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The Asian Question

Mahmood Mamdani: On Leaving Uganda, 6 October 2022

... and whose nationality was later rescinded. With at least 25,000 other Ugandan Asians I headed for Britain, and was placed in a youth hostel on Kensington Church Street, just behind Kensington Palace, which had been turned into a transit camp for the refugees. Six months later I took up my first academic post at the University of Dar es Salaam. After the fall ...

Damsons and Custard

Paul Laity: Documentary cinema’s unsung poet, 3 March 2005

Humphrey Jennings 
by Kevin Jackson.
Picador, 448 pp., £30, October 2004, 0 330 35438 8
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... GPO Film Unit on a freelance basis, mainly, it seems, because he was hard up. He went on to become Britain’s most admired wartime documentary film-maker, and although his is far from a household name, his critical reputation has for decades been extremely high; Lindsay Anderson, an influential champion of his work, considered him ‘the only real poet the ...

In Letchworth

Gillian Darley: Pevsner's Hertfordshire, 2 January 2020

... I learned that his near neighbours were two of the most socially committed architects of postwar Britain, David and Mary Medd, who lived in a house they designed and built for themselves in the 1950s. The Medds were leading figures in the Hertfordshire county schools programme. Using a prefabricated system, first to build single-storey primary schools and ...

With Constantinople as Its Objective

Richard Prior and Trevor Wilson: Lord Kitchener and Winston Churchill, 14 January 2002

Lord Kitchener and Winston Churchill: The Dardanelles Commission Part I, 1914-15 
Stationery Office, 218 pp., £6.99, April 2000, 0 11 702423 6Show More
Defeat at Gallipoli: The Dardanelles Commission Part II, 1915-16 
Stationery Office, 319 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 11 702455 4Show More
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... are the reports of the Dardanelles Commission to an understanding of the First World War? Britain was not primarily at war with Turkey, but with Germany. The Turks had become involved only because they shared Germany’s hostility to Russia. For the Western Allies, however, the war against the Kaiser had taken an unwelcome turn by the end of ...

Nuthouse Al

Penelope Fitzgerald: Memory and culture in wartime London, 18 February 1999

Whistling in the Dark: Memory and Culture in Wartime London 
by Jean Freedman.
Kentucky, 230 pp., £28.50, January 1999, 0 8131 2076 4
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... an ideology that would be acceptable to a diverse population under siege’. She makes use of Ian McLaine’s Ministry of Morale, but has also considered the Home Intelligence Reports, Home Morale Emergency Committee Reports, Morale: Summary of Daily Reports and so forth, where the authorities’ anxious manipulations can be seen at work. It was a two-way ...

Saint John Henry

Richard Altick, 5 August 1982

John Henry Newman: His Life and Work 
by Brian Martin.
Chatto, 160 pp., £8.95, May 1982, 0 7011 2588 8
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Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England 
by Walter Arnstein.
Missouri, 271 pp., £14, June 1982, 9780826203540
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... The unseen spectator who was most involved in Pope John Paul’s progress through Britain, formerly in partibus infidelium, was the spirit of John Henry Newman, dead these 92 years, who doubtless observed the proceedings with mixed feelings. Surely Newman, a man of retiring temperament, would have been horrified by the crowds and the publicity which for the moment turned the search for a Via Media into a media event ...

Max the Impaler

Jeremy Warner, 12 March 1992

Maxwell: The Outsider 
by Tom Bower.
Heinemann, 520 pp., £16.99, December 1991, 0 7493 0238 0
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... would say all the things Mr Bower wanted to say in the first book but was prevented from by Britain’s tough libel laws. Unfortunately most of the new things he has to say – though, for cognoscenti of Maxwell, fascinating enough – pale into insignificance when set alongside the enormity of the financial scandal which has subsequently emerged. Of ...

