Sweetly Terminal
Edward Pearce, 5 August 1993
‘What’s all this?’
Edward Pearce
Edward Pearce is the author of Denis Healey and Reform! The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act.
Letter
On War and Intervention
3 April 2003
Ross McKibbin (LRB, 3 April) makes the mistake of imagining that the Prime Minister shares his own intelligence and serious-mindedness. Also he makes a mistake in speaking of Tony Blair's coming from the Left. Blair's only Left involvement was in the late 1970s when he fought the Beaconsfield by-election. His field of ambition then was the Labour Party; CND, about to define the Party's defence policy,...
Spurning at the High: a poet of Chartism
Edward Pearce, 6 November 2003
Will became an ardent public man, working well in those times when reforms were begun with a young hopefulness of immediate good which has been much checked in our days, and getting at last returned to Parliament by a constituency who paid his expenses.
Middlemarch
The ‘hopefulness’ being ‘much checked in our days’ speaks the caution of 1867 as against the enthusiasm...
Letter
Like/Unlike Alan Bennett . . .
8 January 2004
John Lloyd’s petulant outburst at Alan Bennett will surprise no one familiar with his petulant outbursts. I recall the time when he took his ball home from the New Statesman, refusing to write further for such pinko subversives and anti-Americans.There is no reason for the capture of Saddam to register heavily with Alan Bennett or anyone else familiar with the essential history. Saddam’s wickedness...
Letter
Eliot and Anti-Semitism (again)
25 January 2007
Denis Donoghue handles the desperate writhings of Craig Raine over the primitive anti-semitism of T.S. Eliot with gentle dubiety (LRB, 25 January). Neither Raine nor Eliot deserves it. Dramatic monologues which carry the unchallenged malevolence of ‘Burbank/Bleistein’ and ‘Gerontion’ are no less malevolently anti-semitic for being dramatic monologues.‘The jew is underneath the lot’ is beyond...
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’...
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...
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...
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 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.