The memoirs of a legendary White House advisor chronicle the five decades he spent as an influential figure in Oval Office decision-making, from the recognition of Israel to the Vietnam War. Reprint. Major ad/promo. K. NYT. Acclaimed political commentator Nick Cohen investigates the confusing current status of his own political affiliates, the Left, in this hard-hitting, no-holds-barred survey. He searches for the seemingly impossible answers to such questions as: Why are apologies for a militant Islam—which stands for everything the liberal-Left is against—coming from the Left? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the Left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? Why is Palestine a cause for the liberal-Left, but not China, the Sudan, Zimbabwe, or North Korea? And exactly who or what are the Left fighting for? With biting satire and sharp insight, this sprawling survey reclaims the values of democracy and solidarity, identifies the core tenets of modern liberal thought, and established a new, proactive definition of the Left. Ranging over a quarter of a millennium and four continents, Captives uncovers the experiences and writings of those tens of thousands of men and women who took part in Britain's rise to imperial pre-eminence, but who got caught and caught out. Here are the stories of Sarah Shade, a camp follower imprisoned alongside defeated British legions in Southern India; of Joseph Pitts, white slave and pilgrim to Mecca; of Florentia Sale, captive and diarist in Afghanistan; of those individuals who crossed the cultural divide and switched identities, like the Irishman George Thomas; and of others who made it back, like the onetime Chippewa warrior and Scot, John Rutherford. Linda Colley uses these tales of ordinary individuals trapped in extraordinary encounters to re-evaluate the character and diversity of the British Empire. She explores what they reveal about British responses to, relations with, and frequent dependence upon different non-European peoples. She shows how British attitudes to Islam, slavery, race, and American Revolutionaries look different once the captive's perspective is admitted. And she demonstrates how these individual captivities illuminate the limits of Britain's global power over time - as well as its extent. Richly illustrated and evocatively written, Captives is both a magnificent and compelling work of history, and a powerful and original reappraisal of the significance and survivals of empire now. The definitive work on Stalin's purges, Robert Conquest's The Great Terror was universally acclaimed when it first appeared in 1968. Harrison Salisbury called it "brilliant...not only an odyssey of madness, tragedy, and sadism, but a work of scholarship and literary craftsmanship." And in recent years it has received equally high praise in the former Soviet Union, where it is now considered the definitive account of the period. Robert Conquest has been called by Paul Johnson "our greatest living modern historian". As a new century begins, Conquest offers an illuminating examination of our past failures and a guide to where we should go next. Graced with one of the most acute gifts for political prescience since Orwell. Conquest assigns responsibility for our century's cataclysms not to impersonal economic or social forces but to the distorted ideologies of revolutionary Marxism and National Socialism. The final, sobering chapters of Reflections on a Ravaged Century concern themselves with some coming storms, notably that of the European Union, which Conquest believes is an economic, cultural, and geographical misconception divisive of the West and doomed to failure. Current debate over the motives, ideological justifications, and outcomes of the war with Iraq have been strident and polarizing. A Matter of Principle is the first volume gathering critical voices from around the world to offer an alternative perspective on the prevailing pro-war and anti-war positions. The contribu-tors—political figures, public intellectuals, scholars, church leaders, and activists—represent the most powerful views of liberal internationalism. Offering alternative positions that challenge the status quo of both the left and the right, these essays claim that, in spite of the inconsistent justifications provided by the United States and its allies and the conflict-ridden process of social reconstruction, the war in Iraq has been morally justifiable on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant, a flagrant violator of human rights, a force of global instability and terror, and a threat to world peace. |
Five-year-old Matilda longs for her parents to be loving and understanding but they are none of these things. Matilda invents a game of punishing them each time they treat her badly and she soon discovers she has supernatural powers. At the beginning of the twentieth century England’s empire spanned the globe, its economy was strong, and its political system seemed immune to the ills that inflicted so many other countries. After a resounding electoral triumph in 1906, the Liberals formed the government of the most powerful nation on earth, yet within a few years the House of Lords lost its absolute veto over legislation, the Home Rule crisis brought Ireland to the brink of civil war and led to an army mutiny, the campaign for woman’s suffrage created widespread civil disorder and discredited the legal and penal systems, and an unprecedented wave of strikes swept the land. An innovative thinker tackles the controversial question of why we believe in God and how religion shapes our lives and our future This third volume of the trilogy is a self-contained narrative of Trotsky's years in exile and of his murder in Mexico in 1940. The award-winning translation of Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's reputation has been swallowed by that of his domineering offspring Sherlock Holmes. But, in one of the finest series of historical short stories in literature, Doyle created Brigadier Etienne Gerard, a marvelous hero set against a backdrop of the Europe of Napoleon. |