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No More Baubles

Tom Johnson: Post-Plague Consumption, 22 September 2022

Household Goods and Good Households in Late Medieval London: Consumption and Domesticity after the Plague 
by Katherine L. French.
Pennsylvania, 314 pp., £52, October 2021, 978 0 8122 5305 4
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... as evidence that the Black Death collapsed traditional hierarchies and spooked the elites. The chancellor noted that such an ordinance was ‘new and never before witnessed’. But only two years later the Commons changed its mind. Merchants had been ‘severely aggrieved’ by the restriction of their customer base and MPs decided that monopolies and ...

Pissing on Idiots

Colin Burrow: Extreme Editing, 6 October 2011

Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment 
by Kristine Louise Haugen.
Harvard, 333 pp., £29.95, April 2011, 978 0 674 05871 2
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... pulled the trigger. Or was it? Thomas Gooch, the Tory master of Caius, had in his capacity as vice-chancellor tried to strip Bentley of his degrees. Among all this brouhaha Bentley managed to establish a reputation as the most learned classical scholar in England. Early in his career, after a stint as tutor to the son of the preacher and scholar ...

That sh—te Creech

James Buchan: The Scottish Enlightenment, 5 April 2007

The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in 18th-Century Britain, Ireland and America 
by Richard Sher.
Chicago, 815 pp., £25.50, February 2007, 978 0 226 75252 5
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... a self-conscious attempt to press Edinburgh writers on the world, Alexander Wedderburn (later lord chancellor) listed two obstacles that held up Scottish literary improvement: a lack of both a ‘standard of language’ and a tradition of good printing. As it turned out, Edinburgh was not yet producing enough good books to support the review and it folded ...

Were you a tome?

Matthew Bevis: Edward Lear, 14 December 2017

Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense 
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 608 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 571 26954 9
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... When​ faced by admirers, Edward Lear was inclined to portray himself as a puzzle, or a trap: ‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’     Who has written such volumes of stuff! Some think him ill-tempered and queer,     But a few think him pleasant enough.The first observation was originally made by somebody who did not know Mr Lear ...

Holding all the strings

Ian Gilmour, 27 July 1989

Macmillan. Vol. II: 1957-1986 
by Alistair Horne.
Macmillan, 741 pp., £18.95, June 1989, 0 333 49621 3
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... Chief Whip, Martin Redmayne, and his assistants, were to sound out MPs; Lord Dilhorne, the Lord Chancellor, was to sound out the Cabinet; and other dignitaries were to consult other segments of the Party. Macmillan’s diary has Redmayne as originally a Hoggite (i.e. a Hailshamite). That was certainly not the impression he gave when I inadvertently had ...

Church and State

R.F. Leslie, 20 May 1982

God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Vol 1., The Origins to 1745, Vol. 11, 1745 to the Present 
by Norman Davies.
Oxford, 605 pp., £27.50, December 1981, 0 19 822555 5
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... investment in industry to provide jobs for them. Dr Davies correctly describes the policy of Edward Gierek in contracting loans abroad as a gamble which did not pay off. The muddle which has led to the accumulation of an estimated debt of $27 billion remains unsolved. This is as much a problem for Poland’s Western creditors as it is for Poland ...

Half a pirate

Patrick O’Brian, 22 January 1987

Captain Kidd and the War against the Pirates 
by Robert Ritchie.
Harvard, 306 pp., £16.95, November 1986, 0 674 09501 4
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Richard Knight’s Treasure! The True Story of his Extraordinary Quest for Captain Kidd’s Cache 
by Glenys Roberts.
Viking, 198 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 670 80761 3
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... the Duke of Shrewsbury, Sir John Somers, Lord-Keeper of the Great Seal and soon to be Lord High Chancellor, Lord Romney, Sir Edward Russell the First Lord of the Admiralty, and some others – to join him in a scheme by which Kidd was to be sent after the pirates in a vessel provided by the partners and called the ...

