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Pistols in His Petticoats

Neal Ascherson: The Celebrated Miss Flora, 15 December 2022

Pretty Young Rebel: The Life of Flora MacDonald 
by Flora Fraser.
Bloomsbury, 285 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 1 4088 7982 5
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... rain on the Isle of Skye, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson found a welcome in the house of Allan MacDonald at Kingsburgh. Dr Johnson had developed a nasty cold; Boswell was wet and thirsty and delighted to get indoors. ‘There was a comfortable parlour,’ he wrote in his journal in the autumn of 1773, ‘with a good fire, and a dram of admirable Hollands ...

But what did they say?

Stephen Walsh: Music in 1853, 25 October 2012

Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year 
by Hugh Macdonald.
Boydell, 208 pp., £25, June 2012, 978 1 84383 718 3
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... no conceivable interest to anyone but himself, they are at least factual. This point is reached by Hugh Macdonald’s Music in 1853. Macdonald might not need consolation. He is the author of books that palpably enrich and illuminate. His Master Musicians Berlioz is one of the best volumes in that series. He has been a ...

Short Cuts

Rory Scothorne: Edinburgh’s Festivalisation, 4 January 2024

... soldiers, were arrested. Several of the culprits were deported and on 22 April three teenagers – Hugh MacDonald, Hugh McIntosh and Neil Sutherland – were hanged. Hundreds of police and soldiers lined the streets for the execution, in what Knox calls ‘a pageant of civil and military power’. In 1993 the party was ...

La Côte St André

Julian Rushton, 22 June 1989

Berlioz 1803-1832: The Making of an Artist 
by David Cairns.
Deutsch, 586 pp., £25, February 1989, 0 233 97994 8
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... works in The New Grove Dictionary and Dent’s Master Musicians by the general editor of the NBE, Hugh Macdonald. Stimulated by his excellent edition of the Memoirs, David Cairns has been at work on his biography for twenty years. This long gestation, although a source of frustration to his potential readers, has paid dividends in the depth of ...

Labour’s Lost Leader

A.J. Ayer, 22 November 1979

Hugh Gaitskell 
by Philip Williams.
Cape, 1007 pp., £15
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... If only Hugh Gaitskell had not died when he did. If only he had led the Labour Party into the General Election of 1964. He had at last succeeded in imposing his ascendency over the party – an ascendency repeatedly challenged in the eight years he had led it, all the time in opposition. Would he not have become Prime Minister with a larger majority? Would not his government have dealt more successfully with the economic troubles of the Sixties? Might he not have retained power in 1970, and so saved us from the disastrous years of the Heath government? Might we not consequently have been spared our present discontents? These are questions that I often put to myself ...

Diary

Fraser MacDonald: Wild Beasts, 23 September 2021

... in the door and walking down through the advancing bracken. My father’s Uncle Alick was the last MacDonald in Achbuie, after generations had scratched a living from a few acres of hill, a thousand feet above the Great Glen. The family worked the croft for about two hundred years until an entropic ending in 1960 when the land outpaced Alick’s capacity to ...

Digging up the Ancestors

R.W. Johnson, 14 November 1996

Hugh Gaitskell 
by Brian Brivati.
Cohen, 492 pp., £25, September 1996, 1 86066 073 8
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... The obvious candidate would have been the first man to lead Labour to power, but Ramsay MacDonald put himself beyond the pale: indeed, the psychological wound he left as ‘the lost leader’ was of more lasting significance than anything he achieved in power. Oswald Mosley, the most impressive of the Young Turks to contest ...

When Labour Was New

Malcolm Petrie: Labour’s First Government, 20 June 2024

The Men of 1924: Britain’s First Labour Government 
by Peter Clark.
Haus, 293 pp., £20, October 2023, 978 1 913368 81 4
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The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government 
by David Torrance.
Bloomsbury, 322 pp., £20, January, 978 1 3994 1143 1
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... figures have been forgotten, or, in the case of the party’s first prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, disowned. The Labour left, then and since, thought the new administration was too timid and had failed to promote socialism. The centre and right of the party felt that the experience of 1924 had confirmed the dangers of taking office without a ...

