Contemporary Review articles from October 2003

Contemporary Review archives from October 2003

Europe and the demographic time bomb.
October 1, 2003... OPINION is divided over why Britain and America went to war with Iraq. Perhaps it was all about oil, or then again, perhaps it was to find and destroy weapons of mass destruction. Time as well as Parliamentary and Congressional inquiries may...

Turkmenbashi and his Turkmenistan.
October 1, 2003... AMONG the republics of the former Soviet Union, Turkmenistan, with a population approaching five million, attracts particular attention from several standpoints. It has one of the largest gas reserves in the world; unusually high GDP growth...

Hope for Zimbabwe: a student's view.
October 1, 2003... Editor's Note: The following essay by a sixteen-year-old Zimbabwean student won the 2003 Commonwealth Essay Competition. She studies at Arundel School in Harare and hopes to go to University to read law and diplomacy. Her interests include...

Witnessing Iraq's last revolution.
October 1, 2003... IRAQ, broken by war, revolution and the military despots who have ruled it since the overthrow of the monarchy forty-five years ago, faces an uncertain future. The appointment of an Iraqi governing council, in effect an interim government with...

Esmond Wright: historian and MP.(Obituary)
October 1, 2003... LONG-time readers of Contemporary Review will have become quite used to seeing the name of Esmond Wright frequently in these pages over many decades. His death in August at the age of 87 deprives us both of further articles and reviews and also...

Britain and Italy's Waldensian Church.
October 1, 2003... MOST people well-grounded in English literature have encountered the Waldensians once--in the famous sonnet written on 'the late massacre in Piedmont' when John Milton, despite encroaching blindness, was still consultant spin-doctor for...

The vanishing man of letters.
October 1, 2003... Part Two TRADITIONALLY, the image of the Man of Letters is that of a quiet and gentle scholar leading an eminently civilised life isolated behind the stout book barriers of his comfortable study. Perhaps. But sometimes the Man of Letters...

Bollywood.
October 1, 2003... INDIAN cinema is unique. On average, 800 films are produced and distributed every year, that is more than two per day, and shown to 11,000,000 people every day in 13,000 cinemas across India. To these statistics can be added the export of film...

What Makes Irish Terrorists Tick.(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Armed Struggle: A History of the IRA. Richard English. Macmillan. 20.00 [pounds sterling]. 472 pages. ISBN 1-4050-0108-9. Winston Churchill once said that anyone who claimed to understand the Irish question could not have looked at the...

Novelists and Conscience.(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Consciousness and the Novel. David Lodge. Secker and Warburg. 18.99 [pounds sterling]. 320 pages. ISBN 0-436-21005-3. As David Lodge asserts in this adventurous and ambitious work, consciousness has always been the business of the novelist,...

A Critical Look at Golding's Novels.(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... William Golding: A Critical Study of the Novels. Mark Kinkead-Weekes and Ian Gregor. Faber and Faber. 16.99 [pounds sterling] p. b. 412 pages. ISBN 0-571-21564-5. It is now a decade since William Golding's sudden death from heart failure...

A Gaelic History of Scotland.(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... A New History of Scotland. Murray G. H. Pittock. Sutton Publishing. 8.99 [pounds sterling] p.b. 342 pages. ISBN 0-7509-2786-0. Political devolution, or the assertion of Scottish identity which brought it about, has stimulated a market for...

A New Look at Civic Republicanism.(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Civic Republicanism. Iseult Honohan. Routledge. 15.99 [pounds sterling]. 328 pages. ISBN 0-415-21211-1. The author teaches political theory in University College Dublin and her book is one in a series on major philosophical problems. The...

Cudlipp and King: Tyrants of Fleet Street.(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the Glory Days of Fleet Street. Ruth Dudley Edwards. Secker & Warburg. 20.00 [pounds sterling]. 484 pages. ISBN 0-436-19992-0. 'Power', Cecil King said after he was sacked as chairman...

The Devil and Professor Dawkins.(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Essays. Richard Dawkins. Latha Menon, editor. Weidenfeld and Nicholson. 16.99 [pounds sterling]. 264 pages. ISBN 0-297-82973-4. This reviewer always reads anything by Richard Dawkins with pleasure, even...

The Most Beautiful Villages of France.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Dominique Reperant. Thames & Hudson. 28.00 [pounds sterling]. 232 pages. ISBN 0-500-54162-0. This is the seventh edition of this deservedly popular work which is based on the photographs of M. Reperant. Of the 198 illustrations, 164 are in...

The Habsburg Monarchy, 1490-1848: Attributes of Empire.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Paula Sutter Fichtner. Palgrave Macmillan. 49.50 [pounds sterling]. 222 pages. ISBN 0-333-73727-X. This latest volume in the European History in Perspective series covers the period during which the Habsburg Monarchy created the Empire which...

The Legendary Past World of Myths.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Marina Warner et al. The British Museum Press. 16.99 [pounds sterling]. 410 pages. ISBN 0-71412783-3. This compilation, introduced by the author and historian, Marina Warner, has essays by five experts in mythology in which they analyse,...

Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Alison Weir. Jonathan Cape. 20.00 [pounds sterling]. 621 pages. ISBN 0-22406023-6. Mary, Queen of Scots and mother of James I, under whom the realms of England and Scotland were united, remains one of the most colourful and debated figures in...

Greenback: the Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Jason Goodwin. Hamish Hamilton. 14.99 [pounds sterling]. 320 pages. ISBN 0-241-14098-6. This book is a history of a currency and the role it has played in the history of a country, in this case, the United States. The author's chatty style...

Letters from the Mary Rose.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... C. S. Knighton and David Loades, editors. Sutton Publishing and The Mary Rose Trust. 20.00 [pounds sterling]. 198 pages. ISBN 0-75092839-5. The raising of the surviving parts of Henry VIII's great ship, in 1982, was a tremendous achievement in...

When the King Took Flight.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Timothy Tackett. Harvard University Press. 16.50 [pounds sterling]. 270 pages. ISBN 0-674-01054-X. The attempt of Louis XVI, his Queen, Marie Antoinette, and their children to escape the Parisian revolutionaries in 1791, and their subsequent...

Nationalism and Internationalism in Imperial Japan: Autonomy, Asian Brotherhood, or World Citizenship?(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Dick Stegewems, editor. RoufledgeCurzon. 60.00 [pounds sterling]. 255 pages. ISBN 0-700-71496-01. This collection of ten essays by a team of American, Australian, New Zealand and Japanese scholars looks at the tensions involved in modern...

First to Fly: the Unlikely Triumph of Wilbur and Orville Wright.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... James Tobin. John Murray. 25.00 [pounds sterling]. 431 pages. ISBN 0-7195-5727-5. This account of the Wright brothers' success in manufacturing and flying aeroplanes was first published in the U.S. by Free Press. It is one of many new titles to...

The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Samuel Bawlf. Alien Lane. 20.00 [pounds sterling]. 400 pages. ISBN 0-713-99589-0. Sir Francis Drake is the most famous navigator of the first Elizabethan age, especially for his audacious spirit in harrowing the Spanish fleets laden with South...

Beef and Liberty.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Ben Rogers. Chatto & Windus. 207 pages. ISBN 0-70116980-X. The underlying theme of this book is that 'all cultural identity is closely bound up with food and cooking'. Dr Rogers' concern is with the identification of Englishmen with beef and...

All the King's Women: Love, Sex and Politics in the Life of Charles II.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Derek Wilson. Hutchinson. 20.00 [pounds sterling]. 408 pages. ISBN 0-09-179379-3. The difficulty in writing anything on Charles II is that so much has already been written. A writer needs an 'angle' and in this study, the author has given it an...

SOE: the Scientific Secrets.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... Fredric Boyce and Douglas Everett. Sutton Publishing, 19.99 [pounds sterling]. 310 pages. ISBN 0-75093165-5. As Prof. M.R.D. Foot says in his foreword, both authors write 'with inside knowledge' as Douglas Everett was part of SOE during the war...

The '45.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Christopher Duffy. Cassell. 20.00 [pounds sterling]. 639 pages. ISBN 0-304-35525-9. Of the books published on the last serious attempt of the Stuart dynasty, in the person of the 'Young Pretender', to regain the Throne, this is the most...

Infidels: the Conflict between Christendom and Islam 638-2002.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Andrew Wheatcroft. Viking. 20.00 [pounds sterling]. 443 pages. ISBN 0-670-86942-2. The author admits that his book 'covers a huge sweep, of both time and place' and he therefore centres it on 'the world connected with the Mediterranean'. His...

The Lost City of Solomon & Sheba: an African Mystery.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Robin Brown-Lowe. Sutton Publishing. 20.00 [pounds sterling]. 256 pages. ISBN 0-7509-3033-0. This book is partly a travelogue and partly an investigation into ancient myths and legends centred on the 'lost civilisation' behind 'Great Zimbabwe'...

Elizabeth's London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Liza Picard. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 20.00 [pounds sterling]. 342 pages. ISBN 0-297-60729-4. The author gained fame somewhat late in life for her surveys of London life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this, her third survey of...

Stalin's Last Crime: the Doctors' Plot.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Pavlovich Naumov. John Murray. 20.00 [pounds sterling]. 399 pages. ISBN 0-7195-5448-9. The work on this book, first published in the U.S., began in the 1980s in the research undertaken by Vladimir Naumov for Russia's...

Defence Management in Uncertain Times.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
October 1, 2003... Teri McConville and Richard Holmes. Frank Cass. 45.00 [pounds sterling]. 221 pages. ISBN 0-7146-5522-8. This valuable collection, the third title published in the Cranfield Defence Management Series, has ten essays which examine recent changes...

Telegram from Geurnica: the Extraordinary Life of George Steer, War Correspondent.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... Nicholas Rankin. Faber and Faber. 14.99 [pounds sterling]. 283 pages. ISBN 0-57120563-1. George Steer's most influential piece of journalism was his eye-witness report of the Nazi aerial destruction of the Basque town of Geurnica in 1937,...