Ruth Dudley Edwards is the author of an acclaimed biography, which came out last year, of the publisher Victor Gollancz.
Brenda Maddox’s enjoyable biography of Nora Joyce left me worrying about two questions. Did her subject warrant 526 pages? And was the great Richard Ellmann, along with other scholars, guilty of gross invasion of privacy when he published James Joyce’s coprophiliac letters to Nora?
What is the point of institutional history? For whom is it written? Here I declare my interest: I once wrote a short history of a merchant bank and I am at present working on a history of the Economist, which will be 150 years old in 1993. The former, which had to be circumspect and avoid upsetting the natives, was wholly written for gain; the latter, on which I have a free rein, will be written also for enjoyment.
Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King had been colleagues for 15 years when Cudlipp was ejected from the editorship of the Sunday Pictorial. Though a director of the company, King made no attempt to save...
The conduct of foreign policy has of late fallen into disrepute. The confusions of the post-Cold War world have made diplomacy seem especially futile. Economic decline has turned attention to the...
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