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The Unmaking of the President

Benjamin Barber, 7 October 1982

The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power 
by Garry Wills.
Atlantic/Little, Brown, 310 pp., $14.95, February 1982, 0 316 94385 1
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... neither of Kennedy’s immediate successors served what should have been their normal terms – Johnson repudiating a life of successful power-brokering and exiling himself to Texas to avoid what he was certain would be defeat in the race for a second term, and Nixon eluding impeachment by a hair. The two decent men who followed, Ford and Carter, seemed ...

Liveried

Frank Kermode, 11 May 1995

John Gay: A Profession of Friendship. A Critical Biography 
by David Nokes.
Oxford, 563 pp., £25, February 1995, 0 19 812971 8
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... I draw Miltonic Air. This affable performance goes on for 278 lines. It failed to amuse Dr Johnson, but it has some characteristic jokes: Whether Inviegling Hymen has trapanned The unwary youth, and ty’d the Gordian Knot Of jangling Wedlock, indissoluble; Worried all day by loud Xantippes Din, And when the gentle Dew of sleep inclines With slumbrous ...

You are not helpful!

Simon Blackburn: Wittgenstein in Cambridge, 29 January 2009

Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911-51 
edited by Brian McGuinness.
Blackwell, 498 pp., £75, March 2008, 978 1 4051 4701 9
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... constant nursing, first from Russell, then from a long succession of others including W.E. Johnson, Frank Ramsey, Keynes, Moore, Sraffa, Norman Malcolm and finally, literally, from Dr Bevan and his family, who took him into their home and cared for him during his final illness. It is amazing to think of those ...

There’s Daddy

Michael Wood, 13 February 1992

Flying in to Love 
by D.M. Thomas.
Bloomsbury, 262 pp., £14.99, February 1992, 0 7475 1129 2
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JFK 
directed by Oliver Stone.
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... but continued with the motorcade, had lunch as planned at the Trade Mart, went on to Austin and Johnson’s ranch; went shooting with Johnson the following morning. For various reasons, this story is more real than anything else in the novel; an eloquent and moving representation of our disbelief. For the rest, in the ...

Pious Girls and Swearing Fathers

Patricia Craig, 1 June 1989

English Children and their Magazines 1751-1945 
by Kirsten Drotner.
Yale, 272 pp., £16.95, January 1988, 0 300 04010 5
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Frank Richards: The Chap behind the Chums 
by Mary Cadogan.
Viking, 258 pp., £14.95, October 1988, 0 670 81946 8
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A History of Children’s Book Illustration 
by Joyce Irene Whalley and Tessa Rose Chester.
Murray/Victoria and Albert Museum, 268 pp., £35, April 1988, 0 7195 4584 6
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Manchester Polytechnic Library of Children’s Books 1840-1939: ‘From Morality to Adventure’ 
by W.H. Shercliff.
Bracken Books/Studio Editions, 203 pp., £25, September 1988, 0 901276 18 9
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Children’s Modern First Editions: Their Value to Collectors 
by Joseph Connolly.
Macdonald, 336 pp., £17.95, October 1988, 0 356 15741 5
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... An Adventure of Master Tommy Trusty; and his delivering Miss Biddy Johnson, from the Thieves who were going to murder her’: this is the charming title of a story in the first-ever children’s periodical, the Lilliputian Magazine, brought out by John Newbery in 1751, and with its theme of character-moulding (a silly little girl is cured of vanity through suffering a fright) it set the tone for a good deal of juvenile magazine fiction for some time ...

As the Lock Rattles

John Lanchester, 16 December 2021

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic 
by Rachel Clarke.
Abacus, 228 pp., £9.99, September 2021, 978 0 349 14456 6
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Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy 
by Adam Tooze.
Allen Lane, 354 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 0 241 48587 3
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Failures of State: The Inside Story of Britain’s Battle with Coronavirus 
by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott.
Mudlark, 432 pp., £20, March 2021, 978 0 00 843052 8
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Covid by Numbers: Making Sense of the Pandemic with Data 
by David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters.
Pelican, 320 pp., £10.99, October 2021, 978 0 241 54773 1
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The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality 
by Toby Green.
Hurst, 294 pp., £14.99, April 2021, 978 1 78738 522 1
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... of a bizarre, error-riddled two-thousand-word blogpost which served only to show how rattled the Johnson administration had been by the piece. The book is essentially a longer sequel to that initial exposé, which in all important points overlaps with the critique launched by the joint health and social care and science and technology committees: ‘one of ...

Poisonous Frogs

Laura Quinney: Allusion v. Influence, 8 May 2003

Allusion to the Poets 
by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 345 pp., £20, August 2002, 0 19 925032 4
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... a common misuse of the term ‘metaphor’, and Ricks perhaps took himself to be showing a frank charm in telling it, but its wit is sour. Ricks’s forte is identifying effective poetry, and explaining why it works. In his chapter on David Ferry, he discusses ‘The Lesson’, Ferry’s touching adaptation of a poem Samuel ...

