Hatpin through the Brain

Jonathan Meades: Closing Time for the Firm, 9 June 2022

The Palace Papers 
by Tina Brown.
Century, 571 pp., £20, April, 978 1 5291 2470 5
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... opera buffa that keeps delivering.As well as Epstein and Maxwell it can offer such bit players as John Bryan; Steve Wyatt, ‘a hunky Texan oilman’, and his biological father, Bobby Lipman (who killed a young woman while tripping); Ruth, Lady Fermoy; Major Ron Ferguson’s loyalty to the Wigmore Club (a massage ...

For the Love of Uncle Enver

Thomas Meaney: Albania after Hoxha, 23 June 2022

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History 
by Lea Ypi.
Penguin, 313 pp., £9.99, June, 978 0 14 199510 6
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... classics of liberal philosophy and political theory – from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice – can’t realise their own putative ambitions without reckoning with the latent radicalism in their projects. For several years Ypi has been a co-editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy, an ...

At The Thirteenth Hour

William Wootten: David Jones, 25 September 2003

Wedding Poems 
by David Jones, edited by Thomas Dilworth.
Enitharmon, 88 pp., £12, April 2002, 1 900564 87 4
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David Jones: Writer and Artist 
by Keith Alldritt.
Constable, 208 pp., £18.99, April 2003, 1 84119 379 8
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... of Ceres’ womb, that her reaper-lovers had got upon her – to suit their double-columned books. John Barleycorn must die a second death, when bankers rule, as Spengler shows, till Caesar comes. Jones’s skills have not exactly deserted him: there is still the historical knowledge, the talent for allusion and association, and some distinctive ...

A Very Active Captain

Patrick Collinson: Henricentrism, 22 June 2006

The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church 
by G.W. Bernard.
Yale, 736 pp., £29.95, November 2005, 0 300 10908 3
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Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation 
by Greg Walker.
Oxford, 556 pp., £65, October 2005, 0 19 928333 8
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... and most threatening of all the rebellions against the Tudors, the Pilgrimage of Grace. Such major events deserve exhaustive treatment, and Bernard gives the Pilgrimage more than a hundred pages. Against a mass of scholarship which investigates the various social and political dimensions of this convulsive event, Bernard insists, almost monocausally, on ...

What did you expect?

Steven Shapin: The banality of moon-talk, 1 September 2005

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth 
by Andrew Smith.
Bloomsbury, 308 pp., £17.99, April 2005, 0 7475 6368 3
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... though David Scott of Apollo 15 has become a recluse, Armstrong doesn’t do interviews, and while John Young of Apollo 16 made a speech at Smith, both eye and mind contact seemed impossible for him. None of them found celebrity easy, least of all the crew of Apollo 11, for whom there were no predecessors to show them how it was done. Caught between a ...

The Right to Know

Stephen Sedley: Freedom of information, 10 August 2000

... Adam Smith, was the theory of the marketplace of ideas. In the mouth of Justice Holmes, echoing John Stuart Mill, this became part of the jurisprudence of the First Amendment: ‘The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.’ Holmes’s dictum is cited by Lord Steyn in a significant recent ...

Jousting for Peace

Thomas Penn: Henry VIII meets Francis I, 17 July 2014

The Field of Cloth of Gold 
by Glenn Richardson.
Yale, 288 pp., £35, November 2013, 978 0 300 14886 2
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... peace was embraced by thinkers who, in the early 16th century, included men like the theologian John Colet, Thomas More and their presiding genius, Erasmus. In England, policymakers bought into the idea of peace for pragmatic reasons as much as out of ideological conviction. As Henry VII’s former minister Edmund Dudley put it in 1509, in a treatise ...

Five Possible Ways to Kill a State

Neal Ascherson: Vanished Kingdoms, 15 December 2011

Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe 
by Norman Davies.
Allen Lane, 830 pp., £30, October 2011, 978 1 84614 338 0
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... but often unspoken assumption about Western superiority’. He is particularly annoyed by the late John Plamenatz, who contrasted ‘the healthy “civic nationalism” of Western countries with the supposedly unhealthy nationalism of their Eastern counterparts’. Annoyed not least because Professor Plamenatz of All Souls was actually a Montenegrin. Given the ...

