Tory History

Alan Ryan, 23 January 1986

English Society 1688-1832 
by J.C.D. Clark.
Cambridge, 439 pp., £30, November 1985, 0 521 30922 0
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Virtue, Commerce and History 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 321 pp., £25, November 1985, 0 521 25701 8
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... is, for Pocock, the beginning of wisdom about the 18th century: between them, Ferguson, Millar and Smith made it clear that the contest between the ancients and the moderns had decisively gone to the moderns. However much we might lament the passing of the ancient republics with their militias based on the armed freeholding peasant, their time was over. In the ...

Which Face?

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Emigrés on the Make, 6 February 2020

Cold War Exiles and the CIA: Plotting to Free Russia 
by Benjamin Tromly.
Oxford, 329 pp., £75, September 2019, 978 0 19 884040 4
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The Dissidents: A Memoir of Working with the Resistance in Russia, 1960-90 
by Peter Reddaway.
Brookings, 337 pp., £25.50, February, 978 0 8157 3773 5
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... to the West.’ That was the lesson the American anti-communist Soviet-watcher Louis Fischer drew in 1949 from observation of Soviet ‘displaced persons’ (DPs) in Europe after the Second World War. In the context of the burgeoning Cold War, his analysis made sense to a lot of people in the West. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who had been ...

Warrior Librarians

Neal Ascherson: Cultural Pillaging, 2 July 2020

Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers and Spies Banded Together in World War Two Europe 
by Kathy Peiss.
Oxford, 296 pp., £22.99, March, 978 0 19 094461 2
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... as they copied photographs of Axis agents, bargained for access to secret documents and maps, and drew up assessments of German public opinion.By now, the scale of their operation was enormous, and the quantity of printed paper they were dealing with was threatening to become unmanageable. As the American 12th Army Group approached Paris in the summer of ...

Locum, Lacum, Lucum

Anthony Grafton: The Emperor of Things, 13 September 2018

Pietro Bembo and the Intellectual Pleasures of a Renaissance Writer and Art Collector 
by Susan Nalezyty.
Yale, 277 pp., £50, May 2017, 978 0 300 21919 7
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Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist 
by Gareth Williams.
Oxford, 440 pp., £46.49, August 2017, 978 0 19 027229 6
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... away from it.* Lawrence Principe and William Newman (Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 2002) and Pamela Smith (The Making and Knowing Project) have decrypted arcane manuscripts and recreated forgotten crafts to establish how alchemists and artisans actually did their work, which they then replicate. Sachiko Kusukawa in Picturing the Book of Nature (2012) and ...

Blowing over the top of a bottle of San Pellegrino

Adam Mars-Jones: Protest Dance Pop, 15 December 2005

Plat du Jour 
by Matthew Herbert.
Accidental
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... piece called Measuring Liberty with a Dollar (1998), for instance, Parker took a silver dollar and drew it out into a wire that would stretch from the base to the top of the Statue of Liberty. The ink she used for Pornographic Drawings (1997) was made by chemically dissolving videos confiscated by HM Customs and Excise. Or so it said on the label. There was no ...

A Few Home Truths

Jonathan Rée: R.G. Collingwood, 19 June 2014

R.G. Collingwood: ‘An Autobiography’ and Other Writings, with Essays on Collingwood’s Life and Work 
edited by David Boucher and Teresa Smith.
Oxford, 581 pp., £65, December 2013, 978 0 19 958603 5
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... of their own, independent of the processes through which they are known. The realists drew inspiration from G.E. Moore, who had argued around the turn of the century that genuine knowledge lifts our minds above the historical hurly-burly of words, impressions and emotions and puts us in touch with an impersonal and unchangeable world of ...

Incandescent Memory

Thomas Powers: Mark Twain, 28 April 2011

Autobiography of Mark Twain Vol. I 
edited by Harriet Elinor Smith et al.
California, 736 pp., £24.95, November 2010, 978 0 520 26719 0
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... member of his family kiss another. His dying father ‘put his arm around my sister’s neck and drew her down and kissed her’. The boy was 11. That electrifying actual kiss is coupled in the life of Twain with another, imaginary kiss which Tom Sawyer placed on the sleeping lips of his Aunt Polly while he was creeping about the house at night. The family ...

