The UN and Rwanda

Linda Melvern, 12 December 1996

“... first priority. There were howls of outrage from other members. The British Ambassador, Sir David Hannay, reviewed the options. The first was to reinforce the troops to give the peacekeepers a stronger mandate, though Hannay warned that this had been the UN strategy in Somalia. Second, the troops could pull out completely, risking a negative public ...”

The Finchley Factor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Thatcher in Israel, 13 September 2018

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East 
by Azriel Bermant.
Cambridge, 274 pp., £22.99, September 2017, 978 1 316 60630 8Show More
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“... who had by then returned to office as foreign secretary in the wartime coalition government led by David Lloyd George. The British government would ‘view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. Although there was realpolitik behind ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... south of the border, and this raises two big questions at least. What would have happened had David Cameron not foolishly refused to include a third, ‘devo-max’ option on the ballot? And, whatever the result, will political self-interest and the need to survive finally begin to push the UK’s two so-called main parties in the direction of localism ...”

Unfair Judgments

Ed Kiely: Lethal Cuts at the DWP, 17 April 2025

The Department: How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence 
by John Pring.
Pluto, 292 pp., £16.99, August 2024, 978 0 7453 4989 3Show More
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“... can be exaggerated, faked or feigned,’ the psychologists Peter Halligan, Christopher Bass and David Oakley wrote in their introduction to a collection of essays from 2003 titled Malingering and Illness Deception. Medical professionals, researchers and even courts, they went on, were often reluctant ‘to entertain the label or to stigmatise individuals as ...”

Oddity’s Rainbow

Pat Rogers, 8 January 1987

Laurence Sterne: The Later Years 
by Arthur Cash.
Methuen, 390 pp., £38, September 1986, 0 416 32930 6Show More
Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning 
by Robert DeMaria.
Oxford, 303 pp., £20, October 1986, 9780198128861Show More
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“... with aberration and divergence. In his brave and inventive reconstruction, Wild Diversions (1972), David Thomson found a good image for it: ‘He did not live in the conventional order from day to day, but grew strong or weak like the wind.’ Obviously this has something to do with the vacillations of his physical health – Arthur Cash brings this out ...”

Homage to Wilson and Callaghan

Ross McKibbin, 24 October 1991

Power, Competition and the State. Vol. II: Threats to the Post-War Settlement, Britain, 1961-1974, Vol. III: The End of the Post-War Era, Britain since 1974 
by Keith Middlemas.
Macmillan, 480 pp., £50, March 1990, 0 333 41413 6Show More
Labour’s Economic Policies, 1974-1979 
edited by Michael Artis and David Cobham.
Manchester, 310 pp., £40, June 1991, 0 7190 2264 9Show More
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“... of material are – as in my case – not always Professor Middlemas’s), while Michael Artis and David Cobham have edited a detailed and careful examination of the 1974-1979 governments which replaces all previous accounts. What conclusions might the reader draw from all this kind of evidence? Negatively, the historical record suggests that, as against the ...”

The Biographer’s Story

Jonathan Coe, 8 September 1994

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers 
by Roger Lewis.
Century, 817 pp., £20, April 1994, 0 7126 3801 6Show More
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“... bequeathing it to his estranged fourth wife, Lynne Frederick, who kept it all to herself, married David Frost with indecent haste and recently died in California of a drug overdose. So much for the facts. One of Roger Lewis’s main achievements in his new and frankly enormous biography – at least four times longer than any of the others – is to have ...”

Denatured

Rosemary Hill, 2 December 1993

Karl Friedrich Schinkel: ‘The English Journey’ 
edited by David Bindman and Gottfried Riemann, translated by F. Gagna Walls.
Yale, 220 pp., £35, July 1993, 0 300 04117 9Show More
The Modernist Garden in France 
by Dorothée Imbert.
Yale, 268 pp., £40, August 1993, 0 300 04716 9Show More
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“... notes and drawings he had made of English Gothic, English brickwork and warehouse construction. David Bindman and Gottfried Riemann have edited these notes, interleaving them with Schinkel’s letters home to his wife and they have added contemporary illustrations from other sources, showing places and artifacts referred to in the text. Enhanced by the two ...”

