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Lancastrian Spin

Simon Walker: Usurpation, 10 June 1999

England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399-1422 
by Paul Strohm.
Yale, 274 pp., £25, August 1998, 0 300 07544 8
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... all Henry’s declared opponents in a single implausible conspiracy, probably reflects a strong sense of what their interrogators wanted to hear. To conclude from this that both incidents were ‘either invented or, if not invented, at least so extensively managed as to constitute a virtual invention’ is to overbid a ...

The Leader’s Cheerleaders

Simon Jenkins: Party Funding in Britain, 20 September 2007

The Cost of Democracy: Party Funding in Modern British Politics 
by K.D. Ewing.
Hart, 279 pp., £30, March 2007, 978 1 84113 716 2
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... and defence industries have shown under Labour. The case for limiting very large donations is strong. But the present voluntary union donations to Labour have hardly influenced government employment policy. The most intense external pressure on policy (for instance, in the al-Yamamah contract) has come from MPs defending their constituents’ jobs. But is ...

No Talk in Bed

Owen Flanagan: Confucius, 2 April 1998

The Analects of Confucius 
translated by Simon Leys.
Norton, 224 pp., £9.95, February 1998, 0 393 31699 8
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The Analects of Confucius 
translated by Chichung Huang.
Oxford, 224 pp., £35, October 1997, 0 19 506157 8
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... Legge. The title is obscure, but it has stuck. Chichung Huang, in his literal translation, makes a strong case that the original title, Lun Yu, is best translated as Ethical Dialogues. Thinking of it in this way, as a book of ethics, presented mostly in the form of sayings that begin ‘The Master says’ or with questions followed by answers from the Master ...

His Spittin’ Image

Colm Tóibín: John Stanislaus Joyce, 22 February 2018

... who will fly to avoid what seeks to ensnare him. As he flies, however, his father always follows. Simon Dedalus appears or is mentioned in seven of the 18 episodes of Ulysses. In some of the other versions we have of him, in Stanislaus’s My Brother’s Keeper and in the biography by Wyse Jackson and Costello, where he is installed at home, he is ...

Bait and Switch

Simon Wren-Lewis: The Global Financial Crisis, 25 October 2018

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World 
by Adam Tooze.
Allen Lane, 706 pp., £30, August 2018, 978 1 84614 036 5
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... to dealing with the banking crisis and applying it to public spending. Combined with an equally strong monetary stimulus, the results were impressive. China’s growth rate in 2009, at 9.1 per cent, was barely lower than in 2008, while in most other advanced economies growth in 2009 was significantly negative. In 2009, China was the chief counterweight to ...
Stafford Cripps: A Political Life 
by Simon Burgess.
Gollancz, 374 pp., £25, November 1999, 0 575 06565 6
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... Cripps provide a nice study in contrasts. On the right, the leader of the Conservative Party, with strong nationalist and imperialist instincts: a fat man who notoriously enjoyed his cigars, his champagne (other people’s, too) and his brandy; and who made it the central aim of his postwar policy to give the British people more red meat. On the left, a ...

Snouty

John Bayley, 4 June 1987

The Faber Book of Diaries 
edited by Simon Brett.
Faber, 498 pp., £12.95, March 1987, 0 571 13806 3
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A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children over Three Centuries 
by Linda Pollock.
Fourth Estate, 319 pp., £14.95, April 1987, 0 947795 25 1
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... centuries for each day of the year. The effect of variety, and of uniformity, achieved by Simon Brett’s use of this method, and by the breadth of his selecttion, is very striking. Equally striking is the illustration of Derrida’s point about ‘the other’. Diarists could indeed be said to be afraid of themselves, and to transform those selves ...

Our Trusty Friend the Watch

Simon Schaffer, 31 October 1996

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time 
by Dava Sobel.
Fourth Estate, 184 pp., £12.99, August 1996, 1 85702 502 4
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... Profits could be huge, though ‘all the branches require a mechanic head, a light nice hand and a strong sight. If he understands his Business, he may have Bread almost any where.’ Sobel is fairly reliable on horological technique and has some very good sources, too, notably the stunning lecture delivered in 1935 by the ex-naval officer Rupert Gould, who ...

Exactly like a Stingray

Simon Schaffer: The evolution of the battery, 3 June 2004

Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment 
by Giuliano Pancaldi.
Princeton, 381 pp., £22.95, June 2003, 0 691 09685 6
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... Some bodies could hold a lot of electricity at low tension, so no sparks would appear even though strong shocks might be felt. Another problem, even more tantalising, was how such shocks could be controlled by the animal. Stingrays, their eyes narrowing just before they struck their victim, seemed to be able to decide when to deliver the shock. Here was a ...

Make use of me

Jeremy Treglown: Olivia Manning, 9 February 2006

Olivia Manning: A Life 
by Neville Braybrooke and June Braybrooke.
Chatto, 301 pp., £20, November 2004, 0 7011 7749 7
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... killed in an uprising encouraged by the Germans. Both novels anticipate the trilogies in taking a strong line against colonialism. In the Levant Trilogy, written in the late 1970s, Manning’s views are sometimes too explicit. When Harriet asks Simon what Britain has done for Egypt, he answers dutifully: ‘We’ve brought ...

Larkin and Us

Barbara Everett, 4 November 1982

Larkin at Sixty 
edited by Anthony Thwaite.
Faber, 148 pp., £7.95, May 1982, 9780571118786
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The Art of Philip Larkin 
by Simon Petch.
Sydney University Press, 108 pp., £5.95, September 1982, 0 424 00090 3
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... Dunn, good as they are, can’t help not coming up to. The second or critical section is extremely strong: John Gross on the Oxford Book, George Hartley on the early publishing, Clive James on the jazz criticism as well as the poems, Alan Brownjohn on the novels, Christopher Ricks on Larkin’s poetic style and structure, Seamus Heaney on his idealism, and ...

Amigos

Christopher Ricks, 2 August 1984

The Faber Book of Parodies 
edited by Simon Brett.
Faber, 383 pp., £8.95, May 1984, 0 571 13125 5
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Lilibet: An Account in Verse of the Early Years of the Queen until the Time of her Accession 
by Her Majesty.
Blond and Briggs, 95 pp., £6.95, May 1984, 0 85634 157 6
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... of parodies. This is not it. The superiority of Dwight Macdonald’s old enduring anthology to Simon Brett’s new ephemeral one begins in Macdonald’s not being a sloven. When Pope was imitating Chaucer, he did not write, ‘This sely Clerk full doth lout,’ but ‘full low doth lout’, a line which has rhythm and sense. Lewis Carroll, bent upon ...

Haleking

John Bossy: Simon Forman, 22 February 2001

The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman 
by Barbara Howard Traister.
Chicago, 260 pp., £19, February 2001, 0 226 81140 9
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Dr Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician 
by Judith Cook.
Chatto, 228 pp., £18.99, January 2001, 0 7011 6899 4
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... private-enterprise medical practitioner, counsellor, sexual athlete and compulsive writer Simon Forman. Forman’s voluminous papers, case-notes, diaries and all sorts of other writings had been in the Bodleian Library since Elias Ashmole presented them in the late 17th century. They contained a vast amount of anecdote about all sorts of ...

In the Know

Simon Schaffer, 10 November 1994

Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture 
by William Eamon.
Princeton, 490 pp., £38.50, July 1994, 0 691 03402 8
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The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire 
by Pamela Smith.
Princeton, 308 pp., £30, July 1994, 0 691 05691 9
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... and marvels. What made these experimenters different from their predecessors was their equally strong commitment to publicity and discipline. Della Porta had once explained that ‘if you would have your works appear more wonderful, you must not let the cause be known.’ The 17th-century masters of new kinds of laboratories had to steer a path between the ...

Revolution and Enlightenment in France

Simon Schama, 20 December 1979

The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the ‘Encyclopédie’ 1775-1800 
by Robert Darnton.
Harvard, 624 pp., £13, September 1979, 0 674 08786 0
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... Specialising in rapid turn-over and massive profit margins, he never hesitated to use graft, strong-arm pressure and extortion to secure them. While tyrannising his subcontractors to produce the goods, he was quietly creaming off enormous sums by falsifying his inventory of sales. Even he, however, could go too far and expose himself to lethal ...

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