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The Money

Adam Shatz: What the War is Costing, 6 March 2008

... estimate rises to almost $5 trillion.* And that’s just the cost to the United States. Gordon Brown reserved £1 billion for the war. Britain has now spent more than £5 billion on ‘direct operating expenditures’ in Iraq, and Stiglitz and Bilmes predict that by 2010 the cost of the war will exceed £20 billion. Some of this money has come from a ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: You had better look out, 10 December 1998

... and Gordon Show. Some speculation about whether Blair may be more of a be-er than a do-er, whereas Brown really lives for the exercise as well as the possession of power. I say I’m worried by any politician who thinks that he has the strength of ten because his heart is pure and that he can therefore sup with the devil unscathed. Might the country be better ...

Against Responsibility

William Davies, 8 November 2018

Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism 
by Melinda Cooper.
Zone, 447 pp., £24, March 2017, 978 1 935408 84 0
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... The phrase was used as a way of signalling economic and moral commitment at the same time. Gordon Brown – who liked to cloak redistributive policies in communitarian, traditionalist rhetoric – is said to have been the first to use it, in 1995. The Blair, Brown and Cameron governments all repeatedly claimed to be on the ...

Deadly Eliza

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: ‘The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors’, 1 November 2001

The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors 
by William Dean Howells et al.
Duke, 416 pp., £13.50, November 2001, 0 8223 2838 0
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Publishing the Family 
by June Howard.
Duke, 304 pp., £13.50, November 2001, 0 8223 2771 6
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... Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, John Kendrick Bangs, Edith Wyatt, Mary R. Shipman Andrews, Alice Brown and Henry Van Dyke (‘the friend of the family’). Apart from arranging for the girl to have met her fiancé at college, so that the gentleman in question remains a promising mystery to her relatives, Howells did little in his chapter to advance the ...

A Bit of Ginger

Theo Tait: Gordon Burn, 5 June 2008

Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel 
by Gordon Burn.
Faber, 214 pp., £15.99, April 2008, 978 0 571 19729 3
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... Yesterday, his new novel, is an attempt to bring to life the thesis of the novelist in Mao II, Bill Gray: The novel used to feed our search for meaning . . . It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us towards something larger and darker. So we turn to the ...

Into the Second Term

R.W. Johnson: New Labour, 5 April 2001

Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour 
by Andrew Rawnsley.
Hamish Hamilton, 434 pp., £17.99, September 2000, 0 241 14029 3
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Mandelson and the Making of New Labour 
by Donald Macintyre.
HarperCollins, 638 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 00 653062 1
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Mo Mowlam: The Biography 
by Julia Langdon.
Little, Brown, 324 pp., £16.99, September 2000, 0 316 85304 6
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Ann Widdecombe: Right from the Beginning 
by Nicholas Kochan.
Politico’s, 302 pp., September 2000, 1 902301 55 2
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The Paymaster: Geoffrey Robinson, Maxwell and New Labour 
by Tom Bower.
Simon and Schuster, 272 pp., £17.99, March 2001, 0 7432 0689 4
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The Future of Politics 
by Charles Kennedy.
HarperCollins, 235 pp., £17.99, September 2000, 0 00 710131 7
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... from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon Brown’s press secretary, Charlie Whelan, and his economic adviser, Ed Balls, sent the Times a fax hinting at a major policy change while Whelan tried to persuade the Sun to go with the headline ‘Brown Saves ...

This beats me

Stephen Sedley: The Drafter’s Contract, 2 April 1998

Statutory Interpretation 
by Francis Bennion.
Butterworth, 1092 pp., £187, December 1997, 0 406 02126 0
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Law and Interpretation 
edited by Andrei Marmor.
Oxford, 463 pp., £18.99, October 1997, 0 19 826487 9
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Equality before the Law: Deaf People’s Access to Justice 
by Mary Brennan and Richard Brown.
Deaf Studies Research Unit, University of Durham, 189 pp., £17.50, October 1997, 0 9531779 0 4
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... has been trying to achieve. MPs have at least the advantage of being able to ask the mover of a Bill for clarification. Judges, who have to do the best they can with the words on the page, are not generally as brusque as the Victorian Law Lord who said: ‘This beats me.’ A ready source of help, which I hope will routinely be available when the coming ...

