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Short Cuts

Paul Laity: Hanging out at River Cottage HQ, 14 December 2006

... foraging in the hedgerows, ethical food shopping – that would seriously trouble Gordon Brown or David Cameron, both happy to make green gestures but steadfastly wary of state action to enforce restrictions on personal freedom or curb corporate power. ‘We’ve all got our roles to play, in terms of the choices ...

Short Cuts

Tom Crewe: Ed Balls, 22 September 2016

... ministers leaving Parliament after a short interval (hours for Blair, five years for Major and Brown, with Cameron likely to follow suit) and party leaders quickly throwing in the towel after election defeats (Hague, Miliband, Clegg). The most recent generation of political leaders attained high office infinitely faster than their predecessors, serving no ...

Cover Stories

Patrick Parrinder, 4 April 1985

Lives of the Poets: A Novella and Six Stories 
by E.L. Doctorow.
Joseph, 145 pp., £8.95, April 1985, 0 7181 2529 0
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The Pork Butcher 
by David Hughes.
Constable, 123 pp., £5.95, April 1984, 0 09 465510 3
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Out of the Blue 
by John Milne.
Hamish Hamilton, 309 pp., £8.95, March 1985, 0 241 11489 6
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... is silence, or rather, the rest should be another (and conceivably much more memorable) story. David Hughes’s The Pork Butcher is a worthy winner of the W.H. Smith award, the latest of the series of literary prizes awarded to novels published in 1984. In this, his ninth novel, Hughes has written a moral fable, brief, sensational, and hauntingly ...

Who’s on the Ropes Now?

Ross McKibbin: A Bad Week for Gordon Brown, 1 November 2007

... All those articles written only a couple of weeks ago and giving entirely good reasons why Gordon Brown was on top and David Cameron on the ropes now look faintly embarrassing. But at the beginning of October Brown was on top and no one can be faulted for failing to see his impending ...

Sergeant Farthing

D.A.N. Jones, 17 October 1985

A Maggot 
by John Fowles.
Cape, 460 pp., £9.95, September 1985, 0 224 02806 5
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The Romances of John Fowles 
by Simon Loveday.
Macmillan, 164 pp., £25, August 1985, 0 333 31518 9
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... are arrested in their smoothing.’ As for the other two riders, one of them purports to be ‘Mr Brown’, the uncle of Mr Bartholomew, and the man in the dragoon’s hat calls himself ‘Sergeant Farthing’, Mr Brown’s manservant, a sort of ‘minder’ against highwaymen. John Fowles interposes, in his ...

Institutional Hypocrisy

David Runciman: Selling the NHS, 21 April 2005

Restoring Responsibility: Ethics in Government, Business and Healthcare 
by Dennis Thompson.
Cambridge, 349 pp., £16.99, November 2004, 0 521 54722 9
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NHS plc: The Privatisation of Our Healthcare 
by Allyson Pollock.
Verso, 271 pp., £15.99, September 2004, 1 84467 011 2
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Brown’s Britain 
by Robert Peston.
Short Books, 369 pp., £14.99, January 2005, 1 904095 67 4
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... But the Treasury can hardly be accused of being self-deceived by acting in this way: Gordon Brown is not like those 16th-century Spanish monarchs who insisted that the interest payments on their debts should be left off their accounts because they found it too demeaning to be reminded of them. Brown is attempting to ...

The Reshuffle and After

Ross McKibbin: Why Brown should Resign, 25 May 2006

... which willy-nilly drove this forward, in the long run did the party more harm than good. David Cameron is almost certainly aware of this but clearly isn’t sure what he can do about it. Once again, the problem is likely to be solved – to the extent that it can be – by accumulating error on the government’s part. The Tories just have to make ...

‘Wisely I decided to say nothing’

Ross McKibbin: Jack Straw, 22 November 2012

Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a Political Survivor 
by Jack Straw.
Macmillan, 582 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 4472 2275 0
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... Nowhere does he acknowledge this. He even writes with some pride of the resolution he and David Davis proposed, and which the House of Commons carried, criticising the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights which held that depriving prisoners of the vote was a denial of their human rights. Straw stood to gain nothing politically from this ...

Neo-Blairism

David Runciman: Blair’s conference speech, 21 October 2004

... foreign affairs an all-or-nothing struggle to the death. It has the politicians to do this. Gordon Brown’s conference speech was also a clarion call for progressive politics, but the inflexibility was all in his defence of the public services, and the adaptability was in his programme for African debt relief, where it must be possible to make real progress ...

Red

Stephen Bann, 5 July 1984

Time in a Red Coat 
by George Mackay Brown.
Chatto, 249 pp., £8.95, May 1984, 0 7011 2804 6
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Harland’s Half-Acre 
by David Malouf.
Chatto, 230 pp., £8.95, May 1984, 0 7011 2737 6
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The Border 
by Elaine Feinstein.
Hutchinson, 113 pp., £6.95, June 1984, 0 09 156320 8
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... priority. Images, he suggests, are superior to actions. In Time in a Red Coat, George Mackay Brown has given us his first novel for 11 years. It is, however, a novel in which the poet assumes an undoubted authority. He can question, and criticise at its very base, the prodigal use of images which the storyteller displays in his concern to get the ...

The Ruling Exception

David Cannadine, 16 August 1990

Queen Victoria: Gender and Power 
by Dorothy Thompson.
Virago, 167 pp., £6.99, May 1990, 0 86068 773 2
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... virtually absented herself from London altogether. She found consolation in the company of John Brown, and Thompson suggests that there was more to Victoria’s involvement with her Highland servant than it has been usual to suppose. Inevitably, there was widespread and growing dissatisfaction at the Queen’s non-performance of her public duties. Dowager ...

Mr Straight and Mr Good

Paul Foot: Gordon Brown, 19 February 1998

Gordon BrownThe Biography 
by Paul Routledge.
Simon and Schuster, 358 pp., £17.99, February 1998, 0 684 81954 6
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... The guiding star of his youth has entirely vanished from his firmament. In 1975 the young Gordon Brown compiled, edited and published a socialist manifesto entitled Red Paper for Scotland. At 24, he had just completed a three-year term as rector of Edinburgh University and chaired the University Court in the face of continuous opposition from some of the ...

Enlightenment Erotica

David Nokes, 4 August 1988

Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America 
by Peter Wagner.
Secker, 498 pp., £30, March 1988, 0 436 56051 8
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’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorised Sexuality during the Enlightenment 
edited by Robert Purks Maccubin.
Cambridge, 260 pp., £25, March 1988, 0 521 34539 1
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The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature 
edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown.
Methuen, 320 pp., £28, February 1988, 0 416 01631 6
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... Rousseau, that the commander of the British forces was gay. Although Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown diplomatically avoid so vivid a phrase as ‘prudery and cowardice’, their charges against the conservatism of the Augustan establishment are scarcely less severe. For them the taboo areas are not sexual but ideological. ‘Theory’ is the dirty word ...

Notes on the Election

David Runciman, 7 May 2015

... from 1959-64, when Douglas-Home lost; from 1992-97, when Major lost; and from 2005-2010, when Brown lost. But here we see the obvious flaws of this kind of analysis. Not only is the sample very small, it is clearly skewed. Prime ministers who cling on until the very end of their term, in the hope that something will turn up, are obviously in deep trouble ...

Notes on the Election

David Runciman, 5 February 2015

... of recent British politics is that the SNP has seen its prospects best served by success for David Cameron. If the Tories do hold a referendum on Europe in 2017, and England votes to take Scotland out with it, another referendum on Scottish independence would be hard to resist. It might take a Machiavellian political genius to negotiate a way through ...

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