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Everlasting Stone

Patrick Wormald, 21 May 1981

The Enigma of Stonehenge 
by John Fowles and Barry Brukoff.
Cape, 126 pp., £6.95, September 1980, 0 224 01618 0
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British Cathedrals 
by Paul Johnson.
Weidenfeld, 275 pp., £12.50, September 1980, 0 297 77828 5
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... guides to all they see, but may well also feel the want of more information about the major styles involved than Professor Pevsner’s peremptory abbreviations: E.E., Dec., Perp. etc. The Babel of architectural traditions in most medieval cathedrals makes rigid consistency well-nigh impossible, and alternative allocations would be open to the same ...

Bolsheviks and Bohemians

Angus Calder, 5 April 1984

The Life of Arthur Ransome 
by Hugh Brogan.
Cape, 456 pp., £10.95, January 1984, 0 224 02010 2
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Bohemia in London 
by Arthur Ransome, introduced by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Oxford, 284 pp., £3.50, January 1984, 0 19 281412 5
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... have guessed that of those two struggling young literary journalists, Thomas would become a major poet, and he himself the author of children’s tales loved by millions – nor that his liking for the verse of W.H. Davies, from which he quoted at length in Bohemia, was the portent of a shift in taste which would dominate middlebrow readers for ...

Attercliffe

Nicholas Spice, 17 May 1984

Present Times 
by David Storey.
Cape, 270 pp., £8.95, May 1984, 0 224 02188 5
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The Uses of Fiction: Essays on the Modern Novel in Honour of Arnold Kettle 
edited by Douglas Jefferson and Graham Martin.
Open University, 296 pp., £15, December 1982, 9780335101818
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The Hawthorn Goddess 
by Glyn Hughes.
Chatto, 232 pp., £8.95, April 1984, 0 7011 2818 6
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... character privileged to observe and reflect upon his surroundings. Apparently, this gives him a major advantage in the contest for the reader’s sympathies, to which must be added the considerable charm Storey grants to his personality: strong, silent, laconic, deadpan. Compared with others in the book, Attercliffe says little and does less. Most of the ...

Mrs Thatcher’s Instincts

Barbara Wootton, 7 August 1980

Mrs Thatcher’s First Year 
by Hugh Stephenson.
Jill Norman, 128 pp., £6.50, June 1980, 0 906908 16 7
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A House Divided 
by David Steel.
Weidenfeld, 200 pp., £6.50, June 1980, 0 297 77764 5
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... will never match up to the number of votes cast in their favour. So long therefore as both major parties resolutely reject any form of proportional representation, only by some kind of power-sharing can the Liberals hope to bribe one or other of those parties into accepting PR as the price of guaranteed support for some of their own policies. But once ...

Winners and Wasters

Tom Shippey, 2 April 1987

The French Peasantry 1450-1660 
by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, translated by Alan Sheridan.
Scolar, 447 pp., £42.50, March 1987, 0 85967 685 4
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The Superstitious Mind: French Peasants and the Supernatural in the 19th Century 
by Judith Devlin.
Yale, 316 pp., £20, March 1987, 0 300 03710 4
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... later restitution and final division. One might expect that all these variations would lead to major differences of demography. After all, Ladurie suggests, the custom of primogeniture (he remarks en passant how snobbish and affected of the English peasants it was to follow this) helped to make England a land of emigration. One would suppose that by ...

Grains and Pinches

V.G. Kiernan, 9 July 1992

Salt and Civilisation 
by S.A.M. Adshead.
Macmillan, 417 pp., £45, March 1992, 0 333 53759 9
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... has narrowed its meaning since Shakespeare wrote the Bastard’s great speech about it in King John, where it meant greed, self-interest, the opening bars of capitalism. Adshead’s book belongs to a recently growing genus of works on the history of particular commodities. To be of most value a study of this kind should be a part of general history, joined ...

E Bada!

Rye Dag Holmboe: What Isou Did to Language, 21 July 2022

Speaking East: The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou 
by Andrew Hussey.
Reaktion, 328 pp., £20, September 2021, 978 1 78914 492 5
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... who grew up hearing lectures about her father’s genius – given, of course, by Isou himself.The major psychotic breakdown came in May 1968. Isou couldn’t stop talking, sometimes in languages nobody could understand. The tumultuous events then happening in Paris merged in his mind with the war and the pogrom in Bucharest. The événements confirmed his ...

