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An Escalation of Reasonableness

Conor Gearty: Northern Ireland, 6 September 2001

To Raise up a New Northern Ireland: Articles and Speeches 1998-2000 
by David Trimble.
Belfast Press, 166 pp., £5.99, July 2001, 0 9539287 1 3
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... off the decommissioning hook on which Mayhew (acting on Major’s instructions) had impaled it. Tony Blair’s Government didn’t have to rely on Unionist votes and this made things much easier. But the Unionists had scented blood and were not about to let go. The recalcitrant among them had hit on their make or break issue. When it finally ...

Don’t go quietly

David Trotter: Ken Loach’s Fables, 6 February 2025

Kes 
by David Forrest.
BFI, 112 pp., £12.99, May 2024, 978 1 83902 564 8
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... the first collaboration between Ken Loach, who joined the BBC as a trainee director in 1963, and Tony Garnett, who had been hired by James MacTaggart, producer of the Wednesday Play series, as a story editor and talent scout. Taking advantage of MacTaggart being on holiday, Garnett put sufficient resources into the project to ensure that it would be too ...

Longing for Mao

Hugo Young: Edward Heath, 26 November 1998

The Curse of My Life: My Autobiography 
by Edward Heath.
Hodder, 767 pp., £25, October 1998, 0 340 70852 2
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... diaries to equal the extraordinary raw material supplied by Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn for the delectation of students of government. The best explanation for this party discrepancy I have hit on is that whereas all people of the right enter politics to exercise power, at least some people of the left are as fascinated by how they do what ...

Parcelled Out

Ferdinand Mount: The League of Nations, 22 October 2015

The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire 
by Susan Pedersen.
Oxford, 571 pp., £22.99, June 2015, 978 0 19 957048 5
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... clear barrier has provoked the great powers to trump up international pretexts for intervention, Tony Blair’s dodgy dossiers being a prime example. ‘Dossiers’ in the plural, for it was not simply the sexing up of the scant intelligence available on whether Saddam Hussein possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that seemed dishonest; WMD always ...

Magical Thinking about Isis

Adam Shatz, 3 December 2015

... Saudi Arabia’s top supplier of advanced military technology.2 In one of his last interviews, Tony Judt said: When Bush said that we are fighting terrorism ‘there’ so that we won’t have to fight them ‘here’, he was making a very distinctively American political move. It is certainly not a rhetorical trope that makes any sense in Europe, [where ...

The Sound of Cracking

Pankaj Mishra: ‘The Age of the Crisis of Man’, 27 August 2015

The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-73 
by Mark Greif.
Princeton, 434 pp., £19.95, January 2015, 978 0 691 14639 3
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Moral Agents: Eight 20th-Century American Writers 
by Edward Mendelson.
New York Review, 216 pp., £12.99, May 2015, 978 1 59017 776 1
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... craving for universal mastery and control was rekindled in 1989 among many members of what Tony Judt called the ‘crappy generation’ – the one that ‘grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political’. Judt’s indictment extended beyond Bush, the Clintons, ...

Diary

Dani Garavelli: Election Night in Glasgow, 18 July 2024

... economic position has tipped back to the right and its foreign policy position is back to the Blair years,’ Stephens said. He believed he could keep voters who might have been tempted by a candidate from the Labour left.There were around twenty SNP activists outside Pollokshields Library. Stephens had decided to canvass in Kenmure Street, which in May ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: Reform’s Disaster Capitalism, 25 September 2025

... Farage’s surprise guest speaker on the opening night. Outside the £25-a-head after-party, I met Tony Gilland, chief of staff at Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a Brussels think tank which has received more than €6 million in funding from Viktor Orbán’s government. A veteran of Frank Furedi’s Revolutionary Communist Party, Gilland is now a member of ...

Depicting Europe

Perry Anderson, 20 September 2007

... possessed. At the end of Postwar, his 800-page account of the continent since 1945, the historian Tony Judt exclaims at ‘Europe’s emergence in the dawn of the 21st century as a paragon of the international virtues: a community of values … held up by Europeans and non-Europeans alike as an exemplar for all to emulate’.1 The reputation, he assures ...

The Strange Death of Municipal England

Tom Crewe: Assault on Local Government, 15 December 2016

... of high-value properties as the only way of increasing income. One expert on local government, Tony Travers, says that Osborne’s reforms will transform the average council from ‘a mini-welfare state into a local economic growth agency’. Redistribution is dead, and trickle-down economics is institutionalised. The assault​ on local government has ...

Public Works

David Norbrook, 5 June 1986

The Faber Book of Political Verse 
edited by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 481 pp., £17.50, May 1986, 0 571 13947 7
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... House’. But although he situates Marvell in a republican tradition, he does not make anything of Blair Worden’s republican reading of the ‘Horatian Ode’, which need not be seen merely as a lament for the death of Culture with Charles I; and he does not include anything from the later satires, so that his politically engaged aspect is ...

Tesco and a Motorway

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: In the Coalfields, 9 September 2021

Anne & Betty: United by the Struggle 
by Anne Scargill and Betty Cook.
Route, 256 pp., £20, November 2020, 978 1 901927 81 8
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Women of the Durham Coalfield in the 20th Century: Hannah’s Daughter 
by Margaret Hedley.
History Press, 159 pp., £14.99, March, 978 0 7509 9504 7
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Coal Country: The Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialisation in Postwar Scotland 
by Ewan Gibbs.
University of London, 306 pp., £25, February, 978 1 912702 55 8
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Scottish Coal Miners in the 20th Century 
by Jim Phillips.
Edinburgh, 336 pp., £24.99, February, 978 1 4744 5232 8
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The Shadow of the Mine: Coal and the End of Industrial Britain 
by Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson.
Verso, 402 pp., £20, June, 978 1 83976 155 3
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... over 4.5 million in 1999.New Labour accepted the effective end of the coal industry in Britain. Blair got rid of the party’s constitutional commitment to nationalisation in 1995, the same year the rump of the industry was privatised. Beynon and Hudson suggest that New Labour gave up on ‘any idea of the state as an engaged actor within the economy’ and ...

Diary

Melanie McFadyean: In the Wrong Crowd, 25 September 2014

... impossible in the vast majority of joint enterprise cases.’ Lord Falconer, lord chancellor under Blair, casually dismisses the rights of defendants in these cases. ‘The message that the law is sending out,’ he said in 2010, is that we are very willing to see people convicted if they are a part of gang violence – and that violence ends in somebody’s ...

Do you like him?

Ian Jack: Ken Livingstone, 10 May 2012

You Can’t Say That: Memoirs 
by Ken Livingstone.
Faber, 710 pp., £9.99, April 2012, 978 0 571 28041 4
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... were never given an address, but their accents suggested London or its suburbs, perhaps close to Tony Hancock’s place in East Cheam, definitely somewhere below the middle of the social scale, a place where couples necked in front parlours and publicans called ‘Time, gentlemen, please,’ but not so far down as to be picturesque and identifiable and ...

Gosh, what am I like?

Rosemary Hill: The Revenge Memoir, 17 December 2020

Friends and Enemies: A Memoir 
by Barbara Amiel.
Constable, 592 pp., £25, October 2020, 978 1 4721 3421 9
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Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power 
by Sasha Swire.
Little, Brown, 544 pp., £20, September 2020, 978 1 4087 1341 9
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... to rent’, there is ‘always something to mend, a builder to see’. But she is at a loss when Tony Blair’s former adviser Anji Hunter, who Swire notes nervously is ‘fizzing with character’, asks her point blank what she does. Swire reflects that this is ‘always a weak point for me’ and replies that she is actually ‘a rather solitary ...

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