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The Common Law and the Constitution

Stephen Sedley, 8 May 1997

... Factories Acts designed to protect workers from injury or death. And when in 1863 a builder called Cooper found that the Wandsworth Board of Works had ordered him to pull down a house he owned without first giving him a chance to be heard, the Court of Exchequer struck down the order, not on the officious backbencher’s ground that Parliament must have ...

Elsinore’s Star Bullshitter

Michael Dobson, 13 September 2018

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness 
by Rhodri Lewis.
Princeton, 365 pp., £30, November 2017, 978 0 691 16684 1
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... composer. Edward Bysshe later anthologised it in his Art of English Poetry (1702), Anthony Ashley-Cooper praised it in his Characteristicks (1710), John Hughes discussed it in the Spectator (1712), Voltaire cited it in his Lettres philosophiques (1733), and in 1749 Robert Dodsley recommended memorising it as an exercise in mental self-training. In ...

Grateful Dead

John Barrell, 22 April 1993

The Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons 
edited by C.S. Nicholls.
Oxford, 790 pp., £80, January 1993, 0 19 865211 9
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... a brief life of Butchell in the first Dictionary of National Biography; it was written by Thompson Cooper, who had an eye for such characters, and who contributed over 1400 biographies, more than anyone else to the original dictionary. Cooper made no claims for Butchell’s importance as a physician, or as an innovator in ...

What’s Happening in the Engine-Room

Penelope Fitzgerald: Poor John Lehmann, 7 January 1999

John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure 
by Adrian Wright.
Duckworth, 308 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 7156 2871 2
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... which included contributions from Julian Bell, Richard Eberhart, William Empson, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, William Plomer and Lehmann himself. Through Spender he met Christopher Isherwood. The friendship with Spender from the very first seemed edgy, uncertain and uneasy, but durable for all that. Isherwood he loved, but he was tolerated, rather than ...

And That Rug!

Michael Dobson: Images of Shakespeare, 6 November 2003

Shakespeare’s Face: The Story behind the Newly Discovered Portrait 
by Stephanie Nolen.
Piatkus, 365 pp., £18.99, March 2003, 0 7499 2391 1
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Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions 
by Stephen Orgel.
Palgrave, 172 pp., £25, August 2003, 1 4039 1177 0
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Shakespeare in Art 
by Jane Martineau et al.
Merrell, 256 pp., £29.95, September 2003, 1 85894 229 2
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In Search of Shakespeare 
by Michael Wood.
BBC, 352 pp., £20, May 2003, 9780563534778
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... Tempest, and so on. To be fair, there are some nicely written pieces in Nolen’s book – Tarnya Cooper is good on the painting’s genre, and Jonathan Bate does his usual expert job on the still widespread folk belief that Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays (which would make the Sanders portrait, even if it is all that its current possessor ...

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 Powers: Subject and Citizens 
by Christopher Vincenzi.
Pinter, 343 pp., £47.50, April 1998, 1 85567 454 8
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... the creation of just such a constitutional jurisdiction with the Law Lords at its apex. Louis Blom-Cooper and Gavin Drewry, returning in a short chapter in the Carmichael and Dickson volume to the theme of their pathbreaking book Final Appeal, say: If we were to engage in a second edition of Final Appeal, we would not, as we did in 1966, start from a position ...

Written out of Revenge

Rosemary Hill: Bowen in Love, 9 April 2009

Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen & Charles Ritchie Letters and Diaries 1941-73 
edited by Victoria Glendinning, by Judith Robertson.
Simon and Schuster, 489 pp., £14.99, February 2009, 978 1 84737 213 0
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People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen 
edited by Allan Hepburn.
Edinburgh, 467 pp., £60, November 2008, 978 0 7486 3568 9
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... to Elizabeth and back to himself. Urbane, cultivated and witty in company, lunching with Diana Cooper and staying with the Queen at Balmoral, in private he broods on his own timidity, wondering whether he will ever manage to write a novel, escape ‘the womb of self’ and finally, in his fifties, ‘an elderly sex-maniac’, embark on ‘the voyage ...

Corbyn’s Progress

Tariq Ali, 3 March 2016

... Andy Burnham, who was what passed for leftish, leaving the door open for Liz Kendall or Yvette Cooper. Enter Jeremy Corbyn stage left. He may not be a charismatic figure, but he could never be mistaken for a PR confection. I have shared numerous platforms with him over the past forty years and on key issues he has remained steadfast. During the leadership ...

