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“... Philosophy’s critics have a variety of criteria from which to choose. The first question to ask about any philosopher’s claims is whether they are true. But there are other questions which sometimes crowd this one out. Is his work accessible and persuasive? Does it touch our lives? Will it last? With so many options there is no pretending that it is obvious what counts as success ...”

“... Evan Luard’s Socialism Without the State, John Horam’s calls for ‘market socialism’ and David Owen’s evocation of the co-operative, decentralist element in the British socialist tradition exemplified a widespread mood, with which the old Right of the Labour Party had no more in common than had the Left. It was not as new a mood as he seems to ...”

“... now comprise around 160 Alliance, 180 Labour and 280 Conservative MPs – and the new books by David Butler and Vernon Bogdanor would have vanished beneath a stampede of eager buyers. As things are, though the distorted election results have robbed them of some of their topicality, they will be very widely and minutely studied by politicians, students of ...”

“... Some of the essays are precise, well-researched pieces into easily defined topics, such as Macdonald on model farms (‘expensive, trivial and ultimately ephemeral’), Goddard on agricultural societies, both metropolitan and provincial, and Sykes on the links between agriculture and science. In his account of the growth of ...”

“... pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous. And it’s four decades since David Bowie – wearing a lot of make-up and very few clothes, grinning through his pointy teeth, all at once so English, so ordinary and so glamorous – released The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. ‘Five years, that’s all we’ve ...”

“... in 1650 was marked by Royal Oak Day – 29 May. By drawing profusely on churchwardens’ accounts, David Cressy attempts to illustrate the relative impact of these occasions – though it is not always clear what, if anything, can be concluded from differences in payments. Such difficulties are not overcome by the author’s tendency to slip into ...”

“... This book contains reflections on both history and theory, and is written with David Marquand’s usual elegance and intelligence. Its 19 essays concern themes familiar to readers of his biography of Ramsay MacDonald and his distinguished study, The Unprincipled Society: how can we devise for modern Britain an appropriate ‘social democratic’ theory of social action, and how can we construct a ‘progressive’ coalition which might give it adequate electoral support ...”

“... for military staffs to prepare war plans, or for governments to hint at the use of military force. David Spring shows that Russian leaders knew they had good political, financial, military and social reasons to avoid war, and that their hesitant moves towards army mobilisation were intended only to underscore a firm diplomatic stand, and to deter. The French ...”

“... before the levee at Holyrood, when he had worn ‘full Highland dress’, described by the painter David Wilkie as kilt and hose ‘with a kind of flesh-coloured pantaloons underneath’ and by a Lowland laird as ‘the Royal Tartan Highland dress with buff-coloured trowsers like flesh to imitate his Royal knees, and little bits of Tartan stocking like other ...”

“... and he seems to have left no lasting mark on foreign policy; Of all his prime ministers, he liked MacDonald the best, which hardly inspires confidence in his political judgment. Most politicians, in fact, found George V very difficult to deal with. His obsessions with the trivia of courtly life meant that he rebuked ministers who were working twenty hours a ...”

“... of the Victorian Liberal Party, many of whose members were much nearer to Mrs Thatcher than to David Lloyd George. But it is the Labour Party, and specifically its left wing, which suffers most severely from myths about a golden past now lost in the mists of time. Even quite well-read Labour politicians are prone to the belief that This Great Movement of ...”

“... in public sophistication. Public banding, which articulates the contractarian spirit identified in David Miller’s Queen’s Rebels (1978), has taken varied forms. An unexpected aspect of the present crisis has been the non-emergence of this respectable vigilantism despite Paisley’s repeated efforts to flourish a ‘third ...”

“... John Dewey and Sidney Hook with a similar programme. Lionel Trilling, James Farrell and Dwight Macdonald were among the many writers active on the anti-Stalinist left who were in conflict with the League. Partisan Review posed a series of questions challenging the League to come clean on its position concerning ‘the character of the present war’ and ...”

“... War, when John Bull built up a circulation of two million. Labour leaders like Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald were traitors who should be ‘shot at dawn’. Readers were urged to wage a ‘blood feud’ against Germans living in Britain: ‘You cannot naturalise an unnatural beast – a human abortion – a hellish freak. But you can exterminate ...”

“... were arrested. Several of the culprits were deported and on 22 April three teenagers – Hugh MacDonald, Hugh McIntosh and Neil Sutherland – were hanged. Hundreds of police and soldiers lined the streets for the execution, in what Knox calls ‘a pageant of civil and military power’. In 1993 the party was moved to the New Town. Princes Street had ...”