Under the Sign of the Interim

Perry Anderson, 4 January 1996

The European Rescue of the Nation-State 
by Alan Milward.
Routledge, 506 pp., £17.99, May 1994, 0 415 11133 1
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The Frontier of National Sovereignty: History and Theory 1945-1992 
by Alan Milward.
Routledge, 248 pp., £14.99, September 1994, 0 415 11784 4
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Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence 
by François Duchêne.
Norton, 278 pp., $35, January 1995, 0 393 03497 6
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... social and cultural – interdependencies between the states that made up the initial Coal and Steel Community and its sequels. The tenor of this first wave of interpretation was neo-functionalist, stressing the additive logic of institutional development: that is, the way modest functional changes tended to lead to complementary alterations along an ...

Mrs Thatcher’s Admirer

Ian Aitken, 21 November 1991

Time to declare 
by David Owen.
Joseph, 822 pp., £20, September 1991, 0 7181 3514 8
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... contain something about his love life as well as his thoroughly tedious hate life with David Steel and the Liberal party. If that was the calculation, it certainly worked. The doctor’s early love affairs and his wooing of Debbie dominated the press reaction to his book. The loving details about his relationships with the other three members of the Gang ...

Umpteens

Christopher Ricks, 22 November 1990

Bloomsbury Dictionary of Dedications 
edited by Adrian Room.
Bloomsbury, 354 pp., £17.99, September 1990, 0 7475 0521 7
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Unauthorised Versions: Poems and their Parodies 
edited by Kenneth Baker.
Faber, 446 pp., £14.99, September 1990, 0 571 14122 6
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The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse 
edited by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 407 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 0 571 14470 5
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... simple identification of the praiser of Shakespeare, upon whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of ...

Denatured

Rosemary Hill, 2 December 1993

Karl Friedrich Schinkel: ‘The English Journey’ 
edited by David Bindman and Gottfried Riemann, translated by F. Gagna Walls.
Yale, 220 pp., £35, July 1993, 0 300 04117 9
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The Modernist Garden in France 
by Dorothée Imbert.
Yale, 268 pp., £40, August 1993, 0 300 04716 9
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... a professional position in London similar to his own in Berlin. One possible equivalent was John Nash, the royal architect: had they met, their interview would have made a great, if unconsciously comic centrepiece to the journal. Nash and his work epitomised the Regency and its stucco-fronted standards, high taste and low morals. In his ebullient ...

Maximum Embarrassment

David Marquand, 7 May 1987

Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism 
by John Campbell.
Weidenfeld, 430 pp., £15.95, March 1987, 0 297 78998 8
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The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton: 1918-40, 1945-60 
edited by Ben Pimlott.
Cape, 752 pp., £40, January 1987, 0 224 01912 0
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... to office in the following decade, than some of their old opponents from the right. But, as John Campbell makes clear in this marvellously lucid and moving reassessment of the political career of Aneurin Bevan, the similarities with the Thirties were only skin-deep. This time, the schisms did touch the core of party purpose. Though Left and Right both ...

Diary

Tom Nairn: The Australian elections, 13 December 2007

... when an unhealed wound remains? Not long before the vote, the point was cruelly rubbed in. John Howard’s Liberal-Coalition government made the unusual decision to invade its own country, by sending the Australian Defence Force into the Northern Territory. His aim was to deal decisively with concerns about child abuse and corruption among the mainly ...

Chi Chi Trillip Trillip

Fiona Green: Jorie Graham looks ahead, 23 October 2025

To 2040 
by Jorie Graham.
Carcanet, 95 pp., £15.99, April 2023, 978 1 80017 316 3
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... tentacular furious careful – alsotapping – also pressing gently to feel foredge – loved steel stone wood iron wax melt ofacetylene till yr gloveburned thru bc ucld not waitThe loss of one’s parents puts a person on the front line, and in Graham’s case her own end became a stark reality in 2021, with a second cancer diagnosis about which she has ...

