Edward Pearce

Edward Pearce is the author of Denis Healey and Reform! The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act.

Letter

No, he wasn’t

8 November 2012

Contrary to what Jenny Diski writes in her melancholy article about the Wrotham Hill murder, James Chuter Ede was not an abolitionist any more than Herbert Morrison, his Labour Home Office predecessor, had been (LRB, 8 November). His Criminal Justice Bill of 1947 was widely assailed for its rigidity and he retreated, conceding that all capital sentences should be assessed on their merits. He signed...
Letter

Interpretations of History

17 March 2011

What’s wrong with narrative? Only the word itself as used by Richard J. Evans. Why not ‘story’? Children like stories, as does everyone else. Told properly, they make you read on; and having pupils wanting to read on is the forlorn dream of every teacher of anything. To listen to Evans and his supporters, teaching in this attractive and coherent way means rah-rah history with free flags, a chronicle...
Letter

A Serious Man

20 January 2011

Iain Sinclair’s treatment of John Major – ‘a gap-year, work experience prime minister sleepwalking through the job as a profile-raising opportunity’ – is wonderfully imperceptive (LRB, 20 January). I used to say hard things about politicians for a living, but I tried to watch the facts. In 1990, John Major inherited not just membership of the ERM, but the pound’s too high valuation there,...
Letter

Speaking up for the 1970s

27 August 2009

Ian Jack’s review of Andy Beckett’s When the Lights Went Out is marred by a fearful howler (LRB, 27 August). It wasn’t Jack Jones who insisted on goujons of sole at monthly meetings with Treasury ministers, but Hugh Scanlon.Joking apart, the IMF visitation of 1976 is still reliably posted as the ultimate failure of a Labour government. In fact, the IMF-precipitating episode of 1976 was sparked...
Letter

Such Consolation!

7 February 2008

Eamon Duffy has written an eccentric and charmless piece, the point of which seems to be that Mary and her bishops didn’t just burn people to death for being unsound in their religious beliefs (LRB, 7 February). They also preached more spiffing sermons than we thought and won some conversions; no burning alive without a priest at hand preaching sound doctrine. Such consolation!Against a background...

Pieces about Edward Pearce in the LRB

Shoy-Hoys: The not-so-great Reform Act

Paul Foot, 6 May 2004

No one disputes that the British electoral system before 1832 was a mockery of representation. Members of Parliament did not want or pretend to be representative: the word ‘democracy’...

Read more reviews

Labour’s Beachmaster: Jenkins, Healey, Crosland

Peter Clarke, 23 January 2003

The sudden death of Roy Jenkins took us all by surprise. He was over eighty, of course, and with a heart problem that had required major surgery. This latterly gave him a good excuse to sit down...

Read more reviews

Up the avenue

Peter Clarke, 11 June 1992

Don’t be put off by the title, since it’s only a laboured allusion to Cobbett’s Rural Rides, lacking the alliterative euphony of the original. What Edward Pearce of the Guardian...

Read more reviews

What difference did she make?

Eric Hobsbawm, 23 May 1991

The ‘question of leadership’ which is the subject of both these books is the question of how much difference leadership in politics can make. Contrary to what is held by believers in...

Read more reviews
See all contributors

Download the LRB app

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences