Diary

Orlando Figes: In Moscow, 19 January 1989

... students and workers) with the radical Left among the rank-and-file of the Communist Party. This may pose a threat to the Party leadership: although the Young Turks who organise the Front in Moscow, such as Boris Kagarlitsky, have argued that ‘conditions are not yet ready to replace the one-party system with a multi-party one,’ it is implicit in their ...

Down with Cosmopolitanism

Gillian Darley, 18 May 2000

Stylistic Cold Wars: Betjeman v. Pevsner 
by Timothy Mowl.
Murray, 182 pp., £14.99, March 2000, 9780719559099
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... posters or School Prints, work by Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash. As early as May 1930, another editor, Betjeman’s mentor Philip Morton Shand, part of whose enviable brief was to travel Europe in search of articles to translate and buildings to publish, but who also pursued his own parallel interests in wine and food, ...
The Name of the Rose 
by Umberto Eco, translated by William Weaver.
Secker, 502 pp., £8.95, October 1983, 0 436 14089 6
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... whether by intuition or ratiocination, to writers of detective stories. That a cultural assumption may lead to false interpretation of clues is a donnée of all those crime stories in which a nursery rhyme seems to provide a key to a sequence of murders – Ten Little Indians, for instance. And of course the work of the detective often consists in ...

De Valera and Churchill

John Horgan, 21 July 1983

In Time of War 
by Robert Fisk.
Deutsch, 566 pp., £25, April 1983, 0 233 97514 4
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... a not-too-oblique attack on Irish neutrality in the course of a visit to Northern Ireland on 4 May, he was – presumably – unaware of the fact that he was reopening a book which both Churchill and de Valera had decided peaceably to close almost exactly thirty years ago. That at any rate would be the charitable explanation. Within hours of his ...
... by the domination of unions and professional organisations. Not a bad thing in principle, this may have worked, though, to narrow the teacher concerns the Council was prepared to address and to exclude those classroom teachers whose commitment to their work, or vulnerability to its pressures, make such public forums intimidating and unproductive. There are ...

Power and Prejudice

Michael Dummett, 7 October 1982

Now you do know 
by John Downing.
War on Want Campaigns, 80 pp., £1, December 1980, 0 905990 10 2
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... make no allowance. It is enormously important to grasp why the thought is mistaken. Someone may be aware that he knows very little about the workings of, say, the magistrates’ courts or the welfare services, particularly as they affect black people. But he knows, or he thinks he knows, what the level of racial prejudice is amongst the people with whom ...

Sexual Politics

Michael Neve, 5 February 1981

Edward Carpenter, 1844-1929: Prophet of Human Fellowship 
by Chushichi Tsuzuki.
Cambridge, 237 pp., £15, November 1980, 0 521 23371 2
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... biography, with its Cambridge imprint, makes this revival official. Even ‘England Arise’ may receive its dusting-off. The question still remains: what England, and what active relationship might this revival have to Edward Carpenter himself? Historians, for what it is worth, have never cared much for Carpenter. Peculiar alliances are struck over this ...

Young Love

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 4 December 1980

Paedophilia: The Radical Case 
by Tom O’Carroll.
Peter Owen, 280 pp., £14.95, October 1980, 0 7206 0546 6
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... come to view all consensual sex, including consensual paedophilia, positively and without guilt may be necessary for the welfare of everyone.’ ‘Consensual sex’, mutually agreed and mutually agreeable: is there anything unreasonable in wanting it for oneself but not for one’s children – or Mr O’Carroll? Were Mr O’Carroll a more accomplished ...
The Socialist Agenda 
edited by David Lipsey.
Cape, 242 pp., £7.95, January 1981, 0 224 01886 8
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The Future of Socialism 
by Anthony Crosland.
Cape, 368 pp., £8.95, January 1981, 0 224 01888 4
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Politics is for people 
by Shirley Williams.
Allen Lane/Penguin, 230 pp., £8.50, April 1981, 0 7139 1423 8
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... damage on his torn and battered colleagues. Roy Hattersley’s quaintly-named Solidarity Campaign may reverse some of the wilder decisions taken at the Wembley conference in January, but even if it does the Party will still be committed to an electoral college of some sort, and the leadership will still be even more obviously in thrall to an incompetent and ...