Whoopers and Shouters

James Morone: William Jennings Bryan, 21 February 2008

A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan 
by Michael Kazin.
Anchor, 374 pp., $16.95, March 2007, 978 0 385 72056 4
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... a Florida swamp, where they spent the war fighting malaria, mosquitoes and snakes.) Bryan finally drew the line at swallowing the Philippines. This, he said, was imperialism pure and simple. The island’s natives had rejected the uplifting Anglo-Saxon mission. They rebelled, demanded liberty from their benefactors, and mired America’s imperial illusions in ...

Afloat with Static

Jenny Turner: Hey, Blondie!, 19 December 2019

Face It 
by Debbie Harry.
HarperCollins, 352 pp., £20, October 2019, 978 0 00 822942 9
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... True satiation. It seems so simple. Probably as simple as infinity and the universe.Unlike Patti Smith, her fellow New York rocker and ancient rival, Harry doesn’t do hallucinatory chats with dead lovers and a motel sign (‘Thank you, Dream Motel, I said … It’s the Dream Inn! the sign exclaimed’), or stud her text with dingy photos of chairs and ...

Cultural Judo

Anthony Grafton: Alberti and the Ancients, 21 November 2024

Leon Battista Alberti: Writer and Humanist 
by Martin McLaughlin.
Princeton, 377 pp., £30, June 2024, 978 0 691 17472 3
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... for this view, in Columella’s book on agriculture or the younger Pliny’s letters. But Alberti drew on a wider range of classical sources. Christine Smith has argued that Lucretius, whom Petrarch never read, helped inspire Alberti’s dismay at the lack of giants in his world. In his odd-sounding reference to the ...

His Very Variousness

Ferdinand Mount: Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments, 4 December 2025

Undaunted Mind: The Intellectual Life of Benjamin Franklin 
by Kevin J. Hayes.
Oxford, 480 pp., £30.99, September 2025, 978 0 19 755426 5
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Ingenious: A Biography of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist 
by Richard Munson.
Norton, 288 pp., £23.99, December 2024, 978 0 393 88223 0
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... he described as ‘Errata’, out of keeping with the famous programme of self-improvement that he drew up for himself, adding ‘Humility’ to his twelve original virtues after a Quaker friend informed him of his ‘overbearing and rather insolent’ attitude. The Autobiography, sadly unfinished, is engaging and self-revealing, but humility is not its ...

Cute, My Arse

Seamus Perry: Geoffrey Hill, 12 September 2019

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin 
by Geoffrey Hill.
Oxford, 148 pp., £20, April 2019, 978 0 19 882952 2
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... a Poundian spirit, as the ‘Putrescent idol of retail’. As Coleridge put it in a passage Hill drew on for the epigraph to ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England’, there is what we once had, ‘spiritual platonic old England’, represented by Sidney, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and their kind, and then there is what we now ...

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 1
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... Descriptions​ of Richard Titmuss often drew on the language of otherworldliness. He was ‘the high priest of the welfare state’ according to an assessment quoted in the ODNB. His entry there considers, though judiciously rejects, his frequent characterisation as a ‘saint’; understandably, it doesn’t cite his LSE colleague Michael Oakeshott’s description of him as ‘a snake in saint’s clothing ...

Little Englander Histories

Linda Colley: Little Englandism, 22 July 2010

A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 
by Boyd Hilton.
Oxford, 757 pp., £21, June 2008, 978 0 19 921891 2
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Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1780-1939 
by James Belich.
Oxford, 573 pp., £25, June 2009, 978 0 19 929727 6
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... of the age’. Thomas Chalmers features as the ‘spiritual guide’ of the Liberal Tories. Adam Smith, of course, is ‘central’. Mechanics institutes open first in Glasgow, and then in London. Phrenology infiltrates England ‘via Scotland’. The Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802 by a group of Scottish Whigs, together with the Quarterly Review published ...

Resurrection Man

Danny Karlin: Browning and His Readers, 23 May 2002

The Ring and the Book 
by Robert Browning, edited by Richard Altick and Thomas Collins.
Broadview, 700 pp., £12.99, August 2001, 1 55111 372 4
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The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. Vol. VIII: The Ring and the Book, Books V-VIII 
edited by Stefan Hawlin and Tim Burnett.
Oxford, £75, February 2001, 0 19 818647 9
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... shillings and sixpence. Each purchaser from Browning’s stall – or from that of his publishers, Smith, Elder – was therefore paying thirty shillings, or 360 pence, i.e. 45 times the price of the original. Like a canny Victorian merchant, Browning picked up his raw material cheap abroad, manufactured it into fancy goods, and sold it at a premium in his ...