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Having it both ways

Peter Clarke, 27 January 1994

A.J.P. Taylor: A Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 468 pp., £18.99, January 1994, 1 85619 210 5
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A.J.P. Taylor: The Traitor within the Gates 
by Robert Cole.
Macmillan, 285 pp., £40, November 1993, 0 333 59273 5
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From Napoleon to the Second International: International Essays on the 19th Century 
by A.J.P. Taylor, edited by Chris Wrigley.
Hamish Hamilton, 426 pp., £25, November 1993, 0 241 13444 7
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... by his earnest and readily astonished transatlantic correspondent, Taylor showed himself always ready to oblige, explaining that he had gone on television to debate war origins with Hugh Trevor-Roper ‘solely because I was paid to do so’. What with these shock-horror revelations, can we wonder that Cole’s incendiary manuscript was tucked away in a ...

Intelligencer

Sylvia Lawson, 24 November 1988

Games with Shadows 
by Neal Ascherson.
Radius, 354 pp., £18, April 1988, 0 09 173019 8
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... to find larger readerships. Thus Ascherson joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing ...

Speaking British

Thomas Jones, 30 March 2000

The Third Woman 
by William Cash.
Little, Brown, 318 pp., £14.99, February 2000, 0 316 85405 0
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Greene on Capri: A Memoir 
by Shirley Hazzard.
Virago, 149 pp., £12.99, January 2000, 1 86049 799 3
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... in the same state as Sarah was in at the end of their affair, poised on the brink of faith, almost ready to change the way he sees the world in order to accommodate his distress and the unbearable weight of excess coincidence. The best bit of symbolism in the film is a kind of intertextual joke. Fiennes’s performance is inescapably reminiscent of his role in ...

Late Deceiver

Robert Blake, 17 September 1981

Anthony Eden 
by David Carlton.
Allen Lane, 528 pp., £20, August 1981, 0 7139 0829 7
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... would have been the first to appreciate the risk involved. But he was, as time went on, no less ready to recognise the possible threat to his own position. Crown princes have deposed monarchs. Churchill was formidable, wary and popular. He would only go when he could no longer stay. Mr Carlton points out, however, that in 1939 it was by no means certain ...

Novel and Naughty

Blair Worden: Parliament and the People, 26 September 2019

Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War 
by David Como.
Oxford, 457 pp., £85, July 2018, 978 0 19 954191 1
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The Common Freedom of the People: John Lilburne and the English Revolution 
by Michael Braddick.
Oxford, 391 pp., £25, August 2018, 978 0 19 880323 2
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... counted for little without favourable facts of political life. The essential fact was that Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army was pledged both to unqualified victory and to liberty of conscience, and that the parliamentarian peace party, which had allied itself with the Presbyterians – Milton’s ‘old priest writ large’ – was bent on the ...

Into the Net

Neal Ascherson: Records of the Spanish Civil War, 15 December 2016

Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39 
by Adam Hochschild.
Macmillan, 438 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 1 5098 1054 3
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¡No Pasarán! Writings from the Spanish Civil War 
edited by Pete Ayrton.
Serpent’s Tail, 393 pp., £20, April 2016, 978 1 84668 997 0
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The Last Days of the Spanish Republic 
by Paul Preston.
William Collins, 390 pp., £25, February 2016, 978 0 00 816340 2
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A Distant Heartbeat: A War, a Disappearance and a Family’s Secrets 
by Eunice Lipton.
New Mexico, 165 pp., £18.50, April 2016, 978 0 8263 5658 1
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... Kea – headed a team of white nurses. It was also the first place where a black officer – Oliver Law – commanded an integrated American brigade in battle. Hochschild returns again and again to American non-intervention – the policy Roosevelt himself afterwards called ‘a grave mistake’. Roosevelt had instinctive sympathy for the Republican ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2019, 2 January 2020

... A day when, had either of us been well enough, we would have gone on the march which, thanks to Oliver Letwin’s amendment, turned out marginally more hopeful than I was expecting. Looking for a book to read in bed, I take down as I think Geoff Dyer’s The Missing of the Somme. It seems less chatty than I remember and it’s only when I come to the end of ...

