Book Reviews

Whether the United States is a force for global peace is not really up for debate in the self-described ‘indispensable nation’, though the question sharply divides opinion almost everywhere else. By focusing on America’s fixation with Iran, this short and angry book argues against. The book’s polemic is built on good foundations: we are often told that Iran is a rogue nuclear state, yet it does not possess nuclear weapons. As a signatory to the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran is entitled to a peaceful nuclear energy programme as long as it is monitored by UN inspectors. However, ten years of negotiations aimed at persuading Iran to stop have led

To Chelsea to hear Charles Moore lift the lid on his Thatcher biography. While the crowd at the Cadogan Hall loved the anecdotes and insight, it was Moore’s revelation that, in later life, it ‘became her view’ that Britain should leave the EU that pricked Steerpike’s ears. Moore has expanded on this for tomorrow’s magazine: ‘I think it happened after the Maastricht Treaty in 1992’. So why did we not know this before she died? He claims that ‘advisers had persuaded her that she should not say this in public since it would have allowed her opponents to drive her to the fringes of public life.’ Not these days, though.

‘To give you an idea of the way people here consume stories, I have put this book together as a human would’ writes the alien narrator of Matt Haig’s novel The Humans. Professor Andrew Martin is not Professor Andrew Martin at all, but rather a Vonnedorian sent to destroy all evidence on Earth that Martin has solved the Riemann Hypothesis. This mathematical breakthrough, think the Vonnedorians, would lead to technological advances not safe in the hands of the violent and primitive humans. They must be stopped. Martin is murdered and his laptop destroyed. His wife, Isobel, and son, Gulliver, must also be killed; but perhaps a little predictably, what happens

The anarchist movement in the United States has had the support of leading libertarian intellectuals, such as Noam Chomsky; but it has lacked a figure who could transform its guiding principles into something resembling a political movement. In the autumn of 2011, David Graeber seemed to be the man who could drag anarchism into mainstream politics. Graeber, along with other leading figures in the Occupy movement, coined the term ‘we are the 99 percent’. The catchphrase caught on, and within weeks — with the assistance of social media — Occupy transformed a small group of idealists with little support into a radical network occupying 800 cities around the world. Graeber’s

Since the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, European history has been dominated by two themes: the centrality of Germany and the primacy of foreign policy. This is the argument of Brendan Simms’ new book, Europe: the struggle for supremacy 1453 to the present. Simms is a professor of the History of International Relations at Cambridge University and his decidedly European focus has allowed him to craft a detailed yet expansive account in the style of Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. One afternoon we sat down at Penguin’s offices on the Strand to discuss these issues, as well as their relevance to the current European Union debate.