From Old Adam to New Eve

Peter Pulzer, 6 June 1985

The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher 
by Robert Blake.
Methuen/Fontana, 401 pp., £19.95, May 1985, 0 413 58140 3
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Westminster Blues 
by Julian Critchley.
Hamish Hamilton, 134 pp., £7.95, May 1985, 0 241 11387 3
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... Home Rule came closest to a threat: in the end, it too was absorbed. Where continuity reigns, we may expect the party of continuity to rule. No wonder Disraeli, an essential though not impartial witness, called Toryism ‘the English system’. Yet, as Maitland reminded us long ago, the past was once the future. ‘Who would have thought in the ...

Azure Puddles

John Bayley, 21 May 1987

Compton Mackenzie: A Life 
by Andro Linklater.
Chatto, 384 pp., £14.95, May 1987, 0 7011 2583 7
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... them. What was wrong with me? It is a slight consolation after this lapse of time to feel that I may have been right. How could such a colourful and remarkable personality have written such an unabsorbing novel? Perhaps by an unexpected but logical consequence. Mackenzie himself once said that he thought he would give up writing ‘because living is so much ...

Human Nature

Stuart Hampshire, 25 October 1979

Beast and Man 
by Mary Midgley.
Harvester, 396 pp., £7.50
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... things considered, in the prospects of survival for a species. A temporarily favourable mutation may involve costs in the design of the organism which in the longer run, and in a changed environment, eventually prove disabling and even fatal. So perhaps now for men. Mrs Midgley clarifies, not only the confusions of sociobiology, but also some other ...

An Ecology of Ecstasy

Nicholas Humphrey, 17 April 1980

The Spiritual Nature of Man 
by Alister Hardy.
Oxford, 162 pp., £6.95, December 1979, 0 19 824618 8
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... been conscious of, and perhaps influenced by, some Power, whether they call it God or not, which may either appear to be beyond their individual selves or partly, or even entirely, within their being’. The accounts would be treated in strict confidence, noted, classified and returned. No harassment – no hissing, no dissection ... And the accounts poured ...

Sheep into Goats

Gabriele Annan, 24 January 1980

The British Aristocracy 
by Mark Bence-Jones and Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd.
Constable, 259 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 0 09 461780 5
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The Astors 
by Virginia Cowles.
Weidenfeld, 256 pp., £8.50, November 1980, 9780297776246
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Barclay Fox’s Journal 
edited by R.L. Brett.
Bell and Hyman, 426 pp., £8.95, July 1980, 0 7135 1865 0
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... at its most rigid, a duke and an Indian army subaltern were equal in class, however different they may have been in rank or wealth.’ And they go on: ‘there is only one essential prerequisite for being counted among the British aristocracy: the right to be called a gentleman … so that anyone who has inherited the gentlemanly values, or for that ...

A Writer’s Fancy

D.J. Enright, 21 February 1980

Hackenfeller’s Ape 
by Brigid Brophy.
Allison and Busby, 125 pp., £5.50, October 1980, 0 85031 314 7
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Flesh 
by Brigid Brophy.
Allison and Busby, 124 pp., £1.95, October 1980, 9780850313185
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The Snow Ball 
by Brigid Brophy.
Allison and Busby, 143 pp., £1.95, October 1980, 0 85031 316 3
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... and feelinglessness; and it is advisable for us to be reminded at the outset that, while man may have dominion over all the inhabitants of sea, air and earth, he is still himself a species. Miss Brophy’s intention is neither to sentimentalise the animals (though they can generally do with a little of this) nor to put man in his place below the angels ...