800 Napkins, 47 Finger Bowls

Zachary Leader, 16 March 2000

Morgan: American Financier 
by Jean Strouse.
Harvill, 816 pp., £25, June 1999, 9781860463556
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... little of the venom or relish of such fellow plutocrats as Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller. Most criticism he ignored, cultivating a forbidding taciturnity. ‘He left no record of his response’ is a familiar motif in the biography. What Morgan left instead – and what the biography exhaustively records and explains – are ...

Hate, Greed, Lust and Doom

Sean O’Faolain, 16 April 1981

William Faulkner: His Life and Work 
by David Minter.
Johns Hopkins, 325 pp., £9.50, January 1981, 0 8018 2347 1
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... by the outstanding writers associated with it, such as Robert Penn Warren (All the King’s Men), John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, even Robert Lowell, who literally pitched his tent on Tate’s lawn. All of these must have responded warmly to Robert Frost’s patriotic poem ‘The Gift Outright’: ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a ...

In Clover

Laleh Khalili: What does McKinsey do?, 15 December 2022

When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm 
by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe.
Bodley Head, 354 pp., £20, October 2022, 978 1 84792 625 8
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... finding ‘efficiencies’ and generating savings. McKinsey helped nationalise British Steel, and then helped privatise it. In 1967, the British Transport Docks Board commissioned it to produce a report on containerisation. Dockers in London and Liverpool had been striking throughout the year in an attempt to decasualise the process of hiring ...

The money’s still out there

Neal Ascherson: The Scottish Empire, 6 October 2011

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 
by T.M. Devine.
Allen Lane, 397 pp., £25, August 2011, 978 0 7139 9744 6
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The Inner Life of Empires: An 18th-Century History 
by Emma Rothschild.
Princeton, 483 pp., £24.95, June 2011, 978 0 691 14895 3
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... of industrial revolution. This generated enough domestic capital to power the next phase: iron and steel, shipbuilding and heavy engineering. Production took place in Scotland, but the product itself was overwhelmingly exported. By about 1870, there was a surplus of capital for domestic use, and Scottish savings began to pour overseas, often through the new ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1998, 21 January 1999

... of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of Marske Moor in Swaledale to create a new farm, Cordilleras. The farm and most of the fields round about were named after places in South America, Valparaiso, Cotopaxi, Sierra Pedragosa and so ...

Mansions in Bloom

Ruth Richardson, 23 May 1991

A Paradise out of a Common Field: The Pleasures and Plenty of the Victorian Garden 
by Joan Morgan and Alison Richards.
Century, 256 pp., £16.95, May 1990, 0 7126 2209 8
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Private Gardens of London 
by Arabella Lennox-Boyd.
Weidenfeld, 224 pp., £25, September 1990, 0 297 83025 2
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The Greatest Glasshouse: The Rainforest Recreated 
edited by Sue Minter.
HMSO, 216 pp., £25, July 1990, 0 11 250035 8
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Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale: Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780-1865 
by Albion Urdank.
California, 448 pp., $47.50, May 1990, 0 520 06670 7
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... Private Gardens of London. Written by a landscape gardener, and beautifully photographed by John Miller, the book’s focus is a series of nearly forty gardens from different parts of the metropolis. The Museum of London’s scheme to collect pictures and photographs of London gardens will surely result in a more representative sample, but this is a ...

Diary

Elaine Showalter: On the Phi Beta Kappa Tour, 10 March 1994

... and rent a video while you did your laundry in machines named after movie stars; mine was called John Belushi. At 8.30 a.m., groups of kids in tie-died grunge were guzzling beer and nachos, and watching Rodney Dangerfield deliver double entendres about policemen’s balls on the big video screen. But Natalie and I had a running battle over my reluctance to ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: Slums, Unemployment, Strikes and Party Politics, 23 June 1988

... Thirties is readily paralleled by, for example, the injection of taxpayers’ money into British Steel by none other than Keith Joseph himself when at the Department of Trade and Industry. But in neither case is there any hint of credence being given to the view that government action, of whatever kind, can of itself create jobs for which there is no genuine ...