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The Strange Case of Peter Vansittart

Martin Seymour-Smith, 6 March 1986

Aspects of Feeling 
by Peter Vansittart.
Peter Owen, 251 pp., £10.95, January 1986, 0 7206 0637 3
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... at all closely; he reminds the reader of no one of this century. There is sometimes, it seems, a price to pay for this kind of originality. Although markedly eccentric, he is not just that. ‘When will this extraordinary writer receive his due?’ a critic has asked; nor is the question in the least surprising. Vansittart himself must be puzzled by the ...

Too Obviously Cleverer

Ferdinand Mount: Harold Macmillan, 8 September 2011

Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan 
by D.R. Thorpe.
Pimlico, 887 pp., £16.99, September 2011, 978 1 84413 541 7
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The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II: Prime Minister and After 1957-66 
edited by Peter Catterall.
Macmillan, 758 pp., £40, May 2011, 978 1 4050 4721 0
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... full Commonwealth status after independence; should the island ‘be the RAC or Boodles’? When Roger Hollis, the head of MI5, exulted to Macmillan that they had arrested the spy John Vassall, the prime minister complained that this was the wrong approach: ‘When my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn’t go and hang it up outside the Master of ...

The Sage of Polygon Road

Claire Tomalin, 28 September 1989

The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vols I-VII 
edited by Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler.
Pickering & Chatto, 2530 pp., £245, August 1989, 1 85196 006 6
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... I acquired was called The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, and had a biographical preface by Roger Ingpen. It was a reprint of Mary’s letters to her lover Gilbert Imlay, first published by Godwin among her posthumous works, and then by Kegan Paul in 1879. Ingpen wrote of her life and sufferings tenderly: ‘Pathetic and lonely, she stands out in the ...

Diary

Richard Wollheim: On A.J. Ayer, 27 July 1989

... colours. In the Thirties many of the abler philosophers of the previous generation, such as H.H. Price or William Kneale, in no way iconoclasts, felt grateful to Freddie. No one who has responded to the cadence of Freddie’s prose could doubt the expressiveness of his philosophy, or the vision of the world out of which he wrote. It was a world in which all ...

Legitimate Violence

James Sheehan: After the Armistice, 5 July 2018

The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-23 
by Robert Gerwarth.
Allen Lane, 446 pp., £10.99, June 2017, 978 0 14 197637 2
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... the insurrection that ended the Romanov dynasty’s 300-year reign began with a protest about the price of food in Petrograd. Even when they avoided starvation, civilians in the east suffered far more than those in the west. Except for some six thousand Belgians summarily executed during the first weeks of the war and the many victims of air raids and ...

Ironed Corpses Clattering in the Wind

Mark Kishlansky: The Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, 17 August 2006

Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms 
by Tim Harris.
Penguin, 506 pp., £12.99, January 2006, 0 14 026465 5
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Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy 1685-1720 
by Tim Harris.
Allen Lane, 622 pp., £30, January 2006, 0 7139 9759 1
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... been largely oblivious to events outside England, and dead Irishmen were thought to be a small price to pay for securing a Protestant succession: they were hardly worth mentioning when stacked up against the Bill of Rights. Harris convincingly demonstrates the impact that the three kingdoms had on each other, and especially the ways in which Whig ...

And then there was ‘Playtime’

Jonathan Coe: Vive Tati!, 9 December 1999

Jacques Tati 
by David Bellos.
Harvill, 382 pp., £25, October 1999, 1 86046 651 6
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... worthwhile books devoted to these figures, there should run such a noticeable vein of anxiety. In Roger Lewis’s extraordinary biography of Peter Sellers, for instance, proper celebration of comic genius goes hand in hand with character assassination. Every version of Tony Hancock’s life zooms in on his alcoholism and depression. David Bellos does not, in ...

