The Day the Sky Trembled

Nutchanon Pairoj, a founder member of the United Front of Thammasat and Demonstration protest group, has been found guilty of lèse-majesté and sentenced to two years in prison. He was originally found not guilty by the Thanyaburi Provincial Court on 8th November 2023, though that verdict was overturned today by the Court of Appeal.

Nutchanon was one of several people in a truck that was stopped by police in Pathum Thani on 19th September 2020. They were en route to Thammasat University, intending to distribute copies of the booklet The Day the Sky Trembled (ปรากฏการณ์สะท้านฟ้า 10 สิงหา) to protesters gathered at the university. Police confiscated 45,080 copies of the booklet, and detained the occupants of the truck, though ultimately only Nutchanon was charged.

The Day the Sky Trembled—so notorious that it has become known simply as ‘the red booklet’—contains transcripts of speeches given by UFTD protest leaders at Thammasat on 10th August 2020. Nutchanon is not quoted in the booklet, though today’s judgement convicted him of knowingly attempting to distribute material that contravened the lèse-majesté law.

30 Years of ‘Democrazy’

One way that artists satirise Thai politics is by punning on the Thai word for democracy itself. The earliest and most common example is ‘democrazy’, highlighting the craziness of the Thai political system, which dates back thirty years. Since then, there have been more than a dozen other Thai puns on ‘democracy’.

Democrazy

The band Heavy Mod released their album Democrazy on cassette and CD in 1995. (Its Thai title was ประชาธิปไตย, which translates simply as ‘democracy’.) Democrazy was also the title of a single by another band, Dogwhine, from their EP Dog of God, released on CD in 2019. The animated music video for the song features the folding chair and hanging corpse from an infamous Neal Ulevich photograph. Democrazy (ประชาธิปไทย) is also the title of a 2020 painting by Luck Maisalee.

The fashion brand Russian Roulette designed a Demo-crazy t-shirt in 2023. Bangkok Democrazy was the strapline of the 4th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, which took place in 2004. Democrazy Theatre Studio was founded by Pavinee Samakkabutr and Thanapol Virulhakul in 2008, and the edgy Bangkok performance venue closed down in 2019.

Thunsita Yanuprom and Sarun Channiam directed the short film Democrazy.mov in 2019. In the film, a cellphone signal is jammed by a 44GHz frequency, in reference to article 44 of the interim constitution, which granted absolute power to the leaders of the 2014 coup.

Demockrazy

Duangporn Pakavirojkul directed the short film Demockrazy (ประชาทิปตาย) in 2007. The film was an immediate reaction to the 2006 coup: set in a classroom, an authoritarian teacher symbolises the coup leaders. Its title is a clever double pun on ‘crazy’ and ‘mockery’.

Demoncrazy

Ready Myth Demoncrazy was a retrospective exhibition of art by Panya Vijinthanasarn, held in 2018. Similarly, the fashion brand Plus One designed a Demo(n)cracy hat in 2023.

Dreamocracy

Parit Wacharasindhu’s book Dreamocracy (ประชาธิปไตยไม่ใช่ฝัน) was published in 2022. Parit is a People’s Party MP, and his book is a personal manifesto proposing solutions to the country’s social and economic problems.

Drunkmocracy

Warat Bureephakdee directed the short film Drunkmocracy (สุราธิปไตย) in 2023. A documentary on Thai alcohol laws, it was released online as part of the ไทยถาม (‘Thailand questions’) series by Thai Rath (ไทยรัฐ).

ประชาฉิปตาย

The song title ประชาฉิปตาย translates as ‘democracy dies’, in a particularly effective Thai-language pun. (‘Democracy’ and ‘die-ocracy’ are near-homophones in Thai.) The track is featured on the Heavy Mod album Democrazy, and it’s similar to Die mo cracy, a slogan on a t-shirt sold by the band Speech Odd last year.

Paradoxocracy

Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Pasakorn Pramoolwong’s documentary Paradoxocracy (ประชาธิป'ไทย) was released in 2013. (Pen-ek discussed the film at length in Thai Cinema Uncensored.)

