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Fatalism, Extenuation and Despair

Peter Clarke: John Major, 5 March 1998

Major: A Political Life 
by Anthony Seldon.
Weidenfeld, 856 pp., £25, October 1997, 0 297 81607 1
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... his own party – not least from MPs owing their Westminster seats to his popular appeal. Or so John Major came to feel by the end of 1992. Tony Blair must be thankful that things are now working out so differently for his government, and that, having been elected as New Labour, it is finding it so easy to govern as New Labour, free of the ideological ...

So what if he was

Paul Foot, 25 October 1990

No Other Choice 
by George Blake.
Cape, 288 pp., £12.99, September 1990, 0 224 03067 1
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Inside Intelligence 
by Anthony Cavendish.
Collins, 181 pp., £12.95, October 1990, 9780002157421
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... He was chairman of Tory Action, which campaigned so successfully in 1974 and 1975 to remove Edward Heath as Tory leader and replace him with Thatcher. He even stood for Parliament himself. But he was, as the memo makes clear, deeply suspicious of anything which smacked of democracy. It threw up waverers, compromisers, ready phrases and flashing smiles. One of ...

Yesterday

Frank Kermode, 27 July 1989

The Pleasures of Peace: Art and Imagination in Post-War Britain 
by Bryan Appleyard.
Faber, 367 pp., £12.99, June 1989, 0 571 13722 9
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... goes more smoothly. We are given the necessary information about the likes of Hockney, Ted Hughes, John Berger, Germaine Greer and Noam Chomsky. Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (‘a logical enough outcome’) are briskly explained, Barthes, Lacan and Derrida rush by, Foucault and Althüsser get a rather breathless mention as part of the ‘post-modern ...

Seven Euro-Heresies

Richard Mayne, 26 March 1992

... spokesmen, advocates or analysts had ever disguised its ambitions. In 1962, when Edward Heath was first negotiating terms for British membership, one of his French interlocutors – later a minister – made the point in words reminiscent of a British Army marching song. ‘We don’t know where we’re going,’ he said. ‘All we know is that ...

Ways of Being Interesting

Theo Tait: Ian McEwan, 11 September 2014

The Children Act 
by Ian McEwan.
Cape, 215 pp., £16.99, September 2014, 978 0 224 10199 8
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... reach’: she is an excellent pianist; she knows her Shakespeare, her Adam Smith and her John Stuart Mill. Like Henry Perowne in Saturday, she is enlightened and honourable: a quietly heroic technocrat who brings ‘reasonableness to hopeless situations’, a liberal-paternalist superego figure who sorts things out sensibly, by compulsion if ...

Other People’s Mail

Bernard Porter: MI5, 19 November 2009

The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 
by Christopher Andrew.
Allen Lane, 1032 pp., £30, October 2009, 978 0 7139 9885 6
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... on subversion from the left. Andrew reproduces what is by now a well-known quote from Edward Heath on the ‘nonsense’ that MI5 people could come out with. ‘If some of them were on a Tube and saw someone reading the Daily Mirror, they would say: “Get after him, that is dangerous. We must find out where he bought it.”’ Andrew finds that ...

Petting Cafés!

E.S. Turner: Wartime spivs and dodgers, 4 December 2003

An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War 
by Donald Thomas.
Murray, 429 pp., £20, July 2003, 0 7195 5732 1
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... Haifa, and who enjoyed the distinction of being cashiered in Jerusalem. This was Captain Neville Heath, destined to be hanged in 1946 for the lurid murders of young women (the wartime careers of John George Haigh, the ‘acid bath murderer’, and John Christie, the serial killer, are ...

Jangling Monarchy

Tom Paulin: Milton and the Regicides, 8 August 2002

A Companion to Milton 
by Thomas N. Corns.
Blackwell, 528 pp., £80, June 2001, 0 631 21408 9
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The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography 
by Barbara K. Lewalski.
Blackwell, 816 pp., £25, December 2000, 0 631 17665 9
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... of change Perplexes monarchs. According to Milton’s early biographer, the Irish republican John Toland, Charles II’s Licenser for the Press regarded these lines as subversive, and wanted to suppress the whole poem. Immediately after the passage in which he imagines God hatching the universe out of the abyss, Milton asks: what in me is dark ...
From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities 
edited by David Wright and Anne Digby.
Routledge, 238 pp., £45, October 1996, 9780415112154
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... dead whose minds are irrecoverable and unfathomable, those who, at most, briefly caper across the heath of history crying out ‘come not in here, nuncle,’ or who, as with George Austen, achieve a glimmer of reflected glory. Sister Jane left her novels: the mentally defective brother, boarded out with a poor family near Basingstoke and eventually buried in ...