Sir Jim

Reyner Banham, 22 May 1980

Memoirs of an Unjust Fella: An Autobiography 
by J.M. Richards.
Weidenfeld, 279 pp., £10, March 1980, 9780297777670
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... In the travel-starved Fifties, when the journey was often more glamorous than the destination. Sir Hugh Casson began one of his Observer articles: ‘As the airport bus rolled along Chelsea Embankment, I looked up and saw a light burning late in the study of the architectural correspondent of the Times. No doubt he was writing, “Sir Hugh Casson, whose death in an air accident …” ’ A good Cassonian ploy ...

Protestant Country

George Bernard, 14 June 1990

Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher 
edited by Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy.
Cambridge, 260 pp., £27.50, January 1989, 0 521 34034 9
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The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation 
by Robert Whiting.
Cambridge, 302 pp., £30, July 1989, 0 521 35606 7
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The Reformation of Cathedrals: Cathedrals in English Society, 1485-1603 
by Stanford Lehmberg.
Princeton, 319 pp., £37.30, March 1989, 0 691 05539 4
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Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England 
by David Cressy.
Weidenfeld, 271 pp., £25, October 1989, 0 297 79343 8
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The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the 16th and 17th Centuries 
by Patrick Collinson.
Macmillan, 188 pp., £29.50, February 1989, 0 333 43971 6
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Life’s Preservative against Self-Killing 
by John Sym, edited by Michael MacDonald.
Routledge, 342 pp., £29.95, February 1989, 0 415 00639 2
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Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 
by Nigel Smith.
Oxford, 396 pp., £40, February 1989, 0 19 812879 7
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... royal supremacy preached up and down the land. And who better to preach it than Thomas Cranmer or Hugh Latimer, full of Continental learning, opposed to Papal pretensions, and keen to see Henry as a godly prince who would destroy idolatry and embrace true religion. Henry had not intended to go so far along that road of reformation, but he had unleashed a ...

You must not ask

Marina Warner, 4 January 1996

Lewis Carroll: A Biography 
by Morton Cohen.
Macmillan, 592 pp., £25, November 1995, 0 333 62926 4
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The Literary Products of the Lewis Carroll-George MacDonald Friendship 
by John Docherty.
Edwin Mellen, 420 pp., £69.95, July 1995, 0 7734 9038 8
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... lessons and high sentiments and lyric poetry. His nonsense upskittled rules and regulations; as Hugh Haughton says in an exhilarating Introduction to The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry, writers like Carroll ‘implicitly brought into question the earnestness of being important, and the importance of being earnest’. The Red Queen wanted things to have ...

Appreciating Paisley

Charles Townshend, 22 January 1987

God save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism 
by Steve Bruce.
Oxford, 308 pp., £15, November 1986, 0 19 827487 4
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Children of Wrath: Political Violence in Northern Ireland 
by Michael MacDonald.
Polity, 194 pp., £19.50, September 1986, 0 7456 0219 3
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... on Bruce’s dust-wrapper – rather than of preachers like Henry Cooke and ‘Roaring’ Hugh Hanna, men outside the establishment, is symptomatic of the distortion. In fact, liberals would certainly be happier with Paisley if he were a politician bent on power and thus forced to battle, and compromise, for mainstream support. The salient point about ...

The Trouble with HRH

Christopher Hitchens, 5 June 1997

Princess Margaret: A Biography 
by Theo Aronson.
O’Mara, 336 pp., £16.99, February 1997, 1 85479 248 2
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... delivered covertly to his consort, Mary of Modena.) So J.R. Clynes, Home Secretary to Ramsay MacDonald, had to journey to Glamis Castle and wait for 16 days for the waters to break. He passed the time profitably enough being shown around the local estates by Lady Airlie, a lady-in-waiting, who was pleased to find ‘under his homely exterior a deeply ...

A Great Wall to Batter Down

Adom Getachew, 21 May 2020

Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent 
by Priyamvada Gopal.
Verso, 607 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 1 78478 412 6
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... insisted in 1918, ‘and I shall go to Trafalgar Square, as Mrs Pankhurst went there, as Ramsay MacDonald went there; as all the other fighters for the cause of liberty went there.’Gopal’s focus, however, isn’t on the ways colonial subjects negotiated, resisted and reclaimed the empire, so much as on the ways in which imperial crisis awakened dissent ...

Diary

Fraser MacDonald: Balmorality, 16 November 2023

... land reform since its continued existence legitimises large-scale private landownership.’ MacDonald Gallery Contrary to popular belief, Balmoral wasn’t owned by the queen. It was originally bought by Albert rather than Victoria to ensure that it did not become part of the Crown Estate, with its revenues surrendered to Parliament. Then Albert ...

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