‘Happy-ocracy’

Ing K.’s film Shakespeare Must Die (เชคสเปียร์ต้องตาย) includes a satirical parody of authoritarian propaganda: “Dear Leader brings happy-ocracy!” The line turned out to be a remarkably prescient prediction, as coup leader Prayut Chan-o-cha released a propaganda song titled Returning Happiness to the Thai Kingdom (คืนความสุขให้ประเทศไทย) in 2014. (Ing discussed the film in Thai Cinema Uncensored.)

PrachathipaType

The design studio PrachathipaType was founded in 2020, and its name translates as ‘democratic typography’. The anonymous designer behind PrachathipaType also created a new typeface, PrachathipaTape (ประชาธิปะเทป), for Rap Against Dictatorship’s music video Homeland (บ้านเกิดเมืองนอน).

‘ประชาธิปตู่’

Yuthlert Sippapak’s film Nednary (อวสานเนตรนารี) features a pun on Prayut’s nickname, Tu. When a boy scout, with the same nickname as Prayut, is asked what type of democracy he wants, he replies: “ประชาธิปตู่” (‘Tu-ocracy’). (Yuthlert discussed the film in Thai Cinema Uncensored.) The period of undemocratic military government led by Prayut between 2014 and 2023 is known as ‘Prayutocracy’.

‘Thaksinocracy’

Thaksinocracy (ทักษิณาธิปไตย) describes the populist politics of Thaksin Shinawatra, prime minister from 2001 to 2006. (A slight variation, สู่ทักษิณาธิปไตย, was translated as Thaksinomics, the title of a book by Rangsan Thanapornpun published in 2005.)

‘Premocracy’

Premocracy (เปรมาธิปไตย) describes the period of quasi-democracy from 1980 to 1988, when Prem Tinsulanonda led the government as an appointed prime minister. เปรมาธิปไตย is also the title of a book by Adinan Phromphananjal, published in 2020.

‘Coupocracy’

In her book Dictatorship on Trial, released last year, Tyrell Haberkorn coined the term ‘coupocracy’ to describe the period covering the 2006 and 2014 coups.

‘Dancemocracy’

The new book Made in Thailand includes Anna Lawattanatrakul’s essay Dancemocracy as Political Expression in the 2020 Thai Pro-democracy Movement, a reference to the Dancemocracy (คณะราษแดนซ์) troupe of pro-democracy dancers and protesters.

“Books containing inciteful material...”

Israeli police raided two branches of the Educational Bookstore in Jerusalem today, seizing books and placing the chain’s two owners under arrest. According to a police statement, “detectives encountered numerous books containing inciteful material with nationalist Palestinian themes”, and the shop was accused of “selling books containing incitement and support for terrorism.”

Specifically, the police cited the children’s book From the River to the Sea: A Colouring Book by Nathi Ngubane, whose title is an antisemitic slogan calling for the removal of the State of Israel, located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The book is a work of propaganda that entirely excludes Jewish history from the story of Palestine.

Flowers in the Rain:The Untold Story of The Move

Jim McCarthy covers the history of the 1960s psychedelic rock band The Move in his new book Flowers in the Rain: The Untold Story of The Move, including the libel case brought against the band by former UK prime minister Harold Wilson in 1967. To promote their single Flowers in the Rain, the band’s manager Tony Secunda commissioned Neil Smith to draw a caricature of Wilson in bed with his secretary, Marcia Williams, implying that they were having an affair. Secunda sent copies of the drawing on 500 postcards to newspapers, magazines, and radio stations, though the stunt quickly backfired when Wilson sued for defamation. Wilson won the case on 11th October 1967, and was awarded all royalties from the single in perpetuity (which he donated to charity).

Significantly, McCarthy’s book—an exhaustive history of the band—includes an illustration of the postcard, which is perhaps the first time it has appeared in print in more than fifty years. (It was previously reproduced on p. 22 of the very first issue of Rolling Stone, on 9th November 1967.) McCarthy’s book was published in November 2024, and less than two months later, the postcard was also reproduced in The Oldie magazine’s January issue (no. 447, p. 62). Being a US magazine, Rolling Stone wasn’t affected by UK libel law, and as Wilson and Williams are both now deceased, there is no longer a restriction on publication of the postcard in the UK.