Autoerotisch

Richard J. Evans: The VW Beetle, 12 September 2013

The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle 
by Bernhard Rieger.
Harvard, 406 pp., £20, April 2013, 978 0 674 05091 4
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... Command’s list of military facilities to be destroyed. At the end of the war, Ivan Hirst, a major in the engineers, arrived to inspect it. He found that 70 per cent of its buildings and 90 per cent of its machinery were still intact. The British Zone of Occupation had to cater for the transportation needs of 22 million inhabitants who possessed only ...

Verie Sillie People

Keith Thomas: Bacon’s Lives, 7 February 2013

The Oxford Francis Bacon Vol. I: Early Writings 1584-96 
edited by Alan Stewart, with Harriet Knight.
Oxford, 1066 pp., £200, September 2012, 978 0 19 818313 6
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... mother bombarded him with advice; his tutor at Cambridge was the future archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift; and his godfather, the Earl of Bedford, provided him with a seat in Parliament. But he was short of money and had expensive tastes. He became a barrister at Gray’s Inn, rising rapidly to become a highly successful advocate and legal adviser to ...

Bendy Rulers

Glen Newey: Amartya Sen, 28 January 2010

The Idea of Justice 
by Amartya Sen.
Allen Lane, 468 pp., £25, July 2009, 978 1 84614 147 8
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... has indeed contributed strenuously to public discussion. He is a heroic figure who has published major theoretical works in welfare economics, social choice theory and political philosophy, but has also been politically engaged. He remains prominent in public life in the UK and elsewhere, as a trustee of the Nalanda University project, a member of the UK ...

These people are intolerable

Richard J. Evans: Hitler and Franco, 5 November 2015

Hitler’s Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War 
by Pierpaolo Barbieri.
Harvard, 349 pp., £22.95, April 2015, 978 0 674 72885 1
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... focuses on the period of the Second World War. The topic is also covered in nearly all of the major histories of the Spanish Civil War. It is simply wrong to claim, as Pierpaolo Barbieri does, that the historiography of the war has ignored German economic policy. All the historians mentioned above are agreed that, as Leitz puts it, Nazi Germany tried to ...

Don’t do what Allende did

Greg Grandin: Allende, 19 July 2012

Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War 
by Tanya Harmer.
North Carolina, 375 pp., £38.95, October 2011, 978 0 8078 3495 4
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... nationalism had gone on long enough. Chile’s nationalisations, Nixon’s Treasury secretary, John Connally, said, threatened to provoke a ‘snowballing’ of similar expropriations throughout the region, which Washington could no longer afford to deal with in a ‘piecemeal fashion’. There was a metaphysics of Allende-hating that went beyond matters ...

Homobesottedness

Peter Green: Love in Ancient Greece, 8 May 2008

The Greeks and Greek Love: A Radical Reappraisal of Homosexuality in Ancient Greece 
by James Davidson.
Weidenfeld, 634 pp., £30, November 2007, 978 0 297 81997 4
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... understandable, since his attempt, in effect, to reclaim the Greeks for modern gay love faces two major difficulties. First, as we’ve seen, Greek adult same-sex relationships lacked social validation, and when they do show up – Macedonian boon companions, those Athenian bluebloods pilloried in the Demosthenic speech Against Conon – tend to be ...

Diary

Paul Henley: The EU, 14 January 2002

... ongoing projects elsewhere: Jean-Marie Le Pen and Umberto Bossi, for example, or Ian Paisley and John Hume, who are merely adding a third Parliamentary seat to those they already hold at Westminster and in the Northern Ireland Assembly. A number of MEPs first achieved celebrity in other fields: Dana, the Irish Eurovision popstar, Michael Cashman, one-time ...