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Diary

Ardis Butterfield: Who was Chaucer?, 27 August 2015

... more serious and scientific than love notes.) The second example is a murder mystery about John Gower by Bruce Holsinger, which takes a different tack.2 Chaucer is glimpsed; he is a calculating and casual character, shallowly obsessed with his literary reputation and erotic conquests. The daring comes partly from making Gower – whose literary image ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: Thatcher in Gravesend, 9 May 2013

... Klee hammered out in steel. In Thatcher’s day it seemed a ground-level manifestation of what I took to be her vision of enterprise: deranged scams, small businesses wiped out. And the ghosts of the unions exorcised along with the industries in which they once played a significant role. There used to be an eccentric junk shop honouring an even more ...

Lord Have Mercy

James Shapiro: Plague Writing, 31 March 2011

Plague Writing in Early Modern England 
by Ernest Gilman.
Chicago, 295 pp., £24, June 2009, 978 0 226 29409 4
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... sickness [is] hot’ in London, we never see any evidence of plague or its victims. Shortly after, John Fletcher wrote The Tamer Tamed, in which a wife plays a trick on her domineering husband, having him quarantined after claiming to see the marks of plague on him: ‘The sickness … is i’ th’ house, sir,/My husband has it now, and raves ...

Mirror Images

Jenny Diski: Piers Morgan, 31 March 2005

The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade 
by Piers Morgan.
Ebury, 484 pp., £17.99, March 2005, 0 09 190506 0
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... world of vacant celebrity and tawdry sensationalism that I have never quite believed anyone took seriously. But it becomes clear that Morgan took it very seriously indeed and so do the people whose lives were his raison d’être as an editor and maybe more than just as an editor. His narrative is entirely about being ...

What’s fair about that?

Adam Swift: Social Mobilities, 23 January 2020

Social Mobility and Its Enemies 
by Lee Elliot Major and Stephen Machin.
Pelican, 272 pp., £8.99, September 2018, 978 0 241 31702 0
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Social Mobility and Education in Britain 
by Erzsébet Bukodi and John Goldthorpe.
Cambridge, 249 pp., £19.99, December 2018, 978 1 108 46821 3
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The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged 
by Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison.
Policy, 224 pp., £9.99, January, 978 1 4473 3610 5
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... among advocates of class analysis, about how best to construct a class scheme.These disputes took on a new significance in 2005 when a report on income mobility, co-authored by Machin, made the news. Not only was the UK alongside the US at the bottom of international league tables but things were getting worse. Comparing cohorts born just 12 years apart ...

Two-Year-Olds Are Often Cruel

Mary Hannity: Maternal Ethics, 2 February 2023

The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood and the British Welfare State 
by Shaul Bar-Haim.
Pennsylvania, 352 pp., £60, August 2021, 978 0 8122 5315 3
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... of grandmothers’.Psychological Care for Infant and Child (1928) by the American behaviourist John Watson (a follower of Truby King) found enthusiastic readers in interwar Britain. Behaviourist thinking separated the adult and the child into discrete categories. The child is the ‘shadow’ cast by the adult citizen, more animal than human: ‘If you ...

Diary

Dani Garavelli: Election Night in Glasgow, 18 July 2024

... the party’s co-operation agreement with the Scottish Greens. Yousaf and his replacement, John Swinney, sullied their reputations by defending the former health secretary Michael Matheson, who misled Holyrood’s presiding officer over £11,000 of roaming charges racked up on his iPad. The SNP’s centralising tendencies, lack of transparency and ...

The Need for Buddies

Roy Porter, 22 June 2000

British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World 
by Peter Clark.
Oxford, 516 pp., £60, January 2000, 0 19 820376 4
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... and swearing. In the polarised atmosphere of George III’s reign, a host of political clubs took root. John Wilkes’s success in mobilising antigovernment sentiment during the 1760s owed much to a battery of radical associations, including the Anti-Gallican, Beefsteak and Albion clubs, and the masonic lodges. From ...

Let Us Pay

John Lanchester: Can newspapers survive?, 16 December 2010

... around bits of their content: the New York Times did that with its op-ed material, but then took the wall down. The apparent reason was that the drop in traffic caused by the paywall was so great that it ended up costing money, because the paper’s internet ads reached so many fewer readers. The new revenue was nowhere near enough to compensate from ...

All in Slow Motion

Dani Garavelli: The Murder of Nikki Allan, 15 June 2023

... and was recklessly ambitious. I had hesitated before knocking on her door that first time. But I took to Sharon, whose prickly exterior is a defence mechanism and whose refusal to be cowed into silence I came to admire. I got to know her better the following year when I covered the trial of George Heron, which was moved away from the North-East to Leeds and ...

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat

David Runciman: Thatcher’s Rise, 6 June 2013

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. Vol. I: Not for Turning 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 859 pp., £30, April 2013, 978 0 7139 9282 3
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... other prospective candidates by being well prepared, forthright and energetic. That was all it took. She was not an electrifying public speaker, but she was highly competent and committed. She answered questions and she was never afraid of answering back. She was admired for what was called her ‘platform knowledge’. Bill Deedes, who also first stood ...

The Queen and I

William Empson and John Haffenden, 26 November 1987

... enters in majesty and introduces the instruments of modern science. The open-air production took full shape during Empson’s summer absence at the School of Letters in Bloomington, Indiana. The student producer, Peter Cheeseman (now Director of the New Victoria Theatre, North Staffordshire), together with the stage manager Alan Curtis, bulked up ...

Unmentionables

Hugo Young, 24 March 1994

Europe: The Europe We Need 
by Leon Brittan.
Hamish Hamilton, 248 pp., £17.99, March 1994, 0 241 00249 4
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... that it had not entirely done so. For 11 years, Britain was led by a prime minister who took Britain further into Europe, by pressing for passage of the Single European Act, but simultaneously conducted a relentless propaganda campaign against ‘Europe’ and all its works. This was perhaps the main reason why the apparently settled verdict of 1975 ...

History is always to hand

Douglas Johnson, 8 December 1988

Notre Siècle: 1918-1988 
by René Rémond.
Fayard, 1012 pp., frs 190, February 1988, 2 213 02039 6
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Histoire de la Vie Privée: De la Première Guerre Mondiale à nos Jours 
edited by Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby.
Seuil, 634 pp., frs 375, May 1988, 2 02 008987 4
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France since the Popular Front: Government and People 1936-1986 
by Maurice Larkin.
Oxford, 435 pp., £30, July 1988, 0 19 873034 9
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France Today 
by John Ardagh.
Penguin, 647 pp., £6.95, June 1988, 0 14 010098 9
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... they voted in local elections, and in November the referendum on the future of New Caledonia took place. Many of them are now thinking about how they will vote in next year’s municipal and European elections, and some wiseacres point out that the Constitution would allow the President, if he so wished, to dissolve the present Assembly in May 1989 and ...

Favourite Subjects

J.I.M. Stewart, 17 September 1981

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien 
edited by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien.
Allen and Unwin, 463 pp., £9.95, August 1981, 0 04 826005 3
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Tolkien and the Silmarils 
by Randel Helms.
Thames and Hudson, 104 pp., £5.50, September 1981, 0 500 01264 4
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... his life a copious correspondent, but he appears to have been in his midforties before people took to preserving what he had addressed to them. Even so, Humphrey Carpenter has found that ‘an immense number’ of letters survive. In projecting the present selection, he realised that ‘an enormous quantity of material would have to be omitted’ and that ...

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