Lessons for Civil Servants

David Marquand, 21 August 1980

The Secret Constitution 
by Brian Sedgemore.
Hodder, 256 pp., £7.95, July 1980, 0 340 24649 9
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The Civil Servants 
by Peter Kellner and Lord Crowther-Hunt.
Macdonald/Jane’s, 352 pp., £9.95, July 1980, 0 354 04487 7
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... sure of getting its measures through Parliament. But there is no guarantee that the factors which held Mr Benn back from 1974 to 1979 will still be in operation if another Labour government is returned to power in three or four years’ time, by a similar proportion of the electorate. For more than a century, British public servants have equated loyalty to ...

The Hunger of the Gods

David Brading, 9 January 1992

Aztecs: An Interpretation 
by Inga Clendinnen.
Cambridge, 398 pp., £24.95, October 1991, 0 521 40093 7
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... myths. For Huitzilopochtli, a newcomer to the Mesoamerican pantheon peculiar to the Aztecs, was held to have sprung full-grown from the womb of Coatlicue, a fearsome earth goddess, engendered by a feather falling on her breast. His first act was to slay his half-sister Coyloxauhqui and her four hundred brothers on Mount Coatepec, the hill of the ...

How to be a queen

David Carpenter: She-Wolves, 15 December 2011

She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England before Elizabeth 
by Helen Castor.
Faber, 474 pp., £9.99, July 2011, 978 0 571 23706 7
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... to describe the significance for queenship of an English coronation: the crowning meant the queen held a formal office and was not just the king’s wife; the anointing poured into her all the blessings of the Holy Spirit and made her queen by the grace of God, just as her husband was king; and the prayers invoked the fruitfulness of the biblical Sarah and ...

Ten Billion Letters

David Coward: Artilleur Pireaud writes home, 21 June 2007

Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War 
by Martha Hanna.
Harvard, 341 pp., £17.95, November 2006, 0 674 02318 8
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... dark days of 1917, there was general agreement that France must be defended. Was the cement that held the French together the union sacrée or the intellectual, spiritual and political leadership they were given? Some historians take the view that the stoicism of soldiers who concealed the realities of modern warfare from their friends and family insulated ...

Never Knowingly Naked

David Wootton: 17th-century bodies, 15 April 2004

Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in 17th-Century England 
by Laura Gowing.
Yale, 260 pp., £25, September 2003, 0 300 10096 5
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... These are examples of what Gowing calls ‘the politics of touch’. In all of this women were held responsible for what had been done to them by men – in Holland, Pierre Bayle attacked this hypocrisy, and followed his own logic through to the point of defending abortion and infanticide. No 17th-century English man or woman seems to have had a comparable ...

Warthog Dynamism

David Bromwich, 19 November 2020

... through every twist and turn of his chaotic presidency. On the Sunday before the election, he held rallies in Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida – a jet-fuelled version of the whistle-stop tour by which Harry Truman in 1948 demonstrated his political nerve against the favourite and eventual loser of that year, Thomas E. Dewey. The ...

Dukology

Lawrence Stone, 22 November 1990

The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy 
by David Cannadine.
Yale, 813 pp., £19.95, October 1990, 0 300 04761 4
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... the three countries of England, Scotland and Ireland; those members of the titular baronetage who held land (and their children); and those squires whose landed property amounted to well over a thousand acres. This very capacious definition raises methodological problems, since, as he points out, in 1870 ‘the Duke of Omnium and the small squire were half a ...

After Hartlepool

James Butler, 3 June 2021

... and they mattered especially during the 72-hour period that followed the UK-wide elections held on 6 May, during which results continued to trickle in. Labour was expected to lose the Hartlepool by-election, but the margin of its defeat, announced in the early hours, set the story of a ‘heartlands catastrophe’ rolling. Ben Houchen’s crushing ...