Lunch

Jon Halliday, 2 June 1983

In the Service of the Peacock Throne: The Diaries of the Shah’s Last Ambassador to London 
by Parviz Radji.
Hamish Hamilton, 343 pp., £12.50, April 1983, 0 241 10960 4
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... Charles Douglas-Home, Andrew Knight (the editor of the Economist), Frank Giles, Richard Kershaw, Stephen Spender and others eat and drink their way, sometimes to Tehran, but never, it would seem, to saying anything very interesting or useful. A string of right-wing Tory MPs like Julian Amery (originally seen helping Zog in Albania), Winston Churchill and ...

The Dreamings of Dominic Cummings

James Meek, 24 October 2019

... Each saint had had their face scored out with deep cross-hatching at the time of the Reformation. Stephen de Silva, a cathedral guide, told the Friends that the lines cut into the face of St Thomas Becket, defier of the authority of the English king in the name of the rights of the pan-European Church, had been cut especially deep. ‘They seem to have been ...

Even more immortal

Paul Driver, 8 April 1993

Memories of Beethoven: From the House of the Black-Robed Spaniards 
by Gerhard von Breuning, edited by Maynard Solomon, translated by Henry Mins and Maynard Solomon.
Cambridge, 154 pp., £15.95, November 1992, 0 521 41710 4
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Beethoven: Studies in the Creative Process 
by Lewis Lockwood.
Harvard, 283 pp., £31.95, July 1992, 0 674 06362 7
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... from the ‘Sehnsucht’ sketchbook in 1887, and sustained by such unlikely commentators as Stephen Spender (whom Lockwood quotes), that Beethoven’s first ideas were clumsy and could be refined into masterpieces only by a generalised sort of titanic struggle. Instead of losing himself in pious admiration of Beethoven’s persistence in building ...

Howard’s End

John Sutherland, 18 September 1986

Redback 
by Howard Jacobson.
Bantam, 314 pp., £10.95, September 1986, 0 593 01212 7
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Coming from behind 
by Howard Jacobson.
Black Swan, 250 pp., £2.95, April 1984, 0 552 99063 9
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Peeping Tom 
by Howard Jacobson.
Black Swan, 351 pp., £2.95, October 1985, 0 552 99141 4
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... Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stockhausen and the panel of Any Questions. He envied Bruce Forsyth, Henry Cooper, Chairman Hua, and even Virginia Wade for winning Wimbledon. He didn’t have a clue who Barry Sheene was, but he envied him. Now, Sefton would have to add to the list of enviables ‘the most devastatingly funny novelist writing in English today’. Like ...

Misbehavin’

Susannah Clapp, 23 July 1987

A Life with Alan: The Diary of A.J.P. Taylor’s Wife, Eva, from 1978 to 1985 
by Eva Haraszti Taylor.
Hamish Hamilton, 250 pp., £14.95, June 1987, 0 241 12118 3
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The Painted Banquet: My Life and Loves 
by Jocelyn Rickards.
Weidenfeld, 172 pp., £14.95, May 1987, 0 297 79119 2
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The Beaverbrook Girl 
by Janet Aitken Kidd.
Collins, 240 pp., £12.95, May 1987, 0 00 217602 5
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... bugger, what a job’ thought Rickards as she pocketed her palette. The poor bugger was Stephen Ward. By the mid-Fifties Jocelyn Rickards had begun her career as a stage and film designer. She created the costumes for Morgan, The Knack and From Russia with Love; her accounts of her work on these productions are dispatched with less detail and a lot ...

When the Mediterranean Was Blue

John Bayley, 23 March 1995

Cyril Connolly: A Nostalgic Life 
by Clive Fisher.
Macmillan, 304 pp., £20, March 1995, 0 333 57813 9
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... than the failures of idleness.’ Evelyn Waugh, on the whole in kindly mood, reported to Diana Cooper in Paris that Connolly was ‘wholly absurd in his serious moments, which are becoming more and more frequent ... he sees himself as a Public Relations Officer for Literature’, but ‘he is a droll old sponge at his best and worth six of Quennell.’ It ...

Upside Down, Inside Out

Colin Kidd: The 1975 Referendum, 25 October 2018

Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain 
by Robert Saunders.
Cambridge, 509 pp., £24.99, March 2018, 978 1 108 42535 3
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... Back in 1975 the SNP’s arguments were diametrically opposite. The party’s leading strategist, Stephen Maxwell, argued a few weeks before the 1975 referendum that ‘a No vote here against a Yes vote in England would be ideal … This is our great opportunity to further Scotland’s cause.’ The SNP gloried, then as now, in the possibility of a Scotland ...

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