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Wolves in the Drawing Room

Neal Ascherson: The SNP, 2 June 2011

... supporting British liberty and strength. Now English people who notice it wonder what it was for. David Cameron says he will fight to prevent the break-up of Britain ‘with every single fibre’. But why? When Salmond rang him up after the election and read out a shopping list of demands, Cameron seems to have been oddly silent. Many London commentators made ...

Within the Saffron Family

Andrew Whitehead: Modi, 10 September 2015

The Modi Effect: Inside Narendra Modi’s Campaign to Transform India 
by Lance Price.
Hodder, 342 pp., £25, March 2015, 978 1 4736 1089 7
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2014: The Election that Changed India 
by Rajdeep Sardesai.
Penguin, 372 pp., £16.99, November 2014, 978 0 14 342498 7
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... guards all the time,’ she told a reporter from Reuters. ‘Often my relatives or I have to cook for them, my sister-in-law has to make their beds. This is a bit annoying … It gets really chaotic when I have to travel, because I use public transport and the guards are following me in an air-conditioned car.’ Though she seemed unimpressed by the sole ...

Showboating

John Upton: George Carman, 9 May 2002

No Ordinary Man: A Life of George Carman 
by Dominic Carman.
Hodder, 331 pp., £18.99, January 2002, 0 340 82098 5
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... he sold the family home to pay off his gambling debts. Then in 1978, the influential solicitor Sir David Napley, having seen Carman mesmerise a jury in a closing speech, decided to brief him to defend Jeremy Thorpe in one of the biggest criminal trials of the decade. Thorpe, the urbane Old Etonian leader of the Liberal Party, had been accused of conspiring to ...

Hallelujah Times

Eric Foner: The Great Migration, 29 June 2017

A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland 
by Sydney Nathans.
Harvard, 313 pp., £23.95, February 2017, 978 0 674 97214 8
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... They had dispersed to Detroit, Los Angeles and other cities. (One of her grandsons would work as a cook for President Obama at Camp David.) But Alice Hargress held onto the land she and her husband had inherited. She called it ‘heir land’, meaning that any member of the extended family who encountered difficulty in the ...

Agent Untraceable, Owner Not Responding

Laleh Khalili: Abandoned Seafarers, 30 March 2023

Cabin Fever: Trapped On Board a Cruise Ship When the Pandemic Hit 
by Michael Smith and Jonathan Franklin.
Endeavour, 259 pp., £20, July 2022, 978 1 913068 73 8
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Dead in the Water: Murder and Fraud in the World’s Most Secretive Industry 
by Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel.
Atlantic, 268 pp., £10.99, May 2023, 978 1 83895 255 6
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... the waterline with no portholes. Aside from operating the ship, they wash mountains of laundry, cook and serve vast numbers of meals three times a day, constantly clean hundreds of cabins and a dozen decks, and entertain and attend to hundreds, sometimes thousands, of passengers.The first cruise ship to be stranded by the pandemic, the Diamond ...

American Manscapes

Richard Poirier, 12 October 1989

Manhood and the American Renaissance 
by David Leverenz.
Cornell, 372 pp., $35.75, April 1989, 0 8014 2281 7
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... of infamous goodies. Meanwhile, FDA criticism will probably earn a few more adherents thanks to David Leverenz’s Manhood and the American Renaissance. It is better than most such books because, for one thing, he is at times a competent if constricted close reader, while being at heart resentful that he is required to be one at all by certain of the works ...

Clear Tartan Water

Colin Kidd: The election in Scotland, 27 May 1999

... against the Nato action as ‘an unpardonable folly’, not only found himself denounced by Robin Cook as ‘the toast of Belgrade’, but also saw both his Party’s and his own personal poll ratings fall. However, the reassertion of Britishness is not a mere by-product of Balkan contingencies. Scottish Labour’s manifesto has trumpeted the achievements and ...

In such a Labyrinth

Jonathan Rée: Hume, 17 December 2015

Hume: An Intellectual Biography 
by James Harris.
Cambridge, 621 pp., £35, September 2015, 978 0 521 83725 5
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... Back​ in 1954, the American critic Ernest Campbell Mossner brought out a Life of David Hume that was not only a pioneering work of scholarship but also a labour of love. Mossner wanted to rescue his hero from the romantic reactionaries who typecast him as a narrow-minded representative of the Age of Reason. In particular, he hoped to challenge the condescension of Thomas Carlyle, who dismissed Hume as an associate of Voltaire and the French philosophes, and a slave to the ‘obscurations of sense, which eclipse this truth within us ...

Widowers on the Prowl

Tom Shippey: Britain after Rome, 17 March 2011

Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070 
by Robin Fleming.
Allen Lane, 458 pp., £25, August 2010, 978 0 7139 9064 5
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... Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other ...

Whatever Made Him

Sheila Fitzpatrick: The Bauman Dichotomy, 10 September 2020

Bauman: A Biography 
by Izabela Wagner.
Polity, 510 pp., £25, June, 978 1 5095 2686 4
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... at school and academically successful, and his entrepreneurial mother discovered a talent as a cook that made the refugee family not only better fed than many of their neighbours but also better off than they had been in Poznań. Soviet Mołodeczno (or Maladzechna or Molodechna) turned out to be Bauman’s ‘Zion’, remembered in idyllic terms. He joined ...

Hayek and His Overcoat

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1 October 1998

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations 
by David Landes.
Little, Brown, 650 pp., £20, April 1998, 0 316 90867 3
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The Commanding Heights 
by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw.
Simon and Schuster, 457 pp., £18.99, February 1998, 0 684 82975 4
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... business: theirs was to pay and obey. Their leaders promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté. David Landes takes the story from the scholar of Islam, Michael Cook. It is, for him, a moral tale. Autocracies squeeze, steal and demean. ‘Only societies with room for multiple initiatives,’ he insists, ‘from below more ...

Wrath of the Centurions

Max Hastings: My Lai, 25 January 2018

My Lai: Vietnam, 1968 and the Descent into Darkness 
by Howard Jones.
Oxford, 504 pp., £22.99, June 2017, 978 0 19 539360 6
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... the efforts of kindly Tommies in winning hearts and minds. Recent studies – for instance, David French’s excellent The British Way in Counter-Insurgency 1945-67 – show that in Malaya, Cyprus, Aden and Kenya British soldiers in fact displayed frequent brutality, often condoned by their officers. In all of Britain’s counterinsurgency ...

Heir to Blair

Christopher Tayler: Among the New Tories, 26 April 2007

... being the buzzword for the shearing off of voter-unfriendly associations. Before David Cameron, or ‘DC’, as he’s known, took over in December 2005, Conservative strategists had noted anxiously that focus groups would turn against almost anything – even, or especially, tax cuts – as soon as they were told it was Tory ...

Our Flexible Friends

Conor Gearty, 18 April 1996

Scott Inquiry Report 
by Richard Scott.
HMSO, 2386 pp., £45, February 1996, 0 10 262796 7
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... a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of prolixity), the Report is a model of clarity. Its narrative is compelling ...

The Suitcase: Part Two

Frances Stonor Saunders, 13 August 2020

... or Companion-Help. Austrian lady, age 40, good birth and education, seeks post: good cook, needlewoman, fluent English, French; pianist; willing to care for children; highest credentials. Write Box 4435, Frost-Smith Advertising, London EC2.’27 May 1938: ‘Young Austrian lady (Jewish) seeks position Governess; experienced; good ...

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