Red Flag, Green Light

Rosa Lyster: Keep the Con Going, 16 November 2023

Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Swindled the World 
by Yepoka Yeebo.
Bloomsbury, 378 pp., £20, August 2023, 978 1 5266 6857 8
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... plan to his advantage, in the knowledge that there are quite a lot of people in the world who are ready to persuade themselves of almost anything rather than admit that a man with an air of over-the-top fraudulence has been taking them for a ride.Blay-Miezah was born in 1941, when Ghana was still the Gold Coast. John Kolorah Blay grew up in a tiny village ...

Fraudpocalypse

John Lanchester, 4 August 2022

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion-Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth 
by Dan McCrum.
Bantam, 326 pp., £20, June 2022, 978 1 78763 504 3
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... bill of £193 million arriving in 2022. As with the financial crisis, nobody senior went to jail. Oliver Schmidt, an engineering executive, made the mistake of going on holiday to the US, where he was arrested, charged, tried, pled guilty and was sent to prison for seven years. (Schmidt’s sentence was supposed to run until Christmas this year, but he was ...

Black on Black

R.W. Johnson, 24 November 1988

... and existed mainly in the shape of its External Mission – the exile group in London led by Oliver Tambo. Buthelezi had been an ANC supporter in his youth and was, at least at first, keen to stay on side with the ANC, securing their blessing, for example, before he accepted the position of chief minister of the KwaZulu Bantustan. It seems likely that ...

Apartheid’s Apocalypse

R.W. Johnson, 3 July 1986

South Africa without Apartheid 
by Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley.
California, 315 pp., £15.25, July 1986, 0 520 05769 4
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Move your shadow: South Africa Black and White 
by Joseph Lelyveld.
Joseph, 390 pp., £14.95, February 1986, 0 7181 2661 0
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Capitalism and Apartheid: South Africa 1910-1984 
by Merle Lipton.
Gower/Temple Smith, 448 pp., £18.50, September 1985, 0 85117 248 2
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The Militarisation of South African Politics 
by Kenneth Grundy.
Tauris, 133 pp., £14.95, May 1986, 1 85043 019 5
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... engineers. A worthy cause attracts causeless entrepreneurs. Instant experts pontificate about ready options for a creeping revolution. Some claim to seek ‘moral clarity’ that derives from the ‘scale of the land and its antagonisms’. Many more, one suspects, secretly enjoy what Gordimer calls ‘the last colonial extravaganza’.It is difficult for ...

Off-Beat

Iain Sinclair, 6 June 1996

... on the far side of the fence. Sometimes they get drunk and invade his property. But he’s ready for them. There’s a feathered shamanic wand in the bedroom. There have been rumours of sweat-lodge ceremonies, the casting out of a personal demon – thought of as the unappeased spirit of the dead Joan Vollmer Burroughs, shot through the forehead in ...

Think outside the bun

Colin Burrow: Quote Me!, 8 September 2022

The New Yale Book of Quotations 
edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
Yale, 1136 pp., £35, October 2021, 978 0 300 20597 8
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... blonde hairdos of the presenters might accurately be described as both fair and balanced. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, ‘I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.’ But the reverse is also true: quotations are ...

Chasing Kites

Michael Wood: The Craziness of Ved Mehta, 23 February 2006

The Red Letters: My Father’s Enchanted Period 
by Ved Mehta.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 190 pp., £15.99, November 2004, 0 9543520 6 8
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Remembering Mr Shawn’s ‘New Yorker’ 
by Ved Mehta.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 414 pp., £19.99, November 2004, 9780954352059
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Dark Harbour 
by Ved Mehta.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 272 pp., £17.99, November 2004, 0 9543520 4 1
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... orphanage . . . was barely touched upon. The school was as grim as an institution out of Oliver Twist, but Mehta made friends there, and learned Braille, and how to play chess. He was active and cheerful, and, striking a note of physical risk-taking that characterises much of his life, tells us that he ‘never walked anywhere but always ran, not ...

The Men from God Knows Where

Maurice Keen: The Hundred Years War, 27 April 2000

The Hundred Years War. Vol. II: Trial by Fire 
by Jonathan Sumption.
Faber, 680 pp., £30, August 1999, 0 571 13896 9
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... to cross with an army to the Continent in July 1337; by late August a mere two thousand men were ready in London, waiting for ships; in November the expedition was cancelled. In April 1338, the Earl of Huntingdon was commissioned to lead an army to relieve the hard-pressed English Seneschal of Gascony, Oliver Ingham; by ...

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