Von Hötzendorff’s Desire

Margaret MacMillan: The First World War, 2 December 2004

Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy 
by David Stevenson.
Basic Books, 564 pp., £26.50, June 2004, 0 465 08184 3
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... such as Norman Stone, Hew Strachan, Annette Becker and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau. With Cataclysm, David Stevenson draws on much recent work to provide a comprehensive account of the war, with a welcome interest both in the non-European theatres and in the home fronts. His book is also part of a more general attempt to rethink the meaning of the Great War and ...

What was it that drove him?

David Runciman: Gordon Brown, 4 January 2018

My Life, Our Times 
by Gordon Brown.
Bodley Head, 512 pp., £25, November 2017, 978 1 84792 497 1
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... his medical records were hacked, police officers were bribed for access to the details they held on him. The Sun in particular, under the editorship of Rebekah Brooks, made repeated intrusions into his private life in order to get him on the back foot. Brown calls it ‘a direct attempt to distort and suborn the policy of the government’. He accepts ...

Eyes and Ears

Anthony Thwaite, 23 June 1988

The Silence in the Garden 
by William Trevor.
Bodley Head, 204 pp., £9.95, June 1988, 9780370312187
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Sea Music 
by David Profumo.
Secker, 207 pp., £10.95, May 1988, 9780436387142
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Tell it me again 
by John Fuller.
Chatto, 202 pp., £10.95, April 1988, 0 7011 3288 4
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The Continuing Silence of a Poet: The Collected Short Stories of A.B. Yehoshua 
Peter Halban/Weidenfeld, 377 pp., £11.95, June 1988, 1 870015 14 2Show More
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... other novels and stories. Such children are at the centre of William Trevor’s tenth novel and David Profumo’s first; or rather, Trevor seems to have chosen to place young Tom both centrally and peripherally (as children often are, in fiction and in life), while Profumo makes young James the very eyes and ears of his book, though distancing him by ...

British Marxism

Richard Norman, 21 February 1980

Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence 
by G.A. Cohen.
Oxford, 369 pp., £10.50, December 1978, 0 19 827196 4
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Marxism After Marx: An Introduction 
by David McLellan.
Macmillan, 355 pp., £8.95, December 1980, 0 333 72208 6
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... Is there a British Marxism? David McLellan’s new book offers, implicitly, an answer. In his comprehensive survey of ‘Marxism after Marx’, one of the 24 chapters is devoted to British Marxism – and it is almost the shortest in the book. After a brief history of the British Left, he mentions the good work of some Marxist historians and economists ...

Enemies Within

Peter Clarke, 7 February 1985

... in Parliament it has triumphed over the odds, largely thanks to bloody-minded commando raids by David Owen, who has been the one politician consistently able to score off Thatcher. In the opinion polls it has been back at the levels of the General Election campaign. Moreover, whenever there has been a real election, the Alliance has beaten the polls in a ...

Under the Soles of His Feet

Stephen Alford: Henry’s Wars, 4 April 2019

The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII 
by Steven Gunn.
Oxford, 297 pp., £35, January 2018, 978 0 19 880286 0
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... to Solomon, ‘for he had heard, that they had anointed him king in the room of his father,’ David: For Hiram was ever a lover of David. And Solomon sent to Hiram, saying: thou knowest how that David my father could not build an house unto the name of the Lord his God, for the wars ...

Kipling the Reliable

David Trotter, 6 March 1986

Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling 1879-1889 
edited by Andrew Rutherford.
Oxford, 497 pp., £19.50, March 1986, 9780198123231
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Kipling’s India: Uncollected Sketches 1884-88 
edited by Thomas Pinney.
Macmillan, 301 pp., £25, January 1986, 0 333 38467 9
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Imperialism and Popular Culture 
edited by John MacKenzie.
Manchester, 264 pp., £25, February 1986, 9780719017704
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Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases 
edited by Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell.
Routledge, 1021 pp., £18.95, November 1985, 0 7100 2886 5
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... A rhetorical distance establishes and holds the distance between cultures; the writer himself is held by that distance. A year later Kipling investigated the milk supply of Lahore, thought to be a source of typhoid. He took his purposes and standards with him. His report imitated the narratives of the English sanitary reformers who had written about the ...