Diplomats are masters of urbane doubletalk, so it is refreshing to find a former Foreign Office mandarin issuing a trenchant indictment of Britain’s deplorable geopolitical performance over the last twenty-five years. Arthur Snell held a senior post in the government’s anti-terrorist programme and now hosts a podcast named Doomsday Watch. In this book he argues […]
On 10 September 1976, the day after Chairman Mao died, Gamani Corea, secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, sent a condolence note to the ambassador of the permanent mission of the People’s Republic of China at the United Nations in Geneva: ‘Please convey to the family of Chairman Mao and to […]
If anyone is qualified to write a history of free-market thinking, it is surely Jacob Soll. He is a professor of history, philosophy and accounting at the University of Southern California, and he has needed to draw on all three disciplines to write this history, which stretches from Cicero to Milton Friedman and beyond. The book is simultaneously interesting and frustrating. The subject’s interest is obvious enough: given
It would be hard to find a reputable historian still professing the ‘great man’ theory of history. Widely said to have originated with Thomas Carlyle in the 19th century, the theory had really been the stock-in-trade of annalists since history started to be written, and only the very best historians avoided it. Carlyle’s heroes were […]
Whether tracking prey, scoping a deal, scouting a romantic partner or raising our young, humans have always sought to deduce and then to influence the thinking of those about us. We often succeed, sometimes on a large scale: the results of such influence have included cults, theocracies and totalitarian propaganda, as well as populations responsive […]
It was way back in 2013 when Brett Scott first contacted me. He told me he’d written a book called The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance, ‘which I actually sell for bitcoin,’ he explained. Buying something with bitcoin? The idea seemed preposterous then; now I wish I’d sold my own book for bitcoin. There are […]
At 3am on 6 July 2011, the USS Philippine Sea, on piracy patrol in the Gulf of Aden, received a radio distress message: ‘Coalition warship, coalition warship, this is Brillante Virtuoso. We are under attack.’ There were pirates on board and the ship was on fire. After abandoning ship, the tanker’s mainly Filipino crew, along with their packed suitcases, were picked up by the US cruiser from a large lifeboat. The Brillante’s captain explained
Michael Mandelbaum is one of the most lucid American commentators on international affairs. His books are thought-provoking, even when one does not agree with him. He has an enviable knack of explaining complex matters in crisp and sometimes witty prose. The focus of The Rise and Fall of Peace on Earth is the quarter-century following […]
The government’s Research Excellence Framework (REF), which determines the allocation of research funding to British universities, tends to reward microadvances in each field. These usually take the form of articles published in the top peer-reviewed journals, particularly in the USA. This suits some disciplines better than others. When I was director of the London School […]
It took liberals just two decades to turn from hubris to hand-wringing. When the Berlin Wall fell, their confidence was unbounded. The ‘End of History’ was declared. Liberalism had won. Today, with the rise of populism, liberals are walking around like clueless tourists, wondering how we ended up here and what to do about it. Liberals forgot three fundamental facts
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm