A Fortnightly Review of
On the Governing of Empires
by Alasdair Paterson.
Shearsman Books. 96pp. £8.95
By Edgar Mason.
THE BACK COVER OF Alasdair Paterson’s new collection – his first in over 20 years – shows the author, looking remarkably feline and standing in front of a restaurant called “Le Flaneur”. This is probably the worst authorial joke in On the Governing of Empires (North American readers here), and thank God for that – it leaves the rest of the book free to be as wonderful as it is.
Paterson, who won the Eric Gregory award in 1975, has not been as idle as that author photo might pretend. His years as a globe-trotting librarian have given him what is possibly one of the finest conceits of the last decade or so. On the Governing of Empires is, in fact, a very slight rephrasing of the title of an encyclopedia of 53 volumes, written by Emperor Constantine VII of Constantinople, and passed on to his grandson – who, if the letter fragment that forms one of the book’s epigrams is to be believed, destroyed much of the work. And so Mr. Paterson has undertaken to “reconstruct” – his word – the missing volumes. Continue reading “· Alasdair Paterson’s grand poetry of Byzantine governance.” »
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL [Financial Times] – Where governments come from, what they’re for, who gets to form them – these questions have long fascinated philosophers. Hobbes saw a truce in a “war of all against all”. Rousseau described a “social contract”. The Stanford University political scientist Francis Fukuyama believes we can do better than that. In the wake of Darwin and the great 19th-century anthropologists, we can move beyond parables and speculation. We can build a theory of the origins of government from what we know about biology and history… Continue reading “· Francis Fukuyama, who rode collapse to the top, now has a view of American decline.” »
By HANNES KOCH [Der Spiegel] – They jog in orderly rows of twos through the industrial area. The young people, who look about 19 or 20, hope to be future builders of the iPad. Each of them holds a brown envelope in his or her left hand that contains their job application. At the foreman’s command, they turn a corner onto the steps of the recruitment office.
They are here because of electronic component manufacturer Foxconn, which is hiring tens of thousands of employees. The company has built new factories in the Chinese city of Chengdu to produce millions of iPads for Apple. The supplier is known for the strict rules it imposes on its employees. Continue reading “· Building iPads in China: the workers of the future are united in silence.” »
[Calamo] – TWO INTERESTING POLLS BY Gallup were released today. One shows growing Republican indifference to candidates such as Newt Gingrich, the latest candidate to join the GOP hunt:
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, expected to announce his presidential candidacy on Wednesday, is well-known among Republicans, but has a below-average — and declining — Positive Intensity Score. Mike Huckabee receives the highest Positive Intensity Score among Republicans nationwide who recognize him. Donald Trump, although universally recognized by Republicans, has the lowest Positive Intensity Score of any of the 13 candidates tested in Gallup’s April 25-May 8 tracking. Continue reading “· Gauging the Gingrich effect on American voters.” »
NA– USEATED BY TRITE METAPHORS about financial health? Welcome to the Guardian readers’ ward, where, at least for today, Turkey is not the sick man of Europe. Greece is.
By IAN TRAYNOR [The Guardian] – Greece was diagnosed as critically insolvent a year ago. It was placed in the eurozone’s intensive care ward, treated with an infusion of €110bn and put on a crash diet to thin its bloated state sector. But 12 months on, the patient is getting sicker.
Continue reading “· Greece and its pleasant-tasting poison pill.” »
By ANTHONY GRAFTON [Daily Princetonian] – Last week, I found myself at a conference on universities at New York University. Well-informed professors spoke eloquently about the casualization of academic work and the rising threats to academic freedom, the destructive efforts of politicians and soi-disant reformers to transform the public schools and the difficulty of defending the humanities. I felt myself slipping into my familiar and satisfying state of despair at the condition of my profession.
Continue reading “· Academics could have it worse. They could be journalists.” »
Mr. P: The face of the eurozone's future?
By IRWIN STELZER [The Wall Street Journal] – It is one year since the powers-that-be in the euro zone crafted a plan to get Greece over a liquidity hump and onto the sunlit meadows of fiscal sustainability. Since then, the fiscal situation in Greece has deteriorated, the economy has gone into recession, and the team sent to check on Greece’s progress today will undoubtedly struggle to find the words to translate the reality of the country’s failure to meet its deficit-reduction targets into euro-zone-speak for “success.” Buoyed by that success, the euro-zone team is administering similar medicine to Portugal. The patient is unlikely to recover…
Continue reading “· Portugal: Living high on the hog in a Ponzi paradise.” »
[Humboldt University, Berlin ] – AN EVENING LECTURE ON on the euro crisis by Prof. Hans-Werner Sinn, President of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, is scheduled for Monday, 9 May 2011, at 19.30 in Lecture Hall 201, Spandauer Str. 1, 10178 Berlin. Prof. Sinn’s talk will be introduced by Humboldt Prof. Michael Burda who will provide his own comments and moderate a discussion with the public following the lecture.
