Contemporary Review articles from July 2004

Contemporary Review archives from July 2004

The Indian general election of 2004.
July 1, 2004... ON the surface, the election of 2004 had all the convolutions and contortions, all the passion and frenzy, all the dramatic twists and turns of a great theatre piece. But underneath India has once again done itself proud and lived up to its...

Iraq: the interim balance part II.
July 1, 2004... Armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me, but if I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force I should feel it should be resisted. Neville Chamberlain, 28 September...

The bankers' bankers' bank: the Bank of International Settlements.
July 1, 2004... 'YOU mean to tell me that the success of the program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of --ing bond traders?' This was the response of Bill Clinton, newly elected but not yet inaugurated as US President, when on 7...

Housing, planning and democracy.
July 1, 2004... ALTHOUGH it might sometimes be hard to discern, there is a long history of town and country planning in Great Britain. The first signs (setting aside the planned towns of the Roman period) come from the thirteenth century, when the Cinque Ports...

NEPAD ignores the fundamental politics of Africa.
July 1, 2004... IT is now well over two years since the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) was launched in Abuja, Nigeria and perhaps time to review the progress that this project for supporting development in Africa has made (see Contemporary...

Mobile Africa must not leave its villages behind.
July 1, 2004... AFRICA has entered the information revolution. In 2003 alone over 13 million new mobile subscribers were added on the continent, a figure equivalent to the total number of telephone--fixed-line and mobile-subscribers in 1995. The number of...

Shakespeare and integrated casting.
July 1, 2004... IDON'T want to suggest a Bateman cartoon, but can we discuss colour-casting for a moment? When Declan Donnellan directed his RSC Academy Company King Lear (2002), he cast a Lear, Nonso Anozie, who came over as an African potentate. That was his...

Islamic terrorism and English archbishops.
July 1, 2004... NOT the least memorable of the images generated, directly or indirectly, by events on the Islamic terrorist scene in March 2004 appeared in a Friday supplement of The Times (2 April). It comprised the contorted or smirking faces of six of...

The E.U. from the inside.(Reviews)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... The Gravy Train. Philip Bushill-Matthews. Polperro Heritage Press. [pounds sterling]15.00. 206 pages. ISBN 0-9544233-2-1. The Acknowledgements here include Tony Blair, 'who proposed the current daft system of proportional representation,...

The definitive life of Stalin.(Reviews)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Simon Sebag Montefiore. Weidenfeld & Nicholson. [pounds sterling]25.00. 690 pages. ISBN 1-842-12726-8. Sebag Montefiore has produced the authoritative account of Stalin, the man, his circle, his...

A disappointing life of Iris Murdoch.(Reviews)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her. A. N. Wilson. Hutchinson. [pounds sterling]18.99. x + 275 pages. ISBN 0-09-174246-3. This is a deeply unsatisfactory work of life-writing. It takes A. N. Wilson almost fifty pages to explain the basis of the...

Propaganda and the free press.(Reviews)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits from Propaganda. Roy Greenslade. Macmillan. [pounds sterling]30.00. 787 pages. ISBN 0-333-78311-5. 'No paper', Lord Beaverbrook said back in 1947, 'is any good at all for propaganda unless it is in a...

Poland's part in the Battle of Britain.(Reviews)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... For Your Freedom and Ours: The Kooeciuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II. Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud. William Heineman. [pounds sterling]20.00. 495 pages. ISBN 0-434-00868-0. No less an authority than Air Marshal Sir Hugh...

The women behind Kabul's bookseller.(Reviews)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... The Bookseller of Kabul. Asne Seierstad. Ingrid Christophersen, translator. Little, Brown. [pounds sterling]12.99. 245 pages. ISBN 0-316-72605-2. In most capital cities, a bookseller would be no extraordinary thing, certainly not...

New and noteworthy.(Reviews)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... New releases from CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS dominate this month's column. The first three titles are new additions to its 'companion' series for students of literature, history and the theatre. The new literary title is The Cambridge Companion...

The world of paperbacks.(Reviews)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... From LONGMAN we have new editions of two standard reference works on British political life. The first is a fifth edition of How Parliament Works ([pounds sterling]18.99) by Robert Rogers and Rhodri Walters. This replaces the 1998 edition and...

A People's History of the United States 1492--Present.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... A People's History of the United States 1492--Present. Howard Zinn. Pearson Longman. [pounds sterling]25.00 p.b. vii + 729 pages. ISBN 0-582-77283-4. This is a third edition of a text first published in 1980 and reissued in 1996. This time...

After Theory.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... After Theory. Terry Eagleton. Allen Lane. [pounds sterling]18.99. ix + 225 pages. ISBN 0-713-99732-X. Prof. Eagleton, famous among left-wing thinkers as a leading cultural theorist, has now questioned the value of currently held high cultural...