Great Tradition

D.G. Wright, 20 October 1983

Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears 
by Geoffrey Pearson.
Macmillan, 243 pp., £15, July 1983, 0 333 23399 9Show More
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“... powder dry and prepare for a prolonged siege. Although monetarist economists and cost accountants may feel reasonably safe, Norman Tebbit has recorded his dim view of effete scholars who study tribal customs on the Upper Volta, while Sir Keith Joseph’s hostility towards the social sciences has involved the once-mighty Social Science Research Council in ...”

The Powyses

D.A.N. Jones, 7 August 1980

After My Fashion 
by John Cowper Powys.
Picador, 286 pp., £2.50, June 1980, 0 330 26049 9Show More
Weymouth Sands 
by John Cowper Powys.
Picador, 567 pp., £2.95, June 1980, 0 330 26050 2Show More
Recollections of the Powys Brothers 
edited by Belinda Humfrey.
Peter Owen, 288 pp., £9.95, May 1980, 0 7206 0547 4Show More
John Cowper Powys and David Jones: A Comparative Study 
by Jeremy Hooker.
Enitharmon, 54 pp., £3.75, April 1979, 0 901111 85 6Show More
The Hollowed-Out Elder Stalk 
by Roland Mathias.
Enitharmon, 158 pp., £4.85, May 1979, 0 901111 87 2Show More
John Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest 
by Morine Krissdottir.
Macdonald, 218 pp., £8.95, February 1980, 0 354 04492 3Show More
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“... will rather note the vicar who loves Christ but can’t love God. But newcomers to Powys-land may wonder what the fuss is about. The last chapter of John Cowper’s Autobiography has the strange heading ‘There’s a Mohawk in the Sky!’ Is it a man, is it a bird? Is Powysianism a cult, a fan-club, a Welsh academic festival? Let us turn to Recollections ...”

Social Work with Guns

Andrew Bacevich: America’s Wars, 17 December 2009

“... vigorous exercise of hard power to prolong the postwar Pax Americana. In ways that Obama himself may only dimly appreciate, his decision on Afghanistan affirms the pre-existing character of US foreign policy. But by advocating ‘counter-insurgency’, the McChrystal report also represents a tacit acknowledgment that a decades-long military reform project ...”

No one hates him more

Joshua Cohen: Franzen on Kraus, 7 November 2013

The Kraus Project 
by Jonathan Franzen.
Fourth Estate, 318 pp., £18.99, October 2013, 978 0 00 751743 5Show More
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“... a feminine relationship of jealous comparison might develop: Who spits better? To write a novel may be pure pleasure. To live a novel presents certain difficulties. As for reading a novel, I do my best to get out of it. I no longer have collaborators. I used to be envious of them. They repel those readers whom I want to lose myself. From a torch ...”

The Irresistible Itch

Colin Kidd: Vandals in Bow Ties, 3 December 2009

Personal Responsibility: Why It Matters 
by Alexander Brown.
Continuum, 214 pp., £12.99, September 2009, 978 1 84706 399 1Show More
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“... of uncharismatic right-wing leaders came to an end with the accession to the party leadership of David Cameron, a smoother, less straightforward kind of Conservative. Cameron recognised that if he was to ‘detoxify’ the Tory brand, loosen its association with uncaring Thatcherite economics, then he needed to explode the assumption that the Conservatives ...”

Her face was avant-garde

Christian Lorentzen: DeLillo’s Stories, 9 February 2012

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories 
by Don DeLillo.
Picador, 211 pp., £16.99, November 2011, 978 1 4472 0757 3Show More
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“... a road novel midway and ends with a sloppy orgy in the Texas desert. The ever ironical narrator, David Bell, is fond of making statements like ‘I was an extremely handsome young man,’ and worships at the altar of Burt Lancaster: ‘Burt in the moonlight was a crescendo of male perfection but no less human because of it.’ ‘I don’t think my first ...”

Get the placentas

Gavin Francis: ‘The Life Project’, 2 June 2016

The Life Project: The Extraordinary Story of Our Ordinary Lives 
by Helen Pearson.
Allen Lane, 399 pp., £20, February 2016, 978 1 84614 826 2Show More
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“... as babies. There were, it seemed, patterns and cycles to disadvantage. Around the same time David Barker began to show the ways in which nutrition during pregnancy had long-lasting effects not just on babies’ growth, but also on their risk as adults of developing heart disease, diabetes and obesity. Barker argued that to improve the health of the next ...”
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