Contemporary Review articles from April 2000

Contemporary Review archives from April 2000

DOOMED BY THE DOME: BLAIR'S FARING HEALTH.
April 1, 2000... SHORTLY before midnight on Millennium Eve, the glitterati of London's fashionable boroughs -- or at least those who were invited and could get in -- assembled at a preposterous structure. Amid the glare of television lights and the blast of...

ALISTAIR COOKE: AMBASSADOR ON AIR.
April 1, 2000... EARLY one Saturday morning, many years ago, when I was a young radio producer working at the BBC, I was standing in the entrance hall of Broadcasting House awaiting the arrival of the lift. (Perhaps I should say 'elevator' since the subject of...

THE PAKISTANI MILITARY COUP OF 1999: SOME EXPLANATIONS.
April 1, 2000... PAKISTAN has spent 25 years out of 51 under military rule. General Pervez Musharraf, the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) took power in a coup on 12 October 1999. He declared a state of emergency, suspended the constitution and the National...

RURAL RACISM.
April 1, 2000... TELFORD, 'the new town' in rural Shropshire, has found itself placed firmly upon the mental map, recently, with the deaths of two of the McGowen family, two young black men, both found hanged; one in his home, the other from the railings...

GREEK-TURKISH RELATIONS.
April 1, 2000... THE last year has been particularly tricky for the Greek policy makers who had to respond to one crisis after the other. First, the abduction of the Kurdish rebel leader, Abdullah Ocalan, on 16 February 1999, initially shook the Greek...

TILE GURKHAS.(Review)
April 1, 2000... THE Brigade of Gurkhas has played a major role in British military history, usually at the sharp end of it, for nearly 200 years. Forced to move from Hong Kong when the colony was handed back to China in 1997, it is now permanently based in the...

THE EDWARDIAN LITERARY AFTERNOON: PART ONE.
April 1, 2000... THE fret and fume of High Victorian creativity subsided, the Widow of Windsor having shuffled tardily off to, as she devoutly believed, a long-postponed reunion with Albert the Good, the Boers taught a lesson the realm consigned into the...

ILLUMINATED GOSPELS 'SEEING SALVATION' AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY.
April 1, 2000... ONE enters the National Gallery's latest exhibition, Seeing Salvation, with a sigh. There, dominant in the first room, is the most shunnable platitude in British religious art, although once so revered in its three versions that this one, from...

A Eutopia.(Review)
April 1, 2000... 2099: A Eutopia. Yorick Blumenfeld. Thames and Hudson. [pounds]6.95. 112 pages. ISBN 0-500-28157-2. Writing about imaginary societies in the future, whether such works are by Sir Thomas More, William Morris, Anthony Trollope or George...

U.S. Elections Today.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... U.S. Elections Today. Philip John Davies. Manchester University Press. [pounds]40.00 h.b. and [pounds]14.99 p.b. 237 pages. ISBN 0-7190-4507-X h.b. and 0-7190-4508-8 p.b. This is part of M.U.P.'s 'Politics Today' series and was first...

British Foreign and Imperial Policy 1865-1919.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... British Foreign and Imperial Policy 1865-19 19. Graham D. Goodlad. Routledge. [pounds]6.99. 118 pages. ISBN 0-415-20338-4. This title is part of Routledge's series, 'Questions and Analysis in History' which has a good reputation as a...

Beowulf.(Review)
April 1, 2000... Beowulf Seamus Heaney, translator. Faber and Faber. [pounds]14.99. 106 pages. ISBN 0-571-20113-X. Seamus Heaney is one of the United Kingdom's most respected poets and Beowulf stands as one of the greatest epic poems in English literature....

BRITAIN AND PALESTINE.(Review)
April 1, 2000... Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine 1917-1948. Naomi Shepherd. John Murray. [pounds]20.00. 290 pages. ISBN 0-7195-5707-0. Nothing in Britain's colonial experience, as the author of this book rightly observes, prepared her for the...

UNDERSTANDING AMERICAN GOVERNMENT.(Review)
April 1, 2000... Elections A to Z. John L. Moore. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. [pounds]65.00. 600 pages. ISBN 1-57598-126-9. Congress A to Z. David R. Tarr and Ann O'Connor. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. [pounds]65.00. 600 pages. Third Edition. ISBN...

THE BRITISH EMPIRE REVISITED.(Review)
April 1, 2000... The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century. Andrew Porter, editor. Oxford University Press. [pounds]30.00. 774 pages. ISBN 0-19-820565-1. The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Twentieth Century. Judith M. Brown and...

TODAY'S JOURNALIST ON MODERN BRITAIN.(Review)
April 1, 2000... Devil's Advocate. John Humphrys. Hutchinson. [pounds]16.99. 271 pages. ISBN 0-09-180048-X. There has always been a demand for what the Victorians called 'condition-of-England books' ever since Cobbett invented the genre. They are usually...

THE WHITEWASHING OF HIROHITO.(Review)
April 1, 2000... The Yamato Dynasty: The Secret History of Japan's Imperial Family. Sterling Seagrave. Bantam Press. [pounds]17.99. ISBN 0593-044827. On 28 May 1959, Hirohito, 124th Emperor of Japan, issued a personal order. The Shinto priests, who...

