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Twilight Approaches

David A. Bell: Salon Life in France, 11 May 2006

The Age of Conversation 
by Benedetta Craveri, translated by Teresa Waugh.
NYRB, 488 pp., £17.99, October 2005, 1 59017 141 1
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... and the voluminous historical writing on the subject as well. She pays the American scholar Daniel Gordon, author of an important study of Enlightenment ideas of sociability, the compliment of following him so closely as to lapse, on occasion, into paraphrase. And yet, time and again, the entrancing fable dances away with her like a seducer at a ball. For ...

Credibility Brown

Christopher Hitchens, 17 August 1989

Where there is greed: Margaret Thatcher and the Betrayal of Britain’s Future 
by Gordon Brown.
Mainstream, 182 pp., £4.95, May 1989, 1 85158 233 9
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CounterBlasts No 3: A Rational Advance for the Labour Party 
by John Lloyd.
Chatto, 57 pp., £2.99, June 1989, 0 7011 3519 0
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... Both men are of an age, and both have backgrounds in a harder Left than the one they now espouse. Gordon Brown was one of the convenor/editors of the Red Paper for Scotland in the early Seventies, and John Lloyd saw the inside of the Communist Party before helping to found a pro-European Marxist tendency at about the same time. Rather touchingly, he uses the ...

Maggiefication

Peter Clarke, 6 July 1995

The Path to Power 
by Margaret Thatcher.
HarperCollins, 656 pp., £24, June 1995, 0 00 255050 4
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... the way in which, on becoming leader of the Conservative Party, she put herself in the hands of Gordon Reece, a former television producer, who knew just what needed to be done. The hair was wrong, too suburban: it was restyled. The clothes were wrong, too fussy: they were replaced. The voice was wrong, too shrill: it was lowered in pitch through lessons ...

When Men Started Doing It

Steven Shapin: At the Grill Station, 17 August 2006

Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Butcher in Tuscany 
by Bill Buford.
Cape, 318 pp., £17.99, July 2006, 9780224071840
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... a celebrity cook. Not just how to cook a mushroom risotto like Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson or Gordon Ramsay or Anthony Bourdain, but what it’s like to be Jamie or Nigella or Gordon or Tony: Happy Days with the Naked Chef, How to be a Domestic Goddess, In the Heat of the Kitchen, Kitchen Confidential. And then – as ...

Stainless Steel Banana Slicer

David Trotter, 18 March 2021

Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form 
by Sianne Ngai.
Harvard, 401 pp., £28.95, June 2020, 978 0 674 98454 7
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... gimmick: that of seeming either too old or too new’. She notes that the cellphone brandished by Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) – a Motorola DynaTAC 8000X – was simultaneously cutting-edge and obsolete.The gimmick matters most to Ngai as ‘a contrivance that writers, composers and visual artists not only represent but use, deploying ...

Short Cuts

Daniel Soar: Running Out of Time, 8 January 2015

... and the unreality of time). Steve Richards – a pseudonym, no relation to the biographer of Gordon Brown – may or may not still be in hiding in Dallas; Chris Griscom has latterly retreated to her Light Institute in New Mexico. Nobody of any significance has materialised to replace them. Whatever happened to all the magicians and the nutjobs? Among the ...

A Plumless Pudding

John Sutherland: The Great John Murray Archive Disaster, 18 March 2004

... University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (on the initiative of its bibliophile vice-president, Gordon Ray) acquired the literary correspondence of the publisher Richard Bentley and Sons, principal purveyor of the three-decker novel to the Victorian reading public. At the same time, the British Library (with financial assistance from the Friends of National ...

Sacred Text

Richard Gott: Guatemala, 27 May 1999

Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans 
by David Stoll.
Westview, 336 pp., £20, February 1999, 0 8133 3574 4
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... who else? – of the death of the American Ambassador. It was August 1968, and John Gordon Mein had been assassinated that morning. This was an abrupt introduction to the complexities of Guatemalan politics, and I merely assumed – with the Vietnam War and the less-publicised Guatemalan guerrilla war of the Sixties well underway – that ...

What is Labour for?

John Lanchester: Five More Years of This?, 31 March 2005

David Blunkett 
by Stephen Pollard.
Hodder, 359 pp., £20, December 2004, 0 340 82534 0
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... crucial figure in this transformation. But he is not alone. His key colleague is, also obviously, Gordon Brown, with whom there are – Old Labour stalwarts dreaming of a New Jerusalem after the Blair to Brown handover, please note – plenty of personal differences but almost no ideological ones. And then there are the figures who travelled further in ...

Educating the Utopians

Jonathan Parry: Parliament’s Hour, 18 April 2019

The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800-2000 
edited by David Brown, Robert Crowcroft and Gordon Pentland.
Oxford, 626 pp., £95, April 2018, 978 0 19 871489 7
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... to pretend that these underlying concerns don’t need addressing.There were​ precedents for David Cameron’s decision to go to the people in June 2016: there have been 13 referendums in various parts of the UK since 1973; the Victorian deference to a parliamentary elite has gone, and with good reason. What was indisputably poor statesmanship was the ...

Short Cuts

Tom Hickman: Outside Appointments, 15 August 2024

... from outside Parliament, continuing the practice of his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, who appointed David Cameron as foreign secretary last November, making him a peer in order to do so. Many find the practice of making outside appointments constitutionally suspect. However, the constitutional issue that requires rectification isn’t so much the way in which ...

Confusion is power

David Runciman: Our Very Own Oligarchs, 7 June 2012

The New Few, or a Very British Oligarchy: Power and Inequality in Britain Now 
by Ferdinand Mount.
Simon and Schuster, 305 pp., £18.99, April 2012, 978 1 84737 800 2
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... rather than a cobbled-together document designed to paper over the cracks long enough to prise Gordon Brown out of Downing Street. (He is also a little confused about timing: he gives the date of the formation of the coalition – ‘the most interesting political event I have witnessed’ – as May 2011, a year after it happened.) No doubt Clegg and ...

Into the Future

David Trotter: The Novel, 22 March 2007

The Novel: Vol. I: History, Geography and Culture 
edited by Franco Moretti.
Princeton, 916 pp., £65, June 2006, 0 691 04947 5
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The Novel: Vol. II: Forms and Themes 
edited by Franco Moretti.
Princeton, 950 pp., £65, June 2006, 0 691 04948 3
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... passion is political’. For example, when in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness Stephen Gordon joins an ambulance unit on the Western Front, she travels into France, and into a future in which lesbianism has ceased to be a stigma. ‘Later on would come bitterness, disillusion, but never again would such women submit to being driven back to their ...

Winterlude

Janette Turner Hospital, 1 August 1996

Talking to the Dead 
by Helen Dunmore.
Viking, 224 pp., £16, July 1996, 0 670 87002 1
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... in 1992 when I read it in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories, the annual selection edited by Giles Gordon and David Hughes. I made a mental note of the author’s name, Helen Dunmore, because I’d never heard of her before. A name to watch for, I thought, and watched for it in The Best of Best Short ...

Not No Longer but Not Yet

Jenny Turner: Mark Fisher’s Ghosts, 9 May 2019

k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 
edited by Darren Ambrose.
Repeater, 817 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 1 912248 28 5
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... Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley, One-Dimensional Woman by Nina Power and The Meaning of David Cameron by Richard Seymour, all of which grew from their authors’ blogposts. Such works amounted to ‘a kernel of a whole new left public’, according to another of Fisher’s friends, Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural studies at the University of ...

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