Members’ Memorial

G.R. Elton, 20 May 1982

The History of Parliament: The Commons 1558-1603 
edited by P.W. Hasler.
HMSO, 1940 pp., £95, February 1982, 0 11 887501 9
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... in the 19th century. If this was whig history it affected tories in quite the same way. The layman may well wonder why work should still be done on the history of Parliament, that olive whose oil has surely long since been pressed from its desiccated flesh. There have in fact been three distinguishable phases in modern historians’ treatment of the ...

Not an Inkling

Jerry Coyne: There’s more to life than DNA, 27 April 2000

Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters 
by Matt Ridley.
Fourth Estate, 344 pp., £8.99, February 2000, 9781857028355
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... The Origin of Species a day. By the time you read this, the project will be nearly done, though it may take another year to align the bits of sequence and fill in the gaps. As the most visible (and expensive) product of Big Biology, the human genome project has understandably attracted much public attention. The excitement stems not from decoding the genome of ...

Diary

Will Self: Cocaine, 5 November 2015

... white rather than the right stuff. The cocaine literature of the era reflected these attitudes: Robert Sabbag’s Snowblind (1976) was a gonzo-inflected account of how one man, Zachary Swan, single-handedly turned southern California onto coke; and while there’s plenty of nastiness in the tale (how could there not be?), the overall impression Sabbag gives ...

Walsingham’s Plumber

Patrick Collinson: John Bossy, 5 July 2001

Under the Molehill: An Elizabethan Spy Story 
by John Bossy.
Yale, 189 pp., £18.95, May 2001, 0 300 08400 5
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... his peers. In recent years Bossy has undergone a process of reversion, however. In our dreams we may encounter, disturbingly, old flames of many years ago, or other reminders of the persons we once were. Bossy’s original work, back in the 1950s, was on the French connection: the cross-Channel traffic not in drugs but in Catholicism, and it is to that first ...

You need a gun

Wolfgang Streeck: The A-Word, 14 December 2017

The H-Word: The Peripeteia of Hegemony 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 190 pp., £16.99, April 2017, 978 1 78663 368 2
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The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci 
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 179 pp., £14.99, April 2017, 978 1 78663 372 9
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... with preachers of the ‘white man’s burden’ school of belief in benevolent empire, among them Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, with their self-serving fairy tales about a post-Vietnam US internationalism organised around ‘complexity’, ‘interdependence’, ‘regime theory’ and ‘liberal institutionalism’. But his main focus is Gramsci, who as ...

‘A Being full of Witching’

Charles Nicholl: The ‘poor half-harlot’ of Hazlitt’s affections, 18 May 2000

... Anthony. In the same year Sarah’s elder sister Martha married a well-to-do young solicitor, Robert Roscoe, who had been one of their first lodgers at Southampton Buildings. This was an excellent match from the Walkers’ point of view, one they were no doubt keen to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah ...

Le Roi Jean Quinze

Stefan Collini: Roy Jenkins and Labour, 5 June 2014

Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life 
by John Campbell.
Cape, 818 pp., £30, March 2014, 978 0 224 08750 6
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... become the target of unreasonable blame. The second, sometimes contingently related dream is what may be called the fantasy of the middle ground. This depends, logically as well as practically, on the model of a spectrum. The spatial metaphor exerts its own semantic pull, and so those placed at either extreme of the spectrum must be described as ...

The Art of Stealth

Bruce Ackerman: The Supreme Court under Threat, 17 February 2005

... the Supreme Court has been gathering momentum for almost twenty years: the nomination battles over Robert Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991 were harbingers. But times have changed since these bitter contests. Bork was a cutting-edge neo-conservative of the 1980s, but his successors may well go far beyond him, striking ...

Magnifico

David Bromwich: This was Orson Welles, 3 June 2004

Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life 
by Peter Conrad.
Faber, 384 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 571 20978 5
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... call him an artist. This suggestion, under the rapid wit of the dialogue and the scene shifts, may have done most to compel the admiration of the first grateful viewers of Citizen Kane. Welles’s own ‘presence in the picture’, Otis Ferguson wrote, ‘is always a vital thing, an object of fascination to the beholder. In fact, without him the picture ...

The Road to Reading Gaol

Colm Tóibín, 30 November 2017

... to revise and correct the pages. When he was released, Wilde gave the manuscript to his friend Robert Ross, who had two copies made. He sent one to Lord Alfred Douglas; the other he later lodged in the British Museum. Sections from Ross’s copy were published in 1905 and in 1908. The complete version, based on the original manuscript, wasn’t published ...

Fame at last

Elaine Showalter, 7 November 1991

Anne Sexton: A Biography 
by Diane Wood Middlebrook.
Virago, 488 pp., £20, November 1991, 1 85381 406 7
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... the poem shows Sexton’s craft, honed with advice from John Holmes, W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Lowell. Retrieved at the last moment from her ‘bone pile’ of discards to fill out the book, it had gone through 19 drafts before Sexton achieved what Middlebrook calls the ‘double “I” ’ of the stanza and refrain. It was not craft, however, that ...

Heavenly Cities

Daniel Aaron, 10 October 1991

The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities 
by Richard Sennett.
Faber, 266 pp., £17.50, June 1991, 0 571 16192 8
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... of comparative order and solitude. The Rockefeller Centre’s ‘superbly solemn buildings’ may evoke a sense of safety and authority, as Medieval churches did, but to Sennett the famous landmark is ‘an abscess in the city’, spiritually as well as spacially ‘divorced from the community’. The coldness and impersonality of the American urban scene ...

Let the cork out

John Bayley, 26 October 1989

Foucault’s Pendulum 
by Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver.
Secker, 641 pp., £14.95, October 1989, 0 436 14096 9
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The Open Work 
by Umberto Eco, translated by Anna Cancogni.
Radius, 285 pp., £9.95, October 1989, 0 09 175896 3
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... to by reviewers, with jokes, obscenities, fantasies, pseudo-scholarship. Foucault’s Pendulum may give the impression of being like that, but somehow triumphantly isn’t. For one thing, Eco’s scholarship (so far as I can guess) is real, however engagingly grotesque the uses he makes of it. We need a more seductive explanation, says Belbo at one ...

Zero Hour

E.S. Turner, 29 September 1988

The Berlin Blockade 
by Ann Tusa and John Tusa.
Hodder, 445 pp., £16.95, June 1988, 0 340 41607 6
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... saw too many difficulties. A new university ‘would necessarily be “a very poor affair”, as Robert Birley, the British Educational Adviser, sniffed’. Along with academic snobbery went ‘an acid tinge of anti-American feeling’: the brash Allies were making a vulgar bid for popularity, and so on. They even had the effrontery to appoint an American ...

Crop Masters

Daniel Aaron, 19 January 1989

Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution 
by T.H. Breen.
Princeton, 216 pp., $9.95, February 1988, 0 691 04729 4
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... research strategies’ to reveal colonial anxieties and obsessions. His charges may be technically valid, but they are a little ungenerous. After all, Bailyn noted that what made the Revolution ‘so profoundly a transforming event’ was the ‘intimate relationship between Revolutionary thought and the circumstances of life in 18th-century ...