Untouchable?

David Runciman: The Tory State?, 8 September 2016

... only real setback came in the London mayoral election of 2000, when the official Labour candidate, Frank Dobson, finished a distant third. But the fact that the runaway winner was Ken Livingstone, who stood as an independent but was in effect the alternative Labour candidate (and became the official Labour candidate in 2004), shows the extent of the party’s ...

Those bastards, we’ve got to cut them back

Daniel S. Greenberg: Bush’s Scientists, 22 September 2005

The Republican War on Science 
by Chris Mooney.
Basic Books, 288 pp., £14.99, October 2005, 0 465 04675 4
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... about an unprecedented – and still unmatched – mobilisation of scientists in support of Lyndon Johnson. To promote their cause in broadcasts and newspaper ads, they raised more than $500,000, a respectable sum in those early days of political mega-spending. But the Johnson landslide produced morning-after remorse among ...

Return to the Totem

Frank Kermode, 21 April 1988

William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion 
by Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett and William Montgomery.
Oxford, 671 pp., £60, February 1988, 0 19 812914 9
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Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare 
by Stanley Cavell.
Cambridge, 226 pp., £25, January 1988, 0 521 33032 7
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A History of English Literature 
by Alastair Fowler.
Blackwell, 395 pp., £17.50, November 1987, 0 631 12731 3
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... calls for correction, and, though quite firm in their treatment of other scholars, they avoid what Johnson called ‘the acrimony of a scholiast’ and generally preserve a civil tone. ‘No edition of Shakespeare can or should be definitive ... Our own edition ... is inevitably not only fallible but arbitrary.’ Gary Taylor’s General Introduction carefully ...

The Devil upon Two Sticks

Charles Nicholl: Samuel Foote, 23 May 2013

Mr Foote’s Other Leg: Comedy, Tragedy and Murder in Georgian London 
by Ian Kelly.
Picador, 462 pp., £18.99, October 2012, 978 0 330 51783 6
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... Aristophanes’ – in both cases rather flatteringly – Foote included among his fans Dr Johnson (‘For a broad laugh I must confess the scoundrel has no fellow’) and Edward Gibbon, who told his sister in a letter: ‘When I am tired of the Roman Empire I can laugh away an evening at Foote’s theatre.’ Yet he died, said Garrick, excusing ...

Chronicle of an Epidemic

John Ryle, 19 May 1988

And the band played on: Politics, People and the Aids Epidemic 
by Randy Shilts.
Viking, 630 pp., £15.95, March 1988, 0 670 82270 1
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Crisis: Heterosexual Behaviour in the Age of Aids 
by William Masters, Virginia Johnson and Robert Kilodny.
Weidenfeld, 243 pp., £9.95, March 1988, 0 297 79392 6
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The Forbidden Zone 
by Michael Lesy.
Deutsch, 250 pp., £11.95, February 1988, 0 233 98203 5
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... life has radically altered. Actual behavioural change is more difficult to assess. Masters and Johnson and their colleague Robert Kolodny argue in Crisis that sexual behaviour in the United States among both homosexuals and heterosexuals has not yet altered enough to make a significant difference. In addition to the time-lapse between infection and the ...

Fuming

Richard Altick, 19 July 1984

Thomas Carlyle: A Biography 
by Fred Kaplan.
Cambridge, 614 pp., £25, January 1984, 0 521 25854 5
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Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages 
by Phyllis Rose.
Chatto, 318 pp., £11.95, March 1984, 0 7011 2825 9
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A Carlyle Reader 
edited by G.B. Tennyson.
Cambridge, 544 pp., £25, May 1984, 0 521 26238 0
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... about Carlyle with both authority and imagination is a daunting enterprise. For one thing, Dr Johnson apart, no English man of letters has ever held a higher opinion of the dignity of biography as a literary form, or inferentially expected more from its practitioners. Carlyle’s most famous dictum, ‘History is the essence of innumerable ...

A Poetry of Opposites

C.H. Sisson, 9 July 1992

Housman’s Poems 
by John Bayley.
Oxford, 202 pp., £25, April 1992, 0 19 811763 9
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... for the Yellow Book. Housman was six years older than Yeats and eight years older than Lionel Johnson, but they were much more dependent than he was on the work of the Victorian era, and it was the novelty of his tone which set him apart. The moment of the break-up of existing verse-forms, with Pound and his associates, still lay ahead. Housman was not ...

This Sporting Life

R.W. Johnson, 8 December 1994

Iain Macleod 
by Robert Shepherd.
Hutchinson, 608 pp., £25, November 1994, 0 09 178567 7
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... the maladroit interference of Harold Watkinson, the Transport Minister, and the intransigence of Frank Cousins, the TGWU leader: it was the first great set-piece battle between a union and the government. Shepherd brings this out well but misses altogether the significance of the strike which stands, as we look back, at the very centre of our recent social ...

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