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The Darth Vader Option

Colin Kidd: The Tories, 24 January 2013

The Conservatives since 1945: The Drivers of Party Change 
by Tim Bale.
Oxford, 372 pp., £55, September 2012, 978 0 19 923437 0
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The Conservative Party from Thatcher to Cameron 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 471 pp., £14.99, January 2011, 978 0 7456 4858 3
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Reconstructing Conservatism? The Conservative Party in Opposition, 1997-2010 
by Richard Hayton.
Manchester, 166 pp., £60, September 2012, 978 0 7190 8316 7
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... for the Darwinian challenges facing their party? For all their failings in the role of leader, William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith did try at first to court the elusive middle ground in British politics; but the far from fanciful fear of electoral oblivion prompted a hurried succession of leaders, including Michael Howard, who was less temperamentally ...

What I heard about Iraq in 2005

Eliot Weinberger: Iraq, 5 January 2006

... that there were 3200 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, 700 more than its capacity. I heard Major General William Brandenburg, who oversees US military detention operations in Iraq, say: ‘We’ve got a normal capacity and a surge capacity. We’re operating at surge capacity.’ A year before, I had heard the President promise ‘to demolish the Abu Ghraib ...

Who’s sorry now?

Andrew O’Hagan: Michael Finkel gets lucky, 2 June 2005

True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa 
by Michael Finkel.
Chatto, 312 pp., £15.99, May 2005, 0 7011 7688 1
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Burning Down My Master’s House 
by Jayson Blair.
New Millennium, 288 pp., $24.95, March 2004, 9781932407266
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The Journalist and the Murderer 
by Janet Malcolm.
Granta, 163 pp., £8.99, January 2004, 1 86207 637 5
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... don’t know how I can demonstrate my remorse,’ Glass is reported to have said to Andrew Sullivan, the editor who hired him. Sullivan pointed out, not in so many words, that taking a giant book advance and allowing a film to be made from the story of your misdemeanours might not be the subtlest demonstration of ...

Disappearing Ink

Tom Stevenson: Life of a Diplomat, 10 August 2023

And Then What? Inside Stories of 21st-Century Diplomacy 
by Catherine Ashton.
Elliott and Thompson, 256 pp., £20, February, 978 1 78396 634 9
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... were willing to let him.’ A lot of CIA directors have written memoirs: Richard Helms, William Colby, Robert Gates, George Tenet, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, Michael Morell, John Brennan. We already have the memoir of the current CIA director, Bill Burns, but not that of his predecessor, Gina Haspel. Perhaps it would be too torture-heavy to be ...

Venice-on-Thames

Amanda Vickery: Vauxhall Gardens, 7 February 2013

Vauxhall Gardens: A History 
by Alan Borg and David Coke.
Yale, 473 pp., £55, June 2011, 978 0 300 17382 6
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... customer if Vauxhall offered more nightingales and fewer strumpets. A Virginian gentleman called William Byrd was matter of fact about the amenities in June 1718: We went to Spring Gardens where we picked up two women and carried them into the arbour and ate some cold veal and about 10 o’clock we carried them to the bagnio, where we bathed and lay with ...

A Glorious Thing

Julie Peters: Piracy, 4 November 2010

Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates 
by Adrian Johns.
Chicago, 626 pp., £24, February 2010, 978 0 226 40118 8
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... was death to genius. The engineer, arms manufacturer, inventor and industrial ‘wizard’ Sir William Armstrong, who fought for abolition of the patent regime (exploiting others’ inventions when he could get away with it and fiercely protecting his own), explained his view in 1863 in Darwinian terms: As in the vegetable kingdom fit conditions of soil ...

Utopia Limited

David Cannadine, 15 July 1982

Fabianism and Culture: A Study in British Socialism and the Arts, 1884-1918 
by Ian Britain.
Cambridge, 344 pp., £19.50, June 1982, 0 521 23563 4
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The Elmhirsts of Dartington: The Creation of an Utopian Community 
by Michael Young.
Routledge, 381 pp., £15, June 1982, 9780710090515
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... merchant turned cattle herdsman), Sir Richard Bulkeley (an early 18th-century hunchback virtuoso), William Blake (‘I see so little of Mr Blake now,’ his wife once complained: ‘He is always in Paradise’), and James Pierrepont Greaves (damned by Carlyle as a ‘blockhead’ and an ‘imbecile’), preferred to leave the world rather than to understand or ...

