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The Best Stuff

Ian Jack: David Astor, 2 June 2016

David Astor: A Life in Print 
by Jeremy Lewis.
Cape, 400 pp., £25, March 2016, 978 0 224 09090 2
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... and behind it lay the struggle of a very rich man to do good. In his role as owner-editor, David Astor had more freedom than any other journalist in London, but power made him bashful and uneasy. When, towards the end of Astor’s editing career, the South African journalist Donald Woods proposed a series of interviews with him, Astor suggested that ...

Sunshine

David Goldie: Morecambe and Wise, 15 April 1999

Morecambe and Wise 
by Graham McCann.
Fourth Estate, 416 pp., £16.99, October 1998, 1 85702 735 3
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... comedy was only just beginning to bite, Morecambe and Wise showed that national audiences could be held with material that was innovative, sparkling, and as demotically surreal as anything from the universities and metropolitan comedy clubs. They also showed that there could be such a thing as victimless comedy. In explaining and in celebrating this, McCann is ...

Maximum Embarrassment

David Marquand, 7 May 1987

Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism 
by John Campbell.
Weidenfeld, 430 pp., £15.95, March 1987, 0 297 78998 8
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The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton: 1918-40, 1945-60 
edited by Ben Pimlott.
Cape, 752 pp., £40, January 1987, 0 224 01912 0
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... is Dalton on a meeting of the Constitutional Sub-Committee of the Party’s National Executive, held in January 1934 to consider the recent pronouncements of Sir Stafford Cripps: Cripps seems quite unable to see the argument that he is damaging the party electorally. It is all ‘misreporting’, or picking sentences out of their context. He has become ...

No Exit

David Runciman, 23 May 1996

The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain 
edited by S.J.D. Green and R.C. Whiting.
Cambridge, 403 pp., £40, February 1996, 0 521 45537 5
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... from which we needed to escape. We all know what it means to be interfered with, bossed about, held back, dealt with arbitrarily. But can we recognise when this is being done to us by the state? What sort of experience is it? It is the experience of being interfered with by someone solely on account of the position they hold within the state, of being ...

Bodily Waste

David Trotter, 2 November 1995

The Spectacular Body: Science, Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas 
by Anthea Callen.
Yale, 244 pp., £35, February 1995, 0 300 05443 2
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... highlight what Huysmans believed to be the ‘alarming message’ that female sexual promiscuity held for bourgeois patriarchy. The burden of Callen’s historicism at this juncture rests on Huysmans’s words rather than on her own analysis of the pastels. It is odd, therefore, that she cites his essay not in the original but as it is quoted or paraphrased ...

Politicians in a Fix

David Runciman: The uses of referendums, 10 July 2003

... plebiscite too many in 1969 and was finished. It is also easy to forget that the first referendum held in the British Isles took place in Northern Ireland in 1973, on the question of whether the province should remain part of the United Kingdom or be joined with the Republic of Ireland. This was not a propitious time or place to start experimenting with more ...

Why do you make me do it?

David Bromwich: Robert Ryan, 18 February 2016

... all mad dogs … I wish they’d leave us alone.’ ‘Leave you alone to do what?’ Tracy held his own in the scene magnificently, but later on the set he asked the writer Millard Kaufman, ‘Does Ryan scare you?’ and took no comfort from the reassuring reply. ‘Well, he scares the hell out of me.’ This effect was repeated too often to be called ...

The Mourning Paper

David Simpson: On war and showing pictures of the dead, 20 May 2004

... to avoid a recurrence of Vietnam syndrome, where the wide circulation of images of the dead was held partly responsible for the vigour of the antiwar movement. This wasn’t the reason given: the claim has been that withholding such images is a mark of respect for grieving families, and accords with their own expressed desires. A First Amendment activist ...

The Choice Was Real

David Runciman, 29 June 2017

... for either of the main parties to forge decisively ahead. Seventy seats in the new Parliament are held by MPs who are not Labour or Tory. In 1970 that figure was 12. Back then, Northern Irish electoral politics were still an extension of what happened on the mainland: the Ulster Unionists, effectively the Northern Irish branch of the Conservative Party, won ...

Profits Now, Costs Later

David Woodruff: Mariana Mazzucato, 22 November 2018

The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy 
by Mariana Mazzucato.
Allen Lane, 384 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 0 241 18881 1
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... growth, it directly contributes to rising inequality. A doctrine emerged in the 1970s which held that corporations should focus on maximising ‘shareholder value’, expressed in the price of shares. Tying managers’ pay to share price encourages them to focus on this, but results in gigantic differences in remuneration within companies. You don’t ...

Short Cuts

John Sturrock: A Bath in the Dock, 18 December 2003

... as we now know by his own peculiar account, took place in his bathroom. Since one of the girls is held to have drowned in the bath, the prosecution saw fit to have this detachable part of the crime scene brought into court, to authenticate a pathologist’s testimony, even though there was nothing remotely unorthodox about Huntley’s bath that might have ...

Diary

Tam Dalyell: Questions for Mrs Thatcher, 23 July 1987

... weight to it should ponder the Conservative defeat in genteel South Edinburgh, a seat they had held since the 19th-century Reform Bills, and the loss of its MP, one of the ministerial architects of the poll tax, Michael Ancram; or the fact that they came within the narrowest shave of losing their Defence Secretary George Younger, in Ayr – by general ...

Diary

D.A.N. Jones: In Baghdad , 5 July 1984

... who wanted me to read verses at a little morning session for foreign poets. ‘Oh, please, Mr David. We only have one Frenchman so far.’ Foolishly I agreed to pipe up if she really ran short of European versifiers. By Easter Sunday we were enjoying an ideal English summer, blue skies and cool breeze. We were feasted, Arab poems were beautifully ...

Hebrew without tears

Blair Worden, 20 May 1982

Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603-1655 
by David Katz.
Oxford, 312 pp., £17.50, April 1982, 0 19 821885 0
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... the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I in 1290. During the next fortnight five meetings were held, the last of them open to the public, before the convention was adjourned. It did not meet again. Menasseh ben Israel, who from his base in Amsterdam had for eight years been mobilising support for the readmission of the Jews to England, was broken by the ...

Damnable Deficient

Colin Kidd: The American Revolution, 17 November 2005

1776: America and Britain at War 
by David McCullough.
Allen Lane, 386 pp., £25, June 2005, 0 7139 9863 6
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... in the popular iconography of American freedom, alongside comic-book heroes in capes and tights. David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, a federalist president who failed to secure re-election, has sold two million copies since it was published in 2001. For all its sentimental and antiquarian dimensions, the cult of the founders has damaging political ...

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