How Castro's Cuba has vexed seven U.S. presidents.
Trade with its Money, its credit, its Steam, its Rail- roads, threatens to upset the balance of Man, and establish a new, universal Monarchy more tyrannical than Babylon or Rome."
Ralph Waldo Emerson's cri de coeur in his Journals (1840) reflected the fear among 19th-century naturalists that the rise of industry was threatening the American wilderness.
the late 19th century, a new breed of "conservationists," notably George Perkins Marsh, author of Man and Na-ture (1864), was beginning...
, "America, and I trust Soviet Russia. . . must be the friends and sponsors of the new Europe."
Churchill's condescension reflected an odd view: Britain could still be an independent power, retaining the role bestowed by an empire. He saw Britain as the intersection of three overlapping circles: the Anglo- American world, the Commonwealth, and Europe. That idea was barely plausible after World War II. Itmade no sense at all after the 1956 Suez Crisis, which showed that neither the Commonwealth...
's prime minister in 1979. Her reply: "Everything."
Eight years later, both before and after her re-election this past June, she outlined what she had accomplished, or hoped to, with a series of catch phrases. "People's capitalism." A "lame-duck economy. . . [turned]...bulldog economy." "Every earner an owner." "An England free of socialism."
Pundits lumped it all together: The "Thatcher Revolution."
Revolution is not a term to be used...
"Few ideas are correct ones, and what
are correct no one can ascertain; but with words we govern men."
So said Benjamin Disraeli, as Gertrude Hirnrnelfarb notes in Victorian Minds (Knopf, 1968), a collection of her essays on British men of ideas. British histori- ans also valued word power. Their island nation had seen much change under many leaders, now including 75 mon- archs, beginning with Ethelbert of Kent (560-616), and 72 prime ministers, starting with Robert Walpole (1721-42)....
The blooming of Latin American literature during the past 15 years (four Nobel Prizes) has introduced readers around the world to "magical real- ism," a literary blending of commonplace events with strong elements of fantasy. One of the genre's founding fathers is Chile's distinguished novelist Jose Donoso. In this memoir of Santiago during the 1930s, Donoso shows that "magical realism" may in fact more truly reflect Latin perceptions of reality than most Northerners imagine.
A sad...