Covfefe-19: is Donald Trump responsible?

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If Amazon or the pharmacies of Manhattan are any guide, buying a thermometer in America has become tricky, expensive or both — the Braun thermometer for which I paid some $60 shortly after the birth of our one-year-old was available online over the weekend for a modest $359.97. In confronting an epidemic data is, if not necessarily the first line of defence, very close behind it. Yet when it comes to testing for Covid-19, the US has been a laggard. On some estimates, fewer than 20,000 Americans had been tested by March 11. That’s around 23 per million, compared with a rate of 347 people per million in the UK.

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‘Pravda Ha Ha’ Review: Requiem for a Dream

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There are, remarkably, people who still believe that history has a “right side”—and Britain-based travel writer Rory MacLean, with his “firm and unwavering belief in the promise of the future,” is one of them. Intriguing, informative and infuriating, Mr. MacLean’s latest work, “Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe,” is something of a return, literally and figuratively, to the ground covered in his beautifully written first book, “Stalin’s Nose” (1992), an account of a trip around Eastern Europe during that exhilarating interlude between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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Hitler Revisited

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Adolf? Not again. My first reaction on learning that not one, but two, substantial new Hitler biographies were up for review was not one of unreserved joy. How much more is there to say? After all, Ian Kershaw’s two volumes from the turn of the century have stood the test of time very well. Nevertheless, as Brendan Simms, a professor in the history of international relations at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, demonstrates in the introduction to his Hitler: A Global Biography, the research grinds on. In his case, he has used a basic cradle-to-ashes format (Simms does not pretend to depict “the ‘whole’ Hitler”) as a frame on which to hang an intriguing — if not always convincing — reexamination of Hitler’s thinking.

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“Horizon” Horizontales

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A book’s index can entertain as well as inform, and in D. J. Taylor’s Lost Girls, a lively, perceptive, and gossip-strewn inquiry into an overlooked aspect of an influential corner of London’s literary life in, mainly, the 1940s, the index does not disappoint. Turning from “Horizon, ‘bugger incident,’ ” to the entries for that storied magazine’s creator and presiding genius, “Connolly, Cyril,” we find, among other accolades, “capriciousness,” “dilettante quality,” “double standards and hypocrisy,” “mother-fixation,” “self-absorption,” “self-destructiveness,” “self-propagating mystique,” “sulkiness,” “tactlessness,” and, in a final jab of the indexer’s finger, “vacillation and procrastination.”

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Feeding The Enemy

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The American troops who landed in Russia to help reverse the Bolshevik coup of 1917 did little to change history, but cast as imperialist villains, they were useful to Soviet propagandists charged with rewriting it. In “The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin,” Douglas Smith tells the remarkable tale of a different, largely forgotten yet infinitely more effective intervention.

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The importance of being Ernst

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The more you study history, the less you know. Straight paths turn into labyrinths. So it is that, in the Paris journals of Ernst Jünger (now translated into English by Thomas and Abby Hansen as A German Officer in Occupied Paris), we learn that in July 1942 Jünger, who had previously swapped books with a fellow author by the name of Hitler, dropped in on a future Stalin Prize winner, one Pablo Picasso. The artist was an exile, Jünger a captain in the Wehrmacht, an occupier. The meeting passed off agreeably. Picasso declared that the two of them “would be able to negotiate peace over the course of [that] afternoon.”

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First Persons Singular

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It is both satisfying and subversive that Herman Koch, the author of The Ditch, was, if not exactly expelled, at least “encouraged to leave” his Montessori school in Amsterdam. While any failed attempt at “child-centered” education will warm a chilly reactionary heart, young Koch’s inability to summon up enough self-discipline to survive indiscipline must be regarded as a disappointing rejection of the conscientiousness the Dutch have traditionally, if not always correctly, been thought to possess.

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Gray's Anatomy

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The British philosopher John Gray has been on the Left, and he has been on the Right. More recently, he has settled into the role of a brilliant, provocative, and contrarian curmudgeon, known for an aphoristic style rare in a discipline where opacity is often confused with erudition.

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Confessions of a Revolutionary

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Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” was one of the most influential novels of the 20th century, and the 20th century would have been a better century had it been more influential still. Yet until now, the book could only be read at one remove, in editions based on a hasty English translation of a German text presumed lost in the confusion of wartime.

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