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Diary

James Meek: In Athens, 1 December 2011

... hikes and a one-off ‘solidarity tax’ on property. Like the poll tax that did so much to bring Margaret Thatcher down, like the head tax the Ottoman Empire charged Christian Greeks, it takes little account of people’s ability to pay. It comes in two whopping instalments of hundreds of euros each. And it comes as part of the electricity bill. If ...
... tomboy who wanted to hang on to the privileges that boys and men had. In a way, she reminded me of Margaret Thatcher, who was hailed by many feminists as a blow struck for feminism and turned out to be nothing of the sort. Doris used her femininity where it was useful or enjoyable, but had no interest at all in the actual politics of feminism, or in ...

What are you willing to do?

James Meek, 26 May 2022

How Civil Wars Start – And How to Stop Them 
by Barbara F. Walter.
Viking, 289 pp., £18.99, January 2022, 978 0 241 42975 4
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... faced in forcing European and American leaders to impose sanctions when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher sympathised with the Pretoria regime. Walter’s attribution of the fall of apartheid to pity, white-collar public outrage, elite wisdom, capitalist pragmatism and demographic determinism is odd in a book about civil war. Her text ...

All change. This train is cancelled

Iain Sinclair: The Dome, 13 May 1999

... civil engineering achievements. Look at anything deriving from the key icon of the era, Margaret Thatcher, hard hat perched on hard hair, giving her blessing to Paul Reichmann, as they gloat over a scale-model of the future city of glass. My spirits were high. The Dome (or ‘Doom’, as displaced locals spoke of it) was a Bunyanesque target, a ...

Robin Hood in a Time of Austerity

James Meek, 18 February 2016

... Hood is a tax-cutter and a handout-denouncer. He’s Jeremy Clarkson. He’s Nigel Farage. He’s Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He’s by your elbow in the pub, telling you he knows an immigrant who just waltzed into the social security office and walked out with a cheque for £1000. He’s in the pages of the Daily Mail, fingering a workshy ...

Umpteens

Christopher Ricks, 22 November 1990

Bloomsbury Dictionary of Dedications 
edited by Adrian Room.
Bloomsbury, 354 pp., £17.99, September 1990, 0 7475 0521 7
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Unauthorised Versions: Poems and their Parodies 
edited by Kenneth Baker.
Faber, 446 pp., £14.99, September 1990, 0 571 14122 6
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The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse 
edited by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 407 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 0 571 14470 5
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... more interesting phenomenon, but is the wording of her dedications interesting or original? ‘To Margaret Rutherford, in admiration’: I share the admiration for Margaret Rutherford, but not the admiration for this as a dedication. There can be no intrinsic objection to such a dedication as Thomas Moore’s, of Lalla ...

Two Men in a Boat

Ian Aitken, 15 August 1991

John Major: The Making of the Prime Minister 
by Bruce Anderson.
Fourth Estate, 324 pp., £16.99, June 1991, 9781872180540
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‘My Style of Government’: The Thatcher Years 
by Nicholas Ridley.
Hutchinson, 275 pp., £16.99, July 1991, 0 09 175051 2
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... to the highest elective office in the land only 11 and a half years after becoming an MP in Mrs Thatcher’s first election victory, remarkable though that is in itself. The other reason why he is entitled to be bemused by the whole astonishing chain of events is that he is, by almost anybody’s standards, quite the least charismatic person to hold the ...

The Sound of Thunder

Tom Nairn: The Miners’ Strike, 8 October 2009

Marching to the Fault Line: The 1984 Miners’ Strike and the Death of Industrial Britain 
by Francis Beckett and David Hencke.
Constable, 303 pp., £18.99, February 2009, 978 1 84901 025 2
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Shafted: The Media, the Miners’ Strike and the Aftermath 
edited by Granville Williams.
Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, 176 pp., £9.99, March 2009, 978 1 898240 05 1
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... help, since it wasn’t held by the courts to be an ‘official’ strike). Both books agree that Margaret Thatcher’s eventual victory enabled her to consolidate a free-market programme of deregulation that would soon merge with the wider international movement of neoliberalism. The use of violence by the state was evident in many encounters between ...

I just worked it out from the novel

Michael Wood, 24 April 1997

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me 
by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Harvill, 313 pp., £8.99, October 1996, 1 86046 199 9
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The Club Dumas 
by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, translated by Sonia Soto.
Harcourt Brace, 368 pp., $23, February 1997, 0 15 100182 0
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... A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. All three are admirably translated by Margaret Jull Costa, who not only catches the meanings of words with grace and precision, but gets rhythms of thought, and even better, rhythms of afterthought to carry over into English. Marías writes the kind of old-fashioned, speculative prose we associate ...

Where are all the people?

Owen Hatherley: Jane Jacobs, 27 July 2017

Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs 
by Robert Kanigel.
Knopf, 512 pp., £34, September 2016, 978 0 307 96190 7
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Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs 
edited by Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring.
Random House, 544 pp., £16.99, October 2016, 978 0 399 58960 7
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... underpass. The housing, with its big, airy flats in the middle of London, became desirable after Margaret Thatcher introduced Right to Buy; a government office block designed by a famous architect opposite the Heygate Estate is now a tower of luxury flats. Like many of London’s more interesting spaces, Elephant and Castle ‘worked’ because of a ...

Come hungry, leave edgy

Sukhdev Sandhu: Brick Lane, 9 October 2003

Brick Lane 
by Monica Ali.
Doubleday, 413 pp., £12.99, June 2003, 9780385604840
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... became even worse in the course of the decade. In September 1978, just a few months after Margaret Thatcher claimed to understand why English men and women might feel their country was being ‘swamped’ by Commonwealth immigrants, the National Front moved its central offices from Teddington in West London to Great Eastern Street, a few ...

The Gatekeeper

Adam Tooze: Krugman’s Conversion, 22 April 2021

Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics and the Fight for a Better Future 
by Paul Krugman.
Norton, 444 pp., £13.99, February, 978 0 393 54132 8
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... American conservatives had never been as keen on the slogan There Is No Alternative as Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel. Under Trump there was simply no limit to the GOP’s opportunism. Typically, the centre and left did more intellectual work to come to terms with the new situation. The IMF’s former chief economist, Olivier ...

After Smith

Ross McKibbin, 9 June 1994

... to believe that the Government’s policies are benign in inspiration. Rather the reverse. Lady Thatcher as prime minister was entirely open in her determination to destroy those quasi-constitutional conventions of British political life which underlay the hated ‘consensus’ and the country’s decline. Moreover, the language of a bastard neo-liberalism ...

Thunderstruck

Arthur Gavshon, 6 June 1985

The Falklands War: Lessons for Strategy, Diplomacy and International Law 
edited by Alberto Coll and Anthony Arend.
Allen and Unwin, 252 pp., £18, May 1985, 0 04 327075 1
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... These issues include the nature of the political and Britain which led Galtieri’s Junta and Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet to act and react the way they did; the fact that both leaders’ political survival was at stake in the outcome; the high risks of personal diplomacy and the perils of multiple mediation. From a specifically british points of ...

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