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The Great Dissembler

James Wood: Thomas More’s Bad Character, 16 April 1998

The Life of Thomas More 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Chatto, 435 pp., £20, March 1998, 1 85619 711 5
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... this, forgetting to mention that Rome was in fact taken by mercenaries of the Catholic Emperor Charles V. More was astonishingly disingenuous. Throughout the late 1520s, he claimed that anti-clericalism was identical with heresy, when he, an early anti-clerical, knew this to be untrue. In reply to one Simon Fish, who had argued that England’s travails ...

All the Sad Sages

Ferdinand Mount: Bagehot, 6 February 2014

Memoirs of Walter Bagehot 
by Frank Prochaska.
Yale, 207 pp., £18.99, August 2013, 978 0 300 19554 5
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... a second-class man, and Bagehot was not often wrong.’ Peel lacked the inspirational qualities of Fox and the Pitts, of Gladstone and Disraeli, ‘which is why no party has taken his memory into its care’. This is surely nonsense. Peel is a far more vibrant presence in Conservative politics today than any of the others, because he engaged with the modern ...

Miracle on Fleet Street

Martin Hickman: Operation Elveden, 7 January 2016

... inquiries in London might damage his News Corp business in the US, where his holdings included the Fox TV network. He and his fellow directors stood to be prosecuted in the UK under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and in the US under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Having covered up its activities for years, News Corp reached for the ...

Weird Things in the Sky

Edmund Gordon: Are we alone?, 26 December 2024

After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon 
by Greg Eghigian.
Oxford, 388 pp., £22.99, September 2024, 978 0 19 086987 8
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... had been caused by a downed weather balloon. It wasn’t until 1994, more than a decade after Charles Berlitz and William Moore’s book The Roswell Incident (1980) had spawned a new generation of conspiracy theories, that the Clinton administration fessed up: the crash was related to a secret surveillance programme, in which balloons had been equipped ...

Diary

Antonia Hitchens: At CPAC, 20 March 2025

... in reference to the Israeli operation against Hizbullah; Starmer arrived with a letter from King Charles. On Friday, 26 February Zelensky got out of his car wearing a black tactical sweater. ‘Oh, you’re all dressed up,’ Trump said. They went to the Oval Office to begin their meeting. The usual pool of White House journalists had been expanded to ...

Women beware men

Margaret Anne Doody, 23 July 1992

Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women 
by Susan Faludi.
Chatto, 592 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 7011 4643 5
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The War against Women 
by Marilyn French.
Hamish Hamilton, 229 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 241 13271 1
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... less eliminating women from both the class and the cause. It has recently been argued by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in Feminism without Illusions that feminism when cultivated as ‘sisterhood’ is in danger of eluding class realities: ‘Sisterhood invokes non-political relations ... In so doing it missed the point ... feminist politics of the personal ...

Puzzled Puss

John Lahr: Buster Keaton’s Star Turn, 19 January 2023

Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life 
by James Curtis.
Knopf, 810 pp., £30, February 2022, 978 0 385 35421 9
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... Even his own so-called autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (1960), co-written with Charles Samuels, bowdlerised the evocative sludge of his talk and his harrowing, sodden years in the wilderness. Keaton couldn’t explain himself or his context. Words weren’t his language; he spoke in action. In one of many piquant anecdotes in James ...

11 September

LRB Contributors, 4 October 2001

... public that he had miraculously become a mature statesman. Meanwhile, the certifiably conservative Fox network, owned by Rupert Murdoch, resounded with calls for all-out war against an ill-defined enemy. When a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia made the point that the United States has directly or indirectly visited a great deal of violence on the Middle ...

Heir to Blair

Christopher Tayler: Among the New Tories, 26 April 2007

... slogan, a Conservative government would ‘roll forward the frontiers of society’. Joel Charles, the chairman of the Kent University Conservative Association, who was seated on the stage and was also wearing a pale pink tie, nodded emphatically when Letwin delivered this line. Fifteen days earlier, it had been one of the main soundbites in ...

Watch this man

Pankaj Mishra: Niall Ferguson’s Burden, 3 November 2011

Civilisation: The West and the Rest 
by Niall Ferguson.
Allen Lane, 402 pp., £25, March 2011, 978 1 84614 273 4
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... long-held principles to be elevated to a professorship at Harvard, primetime punditry on CNN and Fox, and high-altitude wonkfests at Davos and Aspen. He quickly and frictionlessly became the most conspicuous refugee from post-imperial Britain to cheerlead Washington’s (and New York’s) consensus. To a reader from the world the British supposedly ...

Look on the Bright Side

Seamus Perry: Anna Letitia Barbauld, 25 February 2010

Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment 
by William McCarthy.
Johns Hopkins, 725 pp., £32, December 2008, 978 0 8018 9016 1
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... when he has learnt, that a Horse is an Animal, & Billy is better than a Horse, & such like,’ Charles Lamb complained, preferring instead ‘that beautiful Interest in wild tales, which made the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child’. Barbauld taught for 11 years, and went on to a long and diverse career in ...

I need money

Christian Lorentzen: Biden Tries Again, 10 September 2020

Yesterday’s Man: The Case against Joe Biden 
by Branko Marcetic.
Verso, 288 pp., £12.99, March 2020, 978 1 83976 028 0
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... of the Western allies and the substantial egos of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Field Marshal Montgomery and General Patton. Dad thought Eisenhower was a man with ballast, a leader. But the Finnegans wanted to argue Ike’s policies.Note the trace of red-baiting in the bit about the steel company (‘un-American’); the ...

Little England

Patrick Wright: The view through a bus window, 7 September 2006

Great British Bus Journeys: Travels through Unfamous Places 
by David McKie.
Atlantic, 359 pp., £16.99, March 2006, 1 84354 132 7
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... only 18 inches tall, he was taken into royal service after being served up in a cold pie before Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria). Rutland had too many military airbases for Goldring, a pacifist opponent of the Cold War, yet he was by no means insensitive to the charms of this miniature county. The fact that its countryside was dominated by aristocratic ...

The Killing of Osama bin Laden

Seymour M. Hersh, 21 May 2015

... Bissonnette, was published in September 2012; and two years later Rob O’Neill was interviewed by Fox News. Both men had resigned from the navy; both had fired at bin Laden. Their accounts contradicted each other on many details, but their stories generally supported the White House version, especially when it came to the need to kill or be killed as the ...

Act One, Scene One

David Bromwich: Don’t Resist, Oppose, 16 February 2017

... back our borders’ and ‘unite the civilised world against radical Islamic terrorism’ – Fox radio hosts have long charged Obama with harbouring occult reasons for never saying the words ‘Islamic terrorism’ though he has always spoken plainly against ‘terror’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘acts of terror’. Trump also added his personal assurance ...

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