Brown v. Salmond

Colin Kidd: The Scottish Elections, 26 April 2007

... politics since the second half of the 18th century.* The rise of George III’s favourite, John Stuart, Third Earl of Bute, to prime minister only 16 years after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745-46 – when the invading Highland army got as far as Derby – provoked a torrent of outrage in the English media. At the forefront of the campaign against Bute was ...

Stand-Off in Taiwan

Perry Anderson: Greens v. Blues in the South China Sea, 3 June 2004

... foundation for independent states. The late 19th century saw a repetition of this process in the white dominions of Canada and Australasia. Seen in this light, contemporary Taiwanese nationalism belongs to a political family with a well-established ancestry. The great majority – perhaps 85 per cent – of its modern population of 22,500,000 descends from ...

Ruck in the Carpet

Glen Newey: Political Morality, 9 July 2009

Philosophy and Real Politics 
by Raymond Geuss.
Princeton, 116 pp., £11.95, October 2008, 978 0 691 13788 9
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... resist the temptations of grandiose theory. The new book’s jacket image, a striking black and white photo by John Sadovy, shows a young man almost literally biting the dust. Only after turning the book over to look at the back does one notice his presumed killer, reloading his rifle. This example already poses questions beyond the ken of liberal ...

On the horse Parsnip

John Bayley, 8 February 1990

Boris Pasternak: The Tragic Years 1930-1960 
by Evgeny Pasternak.
Collins Harvill, 278 pp., £15, January 1990, 0 00 272045 0
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Boris Pasternak 
by Peter Levi.
Hutchinson, 310 pp., £17.95, January 1990, 0 09 173886 5
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Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography. Vol.I: 1890-1928 
by Christopher Barnes.
Cambridge, 507 pp., £35, November 1989, 0 521 25957 6
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Poems 1955-1959 and An Essay in Autobiography 
by Boris Pasternak, translated by Michael Harari and Manya Harari.
Collins Harvill, 212 pp., £6.95, January 1990, 9780002710657
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The Year 1905 
by Boris Pasternak, translated by Richard Chappell.
Spenser, £4.95, April 1989, 0 9513843 0 9
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... opinion has always varied sharply about the actual merits of the book. A judge as sensitive as Stuart Hampshire finds its genius in the love relation between Lara and Zhivago, while the poet Anna Akhmatova, although she admired Pasternak as a poet, could not take him seriously as a deep sage and public figure, or even as a lover, and professed maliciously ...

Elton at seventy

Patrick Collinson, 11 June 1992

Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study 
by G.R. Elton.
Cambridge, 128 pp., £16.95, October 1991, 0 521 41098 3
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... who spoke no English in childhood and who cannot recall his first adolescent sight of Dover’s white cliffs without emotion. Elton is consequently more conscious than most of us of England’s strange neglect of its past. ‘In this country history is not very present.’ Not that he has written exclusively on English topics. Following in the steps of his ...

Living and Dying in Ireland

Sean O’Faolain, 6 August 1981

... invented a visionary myth of a Second Coming by some secular saviour (by then he would be a Stuart) who would come from over the sea to release their shackled queen. This Vision Poetry was written in various forms over and over again. But the two main changes of mentality in this later Ireland were its attitudes to Dying and to Thinking. Death they ...

Crazy America

Edward Said, 19 March 1981

... of supporting ‘moderately repressive regimes’ if they happen to be allies. Accordingly, Peter Stuart reported in the Christian Science Monitor of 29 January that Congressional hearings were likely to be scheduled on the ‘terms of the hostage release agreement...treatment of the hostages...embassy security’ and – as a kind of afterthought ...

Toxic Inner Critic

Leo Robson: On Nicola Barker, 2 April 2026

TonyInterruptor 
by Nicola Barker.
Granta, 208 pp., £16.99, August 2025, 978 1 80351 254 9
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... its name to one of her earlier novels. The Yips (2012) told the story of a has-been golfer called Stuart Ransom, but Barker’s own experience was more closely foreshadowed by a passage involving another character, Jen, who is asked by Gene, her colleague at the Thistle Hotel in Luton, about the role of ‘philosophy’ or ‘structure’ in her ...