Continue reading “· Event: Germany and the euro-debt crisis. In Berlin, 9 May.” »
By ANTHONY HOROWITZ [Telegraph] – Jeffrey seems to have an impulse to prove everything he says. He tells me that for six weeks he’s been the bestselling author in India. His assistant immediately pops down a second time with a printout of the Indian chart. And yes, there he is, well ahead of Mirza Waheed and Manju Kapur.
Here’s photographic evidence of him addressing the crowd of 3,000. Continue reading “· How Anthony Horowitz survived Jeffrey Archer.” »
By MELVYN BRAGG [In Our Time] – I first went to Hexham Abbey when I was seventeen and was then most struck by the Night Stair in the south transept. This wonderful staircase, down which the monks came for their night prayers, has such worn treads that you can almost hear the sandals still slapping down the stones. The abbey was originally built by Wilfrid, an enormously powerful figure up here in Christianity in the 7th century. There is still some of the 7th century church remaining – the crypt.
It was strange to be talking in that abbey about the 400 years’ airbrushed history of the effect of the King James Bible, because here was a place where Christianity had been assiduously practised for hundreds of years, with no questions asked. Continue reading “· What’s at the end of the night stair, pray tell?” »
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THE MYTH THAT SOLDIERS never question orders is a dangerous one. In fact, their questions are the questions that most deserve careful answers.
By KAREN WALKER [Armed Forces Journal] – A hesitant president, a skeptical SecDef and a cautious Air Force chief of staff made a curious trio of warmongers in the days leading up to the United Nations Security Council resolution that authorized “all necessary measures” to protect civilians in Libya, paving the way for a coalition force to start airstrikes March 19…
Continue reading “· In Libya, the US military asks itself some questions.” »
SO IT EMERGES OSAMA bin Laden did not go down in a blaze of ingloriousness after all, but instead was shot while standing, unarmed, in front of his daughter. Perhaps he had it coming – he certainly cared little about the daughters of others – but were there better ways of delivering it?
By DEBORAH ORR [Guardian] – A decade on from the 9/11 atrocities, I had forgotten that the leader of al-Qaida had ever actually existed as a flesh-and-blood person at all. He had become, to me, a cipher representing “evil”, and a cipher, no matter how powerful, cannot be shot in the head (hidden weapon preventing surrender or not). Continue reading “On bin Laden: celebrating the shooting of an unarmed bad-man.” »
THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVEN’T been serious political contenders for a very long time. As a third-rate third party – the party of none-of-the-above – they routinely lose general elections by wide margins. Their only hope? Changing the value of a vote.
By TED R. BROMUND [Commentary] – Great Britain votes Thursday on whether to adopt a newfangled electoral system in which voters would rank candidates for office in order of preference. Opinion polling suggests the new voting method, called the alternative vote (or AV for short), is likely to lose. Anyone who would like to see Britain saved from unsustainably high levels of entitlement spending and further submerging in the European Union ought to breathe a sigh of relief.
Continue reading “· Britain’s AV vote: bending the rules to give first place to the second-best.” »
THE SPECTACLE OF CROWDS cheering the death of a man who had committed unspeakably evil acts probably came as no surprise. Osama bin Laden died with guns blazing in a shoot-out with American soldiers. His acts were reprehensible. Theirs were predictably vengeful, and, despite the cheers, somehow unsatisfying. The least-desirable outcome? A failure to apprehend bin Laden, of course – or more deaths in attempting to do so. The best outcome? Contrition, confession, apprehension, judgement, and the humiliation of lifelong imprisonment. Would such an unlikely result have pleased the crowds? Perhaps not. But then fanatics like bin Laden are incapable of contrition, leaving death, in his case, as the only realistic possibility.
By DAVID ALLEN GREEN [New Statesman] – If one is to take the rule of law and due process seriously, then it is at the margins where they matter most: where the victim is deemed to “deserve it”. If the rule of law and due process are posited as absolutes, then ordering such a killing is necessarily wrong at all times and in all circumstances.
Continue reading “· Osama bin Laden and the next least-desirable outcome.” »
THE MODERN HISTORY OF Africa is quite naturally far from being written. In fact, it’s still in a state of armed contention, with humans exploited like the rest of the continent’s resources to fight battles in academic settings and in newspaper columns over political ideologies from faraway. Meanwhile, on the ground, incredible beauty dodges the bullets to make its own insistent demands, one note at a time.
By WILLIAM BRANGHAM [PBS – Need to Know] – It’s important to remember that even in the midst of unimaginable horror, people can — and do — flourish. As part of our ongoing collaboration with the VII Photo Agency, we bring you photographer Marcus Bleasdale’s portrait of one remarkable symphony orchestra that’s thriving in Congo’s capital city, Kinshasa.
Continue reading “· In the Congo, classical music with a catastrophic backdrop.” »