Collapsing Clouds Form Stars

Som Supaparinya’s exhibition Collapsing Clouds Form Stars (ฝุ่นถล่มเป็นดาว) opened on 30th January at Gallery VER in Bangkok. It was originally scheduled to close on 22nd March, though it has now been extended until 26th April. The centrepiece, after which the exhibition is named, is an installation of 279 ribbons, each of which contains a quotation from Thai political history.

These quotes include the notorious monk Kittivuddho Bhikku’s justification for the killing of Communists, a comment that set the stage for the 6th October 1976 massacre. Other ribbons feature lyrics by Rap Against Dictatorship, among many other examples. The quotes have also been translated into Morse code, which is played over a PA system for the duration of the exhibition.

The use of Morse code, which renders the quotations unintelligible, echoes an earlier piece of sound art by the same artist, Speeches of the Unheard. For this project, an episode of the podcast series Die Erde Spricht (‘the earth is speaking’), Som used computer software to turn extracts from political speeches into birdsong. The speeches included one given by red-shirt leader Nattawut Saikua on 30th December 2007, and one by Arnon Nampa on 16th September 2020.

The exhibition also includes Banned Books, an installation consisting of five books, banned by previous Thai governments, tightly wrapped in more ribbons. The books are: แลไปข้างหน้า (‘looking into the future’), ด้วยเลือดและชีวิต (‘the one-eyed elephant and the elephant genie’), The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today (โฉมหน้าศักดินาไทย), นิราศหนองคาย (‘poem of Nong Khai’), and ทรัพย์ศาสตร์ (‘economics’, Thailand’s first textbook on that subject).

The book Dissident Citizen (ราษฎรกำแหง) also used Morse code to conceal a political message. Several previous exhibitions—including The Grandmaster (สนทนากับปรมาจารย์), Derivatives and Integrals (อนุพันธ์ และปริพันธ์), The L/Royal Monument (นิ/ราษฎร์), and Unforgetting History—have also featured banned books. Sarakadee (สำรคดี) magazine (vol. 22, no. 260) published an extensive article on the history of book censorship, and the journal Underground Buleteen (no. 8) printed a list of books banned between 1932 and 1985.

Cracking the Kube: Solving the Mysteries of Stanley Kubrick through Archival Research

The Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts in London opened in 2007, giving unprecedented access to hundreds of boxes of documentation accumulated by Kubrick throughout his career. (A copy of my research into Kubrick’s photography is included in one box, presumably printed out by someone in Kubrick’s office.) The archive has transformed Kubrick scholarship, with a new focus on the primary sources available there. This has led to revisionist accounts of Kubrick’s working methods, most notably Mick Broderick’s Reconstructing Strangelove and James Fenwick’s Stanley Kubrick Produces.

In his new book Cracking the Kube: Solving the Mysteries of Stanley Kubrick through Archival Research, Filippo Ulivieri goes a stage further: he not only corrects the persistent misconceptions about Kubrick’s life and work, he also identifies their origins. And Ulivieri’s findings are groundbreaking: “Kubrick deliberately crafted his own distinctive persona,” he writes. The legends surrounding Kubrick—his obsessive secrecy, his perfectionism, his eccentricities—were the result of strategic self-mythologising by the director: “what we know about him is in fact a mythology of his own design”.

This conclusion, based on a detailed analysis of hundreds of published interviews with Kubrick, is one of numerous revelations in Cracking the Kube. The book also features a uniquely comprehensive survey of Kubrick’s unmade films (of which there were more than eighty), including the first complete account of Kubrick’s pre-production of A.I. (prior to its development by Steven Spielberg). Ulivieri also fully explores Kubrick’s collaborations with the writers Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, and Frederic Raphael for the first time, and writes a nuanced defence of Raphael’s controversial Kubrick memoir Eyes Wide Open.

Cracking the Kube is the product of extensive archival research, and Ulivieri has also interviewed many of Kubrick’s closest collaborators. Aside from its impeccable scholarly credentials, the book is also incredibly well-written. Ulivieri’s first book, Stanley Kubrick e me, was published in English translation as Stanley Kubrick and Me. He is also a co-author of 2001 between Kubrick and Clarke (2001 tra Kubrick e Clarke) which, like Cracking the Kube, was self-published. He writes that there are “over a hundred books” on Kubrick’s films, and at least half of these are on Dateline Bangkok’s bookshelves.

