A Preference for Strenuous Ghosts

Michael Kammen: Theodore Roosevelt, 6 June 2002

Theodore Rex 
by Edmund Morris.
HarperCollins, 772 pp., £25, March 2002, 0 00 217708 0
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... been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (1996) in order to paint a portrait of integrity and rectitude as an exemplar of what was wanting in the Clinton White House. Books about Franklin D. Roosevelt and, above all, Abraham Lincoln have long since become a cottage industry. FDR’s ...

Bread and Butter

Catherine Hall: Attempts at Reparation, 15 August 2024

Colonial Countryside 
edited by Corinne Fowler and Jeremy Poynting.
Peepal Tree, 278 pp., £25, July, 978 1 84523 566 6
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Britain’s Slavery Debt: Reparations Now! 
by Michael Banner.
Oxford, 172 pp., £14.99, April, 978 0 19 888944 1
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... to develop the Penrhyn slate quarry. After his death, the estate passed to his second cousin, George Hay Dawkins Pennant, a fierce opponent of abolition. After the Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833, Dawkins Pennant was awarded compensation of £14,683 for the 764 enslaved men and women that the law no longer recognised as his property. The freed men ...

Those Suits

Paul Foot, 7 September 1995

Jeffrey Archer: Stranger than Fiction 
by Michael Crick.
Hamish Hamilton, 456 pp., £17.50, May 1995, 0 241 13360 2
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... in a big federal fraud trial the previous day. The federal detective in charge of the case was George Wool, and his deputy was Larry Park. Both men told us how, on the day after Archer gave evidence, they were contacted at lunchtime by a Toronto policeman who said he’d got a suspected shoplifter in the station. The prisoner claimed to be Jeffrey ...

Diary

Ian Hamilton: A Hoax within a Hoax, 15 November 1984

... in it that was petty or vindictive. And what about Dr Johnson’s pal, the awesomely resourceful George Psalmanazar whose fraudulent study of Formosa got him a job at Oxford, teaching missionaries to master his faked-up Formosan tongue? George was made to suffer for his cheek, and in time he did repent – but he too could ...

Short Cuts

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Remembering D.A.N. Jones, 2 January 2003

... probably had more sympathy for army life than most LRB contributors. Here he is, in a review of George Spater’s Life of Cobbett, brushing aside Hazlitt’s remarks about Cobbett’s bullying ways: It is a natural tendency for a sergeant-major to get his way by bullying – both the officers and the men. A sergeant-major bestrides the ranks. He is the ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Basingstoke’s Paisleyite, 21 April 2005

... villages, like the one where my parents live, were lassoed by Hampshire North-West, which Sir George Young (Con, obviously) retained in 2001 with a swollen majority of 12,009. Ever decreasing turn-out probably didn’t help Hunter: Basingstoke’s citizens have followed the national trend of not bothering to vote, though they’ve always been slightly ...
... and about socialism as the rhetoric of the Labour Party. There was even a hasty attempt to redraw Michael Foot as a moderate, a nice old thing who had had a wild youth, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. This reappraisal, however grotesque, may in part have been motivated by a sudden desire to be analytical and reasonably truthful, after all the intoxicating ...

Scoop after Scoop

Ian Jack: Chapman Pincher’s Scoops, 5 June 2014

Dangerous to Know: A Life 
by Chapman Pincher.
Biteback, 386 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 1 84954 651 5
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... managed to reveal quite so many things that the [British] government wanted kept secret,’ writes Michael Goodman of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. And yet Pincher believes he never threatened the security of the state – that would be the work of a traitor, which is the way he described Snowden in a recent television ...

Up the Garden Path

R.W. Johnson: Michael Foot, 26 April 2007

Michael Foot: A Life 
by Kenneth O. Morgan.
Harper, 568 pp., £25, March 2007, 978 0 00 717826 1
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... One day in 1993, I found myself on a bus in Oxford with Michael Foot. He looked shambolic even by my standards – donkey jacket, stick, long hair all over the place. But nobody minded. You don’t often see leading politicians on a bus and passenger after passenger came up to say hello. He smiled and was the soul of friendliness ...

Diary

A.J.P. Taylor: Living with Prime Ministers, 2 December 1982

... Disraeli, a miscellany of works which I also passed by, Disraeli not being my favourite man – Michael Foot can have him; Asquith, 600 pages of love-letters to a girl not half his age; Churchill, first of two volumes of biography by an American writer, a disquisition on his political philosophy, and a massive collection of documents relating to his career ...

Should we say thank you?

Hugh Wilford: The Overrated Marshall Plan, 30 April 2009

The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Reconstruction of Postwar Europe 
by Greg Behrman.
Aurum, 448 pp., £25, February 2008, 978 1 84513 326 9
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Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower 
by Nicolaus Mills.
Wiley, 290 pp., £15.99, August 2008, 978 0 470 09755 7
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... for reconstructing Europe after the Second World War, named after the US secretary of state, George C. Marshall. Between April 1948, when President Truman signed it into law, and the end of 1951, the European Recovery Programme (ERP) poured more than $13 billion of aid into Western Europe – roughly equivalent to $550 billion as a share of current US ...

Ronbo

Michael Rogin, 13 October 1988

Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North 
by Ben Bradlee.
Grafton, 572 pp., £14.95, September 1988, 0 246 13364 3
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For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington 
by Donald Regan.
Hutchinson, 397 pp., £16.95, June 1988, 0 09 173622 6
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... were the doubles of the President they served. ‘I am bringing you a playmate your own age,’ Michael Deaver is supposed to have said when he informed the President that his Secretary of the Treasury, Regan, and his Chief of Staff, Jim Baker, were trading places. Struck at their very first meeting by the similarity in their names, Reagan had told Regan a ...

Main Man

Michael Hofmann, 7 July 1994

Walking Possession: Essays and Reviews 1968-1993 
by Ian Hamilton.
Bloomsbury, 302 pp., £20, May 1994, 0 7475 1712 6
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Gazza Italia 
by Ian Hamilton.
Granta, 188 pp., £5.99, May 1994, 0 14 014073 5
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... I said I’d lost it, paid the ten pound penalty, and thought I’d got away with murder: no doubt George Washington would have behaved differently. Now I’m the proud owner of four or five copies (whenever I come across one, I buy it), and moreover Faber had the grace to publish an enlarged version in 1988, Fifty Poems, so the library will be back in ...

How liberals misread their own history

Michael Ignatieff: The Roosevelt Problem, 29 October 1998

Liberalism and Its Discontents 
by Alan Brinkley.
Harvard, 372 pp., £18.50, May 1998, 0 674 53017 9
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... social-democratic traditions. Liberals and social democrats have been frères ennemis since Lloyd George. A liberal smells paternalism in the social-democratic enthusiasm for the use of state power, while social democrats suspect that liberals care more about liberty than equality. Third Way talk suppresses these contradictions, and while this is good for ...

Capital W, Capital W

Michael Wood: Women writers, 19 August 1999

Women Writers at Work 
edited by George Plimpton.
Harvill, 381 pp., £9.99, February 1999, 1 86046 586 2
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Just as I Thought 
by Grace Paley.
Virago, 332 pp., £8.99, August 1999, 1 86049 696 2
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... It is fatal for a woman,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘in any way to speak consciously as a woman.’ Fatal for her as a writer, Woolf meant, but even so, not many people will now agree with this view. Not all that many, perhaps, will understand it straight off. How could it be fatal? How could you not write or speak as a woman if you were one? Except by pretending to speak or write as a man ...