Zzzzzzz

Mike Jay: Why do we sleep?, 4 April 2024

Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep 
by Kenneth Miller.
Oneworld, 330 pp., £18.99, October 2023, 978 0 86154 516 2
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... of ‘time and motion’ studies to analyse labour productivity. The British psychologist William McDougall and the young W.H.R. Rivers devised laboratory tests to measure fatigue, which correlated with reduced hours of sleep and revealed rates of chronic insomnia far higher than anticipated. The causes of sleeplessness were obvious and largely ...

Shapeshifter

Ian Penman: Elvis looks for meaning, 25 September 2014

Elvis Has Left the Building: The Day the King Died 
by Dylan Jones.
Duckworth, 307 pp., £16.99, July 2014, 978 0 7156 4856 8
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Elvis Presley: A Southern Life 
by Joel Williamson.
Oxford, 384 pp., £25, November 2014, 978 0 19 986317 4
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... Tupelo. His older twin, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. (There was ugly gossip later that the doctor, William Robert Hunt, might have had a drink; that he might have saved Jesse if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the surprise appearance of a second child. But the Presleys were satisfied with his work and Dr Hunt received his standard $15 payment from the ...

All Together Now

Richard Jenkyns, 11 December 1997

Abide with Me: The World of Victorian Hymns 
by Ian Bradley.
SCM, 299 pp., £30, June 1997, 9780334026921
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The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study 
by J.R. Watson.
Oxford, 552 pp., £65, July 1997, 0 19 826762 2
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... Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious above’), the Scottish-born English MP who ended his life as Governor of Bombay; Thomas Olivers (‘The God of Abraham praise’), a ...

Oh! – only Oh!

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Burne-Jones, 9 February 2012

The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination 
by Fiona MacCarthy.
Faber, 629 pp., £25, September 2011, 978 0 571 22861 4
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... No bond was more important to him, or longer-lasting, than the friendship he forged with William Morris at Oxford. Morris, too, had flirted with the Church – much wealthier than his friend, he once contemplated using his inheritance to finance a monastery – but by the time they left university ‘we were both settling in our minds,’ as ...

Bebop

Andrew O’Hagan, 5 October 1995

Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940-56 
edited by Ann Charters.
Viking, 629 pp., £25, August 1995, 0 670 84952 9
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... their chosen moments in the history of American airtime. Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore ...

He is cubic!

Tom Stammers: Wagnerism, 4 August 2022

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music 
by Alex Ross.
Fourth Estate, 769 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 0 00 842294 3
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... a little as they moved along independent paths’. Over time, this force drew in architects (Louis Sullivan), choreographers (Isadora Duncan), scenographers (Adolphe Appia), philosophers (Theodor Adorno) and filmmakers. Our Jedi, hobbits and hammer-wielding superheroes are his distant progeny.Among composers, only Wagner can be said to have secured an ...

Too Proud to Fight

David Reynolds: The ‘Lusitania’ Effect, 28 November 2002

Wilful Murder: The Sinking of the ‘Lusitania’ 
by Diana Preston.
Doubleday, 543 pp., £18.99, May 2002, 0 385 60173 5
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Lusitania: Saga and Myth 
by David Ramsay.
Chatham, 319 pp., £20, September 2001, 1 86176 170 8
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Woodrow Wilson 
by John Thompson.
Longman, 288 pp., £15.99, August 2002, 0 582 24737 3
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... these munitions going off. It therefore tried to shift the blame onto the Lusitania’s captain, William Turner, and also played up talk of a second torpedo. Both Ramsay and Preston are emphatic, however, that the U-20 fired only once, and they broadly agree on what could have caused a single torpedo to sink a 30,000-ton liner in 18 minutes. In 1903, Cunard ...

The Man Who Never Glared

John Pemble: Disraeli, 5 December 2013

Disraeli: or, The Two Lives 
by Douglas Hurd and Edward Young.
Orion, 320 pp., £20, July 2013, 978 0 297 86097 6
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The Great Rivalry: Gladstone and Disraeli 
by Dick Leonard.
I.B. Tauris, 226 pp., £22.50, June 2013, 978 1 84885 925 8
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Disraeli: The Romance of Politics 
by Robert O’Kell.
Toronto, 595 pp., £66.99, February 2013, 978 1 4426 4459 5
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... Canal shares) and the transformer of English queens into empresses of India. Peel, reincarnated as William Gladstone, denounces him from beyond the grave. Gladstone sweeps to victory, Byron is toppled and Peel is avenged. Byron dies, leaving posterity perplexed. Had he been a writer who happened to become prime minister, or a prime minister who happened to be ...

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