His and Hers

Matthew Reynolds: Robert Browning, 9 October 2008

The Poems of Robert Browning. Vol. III: 1847-61 
edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan.
Longman, 753 pp., £100, November 2007, 978 0 582 08453 7
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... and are spoken by characterised individuals (like Felicia Hemans’s dramatic lyrics ‘Arabella Stuart’ or ‘Properzia Rossi’, published in Records of Woman, 1828). But whereas those earlier poems reached out to their readers rhetorically, Browning’s brilliant innovation was to balance attraction and repulsion. Porphyria’s lover says: That moment ...

Uneasy Listening

Paul Laity: ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, 8 July 2004

Germany Calling: A Personal Biography of William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ 
by Mary Kenny.
New Island, 300 pp., £17.99, November 2003, 1 902602 78 1
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Lord Haw-Haw: The English Voice of Nazi Germany 
by Peter Martland.
National Archives, 309 pp., £19.99, March 2003, 1 903365 17 1
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... in Britain,’ Joyce crowed on air as the Phoney War became the invasion summer. During the ‘white hot weeks’ after Dunkirk, the British public grew increasingly susceptible to scares about German parachutists and Fifth Columnists. Ranks of enemy agents were said to be disguising themselves as nuns. As people became more jittery, Lord Haw-Haw’s ...

Not No Longer but Not Yet

Jenny Turner: Mark Fisher’s Ghosts, 9 May 2019

k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher 
edited by Darren Ambrose.
Repeater, 817 pp., £25, November 2018, 978 1 912248 28 5
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... an essay on John Akomfrah’s film triptych The Unfinished Conversation, featuring the memories of Stuart Hall; a book of essays about Kanye West. These interests are all evident in Fisher’s work too.The second memorial lecture was given in January by the American political theorist Jodi Dean, who is keen to rescue the word ‘communist’ from its negative ...

All about the Outcome

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Labour Infighting, 7 November 2024

The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain and Their Many Enemies 
by Andy Beckett.
Allen Lane, 540 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 241 39422 9
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A Woman like Me 
by Diane Abbott.
Viking, 311 pp., £25, September 2024, 978 0 241 53641 4
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Keir Starmer: The Biography 
by Tom Baldwin.
William Collins, 448 pp., £16.99, October 2024, 978 0 00 873964 5
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... productionist, autarchic programme’ that was basically complementary to Harold Wilson’s ‘White Heat’ agenda. It was, however, profoundly out of step with the European Community Britain had joined in 1973. The economist Stuart Holland, the brains behind the AES, quickly came to feel that it had become too statist ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... the reader through the public furores – the outcry over her 1966 pronouncement that ‘the white race is the cancer of human history,’ for example, used as a cudgel against her by conservative foes until their arms went numb – and developments in her personal life familiar from previous biographies, memoirs and profiles. While not stinting on ...

Crops, Towns, Government

James C. Scott: Ancestor Worship, 21 November 2013

The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? 
by Jared Diamond.
Penguin, 498 pp., £8.99, September 2013, 978 0 14 102448 6
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... realistically. And, when it comes to daily health tips, you have to imagine Diamond putting on his white coat and stethoscope as he recommends ‘not smoking; exercising regularly; limiting our intake of total calories, alcohol, salt and salty foods, sugar and sugared soft drinks, saturated and trans fats, processed foods, butter, cream and red meat; and ...

Thanks for being called Dick

Jenny Turner: ‘I Love Dick’, 17 December 2015

I Love Dick 
by Chris Kraus.
Tuskar Rock, 261 pp., £12.99, November 2015, 978 1 78125 647 3
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... outed in New York magazine as the English writer Dick Hebdige, a former star student of Stuart Hall’s at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the author of a great book about the 1970s punk-reggae crossover, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). Hebdige, Kraus has said, was ‘appalled’ to hear what she had done with ...