Diary

R.W. Johnson: Major Wins the Losership, 3 August 1995

... firing the party chairman at will. When a major cabinet crisis erupted under Macmillan, with the Chancellor of the Exchequer resigning in flat disagreement over economic policy, what was chiefly remembered – and admired – was Macmillan’s patrician dismissal of it as ‘a little local difficulty’. This Tory grandee style, itself modelled on notions of ...

Wanting Legs & Arms & Eyes

Clare Bucknell: Surplus Sons, 5 March 2020

Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune: How Younger Sons Made Their Way in Jane Austen’s England 
by Rory Muir.
Yale, 384 pp., £25, August 2019, 978 0 300 24431 1
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... of the 19th century could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In Sense and Sensibility Edward Ferrars, who has chosen to do nothing for a living and regrets it, reels off four possibilities:I always preferred the church, as I still do. But that was not smart enough for my family. They recommended the army. That was a great deal too smart for ...

It was worse in 1931

Colin Kidd: Clement Attlee, 17 November 2016

Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee 
by John Bew.
Riverrun, 668 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 1 78087 989 5
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... seem, Bew argues convincingly that it came from America, from the futuristic utopian fiction of Edward Bellamy, author of Looking Backward (1887). In Bellamy’s novel a resident of late 19th-century Boston is hypnotised and doesn’t wake up until the year 2000. By then the United States has been transformed into an ultra-modern, urban, mechanised ...

Blood All Over the Grass

Ewan Gibbs: On the Miners’ Strike, 2 November 2023

Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 
by Robert Gildea.
Yale, 469 pp., £25, August, 978 0 300 26658 0
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... and comfortably exceeding its outlay on the Falklands War. After the strike ended, the Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, described it as ‘a very good investment’.The miners returned to work in March 1985; a thousand had been sacked during the strike, often after being arrested on picket lines. The fate of these men anticipated that of their ...

Après Brexit

Ferdinand Mount, 20 February 2020

... EU is a visitor who long outstayed her welcome and has now left her luggage blocking the hall.The chancellor, Sajid Javid, talks brightly of ‘divergence’ from EU norms. He told the Financial Times that ‘there will not be alignment, we will not be rule-takers.’ However, when he arrived in Davos last month, that line changed subtly: we would not be ...
... editor and chief executive of Independent Television News, and Dame Rosemary Murray, a former Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University and a director of the Midland Bank. The two nominated by the staff are Lord Windlesham, a former Tory Minister and once managing director of Associated Television (ATV), now chairman of the Parole Board, and William Clark, once ...
The New Select Committees: A Study of the 1979 Reforms 
edited by Gavin Drewry.
Oxford, 410 pp., £25, September 1985, 9780198227854
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Commons Select Committees: Catalysts for Progress? 
edited by Dermot Englefield.
Longman, 288 pp., £15, May 1984, 0 582 90260 6
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British Government and the Constitution: Text, Cases and Materials 
by Colin Turpin.
Weidenfeld, 476 pp., £25, September 1985, 0 297 78651 2
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Parliament in the 1980s 
edited by Philip Norton.
Blackwell, 208 pp., £19.50, July 1985, 0 631 14056 5
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... policy by the Treasury Committee led to increasingly strained relations between Mr (now Sir) Edward du Cann, the committee’s chairman and a champion of the new system, and Sir Geoffrey Howe as Chancellor. In turn, this affected the way the committee’s reports were received by MPs and led to semi-public rumblings ...

Did more mean worse?

Michael Brock, 23 October 1986

Government and the Universities in Britain: Programme and Performance 1960-1980 
by John Carswell.
Cambridge, 181 pp., £19.50, January 1986, 9780521258265
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... did not give the right signals. The representation of employers was equally defective. Sir Edward Herbert died before the Report had been signed. Mr R.B. Southall and Sir David Anderson ‘belonged’, in Mr Carswell’s words, ‘to the silent minority’. All four members of the ‘inner group’, as Mr Carswell defines it, were academics. The most ...

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