1001 Movie Posters: Designs of the Times

1001 Movie Posters: Designs of the Times, released last year, is described by its publisher as “the most comprehensive collection of movie posters ever published,” and it lives up to that claim. Many of the 1,001 posters are full-page images, and all are beautifully reproduced in vibrant colour on matte paper.

With such an extensive selection, and more than 600 pages, the most iconic film posters—such as Metropolis (the rare export version), Frankenstein (the first example of a teaser poster), and The Man with the Golden Arm (designed by Saul Bass)—are all included. Editor Tony Nourmand is the founder of Reel Art Press, publishers of this and other books on the art of film.

Although 1001 Movie Posters features captions and credits for many of its images, and an introduction by cultural historian Christopher Frayling, it isn’t a narrative history of the film poster. Gregory J. Edwards wrote such a book, The International Film Poster, forty years ago, though it has far fewer illustrations. The bibliography in 1001 Movie Posters is also much more extensive.

The most comprehensive general surveys of poster history are The Poster by Alan Weill and Posters by Elizabeth E. Guffey. History of the Poster by Josef and Shizuko Müller-Brockmann—published in a single English, French (Histoire de l’affiche), and German (Geschichte des Plakates) edition—was the first graphic-design book on the history of the poster.

Unleashed

Boris Johnson’s memoir Unleashed is almost 800 pages long, though there are only a handful of genuinely interesting passages amid the self-congratulatory prose. The most curious of these is an anecdote implying that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu planted a bug in the UK Foreign Secretary’s private bathroom: Johnson writes that Netanyahu used the room during a visit to the Foreign Office, and that during a subsequent security sweep “they found a listening device in the thunderbox.”

Johnson is clearly aware of his reputation, characterising himself in his opponents’ eyes as “the monstruous Johnson, the beast of Brexit and the big bullshitting bus, the Pied Piper who played the devil’s tunes and led the people to perdition.” He later describes the Vote Leave campaign bus as “the great red bus of truth”, just one of numerous misleading and unretracted claims about the European Union. When he decided to campaign for Brexit, he says that David Cameron told him: “I will fuck you up forever.”

He acknowledges making “many goofs”, though he is unrepentant about his major failings. He refuses to accept the Supreme Court’s ruling that his prorogation of parliament was illegal, and nicknames Brenda Hale “Spiderwoman” after a brooch she wore while reading the judgement. He is also unapologetic about ‘partygate’, and in fact he now regrets the “rather pathetic apologies” he made at the time. Despite a Privileges Committee report accusing him of repeatedly lying to the House of Commons, he insists that he “hadn’t misled Parliament, certainly not intentionally,” and calls the committee members “my enemies.” This is a consistent theme, as he also blames his partygate fine on people “determined to bring me down.”

Anthony Seldon’s Johnson at Ten is a much more objective account of Johnson’s premiership (as is Tim Shipman’s new book Out), and Sebastian Payne’s The Fall of Boris Johnson is a detailed study of the final months of the Johnson government. The other recent memoirs by former UK prime ministers are A Journey by Tony Blair, My Life, Our Times by Gordon Brown, For the Record by David Cameron, and two less conventional examples: The Abuse of Power by Theresa May and Ten Years to Save the West by Liz Truss.

“une exploration inédite du cinéma thaïlandais...” (‘a unique exploration of Thai cinema...’)

Thai Cinema Uncensored is reviewed in the new issue of the Journal of the Siam Society (pp. 149–152). In his review, written in French, Bruno Marchal describes the book as “une exploration inédite du cinéma thaïlandais... une ressource précieuse pour ceux qui cherchent à comprendre l’évolution et la diversité du cinéma thaïlandais à travers les époques” (‘a unique exploration of Thai cinema... a valuable resource for those seeking to understand the evolution and diversity of Thai cinema through the ages’).

JSS (vol. 112, no. 2) was published this month. Thai Cinema Uncensored has also been reviewed by the International Examiner and Bangkok Post newspapers, the journal Sojourn, the magazines Art Review and The Big Chilli, and the 101 World website.