Own your ignorance

Freya Johnston: Samuel Johnson’s Criticism, 25 April 2024

The Literary Criticism of Samuel Johnson: Forms of Artistry and Thought 
by Philip Smallwood.
Cambridge, 219 pp., £85, September 2023, 978 1 009 36999 2
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... vanquishes her pupil by giving him false, irresistible confidence in his own abilities. Roger Lonsdale identified a similar dynamic in Johnson’s sometimes disturbingly fierce reactions to the ‘seductive powers of eloquence’ and ‘overpowering pleasure’ of poetry. Documenting those responses while seeking to reframe them in general ...

Delivering the Leadership

Nick Cohen: Get Mandy, 4 March 1999

Mandy: The Authorised Biography of Peter Mandelson 
by Paul Routledge.
Simon and Schuster, 302 pp., £17.99, January 1999, 9780684851754
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... to Mike Molloy, a Mirror reporter. Molloy confronts Gould, who refers him to his solicitor, Sir Roger Pelham. A few minutes later when the phone rang again Raymond still hadn’t moved. He picked up the receiver, his hand still shaking. Pelham confirmed that Molloy had been in touch with him.      ‘I presume you made no comment,’ said ...

Fear of Words

Mark Kishlansky: The Cavalier Parliament, 18 December 2008

The Long Parliament of Charles II 
by Annabel Patterson.
Yale, 283 pp., £30, September 2008, 978 0 300 13708 8
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... indignation towards religious intolerance.) This wasn’t the king’s preference, but it was the price he paid for a quiet life, for not having to go ‘on his travels again’. It also led to nearly every political crisis of the reign and ultimately to dependence on secret treaties that were none too secret and to Puritan plots that were none too ...

Who Knows?

Meehan Crist: The Voynich Manuscript, 27 July 2017

The Voynich Manuscript 
edited by Raymond Clemens.
Yale, 336 pp., £35, November 2016, 978 0 300 21723 0
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... Marci reports that the manuscript was ‘sold to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II at a reported price of six hundred ducats and that it was believed to be a work by Roger Bacon’. Rudolf II, emperor from 1576 until 1612, was obsessed with art, science and the occult. He moved his capital to Prague, one of the great ...

800 Napkins, 47 Finger Bowls

Zachary Leader, 16 March 2000

Morgan: American Financier 
by Jean Strouse.
Harvill, 816 pp., £25, June 1999, 9781860463556
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... of rival interests into huge, stable systems was preferable to the boom-and-bust cycles, price wars, waste, and speculative recklessness of internecine competition’; mobilising other bankers and financiers to act, under his direction, as a lender of last resort to the US Treasury and elsewhere, thus restoring foreign faith in American credit during ...

Rug Time

Jonathan Steinberg, 20 October 1983

Kissinger: The Price of Power 
by Seymour Hersh.
Faber, 699 pp., £15, October 1983, 0 571 13175 1
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... happened to Mr Nixon, Dr Kissinger and General Haig after the events described in the book. The Price of Power sticks to foreign affairs, at least as far as the machinations in the Nixon White House permit, and moves more or less chronologically through the four years it covers. So we keep coming back to SALT or Chile and in each case Mr Hersh has to go ...

Stupid Questions

Laleh Khalili: Battlefield to Boardroom, 24 February 2022

Risk: A User’s Guide 
by Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico.
Penguin, 343 pp., £20, October 2021, 978 0 241 48192 9
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... communist. I hadn’t known that this was McChrystal’s idea. He also told his officers to read Roger Trinquier’s Modern Warfare, a French counterinsurgency handbook designed for use in Algeria and famous for its advocacy of torture.McChrystal followed his memoir with three business self-help manuals, published at three-year intervals and copyrighted to ...

Out of Sight, out of Mind

Frank Kermode: A.J. Ayer’s Winning Ways, 15 July 1999

A.J. Ayer: A Life 
by Ben Rogers.
Chatto, 402 pp., £20, June 1999, 9780701163167
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... in Oxford had yet to become Oxford philosophy and, in his view (Ryle, perhaps, apart, and H.H. Price), needed a good shaking. Real philosophy was what went on in Cambridge. Ayer read Wittgenstein when hardly anybody else in Oxford thought of doing so. But at Ryle’s suggestion he gave up the idea of sitting at Wittgenstein’s feet in Cambridge and ...

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