Contemporary Review articles from April 2001

Contemporary Review archives from April 2001

PETROL PROTEST -- CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE OR SELF-INTEREST?
April 1, 2001... ACCORDING to many of its supporters, the petrol protest which took place during the Autumn of 2000 was an example of grass roots democracy in action; an act of civil disobedience designed to force an out of touch government to take notice of...

REBUILDING AFGHANISTAN.
April 1, 2001... Editor's Note: Afghanistan has been much in the news in recent weeks because the Taliban government ordered the destruction of ancient statues of the Buddha on the ground that they offended Islam. In spite of protests from numerous other...

THE GYPSIES IN HUNGARY.
April 1, 2001... ZSOLT Janos, a tall, olive skinned lad with intelligent, widely set dreamy eyes, wants to qualify as a NATO pilot to prevent the recurrence of ethnic cleansing anywhere in Europe. He is a member of the first graduating class of Hungary's Gandhi...

CARAVAGGIO IN PICCADILLY.
April 1, 2001... THE only dull thing about The Genius of Rome, 1592-1623, the current exhibition at the Royal Academy, is its title. It is a stupendous and, on a first visit, stupifying display of over 140 pictures by fifty artists. After two visits one's...

THE ARCHER-SHEE CASE: THE ROOT OF TERENCE RATTIGAN'S 'THE WINSLOW BOY'.
April 1, 2001... BETWEEN 1908 and 1910 the English public underwent one of its periodic outbursts of emotion over a case of clear governmental injustice. George Archer-Shee was a thirteen-year-old cadet at Osborne Naval College in the Isle of Wight when he was...

RUSSIAN STUDENTS AND HISTORY.
April 1, 2001... 'REVISIONIST' history appears to have achieved widespread currency in Britain in recent years. History, we are instructed by several representatives of the intelligentsia (intelligentsia is not an English, but a Russian word, invented in the...

LONDON'S MILLENNIUM DOME.(Poem)
April 1, 2001... Fat cats lick clean the dish wanting more And sly politicians who formed committees To plan, build and offer contracts Now distance themselves From London's world shame. . . the Dome. The British people's Lottery money ...

BRIAN MOORE: NOVELIST IN SEARCH OF AN IRISH IDENTITY.
April 1, 2001... BRIAN Moore, who died in the final year of the twentieth century is increasingly seen as one of the most perceptive novelists of that troubled era. He was born in Belfast on 25th August 1921 and was raised in a devout Catholic family, with six...

CANADA'S ISLAND HIGHWAY.
April 1, 2001... THE 'Island Highway' stretches along the eastern shore of Vancouver Island on Canada's west coast, from Victoria at its southern tip to Port Hardy in the north, where the 'British Columbia Ferries' motor vessel Queen of the North leaves for...

GUN RUNNING IN IRELAND.(Review)
April 1, 2001... The Arms Trial. Justin O'Brien. Gill & Macmillan. [pound]9.99 p.b. 285 pages. ISBN 0-7171-3062-2. In May 1970 Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney were dismissed from government by the then Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, for allegedly using government...

LIFE AFTER OIL: AN ACTIVIST'S ANALYSIS.(Review)
April 1, 2001... The Carbon War. Dispatches from the End of the Oil Century. Jeremy Leggett. Allen Lane: The Penguin Press. [pound]20.00. 338 pages. ISBN 0-713-99360-X. Environmental issues have never been more prominent on international and domestic...

A CLASS WAR WARRIOR.(Review)
April 1, 2001... Red Rose Blues: The Story of a Good Labour Man. Joe Ashton. Macmillan. [pound]17.99. 358 pages. ISBN 0-333-77973-8. In these memoirs we read the words of old Labour, the Party of the Trade Unions and the class war. It starts with a...

NEW PERSPECTIVES IN HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY.(Review)
April 1, 2001... World System History: The Social Science of Long-Term Change. Robert A. Denemark et al, editors. Routledge. [pound]50.00 h.b./[pound]16.99 p.b. 345 pages. ISBN 0-415-23276-7 h.b. and 0-415-23277-5 p.b. Development Geography Rupert Hodder....

AMERICA'S NEW ELITE: 'BOBOS' ON THE MARCH.(Review)
April 1, 2001... Bobos in Paradise. David Brooks. Simon & Schuster. [pound]16.99/US$25.00. 285 pages. ISBN 0-684-85377-9. In the 1960s we had hippies. In the 1980s we had yuppies. Now, in the twenty-first century, we have Bobos. And what are they? According...

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN.(Review)
April 1, 2001... Hans Christian Andersen. The Life of a Storyteller. Jackie Wullschlager. Allen Lane, The Penguin Press. [pound]20.00. 505 Pages. ISBN 0-713-99325-1. On New Year's Day 1835 Hans Christian Andersen wrote, 'I am now starting on some "fairy...

DARWIN, SCIENCE AND RELIGION.(Review)
April 1, 2001... Can a Darwinian be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion. Michael Ruse. Cambridge University Press. [pound]16.95. US$24.95. ISBN 0-521-63144-0. 'My theology is a simple muddle', said Charles Darwin near the end of his...

Nell Gwynne: A Passionate Life.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... Nell Gwynne: A Passionate Life. Graham Hopkins. Robson Books. [pound]16.95. 284 pages. ISBN 1-86105-370-3. Nell Gwynne, orange-seller, actress and prostitute, became the mistress of Charles II and the mother of two of his children. She was a...

Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis. Paul O'Keeffe. Jonathan Cape. [pound]25.00. 697 pages. ISBN 0-224-03102-3. Wyndham Lewis's reputation has declined since his death and in part this is because he engaged in so many different fields...

Hall of Mirrors.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... Hall of Mirrors. David Sinclair. Century. [pound]16.99. 324 pages. ISBN 0-7126-8389-5. This study of the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Versailles takes as its title the grand salon at Versailles in which the full conference met. The...

Encyclopedia of German Literature.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... Encyclopedia of German Literature. Matthias Konzett, editor. [pound]110.00. Fitzroy Dearborn. 1136 pages. ISBN 1-57958138-2. This massive two-volume encyclopedia -- Volume One covers A to I and Volume Two, J to Z -- claims a unique status...

Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. Lynda Nead. Yale University Press. [pound]19.95. 251 pages. ISBN 0-300-08505-2. London, like any great city, is always a-building but in the nineteenth-century London...

Anticlericalism in Britain.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... Anticlericalism in Britain c. 1500-1914. Nigel Aston and Matthew Cragoe, editors. Sutton Publishing. [pound]45.00. 225 pages. ISBN 0-7509-2205-2. This is a very valuable collection of essays into a subject that is often ignored in British...

Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689. John Coffey. Longman. [pound]17.99 p.b. 244 pages. ISBN 0-582-30464-4. This volume is the first survey of this topic since W. K. Jordan's Development of Religious Toleration in...

Karl Popper -- The Formative Years, 1902-1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... Karl Popper -- The Formative Years, 1902-1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna. Malachi H. Hacohen. Cambridge University Press. [pound]35.00/US$54.95. 6l0pages. ISBN 0-521-47053-6. This 'intellectual biography. . . of one of the most...

The History of the University of Oxford. Volume VII. Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... The History of the University of Oxford. Volume VII. Nineteenth-Century Oxford, Part 2. M G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys, editors. Clarendon Press. [pound]75.00. 993 pages. ISBN 0-19-951017-2. This seventh volume completes the survey of the...

The Philosopher's Stone: A Quest for the Secrets of Alchemy.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... The Philosopher's Stone: A Quest for the Secrets of Alchemy. Peter Marshall. Macmillan. [pound]20.00. 545 pages. ISBN 0-333-76367-X. This study of the history of alchemy, the science of transformation that in Europe flourished in the Middle...

Encyclopedia of Mediaeval Literature.(Review)
April 1, 2001... Encyclopedia of Mediaeval Literature. Robert Thomas Lambdin and Laura Cooner Lambdin, editors. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. [pound]65.00. 549 pages. ISBN 157958-054-8. This reference work covers 'topics related to medieval literature' which...

The Reign of King Stephen, 1135-1154.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... The Reign of King Stephen, 1135-1154. David Crouch. Longman. [pound]17.99 p.b. 384 pages. ISBN 0-582-22657-0. The reign and personality of King Stephen have attracted a fair amount of attention from mediaeval historians in recent years....

The Great War and the Twentieth Century.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... The Great War and the Twentieth Century Jay Winter, Geoffrey Parker and Mary R. Habeck, editors. Yale University Press. [pound]19.95. 356 pages. ISBN 0-300-08154-5. This collection of eleven essays on the effects of the Great War (1914-1918) is...

The Road to Omdurman.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... Kitchener. John Pollock. Constable. [pound]20.00. 598 pages. ISBN 0-09-480340-4. At first sight this book may be slightly confusing. In 1998 Constable published The Road to Omdurman, a biography of Kitchener in his earlier years. This volume...

De Tocqueville.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... De Tocqueville. Cheryl B. Welch. Oxford University Press. [pound]15.99 p.b. 284 pages. ISBN 0-19-878131-8. The author's aim is to examine what she calls the paradox of Tocqueville, how a French aristocrat's analysis of American democracy in the...

Contemporary France: Essays and Texts on Politics, Economics and Society.(Review)
April 1, 2001... Contemporary France: Essays and Texts on Politics, Economics and Society. Jill Forbes, Nick Hewlett and Francois Nectoux. Longman. Second Edition. [pound]19.99. 388 pages. ISBN 0-582-36159-2. This volume is part of Longman's 'Contemporary...

The Making of the English Patient: A Guide to Sources for the Social History of Medicine.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... The Making of the English Patient: A Guide to Sources for the Social History of Medicine. Joan Lane. Sutton Publishing. [pound]25.00. 208 pages. ISBN 0-7509-2145-5. Taking its title from the highly successful film, this book looks at the...

Reforming the Constitution: Debates in Twentieth-Century Britain.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... Reforming the Constitution: Debates in Twentieth-Century Britain. Peter Catterall, Wolfram Kaiser and Ulrike Walton-Jordan, editors. Frank Cass. [pound]45.00 h.b. and [pound]17.50 h.b. 304 pages. ISBN 07146-5056-0 h.b. and 07146-8107-5 p.b. By...

Utopian England: Community Experiments 1900-1945.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... Utopian England: Community Experiments 1900-1945. Dennis Hardy. Routledge. [pound]65.00. 305 pages. ISBN 0-41924660-6. One usually thinks of the United States in the nineteenth century or England in the seventeenth as the home of utopian...

The Making of King James II: The Formative Years of a Fallen King.(Review)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2001... The Making of King James II: The Formative Years of a Fallen King. John Callow. Sutton Publishing. [pound]20.00/US$32.95. 373 pages. ISBN 0-7509-2398-9. The author's aim is to 'reconstruct James's career' by examining in detail his formative...