Sarit Thanarat

Sarit Thanarat, military prime minister during the Cold War, died in December 1963. After his death, the floodgates opened, and exposés of his love life were rushed into print. His lovenest was a private residence nicknamed the ‘pink palace’ (วิมานสีชมพู), and this was the title of a Sarit biography published in 1964, which included a dossier of photographs of Sarit’s alleged lovers. Several erotic novels of the period, including แม่ม่ายผ้าขะม้าแดง (‘red-headed widow’), were also thinly-veiled portrayals of Sarit’s mistresses.

Almost fifty years later, the phrase ‘pink palace’ was censored by Channel 3 when it broadcast the lakorn คุณชายพุฒิภัทร (‘khun Chai Puttipat’) on 5th May 2013. In the third episode, a former military general played by Montree Jenuksorn (who slightly resembles Sarit) discussed his ‘pink palace’, though the sound was muted, presumably to avoid any possibility of a libel suit from Sarit’s descendents. (The novel on which the drama was based refers to Sarit more obliquely.)

Potential defamation also prevented director Banjong Kosallawat from making a planned Sarit biopic in 2002, which was to have been titled จอมพล (‘marshal’). Sarit did feature briefly in the horror movie Zee Oui (ซี-อุย), ordering the swift execution of the murderous title character for political expediency. And Sarit’s statue looms ominously over the characters in Song of the City, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s segment of the portmanteau film Ten Years Thailand.

After Sarit led a coup in 1957, he was portrayed as a hero by pliant newspaper cartoonists. One example of such propaganda showed Sarit cradling a rescued child in his arms, returning the boy (who represents the Thai people) to his grateful mother. In contrast, a July 1958 cartoon in the liberal ประชาชน (‘people’) newspaper depicted Sarit as a monkey wrapping his tail possessively around Democracy Monument. Sixty years later, in the wake of the 2014 coup, Sarit satire was too sensitive, and the Guerrilla Boys self-censored their mural Junta Connection (วิ่งผลัดเผด็จการ), which originally depicted Sarit passing his (literal) baton of dictatorship to Prayut Chan-o-cha.

Art and Culture (ศิลปวัฒนธรรม) magazine analysed cartoonists’ caricatures of Sarit (vol. 43, no. 1), and the journal Same Sky (ฟ้าเดียวกัน) examined the lurid books published shortly after his death (vol. 20, no. 2). Thai Cinema Uncensored discusses the portrayal of Sarit in Thai films.

Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art

Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art, published this week, documents the history of tattooing in Europe and America over the last 300 years. Uniquely, it covers tattooing as a professional art form, as distinct from its indigenous origins and its amateur practice by sailors, bikers, and prisoners.

As author Matt Lodder writes, his book is also a revisionist history: “I want, here, to reset the scaffolding for a history of Western tattooing as a professional and commercial practice.” Martin Hildebrandt, who opened a tattoo parlour in New York in 1858, is “widely considered to be the first professional tattooer in the Western world”, though Lodder demonstrates that tattooing was a commercial occupation in England as far back as 1719. He also challenges the concept of the ‘tattoo renaissance’, a term coined by the media in 1970.

Tattoo (Tatoueurs, Tatoues) is another key work of tattoo history. Body Decoration (Geschmückte Haut, by Karl Gröning) and The World of Tattoo (De wereld van tatoeage) illustrate tribal tattooing from around the world. The History of Tattooing, published ninety-nine years ago, was the first book on the subject. Andrea Juno and V. Vale’s Modern Primitives, discussed at length in Lodder’s book, is an influential guide to contemporary body modification.

Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage

The standard histories of collage as an artistic practice, such as Collage by Brandon Taylor, trace its origins to 1912, and the newspaper cuttings appliquéd to Cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Herta Wescher’s Collage (Die Collage), the definitive work on the subject, discussed nineteenth century examples in addition to the Cubists and their successors. The recent exhibition Cut and Paste antedated the technique by 400 years, though Freya Gowrley’s groundbreaking book Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage, published this week, traces the history of collage over thousands of years.

