Book review

Political autobiographies are written to conceal, not to reveal. They come in two eminently pulpable forms. One is the twilight apologia of the retired or defeated politician, the other the resumé-polishing pitch of the rising star. Which category Ilhan Omar’s autobiography falls into depends on whether you, like her, think she’s a cruelly traduced beacon of hope in a land of benighted bigotry; or whether, as one investigative journalist concluded, she has committed the ‘worst spree of felonies by a congressperson in history’.‘I’m not here to undo or rewrite history,’ Omar tells us. But the truth slips away from her like a greased pig.

Probably most of the world is bilingual, or more than bilingual. It is common in many countries to speak a national language alongside an international lingua franca such as Arabic, Spanish or English. On top of that, there may be a mother tongue that is not the same as a national language. A Nigerian, for instance, may be at once one of the million speakers of Berom, one of the 64 million speakers of Hausa and one of the 1.13 billion speakers of English. The same pattern is repeated across the globe.

Dave Rubin loves to talk about ideas. In his new book, Don't Burn This Book, he tells the reader:‘I want you to walk into a bar and order yourselves a full-bodied opinion. I want you to get absolutely wasted on facts until 3:00 a.m., and then, when you’re just about ready to pass out, I want you to get another large glass of reality and chug it.’It's telling that Rubin suggests that we order the opinion before the facts. Would it not make more sense to suggest, say, blending a cocktail of facts into an opinion? Rubin’s advice seems backwards to me.But it would be wrong to take this suggestion seriously. Don't Burn This Book is not a serious work. It is, in fact, extremely lazy, bearing all the hallmarks of a project that was knocked together over a few wet weekends.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. No one remembers Wendell Willkie. If you don’t believe me, mention him as a man worth looking up at your next cocktail hour. Then watch as even well-informed acquaintances wonder when, exactly, you started taking an interest in adult-entertainment performers or bothered to locate the inspiration for Arrested Development’s hit ‘Mr Wendal’. Even the learned (and let’s throw in friends who subscribe to the New Yorker to even things out), will struggle to recall that Willkie was not only referred to as ‘Private Citizen Number One’ by FDR.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The 20th century was a crowded century. Event piled upon world-historical event to produce a mass of history so heavy with the prospect of annihilation and so alive with the possibilities of individual emancipation that one of humanity’s most extraordinary accomplishments, the constitution of a liberal democratic republic on the Indian subcontinent, went largely unnoticed in the West. The significance of India’s birth was, however, not lost on a colonial world clamoring for freedom, or African Americans striving to unlock the full promise of America. India’s founding on August 15, 1947, W.E.B. DuBois rhapsodized, would be ‘remembered as the greatest historical date of the 19th and 20th centuries’.

When Donald Trump proffered advice to then-UK prime minister Theresa May in her Brexit negotiations, he told her to sue the EU. It might have seemed a laughable throwaway line; but suing is second nature to Trump. More than that, it’s a whole way of life. Just to what extent the litigation is the man is comprehensively detailed in Plaintiff in Chief: a Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits. James D. Zirin, respected lawyer, legal commentator and broadcaster as well as a  litigator himself in federal and US courts, delivers a fascinating insight into Trump’s legal history — exposing his motives and methods, psychology and morals.

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘I have observed,’ Joseph Addison wrote in 1711 in the first article in the first issue of the first version of The Spectator, ‘that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure, ’till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an Author.’ Thomas Chatterton Williams has earned a reputation as a tough, thoughtful and genuinely interesting commentator on race.