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Conor Gearty, 18 April 1996

Scott Inquiry Report 
by Richard Scott.
HMSO, 2386 pp., £45, February 1996, 0 10 262796 7
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... were three government ministers, William Waldegrave from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Alan Clark from the DTI and Lord Trefgarne from Defence. On the agenda was what to do about the export of arms and arms-related equipment to the Gulf region in light of the changed circumstances brought about by peace. To the extent that the Howe guidelines were ...

Failed Vocation

James Butler: The Corbyn Project, 3 December 2020

Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour under Corbyn 
by Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire.
Bodley Head, 376 pp., £18.99, September, 978 1 84792 645 6
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This Land: The Story of a Movement 
by Owen Jones.
Allen Lane, 336 pp., £20, September, 978 0 241 47094 7
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... the thinking that informed the Democracy Review undertaken by Corbyn’s political secretary, Katy Clark, a former MP; it also inspired the drive in 2018, heavily promoted by Momentum, to introduce ‘open selection’ for MPs, making it easier to challenge incumbents. (MPs on the party’s right were eager to paint this as bullying, but this level of ...

The Me Who Knew It

Jenny Diski, 9 February 2012

Memory: Fragments of a Modern History 
by Alison Winter.
Chicago, 319 pp., £19.50, January 2012, 978 0 226 90258 6
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... Lombard and, increasingly, that whatsisname – oh you know, the bloke who played uh … Rhett Butler … was married to whatsername … begins with an L or an H … it feels to me that I am not who I used to be, not quite myself, or that I am continuing to leave ever further behind the someone I was. It isn’t the information that Carole Lombard was ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1995, 4 January 1996

... the most appealing a beaker on a dish with a rose belonging to the Saltwood Bequest and so to Alan Clark who is somewhere about, though I don’t see (or hear) him. Then there are lots of terrible flower paintings before some wonderful Goyas in the last room, including a heap of dead fish. The look in the eye of one of the dead bream seems familiar then I ...

Talk about doing

Frank Kermode, 26 October 1989

Against Deconstruction 
by John Ellis.
Princeton, 168 pp., £13.70, February 1989, 0 691 06754 6
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The New Historicism 
by H. Aram Veeser.
Routledge, 318 pp., £30, July 1989, 0 415 90070 0
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Rethinking Historicism: Critical Essays in Romantic History 
by Marjorie Levinson, Marilyn Butler, Jerome McGann and Paul Hamilton.
Blackwell, 149 pp., £22.50, August 1989, 0 631 16591 6
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Towards a Literature of Knowledge 
by Jerome McGann.
Oxford, 138 pp., £16.50, May 1989, 9780198117407
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The Stoic in Love: Selected Essays on Literature and Ideas 
by A.D. Nuttall.
Harvester, 209 pp., £25, July 1989, 0 7450 0614 0
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... offers some opinions that will always remain pretty mysterious. One typical claim is that Marilyn Butler’s contribution to the collection is distinguished by a calculated absence of Theory, and that this lack is a subtle snub to Mrs Thatcher: for it ‘undermines the deeply abstract objectivity used to legitimate the deeply concrete interests of the groups ...

On Saving the Warburg

Charles Hope, 4 December 2014

... long before Courtauld’s funding was due to end, supporters of the institute, including Kenneth Clark and Lee, decided to approach Rab Butler, the secretary of state for education, who happened to be Courtauld’s son-in-law. His first idea was to attach the Warburg to the Victoria and Albert Museum, financed by a grant ...

Chianti in Khartoum

Nick Laird: Louis MacNeice, 3 March 2011

Letters of Louis MacNeice 
edited by Jonathan Allison.
Faber, 768 pp., £35, May 2010, 978 0 571 22441 8
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... but even a MacNeice failure is more interesting than many poets’ successes. According to Samuel Butler, the true test of the imagination is the ability to name a cat, and in his last year at Marlborough, Louis had some suggestions for his stepmother: Re kittens, one must be called Old Foss after Mr Lear’s famous cat. The other two might perhaps be called ...

Enemies of Promise

Angus Calder, 2 March 1989

Breach of Promise: Labour in Power 1964-1970 
by Clive Ponting.
Hamish Hamilton, 433 pp., £15.95, February 1989, 0 241 12683 5
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James Maxton 
by Gordon Brown.
Fontana, 336 pp., £4.95, February 1988, 0 00 637255 4
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Forward! Labour Politics in Scotland 1888-1988 
edited by Ian Donnachie, Christopher Harvie and Ian Wood.
Polygon, 184 pp., £19.50, January 1989, 0 7486 6001 1
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... school-leaving age to 16: a commitment envisaged in the 1944 Education Act steered by the Tory Rab Butler. Just two graduates, Crosland and Benn, sided with formerly working-class ministers, amongst whom Brown challenged the Education Minister directly.     Brown: I want a straight answer to a straight question. If you had to choose between these 400,000 ...

Perfection’s Progress

E.H. Gombrich, 5 November 1981

Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900 
by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny.
Yale, 376 pp., £20, March 1981, 0 300 02641 2
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... No modern critic has approached this role of the antique with more tact and success than Kenneth Clark in his book The Nude, and it is a pity that this title is absent from the extensive bibliography given by the authors. It would certainly be possible to interpret the ‘rules of art’ derived from this approach as technical rules for the achievement of ...

Open in a Scream

Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021

Francis Bacon: Revelations 
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January, 978 0 00 729841 9
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... his painting, and he opened a showroom in South Kensington to display his rugs and furniture. Rab Butler, then a young MP, and his wife, Sydney Courtauld, Samuel Courtauld’s daughter, commissioned him to design their dining room. Interior design led to a growing circle of acquaintance, including with the Australian painter Roy de Maistre. In his ...

Fear in Those Blue Eyes

David Runciman: Thatcher in Her Bubble, 3 December 2015

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. II: Everything She Wants 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 821 pp., £30, October 2015, 978 0 7139 9288 5
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... the impulse to take charge. She allowed herself to be persuaded by her cabinet secretary, Robin Butler, that it was too dangerous for the prime minister’s office to appear to be setting the terms of the dispute. She remained reliant on her energy secretary, Peter Walker, whom she didn’t trust and feared would do ‘a fudge, like Pym and the Foreign ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... millionaire’ and suggests I should buy the library myself. He also claims as did Eamonn Butler back in 1996 that there is nowadays no need for libraries, for which other uses should be found, describing them as ‘prime retail opportunities’, which says it all.30 May, Yorkshire. Asked to provide a foreword for a book of oral history put together ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2010, 16 December 2010

... readable, drawing together so many strands of the artistic life in the 1930s and 1940s – K. Clark, Ben Nicholson, Betjeman and all the stuff to do with the genesis of the Shell Guides. Odd to think of Piper’s gaunt figure sketching in my own Yorkshire village, the paintings he did there reproduced (not plain why) in Osbert Sitwell’s Left Hand, Right ...

Grim Eminence

Norman Stone, 10 January 1983

The Twilight of the Comintern 1930-1935 
by E.H. Carr.
Macmillan, 436 pp., £25, December 1982, 0 333 33062 5
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... generation never forgave him for this and, as with so many other ‘appeasers’, including R.A. Butler, the charge of supporting Hitler’s causes stuck to him until the end. When Stalin began to win battles, Carr changed his tune. His Times editorials argued strongly, and with influence, for recognition of the role that the Soviet Union would have after ...

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