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He huffs and he puffs

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

... who had brought an application for judicial review of the terms of his sentence against the Home Office. Had Hindley lived, the Lords’ judgment in Anderson’s favour might also have led to her release from prison, where she was serving a mandatory life sentence. The Anderson ruling took away from the ...

Operation Overstretch

David Ramsbotham: Unfair to the Army, 20 February 2003

... Armed Forces were used to being given very clear and specific aims for any military operation. (Northern Ireland was an exception.) Since then, however, the Army in particular has been sent on a number of ‘missions without end’. Currently almost 18,000 troops, deployed in the Falklands, Cyprus, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, as well ...

Once a Syrian, always a Syrian

Maria Margaronis: Joseph O’Neill, 8 March 2001

Blood-Dark Track: A Family History 
by Joseph O'Neill.
Granta, 338 pp., £16.99, February 2001, 1 86207 288 4
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... Kildare. Joseph Dakak was seized by the British at the Syrian border in April 1942 as he travelled home by train from a lemon-buying venture in Palestine, and detained for more than three years in a series of British and French concentration camps on (undeclared) suspicion of being an Axis spy. In both families a tense silence surrounded these ...

An Enemy Within

Paul Foot, 23 April 1987

Molehunt: The Full Story of the Soviet Mole in MI5 
by Nigel West.
Weidenfeld, 208 pp., £10.95, March 1987, 0 297 79150 8
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... state. In those years they flew high over the more typical officers of British Intelligence at home and abroad, whose natural sympathies were right-wing, and who tended to side politically with Hitler and Mussolini rather than with anything which stank of Communism. Surprisingly quickly, after the war, the enemy changed. Suddenly Germany and Italy were ...

Not Making it

Stephen Fender, 24 October 1991

The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and how it changed America 
by Nicholas Lemann.
Macmillan, 410 pp., £20, August 1991, 0 333 56584 3
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... that had created America in the first place. Anxious to escape deteriorating conditions at home, the migrants were also attracted by opportunities far away. They wanted to better themselves, to extend their possibilities, and they were willing to uproot themselves in order to do so. Nicholas Lemann’s judicious, well-written study concentrates on the ...

History of a Dog’s Dinner

Keith Ewing and Conor Gearty, 6 February 1997

... case in which the King’s Secretary issued a warrant authorising two messengers to enter the home of John Entick and search for seditious papers. There was neither common law nor statutory authority for this action, which Entick successfully challenged in the courts, recovering damages from the hapless messengers (said to be ‘as much responsible as ...

Diary

Susan McKay: Jean McConville, 19 December 2013

... was a witty woman and she liked a laugh.’ When Terence O’Neill resigned as prime minister of Northern Ireland in 1969 he admitted that he had failed ‘to break the chains of ancient hatreds’. Ian Paisley was on the rise, stirring up fear and bigotry among the Protestant working classes. The McConville children lived in a Protestant area but went ...

Subversions

R.W. Johnson, 4 June 1987

Traitors: The Labyrinths of Treason 
by Chapman Pincher.
Sidgwick, 346 pp., £13.95, May 1987, 0 283 99379 0
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The Secrets of the Service: British Intelligence and Communist Subversion 1939-51 
by Anthony Glees.
Cape, 447 pp., £18, May 1987, 0 224 02252 0
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Freedom of Information – Freedom of the Individual? 
by Clive Ponting, John Ranelagh, Michael Zander and Simon Lee, edited by Julia Neuberger.
Macmillan, 110 pp., £4.95, May 1987, 0 333 44771 9
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... The key judgment is surely that of William Strang, the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, in a paper of May 1943: We need Russian collaboration. The conclusion of the Anglo-Soviet Treaty marks our decision that this must be our policy … even if fears that Russia lay a ‘heavy hand’ on eastern, central ...

Growth

Arthur Marwick, 3 June 1982

The Wasting of the British Economy 
by Sidney Pollard.
Croom Helm, 197 pp., £11.95, March 1982, 0 7099 2019 9
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The Global 2000 Report to the President: Entering the 21st Century 
Penguin, 766 pp., £7.95, January 1982, 0 14 022441 6Show More
United Kingdom Facts 
by Richard Rose and Ian McAllister.
Macmillan, 168 pp., £30, February 1982, 0 333 25341 8
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... which bear little relationship to investment and productivity and divide their activities in office between exaggerated reactions against their predecessors’ policies and preparations for the next election, were well described in Michael Stewart’s The Jekyll and Hyde Years. It is striking how often fugitive wets ...

Madman Economics

William Davies: What the hell is going on?, 20 October 2022

... One of Osborne’s first acts on entering the Treasury in May 2010 was to establish an in-house Office of Budget Responsibility, a kind of financial superego that would judge whatever fiscal announcements emanated from Whitehall. When Osborne told the Conservative Party conference in 2012 that ‘We’re all in this ...

Nine White Men Armed with Iron Bars

Andy Beckett: Postwar Immigrant Experience, 2 November 2017

Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Postwar Britain 
by Clair Wills.
Allen Lane, 442 pp., £25, August 2017, 978 1 84614 716 6
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... as the country they arrived in; the way their experience of Britain evolved as it gradually became home; and the way immigrants felt about their countries of origin if they went back – or if they didn’t. To cover all this, Wills avoids the ploddingly completist and chronological approach of much contemporary British history for something more open-ended ...

Imagine Tintin

Michael Hofmann: Basil Bunting, 9 January 2014

A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting 
by Richard Burton.
Infinite Ideas, 618 pp., £30, September 2013, 978 1 908984 18 0
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... to Denmark (‘on his bicycle the Dane is a beautiful creature, but off it he does not feel at home, and looks as awkward as an automaton’); to Paris; to Rapallo. In 1924 he met Pound there, supposedly – the mythopoeic embellishment – at the top of a local hill. ‘Villon’, his first long poem, was written in 1925, and published, with Pound’s ...

Diary

Gavin Francis: NHS in Crisis, 2 March 2017

... My​ first home visit of the day was to a 97-year-old woman who just ‘wasn’t right’. Her daughter had phoned around ten, while I was still doing the morning clinic. Between patients I’d noticed her name pop up on the screen. ‘What do you mean, “not right”?’ I asked Pearl, the receptionist, on my way to call someone from the waiting room ...

The Angry Men

Jean McNicol: Harriet Harman, 14 December 2017

A Woman’s Work 
by Harriet Harman.
Allen Lane, 405 pp., £20, February 2017, 978 0 241 27494 1
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The Women Who Shaped Politics 
by Sophy Ridge.
Coronet, 295 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 4736 3876 1
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... Friday, picked her children up from school one day a week, tried to make friends with the stay-at-home mothers who networked in the playground (she always turned up, she says, in tracksuit and trainers, to show she was ‘focused’ on the children), and tried not to cancel outings. One half-term she’d promised to take her son and his friend to the cinema ...

What are you willing to do?

James Meek, 26 May 2022

How Civil Wars Start – And How to Stop Them 
by Barbara F. Walter.
Viking, 289 pp., £18.99, January 2022, 978 0 241 42975 4
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... conspiracists and militiamen, according to Walter, that the next American civil war will come, as home-grown bands of right-wing terrorists and xenophobic guerrillas infest the democratic liberal order of the United States. This scenario doesn’t allow space for an alternative fracture in society’s representation of reality, one that is possibly more ...

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