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Keys to the World

Tom Stevenson: Sea Power, 8 September 2022

The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans 
by David Bosco.
Oxford, 320 pp., £22.99, April, 978 0 19 026564 9
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Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order In World War Two 
by Paul Kennedy.
Yale, 521 pp., £25, May, 978 0 300 21917 3
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... The best summation of the importance of naval position was given in 1904 by the British admiral John Fisher: ‘Five keys lock up the world! Singapore, the Cape, Alexandria, Gibraltar, Dover. These five keys belong to England.’ But if you leave strategic bases aside, it is often the show of naval force, rather than its application, that has proved most ...

Cityphobia

John Lanchester: The Crash, 23 October 2008

... wrote in a piece about the City of London, in the aftermath of the Northern Rock fiasco: ‘If our laws are not extended to control the new kinds of super-powerful, super-complex and potentially super-risky investment vehicles, they will one day cause a financial disaster of global-systemic proportions.’* The prediction was right, but the tense was ...

AmeriKKKa

Thomas Sugrue: Civil Rights v. Black Power, 5 October 2006

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice 
by Raymond Arsenault.
Oxford, 690 pp., £19.99, March 2006, 0 19 513674 8
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... Alabama boycotted the city’s public transport system after Rosa Parks defied Jim Crow laws by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Leading the protests was Martin Luther King. In the aftermath of the Montgomery bus boycott, King established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, using black churches as the base for organising ...

Decay-Prone

Stephen Mulhall: The intolerance of liberalism, 22 July 2004

Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law 
by Martha Nussbaum.
Princeton, 413 pp., £19.95, April 2004, 0 691 09526 4
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... simply; even the distinction I have just made fails to dispel the suspicion of liberal partiality. John Rawls’s reputation is built on his monumental A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. But in later years, he not only refined the details of his account of justice as fairness; he also reconstructed its mode of presentation so that it might illuminate and ...

Warrior Women

Patrick Wormald, 19 June 1986

Women in Anglo-Saxon England and the Impact of 1066 
by Christine Fell, Cecily Clark and Elizabeth Williams.
British Museum/Blackwell, 208 pp., £15, April 1984, 0 7141 8057 2
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... this exaltation of the female sex to that honour, consequence and independence, which European laws studied to uphold.’ In 1848, John Mitchell Kemble, in one of the top three, assured (reassured?) Queen Victoria that ‘woman among the Teutons was near akin to divinity, but not one among them ever raved that the femme ...

Short Cuts

Francis FitzGibbon: Locking On, 10 February 2022

... on Human Rights). In 2004 Peter Hain, then the Labour Leader of the House of Commons, introduced laws designed to curb anti-war protests in Parliament Square. The Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, aimed at the Iraq War protester Brian Haw, included a ban on using tents, sleeping bags and megaphones in the square. In the debate in the Lords last ...

A Piece of Pizza and a Beer

Deborah Friedell: Who was Jane Roe?, 23 June 2022

The Family Roe: An American Story 
by Joshua Prager.
Norton, 655 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 0 393 24771 8
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... of illegitimate children’. Abortion-seeking Texans usually travelled to states with more liberal laws, or to Mexico, but Roe claimed, and there seemed no reason to doubt her, that she couldn’t afford to leave town. She understood that some doctors in Dallas did perform illegal abortions, but these were expensive and often unsafe, and she worried that ...

Saint Jane

D.A.N. Jones, 20 October 1983

The Good Father 
by Peter Prince.
Cape, 204 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 224 02131 1
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Mrs Pooter’s Diary 
by Keith Waterhouse and John Jensen.
Joseph, 208 pp., £7.95, October 1983, 0 7181 2339 5
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Dandiprat’s Days 
by David Thomson.
Dent, 165 pp., £8.50, September 1983, 0 460 04613 6
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The Dream of a Beast 
by Neil Jordan.
Chatto, 103 pp., £6.95, October 1983, 0 7011 2740 6
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Squeak: A Biography of NPA 1978A 203 
by John Bowen and Eric Fraser.
Faber, 127 pp., £2.95, October 1983, 0 571 13170 0
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The Life and Times of Michael K 
by J.M. Coetzee.
Secker, 250 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 436 10297 8
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... boring Holloway to good old Peckham on the south side of the river, nearer the centre of things. John Jensen’s illustrations match Weedon Grossmith’s very neatly. Carrie thought the Pooters’ house rather too near the railway line, and deemed her husband’s jolly friend, Gowing, a touch too bibulous: to express her point of view, Jensen has embellished ...

