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Little England

Patrick Wright: The view through a bus window, 7 September 2006

Great British Bus Journeys: Travels through Unfamous Places 
by David McKie.
Atlantic, 359 pp., £16.99, March 2006, 1 84354 132 7
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... from the start; posthumous membership should no doubt be awarded to John Smith, Donald Dewar and Robin Cook. The reformulation of Britishness remains high on their devolutionary agenda, but New Labour politicians can be seen carefully distancing themselves from the English question just as, in the dawn of their power, they used to avoid, on the advice ...

What was it that drove him?

David Runciman: Gordon Brown, 4 January 2018

My Life, Our Times 
by Gordon Brown.
Bodley Head, 512 pp., £25, November 2017, 978 1 84792 497 1
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... dispute, particularly one that was not my departmental responsibility.’ So he shirked it, unlike Robin Cook, who showed what could be known about what was not known at the time. Brown now feels that ‘we were all misled on the existence of WMDs.’ In fact, he is convinced that the Bush administration duped them: ‘Somewhere in the American system the ...

A horn-player greets his fate

John Kerrigan, 1 September 1983

Horn 
by Barry Tuckwell.
Macdonald, 202 pp., £10.95, April 1983, 0 356 09096 5
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... late as 1772, the distinguished naturalist Sir Joseph Banks fell out, preposterously, with Captain Cook because Cook would not let him take an entourage which included two french-horn players to the South Seas on board the good ship Resoultion. (Banks and his musicians went to Iceland instead.) Exotic and a little ...

The Garden, the Park and the Meadow

David Runciman: After the Nation State, 6 June 2002

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History 
by Philip Bobbitt.
Allen Lane, 960 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 7139 9616 1
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Reordering the World: The Long-Term Implications of 11 September 
edited by Mark Leonard.
Foreign Policy Centre, 124 pp., £9.95, March 2002, 1 903558 10 7
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... in policy circles for his own tripartite schema of current political practices. He had the ear of Robin Cook and is now said to have the ear of Jack Straw (though Tony Blair, typically, blows hot and cold). In The Post-Modern State and the World Order, Cooper divides the world up into pre-modern, modern and post-modern states. Pre-modern states ...

Diary

Stephanie Burt: D&D, 9 June 2022

... us to work out in a made-up setting what we hope to manage in real life. The game designer Robin Laws classifies stories, and moments within stories, as either procedural (characters try to accomplish a concrete end – capture the leopard, solve the murder) or dramatic (characters change one another through their interactions). A James Bond film is ...

Wrinkled v. Round

Andrew Berry: Gregor Mendel, 8 February 2001

A Monk and Two Peas: The Story of Gregor Mendel and the Discovery of Genetics 
by Robin Marantz Henig.
Weidenfeld, 288 pp., £14.99, June 2001, 0 297 64365 7
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... of him). The recollections he recorded are embarrassingly saccharine: ‘He was such a good cook that he could make any intellectual food nutritious and tasty, no matter whether the subject was zoology, botany or physics.’ Despite his obvious aptitude, Mendel lacked the formal qualifications required of a Gymnasium teacher and sought to make amends by ...

Neo-Blairism

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

... be possible to make real progress (more progress than Blair has achieved, for all his big talk). Robin Cook’s careful, persistent unpicking of the government’s Iraq policy also offers a way out of the Manichean nightmare of the war on terror. Of course, a Labour government led by Brown, with Cook as foreign ...

Saints on Sundays, Devils All the Week After

Patrick Collinson: London Burnings, 19 September 2002

The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England 
by Peter Lake and Michael Questier.
Yale, 731 pp., £30, February 2002, 0 300 08884 1
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... collaborator Michael Questier (a team recently described by a witty Jesuit as ‘the Batman and Robin of Elizabethan and Jacobean religious studies’) extended their reading to the contemporary accounts of Catholic traitors/martyrs, in prison and on the scaffold (and it is here that ‘Robin’, an authority on ...

After the May Day Flood

Seumas Milne, 5 June 1997

... Social Chapter, followed by the restoration of the Civil Service unions to GCHQ. Then came Robin Cook’s declaration in favour of a landmine ban – achieved by the simple, but effective, technique of failing to inform the Ministry of Defence in advance. Then there was the cancellation of the deportation order against the adopted Nepalese, Jay ...

Widowers on the Prowl

Tom Shippey: Britain after Rome, 17 March 2011

Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070 
by Robin Fleming.
Allen Lane, 458 pp., £25, August 2010, 978 0 7139 9064 5
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... Robin Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other words, don’t just write for the trade ...

The Suitcase: Part Two

Frances Stonor Saunders, 13 August 2020

... or Companion-Help. Austrian lady, age 40, good birth and education, seeks post: good cook, needlewoman, fluent English, French; pianist; willing to care for children; highest credentials. Write Box 4435, Frost-Smith Advertising, London EC2.’27 May 1938: ‘Young Austrian lady (Jewish) seeks position Governess; experienced; good ...

Diary

Marina Warner: Why I Quit, 11 September 2014

... studies, its sympathy with poets, translators, excitable theorists, its egalitarianism. Robin Blackburn on slavery, Angela Livingstone on Tsvetaeva, Ernesto Laclau’s charismatic mystifications. Dawn Ades’s work on Latin America inspired artists from all over the continent to donate paintings and sculpture, so it has a collection unrivalled by ...

Chinese Whispers

D.J. Enright, 18 June 1981

The Woman Warrior 
by Maxine Hong Kingston.
Picador, 186 pp., £1.50, March 1981, 0 330 26400 1
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China Men 
by Maxine Hong Kingston.
Picador, 301 pp., £1.50, March 1981, 0 330 26367 6
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... her mother told of Fa Mu Lan. In a less diluted Water Margin epic, she is a kind of Maid Marian as Robin Hood (‘My army did not rape, only taking food where there was an abundance. We brought order wherever we went’), or a female avenger, at times a Bruce Lee in drag. She defeats a giant, who changes into his true shape, a snake – whereupon his disgusted ...

No looking at my elephant

Mary Wellesley: Menageries, 15 December 2016

Menagerie: The History of Exotic Animals in England 1100-1837 
by Caroline Grigson.
Oxford, 349 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 0 19 871470 5
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... diary that ‘we were heartily glad to be rid of her, she fouling our house mightily.’ Captain Cook had more success when the Resolution arrived in Woolwich in 1775, carrying birds and animals purchased by Johann Reinhold Forster, the expedition’s naturalist, in South Africa, and intended for the queen. John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was waiting ...

Paley’s Planet

Robert Walshe, 17 April 1986

Three of a Kind 
by Rachel Ingalls.
Faber, 141 pp., £8.95, October 1985, 0 571 13606 0
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Home Truths 
by Mavis Gallant.
Cape, 330 pp., £9.95, November 1985, 0 224 02344 6
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Later the Same Day 
by Grace Paley.
Virago, 211 pp., £8.95, November 1985, 0 86068 701 5
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... climate of paragraph one, we arrive at paragraph two which begins: ‘ “Life is hell,” Ruth Cook wrote on the lid of a desk, hoping that someone would see it and that there would be a row.’ And with that, of course, we are off and running. If I may venture another ‘of course’, there is nothing worse in life than a book review which tells the story ...

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