Paul Foot died in July 2004. He wrote 60 pieces for the LRB – on subjects including Leon Britain, the Birmingham Six, MI5, Tiny Rowland, Neil Hamilton, Gordon Brown and (often) Shelley.
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Vol. 8 No. 2 · 6 February 1986
pages 3-5 | 3212 words
Westland Ho
Paul Foot
It was the end of a Cabinet meeting and Mrs Thatcher was cross. It was all so silly, so unnecessary. She was half-way through her second term as prime minister – a bad time for most governments, but hers was doing surprisingly well. Earlier in the year, the most dangerous of all the ‘enemies within’, the miners’ union, had been thoroughly beaten in a tough fight. The trade unions everywhere else were humbled and split. The Opposition was fighting itself, and was unconvincing. For a brief moment, almost incredibly, the Conservative Party had established a small lead in the polls.
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Letters
Vol. 8 No. 4 · 6 March 1986
From E.W. Cohen
SIR: I have been a regular reader of the LRB for four years. When I opened the issue of 6 February I was dismayed to find pride of place and more than four full columns devoted to a competent piece of domestic political journalism, surely more suited to a newspaper or one of the many weeklies. Is this an indication of a change in your policy, a waning of interest in books both scholarly and literary, to be replaced with articles on the ephemera of domestic political quarrels? The only compensation for your apparent change in direction was the inclusion of that excellent contribution by Peter Burke. For once you allowed space for reference to an important piece of European scholarship. If you intend to adulterate the Review with journalistic articles, please warn us.
E.W. Cohen
Girton, Cambridge
From Editor, ‘London Review of Books’
We have always published some pieces which make no mention of books. In the issue before the Paul Foot article mentioned by E.W. Cohen there was a piece of the same Cohen-repellant kind, and in the issue before that, Frank Field’s heartfelt piece about the state of Liverpool referred very little to publications.
Editor, ‘London Review of Books’