Isabel la Catolica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Isabel la Catolica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays. David A. Boruchoff, editor. Palgrave Macmillan. [pounds sterling]45.00. xviii + 312 pages. ISBN 0-312-29307-0. In this collection of eleven articles, scholars from Spain, Canada, the U.S....

Transplant: From Myth to Reality.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Transplant: From Myth to Reality. Nicholas L. Tilney. Yale University Press. [pounds sterling]19.95. xii + 320 pages. ISBN 0-300-09963-0. This title, published by Yale's New Haven branch, gives readers a history of the 'parallel evolution of...

Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market 1836-1916.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market 1836-1916. Alexis Weedon. Ashgate. [pounds sterling]40.00. xvi + 212 pages. ISBN 0-7546-3527-9. One of the most profound changes of the nineteenth century was the massive...

Magna Carta: Through the Ages.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Magna Carta through the Ages. Ralph V. Turner. Pearson Longman. [pounds sterling]19.99. x + 256 pages. ISBN 0-582-43826-8. As the author points out, Magna Carta was a 'practical solution to political problems', the demand that the King govern...

The Daily Telegraph Book of Military Obituaries.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... The Daily Telegraph Book of Military Obituaries. David Twiston Davies, editor. Grub Street. [pounds sterling]17.99. 416 pages. ISBN 1-904010-34-2. This latest edition of the Daily Telegraph's obituaries follows on several earlier and highly...

Jung: A Biography.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Jung: A Biography. Deirdre Bair. Little, Brown. [pounds sterling]25.00. xiii + 882 pages. ISBN 0-316-85434-4. This is Prof. Bair's fourth biography of intellectuals who have helped to shape our world. In this case it was Jung who gave modern...

The Origins of the First World War.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... The Origins of the First World War. Gordon Martel. Pearson Longman. [pounds sterling]9.99p.b. xix + 162 pages. ISBN 0-582-43804-7. As part of Longman's 'Seminar Studies in History' this book aims at bridging the gap between the latest...

Dipped Into Oblivion.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Dipped Into Oblivion. Sacha Bonsor. Rider. [pounds sterling]9.99. 190 pages. ISBN 1-84413229-3. The author was a twenty-year-old student in the University of Newcastle when she became distressingly ill with what was eventually diagnosed as a...

Mussolini.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Mussolini. Peter Neville. Routledge. [pounds sterling]9.99 p.b. xiv + 237 pages. ISBN 0-415-24990-2. This short biography, part of Routledge's Historical Biographies series, rejects the view of Mussolini as a 'cynical opportunist obsessed only...

Slim, Master of War: Burma and the Birth of Modern Warfare.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Slim, Master of War: Burma and the Birth of Modern Warfare. Robert Lyman. Constable. [pounds sterling]25.00. xvii + 327 pages. ISBN 1-84119-811-0. Lord Mountbatten once wrote that William Slim, later Viscount Slim, was 'the finest general the...

Henry VIII: A Study in Kingship.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Henry VIII: A Study in Kingship. Michael A. R. Graves. Pearson Longman. [pounds sterling]14.99 p.b. xi + 217 pages. ISBN 0-582-38110-X. This title is another in Longman's series, Profiles in Power. In this well argued and succinct presentation,...

Mendelssohn: A Life in Music.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Mendelssohn: A Life in Music. R. Larry Todd. Oxford University Press. [pounds sterling]25.00. xxix + 683 pages. ISBN 0-19-511043-9. This biography, published by O.U.P. New York, seeks to give readers a balanced view of a composer whose fate has...

Constitution-Making and the Labour Party.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Constitution-Making and the Labour Party. Mark Evans. Palgrave Macmillan. [pounds sterling]55.00. xiii + 386 pages. ISBN 0-333-77614-3. Once the Labour Party gave over socialism there was little to do but play with the Constitution. Since 1997...

History in Quotations.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... History in Quotations. M. J. Cohen and John Major. Cassell. [pounds sterling]30.00. xxviii + 1008. ISBN 0-304-35387-6. This collection of some 9,000 quotations has been assembled by a team of thirty-seven contributors and is given an imprimatur...

The Poems of Andrew Marvell.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... The Poems of Andrew Marvell. Nigel Smith, editor. Pearson Longman. [pounds sterling]50.00. xxv + 468 pages. ISBN 0-582-07770-2. This latest number in the well established 'Longman Annotated English Poets' series fully lives up to the high...

The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Benny Morris. Cambridge University Press. [pounds sterling]70.00 (US$110). xii + 640 pages. ISBN 0-521-00967-7. The author of this study teaches History in Israel's Ben-Gurion University....

American Literature Before 1880.(Reviews)(Brief Article)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... American Literature Before 1880. Robert Lawson-Peebles. Pearson Longman. [pounds sterling]19.99 p.b. x + 342 pages. ISBN 0-582-49522-9. This survey begins with a long analysis of what constitutes American literature and what constitutes the...