Little Englander Histories

Linda Colley: Little Englandism, 22 July 2010

A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 
by Boyd Hilton.
Oxford, 757 pp., £21, June 2008, 978 0 19 921891 2
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Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1780-1939 
by James Belich.
Oxford, 573 pp., £25, June 2009, 978 0 19 929727 6
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... and French Revolutions. So successful was this propertied revanche, Hilton suggests, echoing F.M.L. Thompson, that by ‘about 1850’, the onetime ‘mad, bad and dangerous people’ had themselves come increasingly to embrace ‘an ethos of self-improvement and respectability’. Presiding over these political and propertied elites were a succession of ...

Browne’s Gamble

Stefan Collini: The Future of the Universities, 4 November 2010

Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education: An Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance 
by Lord Browne et al.
62 pp., October 2010
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... of deferred repayments of an initial loan, calibrated according to income after university. But David Blunkett, the relevant minister at the time, decided that it should be imposed as an upfront charge, initially of £1000 per year. He also, in an equally ill-considered move, reduced maintenance grants. Most students felt worse off; most universities felt ...

Time to Repent

Ross McKibbin: The New Political Settlement, 10 June 2010

... the evidence of the ‘federalising’ effect. Scotland is clearly drifting away from England, as David Runciman suggested in the last issue of the LRB, making it increasingly hard to speak confidently of ‘British’ politics. But it is not drifting towards independence. On the contrary, the main beneficiary of the drift is Labour, a devolutionist party ...

Heat in a Mild Climate

James Wood: Baron Britain of Aldeburgh, 19 December 2013

Benjamin Britten: A Life in the 20th Century 
by Paul Kildea.
Allen Lane, 635 pp., £30, January 2013, 978 1 84614 232 1
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Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music 
by Neil Powell.
Hutchinson, 512 pp., £25, January 2013, 978 0 09 193123 0
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... easy about Britten’s boys. Britten certainly fell in love with Piers Dunkerley, Bobby Rothman, David Spenser and David Hemmings (the youngest of them, and the one whose relations with Britten were ‘nearly catastrophic’, according to Pears). But these were chaste relationships. Hemmings later said that ‘there was no ...

Back to Runnymede

Ferdinand Mount: Magna Carta, 23 April 2015

Magna Carta 
by David Carpenter.
Penguin, 594 pp., £10.99, January 2015, 978 0 241 95337 2
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Magna Carta Uncovered 
by Anthony Arlidge and Igor Judge.
Hart, 222 pp., £25, October 2014, 978 1 84946 556 4
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Magna Carta 
by J.C. Holt.
Cambridge, 488 pp., £21.99, May 2015, 978 1 107 47157 3
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Magna Carta: The Foundation of Freedom 1215-2015 
by Nicholas Vincent.
Third Millennium, 192 pp., £44.95, January 2015, 978 1 908990 28 0
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Magna Carta: The Making and Legacy of the Great Charter 
by Dan Jones.
Head of Zeus, 192 pp., £14.99, December 2014, 978 1 78185 885 1
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... the same root as ‘rune’ or ‘secret’. The drama of the proceedings zings off the pages of David Carpenter’s magisterial new study. What Carpenter does better than his rivals or predecessors is to make clear the continuing intensity of events after Runnymede and the hectic pace of them. Within days of its sealing, engrossments of the Charter were ...

The Candidates

Chris Lehmann: Scott, Rick, Ted, Marco and Jeb, 18 June 2015

... the same time accusing me.’ Meanwhile, a longtime friend and ally of Rubio, former Congressman David Rivera, is facing a series of ethics proceedings, the Washington Post reports, for ‘routinely billing the state for travel and other expenses while paying himself back out of campaign accounts when he was a state legislator’. In 2005, Rivera and Rubio ...

Like Colonel Sanders

Christopher Tayler: The Stan Lee Era, 2 December 2021

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee 
by Abraham Riesman.
Bantam, 320 pp., £20, February, 978 0 593 13571 6
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Stan Lee: A Life in Comics 
by Liel Leibovitz.
Yale, 192 pp., £16.99, June 2020, 978 0 300 23034 5
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... the greatest ideas.’ Rejecting one of them, a pitch for a Marvel project constructed around David Schwimmer from Friends, the executives reached a consensus that ‘David Schwimmer had no charisma and was a little bit derided.’ Then they high-fived one another over Lee’s head.Professional humiliations didn’t ...

With a Da bin ich!

Seamus Perry: Properly Lawrentian, 9 September 2021

Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence 
by Frances Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 488 pp., £25, May 2021, 978 1 4088 9362 3
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... the artist,’ D.H. Lawrence wrote, ‘trust the tale.’ It must be his most famous aphorism – David Lodge even called it ‘a cardinal principle of modern hermeneutics’. It has proved especially popular with critics who want to deny authors the last word on their work. ‘What if a reader construes a poem in a way you felt you didn’t mean?’ an ...