Diary

Patrick Wright: The Deer Park or the Tank Park?, 31 March 1988

... is the Palladian Chapel which Fanny Burney described as ‘a Pantheon in miniature’. Designed by John Tasker for Thomas Weld and made by Italian craftsmen in 1792, this is widely known as the first free-standing Catholic church to be built in England after the Reformation. Meanwhile Saint Andrews, the old village church from which Weld bones were removed to ...

Raven’s Odyssey

D.A.N. Jones, 19 July 1984

Swallow 
by D.M. Thomas.
Gollancz, 312 pp., £8.95, June 1984, 0 575 03446 7
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First Among Equals 
by Jeffrey Archer.
Hodder, 446 pp., £8.95, July 1984, 0 340 35266 3
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Morning Star 
by Simon Raven.
Blond and Briggs, 264 pp., £8.95, June 1984, 9780856341380
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... story reaches 1975, the artist draws the two fictional Tories acting as bookmakers, while Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher are harnessed as racehorses. The Parliamentary history recorded in First Among Equals begins in 1964 and concludes in 1991. Since Jeffrey Archer served in Parliament from 1969 to 1974, he offers here the benefit of his experience, his ...

Say what you will about Harold

Christopher Hitchens, 2 December 1993

Wilson: The Authorised Life 
by Philip Ziegler.
Weidenfeld, 593 pp., £20, September 1993, 0 297 81276 9
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... been debated for decades whether Wilson resigned on this matter, along with Aneurin Bevan and John Freeman, because of the principle of National Health, or because of the more ancient principle of reculer pour mieux sauter. And it’s hard to blur this choice, but Ziegler has a clumsy try at the task. Prescription charges, on the one hand, Gaitskell’s ...

Fathers Who Live Too Long

John Kerrigan: Shakespeare’s Property, 12 September 2013

Being and Having in Shakespeare 
by Katharine Eisaman Maus.
Oxford, 141 pp., £25, February 2013, 978 0 19 969800 4
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... Cade’s rebellion is brought to an end. No such stable, temperate propriety exists on Lear’s heath, where wisdom is found in turbulence. Maus illuminates the core stuff of the tragedy, from the king’s outcry against injustice to the sequence after his death when the division and handing on of property is again a major concern. She is alert to the way ...

Kinsfolk

D.A.N. Jones, 12 July 1990

A Sort of Clowning: Life and Times, 1940-59 
by Richard Hoggart.
Chatto, 225 pp., £14.95, June 1990, 0 7011 3607 3
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Tilting at Don Quixote 
by Nicholas Wollaston.
Deutsch, 314 pp., £14.95, June 1990, 0 233 98551 4
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Finger Lickin’ Good: A Kentucky Childhood 
by Paul Levy.
Chatto, 202 pp., £13.95, May 1990, 0 7011 3521 2
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How Many Miles to Babylon? 
by Adewale Maja-Pearce.
Heinemann, 154 pp., £13.95, June 1990, 0 434 44172 4
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... solid chargehand’s tread and decent low voice as he rounded the corner with his workmate, John Armitage ...’ The parody seems to invite a warm-hearted review. What is wrong with it? The serious Hoggart snaps: ‘Epithets are used for their likely effect on the reader, not to catch the nature of what is being described.’ Such books are no use, with ...

Sticky Wicket

Charles Nicholl: Colonel Fawcett’s Signet Ring, 28 May 2009

The Lost City of Z 
by David Grann.
Simon and Schuster, 339 pp., £16.99, February 2009, 978 1 84737 436 3
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... the wilderness’. In Conan Doyle’s South American fantasia, The Lost World (1912), the explorer John Roxton is recognisably based on Fawcett, whose lectures in London Doyle had attended. He had ‘something of Don Quixote’, Doyle wrote, ‘and yet again something which was the essence of the English country gentleman’, and though his eyes twinkled there ...

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