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War in My Head

Michael Wood: The Céline Case, 18 August 2022

Guerre 
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
Gallimard, 184 pp., £15.35, May, 978 2 07 298322 1
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Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Journeys to the Extreme 
by Damian Catani.
Reaktion, 392 pp., £27, September 2021, 978 1 78914 467 3
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... he is a pimp and she is a prostitute. They start to disagree about the distribution of their powers in the town, and she threatens to denounce him to the authorities for a misdemeanour. He defies her and the next thing we read is an account of the friend being arrested and put in chains. ‘Four days later he was shot at his billet near Péronne where ...

He huffs and he puffs

John Upton: David Blunkett, the Lifers and the Judges, 19 June 2003

... judges recommended a tariff of 15 years; the Home Secretary imposed a sentence of 20. In 1995, Michael Howard explicitly referred to the quasi-judicial nature of his role: ‘The prisoner is aware of the judicial view and has the opportunity to make representations. He is then told of the tariff set. If there is any departure from the judicial advice, he ...

Beddoes’ Best Thing

C.H. Sisson, 20 September 1984

The Force of Poetry 
by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 447 pp., £19.50, September 1984, 0 19 811722 1
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... from which Ricks takes the title of his volume. Johnson speaks of ‘that force which calls new powers into being, which embodies sentiment, and animates matter’. The essay on Gower starts by propounding one of those popular critical problems which have little bearing on the ordinary reader’s enjoyment of literature: are an author’s effects ‘the ...

From Old Adam to New Eve

Peter Pulzer, 6 June 1985

The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher 
by Robert Blake.
Methuen/Fontana, 401 pp., £19.95, May 1985, 0 413 58140 3
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Westminster Blues 
by Julian Critchley.
Hamish Hamilton, 134 pp., £7.95, May 1985, 0 241 11387 3
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... of these – it is evident that the two parties arose simultaneously. They have not shown equal powers of survival. Whiggery has long disappeared, though 20th-century Conservatives have included a few Whiggish eccentrics. The Liberal Party of David Steel bears little resemblance to it, except in some residual link with religious dissent and the geographical ...

We are all Scots here

Linda Colley: Scotland and Empire, 12 December 2002

The Scottish Empire 
by Michael Fry.
Tuckwell/Birlinn, 580 pp., £16.99, November 2002, 9781841582597
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... of alien oppression now triumphantly shrugged off. Nor in practice have those current Great Powers which are still in essence imperial found coming to terms with empire difficult. China, for instance, continues to retain territories that were conquered by Chinese emperors long after the Spanish and Portuguese invasions of the New World, and does not ...

History of a Dog’s Dinner

Keith Ewing and Conor Gearty, 6 February 1997

... as such in Entick v. Carrington. They are, however, compelling arguments in favour of limited powers, restrained in the manner of their exercise and capable of being deployed only after the most testing form of authorisation. State powers of surveillance are exercisable against the innocent as well as the guilty and are ...

Professor or Pinhead

Stephanie Burt: Anne Carson, 14 July 2011

Nox 
by Anne Carson.
New Directions, 192 pp., £19.99, April 2010, 978 0 8112 1870 2
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... Some writers discover their powers gradually. Others – Anne Carson, for example – spring from the head of Zeus. With three books in four years during the mid-1990s, the Canadian poet, classical scholar, essayist and translator became suddenly prominent in North America; she had found readers in Britain as well by 2001, when The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos won the T ...

Beware Kite-Flyers

Stephen Sedley: The British Constitution, 12 September 2013

The British Constitution: A Very Short Introduction 
by Martin Loughlin.
Oxford, 152 pp., £7.99, April 2013, 978 0 19 969769 4
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... state – Oliver Cromwell – who was to be not a figurehead but a chief executive whose emergency powers of taxation were to be subject to Parliament’s endorsement or override, and who was forbidden to suspend or dispense with its legislation: ‘The laws shall not be altered, suspended, abrogated or repealed, nor any new law made, nor any tax, charge or ...