Find the Method

Timothy Shenk: Loyalty to Marx, 29 June 2017

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion 
by Gareth Stedman Jones.
Penguin, 768 pp., £14.99, May 2017, 978 0 14 102480 6
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... been a part of his work; Outcast London began with a survey of British economic thought from David Ricardo to William Stanley Jevons. Now, Stedman Jones’s commitment to the constitutive power of language propelled him down a path that eventually led to a tamed version of social democracy. In An End to Poverty (2004), he sought to recover a lost ...

Think outside the bun

Colin Burrow: Quote Me!, 8 September 2022

The New Yale Book of Quotations 
edited by Fred R. Shapiro.
Yale, 1136 pp., £35, October 2021, 978 0 300 20597 8
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... dicta gathered together in the Yale Book does bring to mind a quotation from the only song by David Byrne for which it finds space: ‘You may ask yourself/Well, how did I get here?’How did we get here? What can the history of books of quotations tell us about what they’re now expected to contain? As everybody knows, ‘there is no new thing under the ...

Keys to the World

Tom Stevenson: Sea Power, 8 September 2022

The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans 
by David Bosco.
Oxford, 320 pp., £22.99, April, 978 0 19 026564 9
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Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order In World War Two 
by Paul Kennedy.
Yale, 521 pp., £25, May, 978 0 300 21917 3
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... United Kingdom, Madagascar) and archipelagic states (Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines). David Bosco opens his account of ocean governance with the question of the Senkaku Islands, eight uninhabited rocks between Taiwan and Okinawa which are in themselves no good to anyone but are nonetheless bitterly contested. Under US occupation from 1945, when ...

Finished Off by Chagrin

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Monarchs and Emperors, 21 July 2022

The Last Emperor of Mexico: A Disaster in the New World 
by Edward Shawcross.
Faber, 336 pp., £20, January, 978 0 571 36057 4
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King Leopold’s Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the 19th Century 
by Andrew Fitzmaurice.
Princeton, 592 pp., £35, February, 978 0 691 14869 4
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The Kaiser and the Colonies: Monarchy in the Age of Empire 
by Matthew Fitzpatrick.
Oxford, 416 pp., £90, February, 978 0 19 289703 9
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... lies rather in his sly portrayal of the squad’s commanding officer as Napoleon. As the historian David Todd has argued, this foreign policy disaster exposed the hollowness of the emperor’s promises to promote the trade and influence of France throughout the world. After Napoleon’s overthrow in 1870 and death in exile at Chislehurst in Kent, the fate of ...

You’ve got it or you haven’t

Iain Sinclair, 25 February 1993

Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror 
by Tony Lambrianou and Carol Clerk.
Pan, 256 pp., £4.99, October 1992, 0 330 32284 2
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Gangland: London’s Underworld 
by James Morton.
Little, Brown, 349 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 356 20889 3
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Nipper: The Story of Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read 
by Leonard Read and James Morton.
Warner, 318 pp., £5.99, September 1992, 0 7515 0001 1
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Smash and Grab: Gangsters in the London Underworld 
by Robert Murphy.
Faber, 182 pp., £15.99, February 1993, 0 571 15442 5
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... died. His name is above the title: in yellow print, superimposed over the famous (and uncredited) David Bailey portrait, the Sixties icon that makes the Twins look like two portions of Robert Maxwell, split by an axe. The Krays allowed Pearson the status of a nightclub photographer with a flash in his fist. He was supposed to offer his contribution to their ...

The Egocentric Predicament

Thomas Nagel, 18 May 1989

The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, Vol. II 
by David Pears.
Oxford, 355 pp., £29.50, November 1988, 0 19 824487 8
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... years ago. It is too easy to embrace the solutions without understanding the problems. As David Pears observes, ‘when we read one of Wittgenstein’s discussions of philosophical illusions, there are two things which we may not find it easy to hold together in our minds simultaneously, his success in dispelling them and the depth and difficulty of ...

Blunder around for a while

Richard Rorty, 21 November 1991

Consciousness Explained 
by Daniel Dennett.
Little, Brown, 514 pp., $27.95, October 1991, 0 316 18065 3
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... of post-Rylean anti-Cartesians in chronological order – Wilfrid Sellars, J.J.C. Smart, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam, Jerry Fodor, Donald Davidson, Ruth Millikan, Patricia and Paul Churchland – one gets a clear sense of a developing consensus. There is increasing agreement about which moves will and won’t work, which strategies are dead and ...