Archive for March, 2019
The making of American power (3): the war in Vietnam
March 14th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Last week, I attended week 3 of an eight-week evening class at London”s City Literary Institute. The title is “The making of American power: US foreign policy from the Cold War to Trump” and our lecturer is Jack Gain. Week 3 of the course was on the war in Vietnam. I was reminded of my […]
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A review of the new superhero movie”Captain Marvel”
March 12th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
Following the great success of the first female titular role for a super-hero movie (“Wonder Woman”), thanks to the owners of of DC Comics franchise, it was inevitable that we would have a female super-hero fronting a work from the Marvel Cinematic Universe – another first – and it’s a pity that the two will […]
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A review of “A Short History Of Europe” by Simon Jenkins
March 10th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
“My young granddaughter did not think that this book looked ‘short’ but, at around 300 pages to tell the story of some two and half millennia, this can truly be termed a concise history and Jenkins has done a splendid job in making it very accessible and immensely readable. The alliterative subtitle of the work […]
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Ever heard of the Thucydides gap?
March 5th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
In foreign policy discussions, this is a deadly trap first identified by the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. As he explained, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” The past 500 years have seen 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a […]
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The shameful history of Vichy France
March 4th, 2019 by Roger Darlington
This weekend, together with 36 others, I attended a one-day course on Vichy France delivered by Sebastien Ardouin at London’s City Literary Institute. It was an immensely informative course backed up with a handout of 24 pages. Vichy France was the so-called Free Zone of the country which operated from 1940 to 1944 under the […]
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A review of the remarkable Lebanese film “Capernaum”
March 3rd, 2019 by Roger Darlington
As well as being a town where Jesus performed miracles, Capernaum is the Arabic word for chaos and it is a kind of miracle that comes out of the chaos of a young boy’s life on the streets of Beirut in this remarkable work by Lebanese director Nadine Labaki. Twelve year old Zain (played by […]
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The making of American power (2): the Cold War
March 1st, 2019 by Roger Darlington
This week, I attended week 2 of an eight-week evening class at London”s City Literary Institute. The title is “The making of American power: US foreign policy from the Cold War to Trump” and our lecturer is Jack Gain. Week 2 of the course addressed Cold War power politics with the Soviet Union. We talked […]
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