Sizing up the Ultra-Right

David Butler, 2 July 1981

The National Front 
by Nigel Fielding.
Routledge, 252 pp., £12.50, January 1981, 0 7100 0559 8
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Left, Right: The March of Political Extremism in Britain 
by John Tomlinson.
Calder, 152 pp., £4.95, March 1981, 0 7145 3855 8
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... the loss of its imperial role, by its industrial decline compared to other major – and minor – powers, and by the failure of the nostrums prescribed by alternating governments, meets most of the textbook requirements for the growth of extremism. Some profess to see in the monetarist takeover of the Conservative Party, or in the Labour Party’s lurch to ...

We do it all the time

Michael Wood: Empson’s Intentions, 4 February 2016

... often you read them; it remains the incantation of a murderer, dishevelled and fumbling among the powers of darkness.It is an act of alert critical reading to spot the action word among the proliferating concepts; and generous to suggest that Macbeth, crazed and ambitious as he is, even as he contemplates the killing of his king, can still represent a more ...

Marvellous Money

Michael Wood: Eça de Queirós, 3 January 2008

The Maias: Episodes from Romantic Life 
by José Maria Eça de Queirós, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Dedalus, 714 pp., £15, March 2007, 978 1 903517 53 6
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... said to have a ‘Balzacian eye’, and Balzac is elsewhere called a ‘prodigy of observational powers’. A love nest is called the Villa Balzac, an intricate, critical irony because the owner of the house is a ‘great fantasist’ far from fully aware of what he is doing when he adopts the great realist as his ‘patron saint’. The book itself, I ...

Our Flexible Friends

Conor Gearty, 18 April 1996

Scott Inquiry Report 
by Richard Scott.
HMSO, 2386 pp., £45, February 1996, 0 10 262796 7
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... the Government’s manifestly untenable case. The story starts with the Import, Export and Customs Powers (Defence) Act 1939, the casual misuse of which is characteristic of government conduct as evidenced throughout the Report. Before this Act, control of the export of goods out of Britain was governed by the royal prerogative and the common law. The Second ...

Where will the judges sit?

Stephen Sedley: What will happen to the Law Lords?, 16 September 1999

The House of Lords: Its Parliamentary and Judicial Roles 
edited by Brice Dickson and Paul Carmichael.
Hart, 258 pp., £30, December 1998, 1 84113 020 6
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Constitutional Futures: A History of the Next Ten Years 
edited by Robert Hazell.
Oxford, 263 pp., £17.99, January 1999, 0 19 829801 3
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The Law and Parliament 
edited by Dawn Olivier and Gavin Drewry.
Butterworth, 219 pp., £15.95, September 1998, 0 406 98092 6
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Crown PowersSubject and Citizens 
by Christopher Vincenzi.
Pinter, 343 pp., £47.50, April 1998, 1 85567 454 8
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... judicial with the legislative function. The easy answer is to be serious about the separation of powers, but the separation of powers is and always has been a myth – that is, a useful but untrue account of things. The Georgian England in which Montesquieu claimed, for his own good reasons, to have observed and admired it ...

Not Just Anybody

Terry Eagleton: ‘The Limits of Critique’, 5 January 2017

The Limits of Critique 
by Rita Felski.
Chicago, 238 pp., £17, October 2015, 978 0 226 29403 2
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... charitably known as jargon. On this view, to be lucid is to make one’s peace with the prevailing powers. It is to speak a commodified language, even though in Marx’s opinion there are few more enigmatic phenomena than the commodity form. The clear is confused with the plain. It is perhaps significant in this respect that the very readable Felski, though a ...

Keeping Left

Edmund Dell, 2 October 1980

The Castle Diaries 
by Barbara Castle.
Weidenfeld, 778 pp., £14.95, September 1980, 0 297 77420 4
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... and sense of fun, less than the most listened-to member of Cabinet. The man she admires most is Michael Foot, while transmitting her satisfaction at his gradual education in the responsibilities of government, and consequent adoption of policies very different from those advocated in savage criticism of Barbara Castle in the late Sixties. But he, above ...

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