A Mess of Their Own Making

David Runciman: Twelve Years of Tory Rule, 17 November 2022

... Someone talked her out of that. Instead, she and Kwarteng spent the next ten days planning for a major shift in government policy at a time when most government activity was on hold. During the period of mourning Britain looked like a country that knew what it was about, confident in its institutions and proud of its traditions. But that’s because it was ...

Great Expectations of Themselves

Anthony Pagden: Was there a Spanish Empire?, 17 April 2003

Spain’s Road to Empire: The Making of a World 1492-1763 
by Henry Kamen.
Allen Lane, 609 pp., £25, November 2002, 0 7139 9365 0
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... and Eurocentric perspective’ date from the first half of the last century. Set against, say, John Elliott’s concept of a ‘multiple monarchy’ (Elliott is absent even from Kamen’s bibliography which, given his enormous influence, is difficult to account for) or Serge Gruzinski’s writings on mestisaje (also absent) which depict the Empire as not ...

Turf Wars

Andrew Sugden: Grass, 14 November 2002

The Forgiveness of Nature: The Story of Grass 
by Graham Harvey.
Vintage, 372 pp., £7.99, September 2002, 0 09 928366 2
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... longest-running experiment in the history of science. The Park Grass Experiment, set up in 1856 by John Bennet Lawes at Rothamsted in Hertfordshire, has now been running more than five times longer than its nearest rival, and still yields results of use to plant ecologists. The original object was to assess the effects of different fertilisation regimes on a ...

Ciné, ma vérité

Emilie Bickerton: The films of Chris Marker, 20 April 2006

Chris Marker: Memories of the Future 
by Catherine Lupton.
Reaktion, 256 pp., £14.95, October 2004, 1 86189 223 3
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... Statues meurent aussi (1953) and the ground-breaking Nuit et brouillard (1955); he then became a major figure in the French short film industry of the 1950s and 1960s, pioneering a new genre, ‘the essay-film’, in a series of documentaries from around the world. In all, he has made more than forty films and published seven books of photographs; in the ...

Carry on up the Corner Flag

R.W. Johnson: The sociology of football, 24 July 2003

Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War 
by Simon Kuper.
Orion, 244 pp., £14.99, January 2003, 0 7528 5149 7
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Broken Dreams: Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football 
by Tom Bower.
Simon and Schuster, 342 pp., £17.99, February 2003, 9780743220798
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... Burnley and Wolves. In 1861, at under 20,000, Middlesbrough’s population could not support a major club, but by 1881 it had 55,934 inhabitants and by 1901, 91,302. Middlesbrough FC followed this curve. It was founded in 1876, went professional in 1889 and was in Division I by 1902. The football revolution had enormous social significance. Above all, it ...

Leur Pays

David Kennedy: Race, immigration and democracy in America, 22 February 2001

Making Americans: Immigration, Race and the Origins of the Diverse Democracy 
by Desmond King.
Harvard, 388 pp., £29.95, June 2000, 0 674 00088 9
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... countries of Britain, Ireland and Germany, while Italy, Poland and the Soviet Union – the major nurseries of the third wave’s new immigrants – together received about 10 per cent. Further evidence of the climate of racist thinking that informed the 1924 statute were the provisos debarring all Asians from entry, and declaring those already in the ...

Messages from the 29th Floor

David Trotter: Lifts, 3 July 2014

Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator 
by Andreas Bernard, translated by David Dollenmayer.
NYU, 309 pp., £21.99, April 2014, 978 0 8147 8716 8
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... scenes occur in the great mining films of the early 1940s (Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). Bernard soon leaves the mineshafts behind. His main interest lies in the ways in which the advent of the elevator transformed the design, construction and experience of high-rise buildings, and thus of modern urban life in ...

Don’t talk to pigeons

Ben Jackson: MI5 in WW1, 22 January 2015

MI5 in the Great War 
edited by Nigel West.
Biteback, 434 pp., £25, July 2014, 978 1 84954 670 6
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... Germany and at first didn’t hesitate to express his impatience with the scare: when asked by Sir John Barlow, MP for Frome, whether he was aware that there were 66,000 German soldiers in England and 50,000 stands of Mauser rifles stored in cellars within a few hundred yards of Charing Cross, he thanked Barlow for providing such an excellent example of the ...

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