Following another thread in another place, here are a couple of reviews of books about Silvio Berlusconi, currently Prime Minister of Italy for the third time. As you can see, these reviews predate the 2006 elections, won by a united Left under Prodi (perhaps not quite the gran tessitore Aldo Moro was, but certainly a [...]
There was a curious piece in the ‘Work’ section of Saturday’s Guardian (I only read it for the problem page). It was headed
10 things we’ve learned so far
We send our reporters around the UK to see what happens in a downturn
but on inspection there were only three things that they’d learnt from their roving reporters; [...]
22 February 2009 – 1:33 am
My book: an announcement and a question.
I’m quite excited about my book. Or should I say, my book – for lo, that’s an actual link to a page where you can, apparently, pre-order it, with free UK delivery and everything. And here’s the publisher’s page about the book, and here’s what it says there:
‘More work! [...]
A quick post to register a rather striking piece of news (via), which didn’t seem to get much notice in the British media. First, here’s the complete text of a piece on torture from the January 2008 Washington Monthly:
According to the latest polls, two-thirds of the American public believes that torturing suspected terrorists to gain [...]
24 December 2008 – 1:04 am
(Updated Christmas Eve, after spotting a flaw in my statistical analysis. I am deeply sad.)
Now that it’s well and truly over, two things really stick in my mind about the Manchester Congestion Charge vote. (Strictly speaking, the Manchester Transport Innovation Fund vote – but I don’t think it’s a fund that we voted to reject.)
One [...]
30 November 2008 – 12:42 am
Belatedly, a bit more Bingham. (Updated 30/11.) And a question: what, exactly, was Martin Kettle saying in this column?
What’s most remarkable about the column is that Kettle doesn’t actually contest the argument Bingham put forward. Instead, there’s a steady drip-feed of insinuations that Bingham’s speech shouldn’t be taken seriously, whatever it was he actually said [...]
20 November 2008 – 9:42 pm
Airmiles was quoted in the LRB the other week:
it was clear soon after 9/11 that the Bush administration … believed that the awesome demonstration of American military muscle would intimidate present and potential enemies everywhere. The administration had its own intellectual cheerleaders and experts on the Middle East: Bernard Lewis, for instance, whose pet conviction [...]
2 October 2008 – 12:48 am
My worldview was formed in the 1970s, when (it seemed to me) there was no such thing as lifestyle: to say that personal choices mattered, were worthy of attention, was to say that the personal was political, which in turn connected those choices to a whole range of broader commitments. Because it all was connected, [...]
Eliot Weinberger’s Obama v. Clinton: A Retrospective was clearly written in the heat of (interim) triumph:
Just when you thought [Clinton] had hit bottom, she went even lower. She tried to cast Obama as a scary black man who, as subliminally suggested in her infamous (and mercilessly parodied) ‘3 a.m.’ ad, would break into your house [...]
WorldbyStorm:
Once Blair et al dreamed of a hegemonic project that would dominate the centre left for decades. At this rate they’ll be lucky to salvage anything from the wreckage.
Which reminded me of something I wrote for Casablanca (anyone else remember Casablanca?) in October 1994. To set the scene, John Major’s Conservative government had been re-elected [...]
Something from the Italian press, following on from Liam. This is taken from a column by Curzio Maltese in today’s Repubblica. ‘Il Caimano’ – ‘the caiman‘ – is a popular and well-deserved nickname for Berlusconi.
It’s a bit naive – no, extremely naive – to profess to be astonished that Berlusconi the statesman has turned back [...]
Obsolete has an excellent, if inevitably depressing, analysis of the latest from Louise Casey. I was particularly struck by one line in particular: apparently Casey thinks it’s important
to get the public more engaged in tackling crime and to stop the erosion of community spirit.
Oh-oh – Broken Windows alert. Criminologists have spent years of their lives [...]
I seem to be disagreeing with WorldbyStorm quite a lot lately. Here’s WbS on the Lisbon Treaty:
I’d tend to the view that it is difficult to see how 26 countries won’t move forward. Why shouldn’t they? There’s no advantage to the status quo.
…
I was once, in a fairly received way, quite wedded to the federal [...]
A bit more oneirography (I don’t intend to make a habit of it). I had a dream last night which reminded me oddly of a dream I made up some years ago. (I wrote it for a short story (unpublished); the story was vaguely, partially autobiographical, but the dream was completely made up.) See if [...]
An Italian postscript. Here’s a post which originally appeared eighteen months ago (23/11/06) at the recently-revived Sharpener. I think it stands up pretty well: I got the importance of fragmenting the old Christian Democrat bloc, Prodi’s skill in knitting together ex-Christian Democrats and ex-Communists, and the lamentable importance of Clemente Mastella. (Who didn’t even stand [...]
For the Left, the Italian elections were an avoidable disaster. Unfortunately, they weren’t avoidable by the Left.
Brief history lesson. Western Communist Parties always were contradictory formations, and the Italian Communist Party (PCI) more than most. The official ideology of the party was gradualist: the irreversible socialist transformation of society was to be achieved through [...]
7 November 2007 – 11:48 pm
Apologies for the long silence – and for the post that’s about to follow, which will be of much greater interest to some than others.
Unlike Liam and Andy, I am not now and have never been a member of RESPECT. Like Liam and Andy, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the fallout within [...]
I’ve been away for a week & come back to a letter from my MP, Tony Lloyd. Who writes:
Whilst I do not think there should be a blanket policy for all Iraqis working for the UK Government, we need to give proper consideration to the many Iraqis whose lives are at risk. It is important [...]
Some years ago, John Harris (not the pundit) proposed a thought-experiment called the Survival Lottery. The premise was that the supply of organs for transplant is currently inadequate to meet the demand. Moreover, the whole business of harvesting organs for transplant is fraught with practical and emotional difficulties, putting both the bereaved and potential recipients [...]
Andy draws our attention to this statement by Alex Callinicos (‘for the SWP Central Committee’):
as we put it in our ‘International Perspectives 2005’, ‘if the movements are most advanced in Latin America, the most important front in the struggle against US imperialism is in Iraq.’ It is the resistance in Iraq that is in the [...]
