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What are we telling the nation?

David Edgar: Thoughts about the BBC, 7 July 2005

Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC 
by Georgina Born.
Vintage, 352 pp., £10.99, August 2005, 0 09 942893 8
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Building Public Value: Renewing the BBC for a Digital World 
BBC, 135 pp.Show More
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... by the head of serials, Jonathan Powell, produced by the Birmingham regional drama head, Michael Wearing, and scheduled before Martin had finished the scripts. Third, as a result of its plural structure, the department had gained and kept its reputation as a producer-led, oppositional space, not just for Edge of Darkness, but for Alan Bleasdale’s ...

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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... 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 15-year-olds and university students, which would you help?     Gordon-Walker: If I had to make such a choice I suppose I’d help ...

The Cruiser

Christopher Hitchens, 22 February 1996

On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy through an Age of Unreason 
by Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Free Press, 168 pp., £7.99, February 1996, 0 02 874094 7
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... of these themes, without actually expanding them very much. Yet here we have Burke presented as a straight, unambiguous Tory; either the adamant foe of Jefferson or the moaning defender of Marie Antoinette. This is a real and sad declension. One of the signal achievements of the French Revolution was the abolition of slavery, and one of the horrors of ...

A Surfeit of Rank

Simon Akam, 10 March 2022

The Habit of Excellence: Why British Army Leadership Works 
by Langley Sharp.
Penguin, 320 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 0 241 50750 6
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... an oik, show proper deference to seniors and get a decent tailor.This dispatch, which appears in Michael Yardley and Dennis Sewell’s 1989 book A New Model Army, sounds like a transmission from another era. But the practice of moulding the intake has continued. Patrick Hennessey, the author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club, served from 2004 to ...

For Those Who Don’t Know

Julian Bell: Van Gogh’s Letters, 5 November 2009

Vincent van Gogh: The Letters 
edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker, translated by Michael Hoyle et al.
Thames and Hudson, 2180 pp., £395, October 2009, 978 0 500 23865 3
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... he had also reverted to the middle ground of his practice, landscape painted straight from the motif. Landscape punctuated with near equivalents to figures – the sun, the stars, the trees. At its furthest reach, pervaded with them, so that the familiar biblical metaphor swished both ways and all grass was flesh. Investing vegetation ...

Our Fault

Frank Kermode, 11 October 1990

Our Age: Portrait of a Generation 
by Noël Annan.
Weidenfeld, 479 pp., £20, October 1990, 0 297 81129 0
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... treatment of persons. Among its heroes are Isaiah Berlin and, with a good deal of qualification, Michael Oakeshott; on the Left there is the author’s contemporary Eric Hobsbawm. Others’ heroes – Raymond Williams, for instance – are sometimes harshly dismissed (‘a nonconformist spellbinder, rhetorical, evasive and vacuous’). These judgments are ...

Bringing Down Chunks of the Ceiling

Andy Beckett: Manchester, England: The Story of the Pop Cult City by Dave Haslam, 17 February 2000

Manchester, England: The Story of the Pop Cult City 
by Dave Haslam.
Fourth Estate, 319 pp., £12.99, September 1999, 1 84115 145 9
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... city, Manchester was notoriously overcrowded, jerrybuilt and grey. The ‘poor quality of straight life’, as Haslam drily puts it, gave a ‘mania’ to the population’s efforts at escape. Drinking was already a notorious local pastime – the beer was safer than the water – but the sheer density and novelty of the 19th-century city generated ...

Romantic Ireland

Denis Donoghue, 4 February 1982

The Collected Stories of Sean O’Faolain: Vols I and II 
Constable, 445 pp., £8.50, October 1980, 0 00 946330 5Show More
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... in Inchigeela but in Literature. Specifically, the encounter with the dark woman seemed to come straight from Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen, the loneliness, the desire, and I was not surprised to find the story ending with a poem in eight lyric stanzas and a word from Yeats: ‘The dawn moved along the rim of the mountains and as I went down’ the hill ...

Diary

Clive James, 20 May 1982

... Roy Jenkins wins and history is made Or if not made at least it’s modified. The dingbats straight away are on parade With Benn at his most foam-flecked and pop-eyed, Saying the gains the SDP has made All clearly point to a retreating tide. Thus King Canute spake as his feet got wetter, But further up the beach his court knew better. But now a ...

Green Martyrs

Patricia Craig, 24 July 1986

The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse 
edited by Thomas Kinsella.
Oxford, 423 pp., £12.50, May 1986, 0 19 211868 4
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The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry 
edited by Paul Muldoon.
Faber, 415 pp., £10.95, May 1986, 0 571 13760 1
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Irish Poetry after Joyce 
by Dillon Johnston.
Dolmen, 336 pp., £20, September 1986, 0 85105 437 4
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... Carson, McGuckian ... the list goes on. Perhaps the most singular omission, though, is that of Michael Longley, whose Poems 1963-83, issued last year by the Salamander Press, shows a poet of incomparable fluency and discernment. When it comes to the Heaney selection (five poems), Kinsella has been rather unenterprising: nothing at all from Station ...

Favourite Subjects

J.I.M. Stewart, 17 September 1981

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien 
edited by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien.
Allen and Unwin, 463 pp., £9.95, August 1981, 0 04 826005 3
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Tolkien and the Silmarils 
by Randel Helms.
Thames and Hudson, 104 pp., £5.50, September 1981, 0 500 01264 4
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... in different fashion by Germanic poets and Roman writers. His father, having heard the paper, went straight home and wrote as follows: I suddenly realised that I am a pure philologist. I like history, and am moved by it, but its finest moments for me are those in which it throws light on words and names! ... I find the thing that really thrills my nerves is ...

Diary

Jon Day: Hoardiculture, 8 September 2022

... as a collector is merely a hoarder who has space for his stuff). This is one of the reasons Michael Landy’s Break Down (2001), the artwork in which he systematically destroyed all his possessions – including his passport, his birth certificate and his father’s sheepskin coat – in a shop window on Oxford Street, was so provocative. It felt not ...

Vibrating to the Chord of Queer

Elaine Showalter: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 6 March 2003

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity 
by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Duke, 216 pp., £14.95, March 2003, 0 8223 3015 6
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Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory 
edited by Stephen Barber and David Clark.
Routledge, 285 pp., £55, September 2002, 0 415 92818 4
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... taught her first course in gay and lesbian studies to undergraduates at Amherst College and met Michael Lynch, a Canadian critic and gay activist with Aids, who introduced her to ‘the scene of gay men’s bonding . . . which at the experiential level was almost totally unknown to me’. In her next book, Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick wrote more ...

Who scored last?

Gavin Francis: Collision Sport, 5 October 2023

Concussed: Sport’s Uncomfortable Truth 
by Sam Peters.
Allen & Unwin, 448 pp., £20, August, 978 1 83895 577 9
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... player and coach Alex Murphy: ‘“You don’t bring that player off,” and then he looked me straight in the eyes and said, “unless he’s ——ing dead.”’ And then he pushed me onto the field.’ In 2009, it was discovered that at a game between Harlequins and Leinster, the Harlequins’ physio, attending a player on the field, slipped him a fake ...

England’s Isaiah

Perry Anderson, 20 December 1990

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas 
by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy.
Murray, 276 pp., £18.95, October 1990, 9780719547898
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... volume provides a graphic illustration of the point. ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made’: Immanuel Kant dixit. By dint of repetition – the statement is cited once in Russian Thinkers, twice in Against the Current, three times in Four Essays on Liberty, and twice more in The Crooked Timber itself – Berlin has ...

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