As she writes in her introduction, Gowrley (who contributed to the Cut and Paste exhibition catalogue) “aims to provide a more expansive history of collage than has previously been produced.” The book’s publisher calls it a “global history of collage from the origins of paper to today”, and at 400 pages it lives up to that description. All previous histories of collage have focused entirely on European and American artists, though the scope of Gowrley’s book is truly international, with coverage of collage in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Again, unlike previous histories of the topic, Fragmentary Forms considers collage not only as fine art, but also examines its role in devotional objects, taxonomic collections, and domestic craftmaking.

The book describes a highly diverse variety of artistic forms, from ancient Chinese jianzhi papercuts and African bochio sculptures to decorated prayer cards (known in France as canivet and in Germany as spitzenbild). Gowrley discusses a series of unique artefacts, produced by amateur artists, which are surprisingly elaborate and creative. One of the most fascinating examples is the medieval practice of constructing ‘enclosed gardens’, known as besloten hofje, relief panels displaying religious statuettes surrounded by silk flowers and other trinkets.

Priyanandana Rangsit v. Nattapoll Chaiching

The Civil Court has dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed in 2021 by the aristocrat Priyanandana Rangsit against the historian Nattapoll Chaiching and his publisher, Same Sky Books. Nattapoll is the author of the bestselling ขุนศึก ศักดินา และพญาอินทรี (‘feudal warlords and the eagle’). His earlier book ขอฝันใฝ่ในฝันอันเหลือเชื่อ (‘I dream an incredible dream’) also saw a revival in sales after it was among five titles seized by police from the offices of Same Sky.

On 5th March 2021, aristocrat Priyanandana Rangsit sued Nattapoll and Same Sky for defamation, seeking ฿50 million in damages. According to the lawsuit, Nattapoll’s books incorrectly assert that her grandfather, Prince Rangsit Prayurasakdi, sought an improper political influence over Phibun Songkhram’s government in the 1940s. She argued that this allegation about her long-dead ancestor tarnished her family name, and was thus defamatory to her personally.

Yesterday, the court came to the obvious conclusion that Prince Rangsit, having died in 1951, was not affected by the content of Nattapoll’s books. In the court’s judgement, Priyanandana’s legal case was therefore invalid from the beginning. This ruling is hardly surprising, though more questionable is the fact that it took almost four years for such a spurious case to be dismissed.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

Taschen published The Stanley Kubrick Archives as a limited coffee-table book in 2005. Then, in 2009, came their collector’s edition of Kubrick’s Napoleon, limited to 1,000 copies: ten volumes inside one enormous book. Another collector’s edition followed in 2014: the making of Kubrick’s 2001, limited to 1,500 copies in a metal slipcase. Of course, these books were far from cheap, though last year’s collector’s edition on the making of Kubrick’s The Shining (limited to 1,000 copies) cost a prohibitive $1,500 (almost as much as the other three titles combined).

Fortunately, a year after its release, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is now available in a more modest edition, costing around a tenth of the original price. (How times have changed: this version is the same price as the limited edition of The Stanley Kubrick Archives was in 2005.) The new edition consists of two heavy volumes in a slipcase: a book of rare photographs (including a few taken by Kubrick, and numerous shots from deleted scenes) styled to look like a scrapbook; and The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a definitive 900-page account of the film’s production.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a collaboration between writer J.W. Rinzler and Pixar director Lee Unkrich, and benefits both from Rinzler’s expertise as a writer of making-of books (such as The Making of Alien), and Unkrich’s passionate interest in The Shining. (He wrote the introduction to Danel Olson’s book, also titled Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.) The original collector’s edition also included a reproduction of the film’s continuity script and other supplemental material.

War

Bob Woodward’s most recent books on presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden all have one-word titles: Fear, Rage, Peril, and now War. Woodward covered the first few months of the Biden administration in Peril, and War—released earlier this month—is his account of Biden’s responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Isreal’s war with Gaza. (He previously wrote a similar book on Barack Obama’s foreign policy, Obama’s Wars.)

Woodward’s reporting is always extraordinary—his and Carl Bernstein’s investigation into the Watergate scandal ultimately led to Richard Nixon’s resignation—but War is a remarkable book. Almost every chapter features direct quotes from secure telephone calls and private meetings between Biden, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and others.

