London Review of Books

You’re only interested in Hitler, not me

Susan Pedersen: Shirley Williams, 19 December 2013

Shirley Williams: The Biography
by Mark Peel.
Biteback, 461 pp., £25, September 2013, 978 1 84954 604 1Show More

“... women and children) better. Yet Castle rests in public memory (if at all) as a class warrior, the abrasive, too stylish Red Queen, while the personable, sartorially challenged Williams is thought of as reasonable, classless and comfortably middle of the road. This, again, isn’t quite right. Williams isn’t a liberal or a centrist but a ...”

Pilgrim’s Progress

Michael Davie, 4 December 1980

The Letters of Evelyn Waugh
edited by Mark Amory.
Weidenfeld, 664 pp., £14.95, September 1980, 0 297 77657 6Show More

“... about the subjects that interested him – the conflict of civilisations, the march of barbarism, class, aesthetics, Roman Catholicism – still possess bite and pertinence. His despair at the condition of 20th-century man, much ridiculed at the time, now seems merely prescient. But he did not arrive at these beliefs by contemplation. Pious he may have ...”

Bloody Furious

William Davies: ‘Generation Left’, 20 February 2020

Generation Left
by Keir Milburn.
Polity, 140 pp., £9.99, May 2019, 978 1 5095 3224 7Show More

“... comes to history. The issues on which pro-Brexit Conservatives seem most keen to fight a culture war are those that have to do with violence, masculinity and war: whether or not to prosecute British soldiers for past crimes, what to teach schoolchildren about the British Empire, how to commemorate the ...”

Educating the Utopians

Jonathan Parry: Parliament’s Hour, 18 April 2019

The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800-2000
edited by David Brown, Robert Crowcroft and Gordon Pentland.
Oxford, 626 pp., £95, April 2018, 978 0 19 871489 7Show More

“... of abstract constitutional theories on American or French lines, which had led to civil war and revolution. Instead Bagehot showed the practical benefits of the apparently illogical mix of crown, cabinet and parliamentary authority. In 1860 he described Parliament as ‘the most efficient instrument for expressing the practical opinion of cultivated ...”

Whose person is he?

Sheila Fitzpatrick: ‘Practising Stalinism’, 20 March 2014

Practising Stalinism: Bolsheviks, Boyars and the Persistence of Tradition
by J. Arch Getty.
Yale, 359 pp., £30, September 2013, 978 0 300 16929 4Show More

“... regional power bases, which the early modern tsars were trying to turn into a reliable service class. An elaborate ‘place’ system (mestnichestvo) determined a boyar’s exact rank for honorific and ceremonial purposes. Patron-client relationships were crucial in politics and every other aspect of life. Collective responsibility – on the part of a ...”

Slim for Britain

Susan Pedersen: Solidarity Economy, 23 January 2025

The Solidarity Economy: Non-Profits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire
by Tehila Sasson.
Princeton, 298 pp., £35, July 2024, 978 0 691 25038 0Show More

“... has happened to ‘making’, though, since E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Thompson’s title tells us that his subject is a discrete historical process, class-making. In the book, he’ll specify the large forces at work in that making – ...”

Growth

Arthur Marwick, 3 June 1982

The Wasting of the British Economy
by Sidney Pollard.
Croom Helm, 197 pp., £11.95, March 1982, 0 7099 2019 9Show More

The Global 2000 Report to the President: Entering the 21st Century
Penguin, 766 pp., £7.95, January 1982, 0 14 022441 6Show More

United Kingdom Facts
by Richard Rose and Ian McAllister.
Macmillan, 168 pp., £30, February 1982, 0 333 25341 8Show More

“... the origins in the complacencies engendered, and the conservatism confirmed, in the Second World War: the war’s effect, in Angus Calder’s ringing words, ‘was not to sweep society on to a new course, but to hasten its progress along the old grooves’. Some have placed them as late as the conservative reaction against ...”

