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Susan Pedersen: The Fate of Social Democracy, 2 January 2020

Thatcher’s Progress: From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism through an English New Town 
by Guy Ortolano.
Cambridge, 301 pp., £29.99, June 2019, 978 1 108 48266 0
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Me, Me, Me? The Search for Community in Postwar England 
by Jon Lawrence.
Oxford, 327 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 0 19 877953 7
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... the postwar order offer some clues. (I should say that I know both the authors.) Guy Ortolano’s Thatcher’s Progress tracks the passage ‘from social democracy to market liberalism’ through the history of Milton Keynes, the last and largest of Britain’s postwar ‘new towns’. Ortolano calls the new towns the ‘spatial dimension’ of the postwar ...

Mother One, Mother Two

Jeremy Harding: A memoir, 31 March 2005

... me with the machinery of my investigation and informed me of the name of my natural mother – Margaret Walsh – which my adoptive mother had only ever hazarded or garbled. But after a few days in the Family Records Centre in London, it was clear that there’d be work to do: the number of Margaret Walshes qualifying as ...

Mr Straight and Mr Good

Paul Foot: Gordon Brown, 19 February 1998

Gordon Brown: The Biography 
by Paul Routledge.
Simon and Schuster, 358 pp., £17.99, February 1998, 0 684 81954 6
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... Labour offered in the past,’ he writes ‘was not appropriate for 1992 and beyond ... The Thatcher years had made people more self-reliant and that “dimension” must be accommodated in Labour’s approach.’ As usual, there is no attempt to prove this. Who precisely was made ‘more self-reliant’ during the ‘...

Diary

Jenny Diski: Back to School, 30 April 2009

... devices. The classroom freedom we had in the most difficult state schools was exactly what both Thatcher and New Labour set out to eradicate with quantification. There were no league tables of schools, or SATs to see how teachers and pupils were doing, just CSEs (as they were then), for which in my school expectations were tragically low. There was a small ...

Short Cuts

James Meek: Thames Water, 9 May 2024

... new bathroom – a deep overhaul of their broken-down old water supply and sewer system – it was Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government that made the call. They couldn’t have got it more wrong. Eight out of ten people opposed water privatisation, but Thatcher privatised it anyway. In the ...

Diary

A.J. Ayer: More of A.J. Ayer’s Life, 22 December 1983

... came with me and we spent a very pleasant day at Bard. My fellow honorands included the novelist Margaret Drabble, the exceptionally learned ancient historian, Professor Momigliano, who had been a colleague of mine for many years at University College, London, and Professor Kolakowski whom I first met at a congress in Warsaw in 1957 when he was still a ...

Why Literary Criticism is like Virtue

Stanley Fish, 10 June 1993

... car. The car has only one occupant, but it is Saul Bellow, or Madonna, or Michael Jordan, or Margaret Thatcher. What do you do? I submit that if you are seeking counsel at a crucial moment of decision the last person you want to turn to is someone who spends his time thinking up hypotheticals like this one so that he can amaze students with his ...

Maurice Thomson’s War

Perry Anderson, 4 November 1993

Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders 1550-1653 
by Robert Brenner.
Cambridge, 734 pp., £40, March 1993, 0 521 37319 0
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The Nature of the English Revolution 
by John Morrill.
Longman, 466 pp., £32, June 1993, 0 582 08941 7
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... Henrietta Maria as a bubbly twin of Princess Diana, and even transvests Charles I into a baroque Margaret Thatcher, closing seven hundred pages on the King with the words: ‘He believed some principles worth adhering to whatever the repercussions – and well, he may even have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe ...

Snakes and Ladders

Stefan Collini: Versions of Meritocracy, 1 April 2021

The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War 
by Peter Mandler.
Oxford, 361 pp., £25, September 2020, 978 0 19 884014 5
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The Meritocracy Trap 
by Daniel Markovits.
Allen Lane, 464 pp., £10.99, August 2020, 978 0 14 198474 2
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... of selection in the 1950s and 1960s; as secretary of state for education in the early 1970s, Margaret Thatcher oversaw the establishment of more comprehensives than any minister from either party; Keith Joseph initiated moves towards replacing the old divide between O levels and CSEs with GCSEs to be taken by all, a key step in expanding sixth forms ...

Free speech for Rupert Murdoch

Stephen Sedley, 19 December 1991

... 1934 of the NCCL was a barometric indication of the state of civil rights and the rule of law when Margaret Roberts was still a child. Yet it has taken the illiberal and unconstitutional conduct of her three governments to push a written constitution and a Bill of Rights to the head of the political agenda. The radical authoritarianism of the Eighties has ...

Doctor Feelgood

R.W. Johnson, 3 March 1988

Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home 
by Garry Wills.
Heinemann, 488 pp., £14.95, February 1988, 0 434 86623 7
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... that the secret is not there. There is a tendency to believe that, when someone is, like Reagan or Thatcher, greatly successful or even, like Nixon, a spectacular failure, there must be something special, almost magical about them as a person. In the wake of Reagan’s second and Thatcher’s third election victory we had to ...

Making It

Melissa Benn: New Feminism?, 5 February 1998

Different for Girls: How Culture Creates Women 
by Joan Smith.
Chatto, 176 pp., £10.99, September 1997, 9780701165123
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The New Feminism 
by Natasha Walter.
Little, Brown, 278 pp., £17.50, January 1998, 0 316 88234 8
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A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States 
by Sheila Rowbotham.
Penguin, 752 pp., £20, June 1997, 0 670 87420 5
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... on the inside of power rather than ‘stuck in a ghetto’. Like Wolf, Walter sees such figures as Thatcher and MI5’s Stella Rimington as largely positive role models because of what they do for women’s perception of achievement, ‘their normalisation of success’: what they do once success has come is neither here nor there. ...

Matsanga

Jeremy Harding, 16 February 1989

... months earlier at her first Commonwealth Conference. By April 1980 the weeping was done and the Thatcher Government had a foreign policy triumph to its credit. Today Britain’s relations with Frelimo are good and it supplies Mozambique with generous aid, including £27.5 million in bilateral emergency relief over the last two years and £22.8 million in ...

It was sheer heaven

Bee Wilson: Just Being British, 9 May 2019

Exceeding My Brief: Memoirs of a Disobedient Civil Servant 
by Barbara Hosking.
Biteback, 384 pp., £9.99, March 2019, 978 1 78590 462 2
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... Hosking is left-leaning, Trumpington is a Conservative (she went to the Lords in 1980 under Mrs Thatcher, her great mentor). Hosking is gay, Trumpington was heterosexual – the happiest years of her life, she tells us, were spent with her late husband, ‘Barker’, who was headmaster of The Leys school in Cambridge. Hosking’s family was ...

Women beware men

Margaret Anne Doody, 23 July 1992

Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women 
by Susan Faludi.
Chatto, 592 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 7011 4643 5
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The War against Women 
by Marilyn French.
Hamish Hamilton, 229 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 241 13271 1
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... the young have not had their spirit broken nor their minds unhinged by coming of age in the Reagan-Thatcher era. Susan Faludi discovered her topic, as she tells us in her prefatory Acknowledgments, when she began work on a ‘magazine story on the Harvard-Yale “man shortage” study’. That Harvard-Yale ‘study’ provides clues and metaphors for ...

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