Europe thinks ‘that to achieve peace no price is too high: not appeasement, not massacres on its own soil, not even surrender to terrorists… Europe is impotent. A foul wind is blowing through [it]… the idea that we can afford to be lenient even with people who threaten us… This same wind blew through Munich
Craig Murray, formerly Our Man in Tashkent, was not your average ambassador. He put the wind up the Uzbeks with his uncompromising position on President Islam Karimov’s unspeakably grisly human rights record. This is the country that infamously boiled a dissident to death and then sentenced his mother to six years of hard labour when
Novels narrated in the first person by dysfunctional adolescent boys are no rare thing. Nor is there a yawning gap in the market for novels detailing the squalor and eccentricity and thwarted dreams of life in 20th-century Ireland. I opened Carry Me Down, therefore, with a sense of weariness in advance. But I found that
It was Peter Fleming who noted a principal difficulty for the traveller in the 20th century. There were no journeys to be made, he said, that had not been made already, and he knew that in anything he chose to do, ‘other, better, men’ would have gone before. Under such circumstances, ‘only the born tourist
There are few pleasures more reassuring than that of disagreement with some of the contents of a book that is closely argued, extremely well-written and clearly the work of a highly civilised, cultivated and decent man. Such a pleasure is reassuring because, in a hate-filled world, it reminds us that identity of opinion, which makes
Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and these 27 essays, relating to lectures and reviews, have a strong psychoanalytic focus. In the preface Phillips suggests that psychoanalysis has got over its honeymoon belief that it is a universal panacea, and can now enjoy its relish of sexuality with amusement, as well as the straddling of conflicts
Even though Rudyard Kipling died 70 years ago, listeners to Plain Tales from the Hills are sure to gain the beloved storyteller some new followers. I’m certainly joining the fan club. Never engrossed by ‘Gunga Din’, ‘If’ or ‘the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River’, I was astounded how quickly I became hooked on these stories
Anthony Powell’s centenary last year was rightly celebrated; not much notice, I think, was taken of C. P. Snow’s. This was hardly surprising. Shares in ‘Snow Preferred’ are, in Wodehouse’s phrase, ‘down in the cellar with no takers’. I would guess that very few under the age of, say, 50 have read the 11 volumes