HERE BE NO DRAGONS.(Review)
April 1, 2000... Nessie: The Surgeon's Photograph. David Martin and Alastair Boyd. Martin & Boyd. [pounds]6.00. 100 pages. ISBN 0-9535708-0-0. Available from 11 Ridgeway Avenue, East Barnet, Herts., EN4 8TL. This is an excellently produced account which is...

THE WORLD OF PAPERBACKS.(Review)(Brief Review)
April 1, 2000... PENGUIN have published a trade size paperback edition of Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry ([pounds]12.99. 596 pages. ISBN 0140-58899-X) edited by Peter Forbes. It tells the history of the twentieth...

Norfolk 2: North-West and South.(Review)
April 1, 2000... Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson. The Buildings of England & Penguin Books. [pounds]35.OO/Can$70.00. 864 pages. ISBN 0-14-071060-4 This latest volume in what most people still call 'Pevsner's England' is a revised version of the first edition...

The Seventy Wonders of the Ancient World: The Great Monuments and How They were Built.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... Chris Scarre, editor. Thames & Hudson. [pounds]24.95. 304 pages. This is the sort of reference book all families with children should have, for few things fascinate the interested child as much as mysterious monuments from the past. Who built...

Blue Guides.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... The Blue Guides, published in the UK by A. & C. Black, in Canada by Penguin Books and in the US by W. W. Norton, now enter their second century with two new titles. The first is the third edition of Alta Macadam's Tuscany ([pounds]14,99. 544...

The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered: A. J. P. Taylor and the Historians.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... Gordon Martel, editor. Routledge. [pounds]50.00 h.b. and [pounds]15.99 p.b. 278 pages. ISBN 0-415-16324-2 h.b. and ISBN 0-415-16325-0 p.b. This collection of essays takes as its starting point the effect of A. J. P. Taylor's famous -- or...

The Times' History of London.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... Hugh Clout, editor. Times Books-HarperCollins. [pounds]24.99. 192 pages. ISBN 0-7230-1030-7. This is a new edition of The Times' History of London first published in 1991 and republished in 1997. As is usual in these books, maps, illustrations,...

The CIS Handbook.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... Patrick Heenan and Monique Lamontagne, editors. Fitzroy Dearborn. [pounds]35.00. 285 pages. ISBN 1-57958-088-2. This volume is part of Fitzroy Dearborn's 'Regional Handbooks of Economic Development Prospects into the 21st Century' and covers...

The Life of Musorgsky.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... Caryl Emerson. Cambridge University Press. [pounds]27.50/US$44.95. 194 pages. ISBN 0-521-48009-4. This is the latest volume in Cambridge's 'Musical Lives' series and gives us a well rounded picture of the composer still most famous for his...

The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky: Unexpurgated Edition.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... Kyril Fitzlyon, translator and Joan Acocella, editor. Allen Lane: The Penguin Press. [pounds]20.00. 312 pages. ISBN 0-71-399354-5. The thoughts, or, to some, ravings, of the great ballet dancer, Vaslav Nijinsky, have for years fascinated not...

The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... Michael S. Molasky. Routledge. [pounds]5.00. 244 pages. ISBN 0-415-19194-7. This title, based on a doctoral thesis, is part of Routledge's series, 'Studies in Asia's Transformations.' The author investigates how 'Okinawan as well as mainland...

Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark c. 1880-1939.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... S. C. Williams. Clarendon Press, Oxford. [pounds]45.00. 206 pages. ISBN 0-19-820769-7. For well over 100 years church historians and sociologists have been interested in the impact, or lack thereof, of the Church of England and of other...

Art in the Age of Queen Victoria: Treasures from the Royal Academy of Arts' Permanent Collection.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... Helen Valentine, editor. Yale University Press. [pounds]25.00. 167 pages. ISBN 0-300-07997-4, The fortunes of Victorian art have gone up and down and up again since the Queen's death in 1901. This volume is something of a celebration of the...

The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... Colm Toibin, editor. Viking. [pounds]25.00/Can$55.00. 1086 pages. ISBN 0-670-85497-2. The editor of this anthology, himself one of Ireland's leading novelists, argues that 'the purpose of much Irish fiction, it seems, is to become involved in...

Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England: The Framing of the 1842 Copyright Act.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... Catherine Seville. Cambridge University Press. [pounds]40.O0/US$64.95. 300 pages. ISBN 0-521-62175-5. Most people today know of something called 'copyright' by which an author protects his literary or artistic productions. Most people also know...

Secrets of the Press: Journalists on Journalism.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... Stephen Glover, editor. Allen Lane: The Penguin Press. [pounds]20.00. 317 pages. ISBN 0-713-99265-4. This collection of essays by journalists on journalism seeks to unravel the dark secrets of Fleet Street. How are newspapers written? What...

Anthony van Dyck.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... A Life 1599-1641. Robin Blake. Constable. [pounds]25.00. 435 pages. ISBN 0-09-479720-X. This is the fullest biography of the great painter ever to appear in English and gives us as well rounded and full a picture of van Dyck's life as is...

The Faber Book of Utopias.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2000... John Carey, editor. Faber and Faber. [pounds]20.00/US$40.00. 531 pages. ISBN 0-571-19785-X. One of man's favourite past-times before the invention of television was the creation of utopias, literally 'no-places,' make believe worlds in which...