Israel’s Message

Ilan Pappe: Gaza, 1 January 2009

“... Hizbullah fought Israel to a draw in the north, so that the IDF could prepare to fight a ‘better war’ against Hamas in the south. When the Israeli Chief of General Staff Dan Halutz visited the site after the Lebanon war, he told the press that soldiers ‘were preparing for the scenario that will unfold in the dense ...”

From The Blog

Cinematic Looting

, 8 September 2022

“... the perspective of diplomats who are Communist Party members, who braved a hail of bullets in a war-torn country and safely brought all Chinese compatriots onto one of the country’s warships unscathed’.The war-torn country where the movie is set, however, isn’t Syria but Yemen. In a segment broadcast on BBC ...”

From The Blog

Gallant Work

Tom Stevenson, 28 July 2023

“... In July 2022, the BBC and the Sunday Times published an investigation into war crimes by British troops in Afghanistan. They presented striking evidence that UK special forces – primarily SAS units – were responsible for dozens of extrajudicial executions in Helmand, and that these crimes had been covered up. Despite some early attempts to brush off the allegations, they have now prompted an official inquiry, chaired by Lord Justice Haddon-Cave ...”

Head over heart for Europe

Peter Pulzer, 21 March 1991

Ever Closer Union: Britain’s Destiny in Europe
by Hugh Thomas.
Hutchinson, 96 pp., £7.99, January 1991, 0 09 174908 5Show More

The Challenge of Europe: Can Britain win?
by Michael Heseltine.
Pan, 226 pp., £5.99, February 1991, 9780330314367Show More

“... released under the thirty-year rule. Whitehall, as we know from the history of the Second World War, has never had much faith in ordinary people. The idea that the public is a backward tribe in need of ‘re-education’ is a trifle patronising. But most of us would agree that a government trying to ‘take Britain into Europe’ had a public relations ...”

Rough Wooing

Michael Brown: Flodden, 23 January 2014

Fatal Rivalry: Flodden 1513
by George Goodwin.
Weidenfeld, 288 pp., £20, July 2013, 978 0 297 86739 5Show More

“... wars with England between the end of the 13th century and the 1540s. As an example of the waste of war, it seemed to retain its relevance for later generations. Like many other Scottish battles, it has its own song (written much later): The Flooers of the Forest, that focht aye the foremost The prime o our land, lie cauld in the clay. Historians have sometimes ...”

The Great Fear

William Lamont, 21 July 1983

Charles I and the Popish Plot
by Caroline Hibbard.
North Carolina, 342 pp., £21, May 1983, 0 8078 1520 9Show More

Charles I: The Personal Monarch
by Charles Carlton.
Routledge, 426 pp., £14.95, June 1983, 9780710094858Show More

The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County
by William Hunt.
Harvard, 365 pp., £24, April 1983, 0 674 73903 5Show More

“... We shall know more about the origins of the English Civil War when we know more about English Puritans. This seems, on the face of it, an absurd proposition. From S.R. Gardiner’s confident description of the Great Rebellion as ‘the Puritan Revolution’ downwards, we have not lacked studies which linked Protestant religious attitudes to the coming of the Civil War ...”

Radical Aliens

David Cole: The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair, 22 October 2009

The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair: America on Trial
by Moshik Temkin.
Yale, 316 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 0 300 12484 2Show More

“... the dean of Harvard Law School, Roscoe Pound and 205 members of the law school’s 1927 graduating class. Interest in the case did not die with the men’s executions. It has been the subject of countless books, articles and TV documentaries, it has also inspired novels and films, and even came up on The Sopranos, cited by Tony and Carmela Soprano to their ...”

Saint or Snake

Stefan Collini: Ann Oakley on Richard Titmuss, 8 October 2015

Father and Daughter: Patriarchy, Gender and Social Science
by Ann Oakley.
Policy, 290 pp., £13.99, November 2014, 978 1 4473 1810 1Show More

“... long, published by HMSO as part of the official history of the home front during the Second World War, and it addresses, with unyielding attention to detail, such topics as the exact division of administrative responsibilities for the provision of ambulance and other first-aid services during the war. Much of his later work ...”

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