Highway to Modernity

Colin Kidd: The British Enlightenment, 8 March 2001

Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World 
by Roy Porter.
Allen Lane, 728 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 7139 9152 6
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... Curiously, the first historian to query this complacent picture was the future arch-Eurosceptic, John Redwood, in his Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660-1750 (1976). This told the story of the assault on orthodox Christianity launched during the Augustan age by a variegated cast of libertine rakes, deists and heterodox ...

Nationalities

John Sutherland, 6 May 1982

Headbirths, or The Germans are dying out 
by Günter Grass, translated by Ralph Manheim.
Secker, 136 pp., £6.95, March 1982, 0 436 18777 9
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The Skating Party 
by Marina Warner.
Weidenfeld, 180 pp., £6.95, April 1982, 0 297 78113 8
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Sour Sweet 
by Timothy Mo.
Deutsch, 252 pp., £7.95, April 1982, 0 233 97365 6
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At Freddie’s 
by Penelope Fitzgerald.
Collins, 182 pp., £6.50, March 1982, 0 00 222064 4
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... of Mo’s narrative is stilted, but in the literal sense that he contrives to walk on what, by all laws of balance, ought to topple him into pidgin or condescending wog-com of the ‘It ain’t half hot, Mum’ or ‘Mind your language’ kind. This trick is easier shown than described. The following passage concerning Chen’s wife refers to ‘Chinese ...

Unsex me here

John Bayley, 20 May 1982

Shakespeare’s Division of Experience 
by Marilyn French.
Cape, 376 pp., £12.50, March 1982, 0 224 02013 7
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... 18th-century critic Maurice Morgann suggested in his ‘Essay on the Dramatic Career of Sir John Falstaff’, Shakespeare’s art is to make us infer far more material about the nature and potential of his characters than is needed for the action of the play. Cordelia is not pinned to her filial devotion and her demise at the hands of Edmund’s ...

We simply do not know!

John Gray: Keynes, 19 November 2009

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism 
by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller.
Princeton, 230 pp., £16.95, February 2009, 978 0 691 14233 3
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... The last two years, in which capitalism has suffered one of its periodic shocks, have given John Maynard Keynes a new lease of life. Events have demonstrated the limits of the theory that economies can be relied on to be stable if they are lightly regulated and otherwise left to themselves. There is now much talk of the paradox of thrift, whereby the rational choices of individuals can prove collectively ruinous, and of the need for government to counteract the inherently anarchic tendencies of markets ...

Mere Party

Robert Stewart, 22 January 1987

Pillars of Government, and Other Essays on State and Society c.1770-c.1880 
by Norman Gash.
Arnold, 202 pp., £25, June 1986, 0 7131 6463 8
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Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 
by Norman Gash.
Longman, 745 pp., £12.50, July 1986, 0 582 49722 1
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... historian. His notions of history-writing may not accommodate the wilder ambitions of Whigs like John Morley, who said that ‘the history of England ought to end with something that might be called a moral,’ or Professor Seeley, whose Expansion of England, invigorating though it is, gave ample proof that he really believed that ‘history fades into mere ...

Draining the Whig bathwater

Conrad Russell, 10 June 1993

The Personal Rule of Charles I 
by Kevin Sharpe.
Yale, 983 pp., £40, November 1992, 0 300 05688 5
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... because they say so. It is difficult to believe that ‘Justice Finch’s claim that the forest laws were implemented “without the least distaste or disaffection or complaint or clamour of his people”, and the King’s own expressed belief that the forest laws were for the benefit of his subjects as well as himself ...

Tocqueville anticipated me

Katrina Forrester: Karl Popper, 26 April 2012

After ‘The Open Society’: Selected Social and Political Writings 
by Karl Popper, edited by Jeremy Shearmur and Piers Norris Turner.
Routledge, 493 pp., £16.99, August 2011, 978 0 415 61023 0
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... 2011, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that George Soros had violated insider trading laws more than two decades ago in dealings with the French bank Société Générale. Soros has given billions of his personal wealth to fund liberal political organisations, notably his own Open Society Foundations, which operate on a global scale and have ...

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