The US intelligence services were aware of Putin’s plan to attack Ukraine, and tried several times to convince Zelensky that it would happen. Woodward reports that Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told a skeptical Zelensky: “we believe there is a very high risk that the Russians will re-invade your country.” Zelensky was equally dismissive when CIA director Bill Burns reiterated: “There is going to be a significant invasion of your country”. Even a week before the war began, Zelensky remained unconvinced when Vice President Kamala Harris warned him: “You face a potentially imminent invasion.”

After the 7th October 2023 attack on Isreal by Hamas, Woodward shows how Biden and his most senior diplomats were focused on seeking assurances from Netanyahu that his retaliation would be proportionate. Netanyahu insisted that “not an ounce of anything will go into Gaza to help people,” though Blinken and Biden convinced him to reconsider. As the war dragged on, Biden sought to minimise any potential escalations, and Woodward quotes at length from a wide-ranging 4th April call between Biden and Netanyahu debating an invasion of Rafah, humanitarian aid, and the hostage crisis.

Biden’s private opinion of Netanyahu is clear from War. Woodward reports that Biden called the Israeli PM “a fucking liar,” and added for good measure: “That son of a bitch Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad fucking guy!” But it was the book’s reporting about former president Donald Trump that made more headlines: Woodward quotes Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s presidency, describing Trump as “fascist to the core.” (Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly agreed with Milley in a recent New York Times interview.)

Woodward’s own assessment of Trump (who is suing him after the release of The Trump Tapes) is also unequivocal. He ended Rage by describing Trump as “the wrong man for the job” though he goes much further in War: “Donald Trump is not only the wrong man for the presidency, he is unfit to lead the country. Trump was far worse than Richard Nixon, the provably criminal president... Trump was the most reckless and impulsive president in American history and is demonstrating the very same character as a presidential candidate in 2024.”

Chris Whipple (The Fight of His Life) and Franklin Foer (The Last Politician) have also written books on the Biden White House. Simon Shuster’s The Showman is an account of Zelensky’s presidency and the war in Ukraine.

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

Amanda Montell’s aim in Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language is to encourage and empower women “to reclaim a language that for so long has been used against us.” Wordslut, published in 2019, is not the first book to show how gender-neutral terms have been transformed into sexist insults: Jane Mills did so in Womanwords thirty years previously. And the notion of reappropriating those pejoratives is older still: Germaine Greer attempted to reclaim the c-word, for example, in the early 1970s. Mills and Greer are not cited in Wordslut (and the book has no bibliography), though Montell did interview Deborah Cameron, author of Feminism and Linguistic Theory.

Montell begins her book by calling for “a language revolution”, though her ultimate conclusion is more measured. She argues that reappropriation is a gradual process: “A word doesn’t have to lose its negative meanings completely to be considered reclaimed. The path to reclamation is almost never that smooth... As long as the positive varieties of a word steadily become more common, more mainstream, by the time the next generation starts learning the language, they will pick up those meanings first.” The book’s title is itself a reappropriation of ‘slut’, though Montell doesn’t mention Katharine Whitehorn’s pioneering self-identification with that word sixty years ago.

Infiltrating Society: The Thai Military’s Internal Security Affairs

Internal Security Operations Command, the political arm of the Thai military, has called for sales of a new book to be halted. The book in question is ในนามของความมั่นคงภายใน การแทรกซึมสังคมของกองทัพไทย, a Thai translation of Infiltrating Society: The Thai Military’s Internal Security Affairs by the distinguished academic Puangthong Pawakapan. Infiltrating Society was published in English in 2021, and the Thai translation will be released on 25th September by Same Sky Books.

ISOC posted a written statement on its Facebook page on 14th September, questioning Puangthong’s academic credentials and research methods, and challenging her findings. It also requested that the book was removed from sale (“ขอเรียนว่าการนำหนังสือและบทความทางวิชาการที่มีข้อมูลในลักษณะที่เป็นเท็จ”), and threatened legal action against the author.

