and Chris Hedges, who reported on Bosnia and the Middle East for the New York Times in the 1990s. Hedges’s thesis is simple: religious conservatives in the ...

Issues of Truth and Invention

Colm Tóibín: Francis Stuart’s wartime broadcasts, 4 January 2001

The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart 
edited by Brendan Barrington.
Lilliput, 192 pp., £25, September 2000, 1 901866 54 8
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... life generally? Stuart: Non, non, je ne regrette rien, rien du tout. The Irish Times columnist Kevin Myers was watching this programme and would have much to say about it: ‘Honouring such a man with the highest artistic accolade this state has to offer is at best to be morally neutral about the barbarous cause he served. It is to follow the fascist chic ...

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