Let’s go to Croydon

Jonathan Meades, 13 April 2023

Iconicon: A Journey around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain 
by John Grindrod.
Faber, 478 pp., £10.99, March, 978 0 571 34814 5
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... bloke of a building … cantilevered pot belly poking out over tight trousers’. Its architect, Ian Simpson, has a magnificent and probably iconic light entertainer’s bouffant. His work, too, is on an epic orchestral scale: fittingly brash and boorish, now thrilling, now corny. Like the late Ricardo Bofill he suggests that singular talent and gleeful ...

Talking about Northern Ireland

Tom Wilson, 27 February 1992

All in a Life 
by Garret FitzGerald.
Macmillan, 674 pp., £25, October 1991, 0 333 47034 6
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... as it happened, the number of seats held reflected votes cast much more accurately than in Great Britain, but this was cold comfort to the representatives of the Catholic minority, who had no chance of forming a government. Faulkner had therefore proposed, belatedly, that there should be three parliamentary committees, with the chairmanship of two guaranteed ...

Whose Body?

Charles Glass: ‘Operation Mincemeat’, 22 July 2010

Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that Changed the Course of World War Two 
by Ben Macintyre.
Bloomsbury, 400 pp., £16.99, January 2010, 978 0 7475 9868 8
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... a cameo role as an air-force officer who questions the wisdom of the scheme. In the meantime, Ian Colvin, a journalist whose investigation into the wartime coup had prompted Montagu to come out first with his authorised version, published The Unknown Courier. So the tale has been told before, but Ben Macintyre has done a more thorough and readable job of ...

The Road to Independence

David Caute, 21 November 1985

Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe 
by Terence Ranger.
James Currey, 377 pp., £25, October 1985, 0 85255 000 6
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Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe 
by David Lan.
James Currey, 244 pp., £19.50, October 1985, 0 85255 200 9
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... were now no more than minor functionaries and tax collectors for the native commissioners. (Hence Ian Smith’s insistence that the chiefs were the ‘true’ leaders and spokesmen of their people.) The guerrillas also got advice from the mediums about bushcraft. David Lan quotes three former Zanla guerrillas: The spirit mediums gave us many good ideas. The ...

Into the Future

David Trotter: The Novel, 22 March 2007

The Novel: Vol. I: History, Geography and Culture 
edited by Franco Moretti.
Princeton, 916 pp., £65, June 2006, 0 691 04947 5
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The Novel: Vol. II: Forms and Themes 
edited by Franco Moretti.
Princeton, 950 pp., £65, June 2006, 0 691 04948 3
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... terms, the novel is modern. The most influential version of this argument was formulated by Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957), who found in the writing of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding a new and radical preoccupation with the here-and-now. The name Watt gave this preoccupation was ‘formal realism’: the premise, or primary convention, that ...

Megalo

R.W. Johnson, 9 March 1995

The State We’re In 
by Will Hutton.
Cape, 352 pp., £16.99, January 1995, 0 224 03688 2
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... economics editor, has produced a book which is part show-biz – it carries a passionate puff from Ian McEwan on the front cover and leapt straight into the bestseller list – and part political event: it clearly aims to provide a sweeping economic and political platform for Labour, has been elaborated with the help of Tony Blair’s adviser, David ...

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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... for the Gladstone Memorial Essay Prize, which was entitled ‘The State and the Railways in Great Britain 1823 – 63’ and which contained four hundred of them.At what point, I wonder, could anyone have seen it coming? The advance, I mean to say, of a mediocre but ruthless man without qualities? Philip Ziegler’s book charts the boy Wilson’s ghastly ...

Hopping in His Matchbox

Neal Ascherson: Hitler as a Human, 2 June 2016

Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 
by Volker Ullrich, translated by Jefferson Chase.
Bodley Head, 758 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 1 84792 285 4
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... historian to seize on the ‘working towards the Führer’ interpretation seems to have been Ian Kershaw. Each in the procession of immense tomes of Adolf biography claims to be ‘definitive’, but Kershaw’s two volumes, ‘Hubris’ and ‘Nemesis’, still dominate more than 15 years after their publication. Commenting on Willikens, Kershaw said ...

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