Thailand’s modern political history has been dominated by military rule, with thirteen successful coups. But Puangthong argues that, even during periods of civilian government, ISOC’s influence is ever present, creating a constant atmosphere of military surveillance and propaganda. She makes the crucial point that ISOC’s activities are fundamental to the military’s agenda: “Internal security affairs, rather than external threats, have long been the raison d’être of the Thai military”.

God and the Devil:The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman

Peter Cowie is a leading authority on director Ingmar Bergman, and God and the Devil: The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman, published last year, is his comprehensive account of Bergman’s entire career. Beginning in the late 1950s, Cowie was in regular contact with Bergman for more than thirty years, and in his critical biography he also quotes from letters and journals from the Bergman archive.

The book’s stark cover shows the personification of Death from Bergman’s masterpiece The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet). God and the Devil examines not just Bergman’s acclaimed filmography, but also his often overlooked theatrical productions and his complicated private life. Cowie’s ultimate assessment of Bergman is as follows: “Forever obsessed with God and his demons, reckless in love, and relentless in his commitment to film and theatre.”

Cowie has written and published dozens of books on cinema, specialising in works on the pantheon of great directors, including an early monograph on Orson Welles (A Ribbon of Dreams). He wrote a lavish guide to the films of Akira Kurosawa, and his books on the making of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now are indispensable. His second Godfather book was published fifteen years after the first, and he also wrote a book on another 1970s classic, Annie Hall.

Truss at Ten:How Not to Be Prime Minister

“Is it all over?”
“Yes, Prime Minister, I think it probably is.”

That exchange, between Liz Truss and Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, is one of several blunt conversations documented by Anthony Seldon in Truss at Ten, which was published last month. Seldon has written profiles of every UK prime minister since John Major, and his previous book covered Boris Johnson’s aberrant premiership. Some PMs cooperate with Seldon, and others don’t; Truss and David Cameron did, while Johnson and Theresa May didn’t.

Truss at Ten features new reporting on the key moments from the shortest British government in history: the reversal of the 45p tax rate policy (“the biggest U-turn in modern prime ministerial history”), the sacking of Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, and the appointment of Jeremy Hunt as his replacement. Surprisingly, given her reckless self-confidence, Truss seemed to defer to Hunt, telling her Principal Private Secretary: “Jeremy will do the domestic side and I’ll do the foreign.”

Seldon has been headmaster of three schools, and his Truss book reads like a wayward student’s end-of-term report card. He sets out ten requirements for a successful PM, and demonstrates how Truss failed at all of them. (The book is subtitled How Not to Be Prime Minister.) Making frequent historical comparisons, Seldon argues that Truss’s period of office was uniquely damaging to the country’s economy. Ultimately, he criticises her “total failure to understand the nature of leadership and the job of being Prime Minister.”

There have been other accounts of the Truss premiership, the best of which is Out of the Blue by Harry Cole and James Healey. Ben Riley-Smith’s The Right to Rule (retitled Blue Murder in paperback) also covers Truss in office, and Truss herself wrote an unapologetic memoir, Ten Years to Save the West.

The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau

Journalist Stephen Maher’s first impression of Justin Trudeau was not particularly favourable: “He looked like a charismatic lightweight”. Maher’s new political biography of Trudeau portrays the Canadian Prime Minister as narcissistic and superficial, “a leader of limited ambitions, a transactional rather than a transformational leader.” Surprisingly, Trudeau agreed to be interviewed for the book earlier this year.

The biography takes its title, The Prince: The Turbulent Reign of Justin Trudeau, from a 1977 interview with Trudeau’s mother, who described him as “a prince—a very good little boy”. But the term also has other connotations, and Maher describes Trudeau’s sense of entitlement, “his princely certainty in the importance of his ideas,” his “princely capriciousness” and “princely vanity.” There is also a Machiavellian reference, and the book includes withering epigraphs from the Italian philosopher’s The Prince (Il principe).

Maher gives Trudeau due credit for a successful domestic social agenda, with “real progress for children, women, families, and the most significant effort to fight poverty in a generation.” But mindful of Canada’s election next year, he sums up Trudeau’s three terms in office with an unambiguous conclusion that echoes the PM’s current low approval rating: “After eight years of Trudeau, we are obviously in a weaker position.”