Through Plate-Glass

Ian Sansom: Jonathan Coe, 10 May 2001

The Rotters’ Club 
by Jonathan Coe.
Viking, 405 pp., £14.99, April 2001, 0 670 89252 1
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... He is happy to admit to the various and necessary time-saving devices, back-scratchings and brown-nosings that other writers do their best to disavow. At the end of What a Carve Up! (1994) Coe acknowledges the work of Frank King, and writes: ‘the only repayment I can offer him is to recommend that readers make every effort to seek out these and other ...

Fergie Time

David Runciman: Sir Alex Speaks (again), 9 January 2014

My Autobiography 
by Alex Ferguson.
Hodder, 402 pp., £25, October 2013, 978 0 340 91939 2
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... the purchase of Wayne Rooney from Everton in 2004. He was in his office, and the Everton chairman, Bill Kenwright, was weeping copiously. Through his tears Kenwright makes a phone call and hands the receiver to Ferguson. On the other end an elderly female voice berates him: ‘Don’t you dare think you’re getting that boy for nothing. That boy’s worth ...

Disappearing Ink

Tom Stevenson: Life of a Diplomat, 10 August 2023

And Then What? Inside Stories of 21st-Century Diplomacy 
by Catherine Ashton.
Elliott and Thompson, 256 pp., £20, February 2023, 978 1 78396 634 9
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... Panetta, Michael Morell, John Brennan. We already have the memoir of the current CIA director, Bill Burns, but not that of his predecessor, Gina Haspel. Perhaps it would be too torture-heavy to be published.Catherine Ashton’s memoir offers neither brutal candour nor aristocratic irony. Instead, she aspires to sincerity. Ashton, like Pompeo, wasn’t a ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: Exit Blair, 24 May 2007

... in the importance of ‘parent power’, he contrived to forget that his own Local Government Bill was about to abolish the commission that he had set up to enhance parent power three years before. When he dismissed the fears voiced by objectors to super-casinos, he closed his eyes to the harm they would do to the indebted and vulnerable. When he ...

Lawrence and the Mince-Pies

Dan Jacobson, 25 October 1979

The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol I: September 1901 – May 1913 
edited by James Boulton.
Cambridge, 579 pp., £15
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... In 1932,​ Aldous Huxley published The Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, a large brown volume, printed in a curiously elaborate type, which has no doubt become something of a special item in booksellers’ catalogues. It contained 889 pages. Exactly 30 years later Harry T. Moore edited The Collected Letters of D ...

Shtum

John Lanchester: Alastair Campbell’s Diaries, 16 August 2007

The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries 
edited by Alastair Campbell and Richard Stott.
Hutchinson, 794 pp., £25, July 2007, 978 0 09 179629 7
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... know: let’s find our angriest, shoutiest, most tribal, most aggressive party loyalist. As Craig Brown joked in the Mail on Sunday, it is as if, instead of turning to Doctor Watson for advice, Sherlock Holmes had instead consulted the Hound of the Baskervilles. Campbell is a political journalist who, as part of a not-all-that-complex self-loathing, despises ...

Defeatism, Defeatism, Defeatism

Ross McKibbin: Ten Years of Blair, 22 March 2007

... the campaign that Labour had insufficiently recognised Thatcher’s achievements. Both Blair and Brown became increasingly reluctant to criticise the Conservative government or to admit that the principal victims of its policies had been the people the Labour Party was founded to protect. This led them further away from Smith, who never doubted that much of ...

The Party in Government

Conor Gearty, 9 March 1995

... David Mellor (greatly exaggerated, but not his only alleged misdemeanour), Hartley Booth, Michael Brown (though he is a borderline case, since he resigned from office while denying allegations that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget David Trevinnick and Graham Riddick, suspended from their jobs as Parliamentary Private ...

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