Thatcherism

Gordon Brown, 2 February 1989

Thatcherism 
edited by Robert Skidelsky.
Chatto, 214 pp., £18, November 1988, 0 7011 3342 2
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The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left 
by Stuart Hall.
Verso, 283 pp., £24.95, December 1988, 0 86091 199 3
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... have made our problems worse. A.H. Halsey and Brian Barry in their essay in the Skidelsky, and David Marquand in his, take this on, seeking to identify collective actions and provisions that can mitigate the worst effects of the free market. By denying, in a chillingly offguard moment, the very existence of such a thing as society, she has at least allowed ...

Smoking for England

Paul Foot, 5 July 1984

Smoke Ring: The Politics of Tobacco 
by Peter Taylor.
Bodley Head, 384 pp., £9.95, March 1984, 0 370 30513 2
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... on by the medical profession, set out to curb the tobacco industry. They were Kenneth Robinson and David Owen (Labour) and Sir George Young (Tory). All three were routed. The hardest fighter of the three was Sir George Young. His determination to cut down, for instance, on tobacco’s sponsorship of sports made him unpopular in those parts of the Tory Party ...

2000 AD

Anne Sofer, 2 August 1984

The British General Election of 1983 
by David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh.
Macmillan, 388 pp., £25, May 1984, 0 333 34578 9
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Militant 
by Michael Crick.
Faber, 242 pp., £3.95, June 1984, 0 571 13256 1
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... When future historians come to write about the 1983 General Election, these two books will be essential reading. One is a thorough compilation of the evidence, and the other a brilliant line drawing of a maverick who streaked dramatically across the scene causing all heads to turn and significantly affecting the outcome. I recommend to the researcher of the year 2000 that he or she start with Militant, to get properly into the mood ...

Wigan Peer

Stephen Koss, 15 November 1984

The Crawford Papers: The Journals of David Lindsay, 27th Earl of Crawford and 10th Earl of Balcarres, during the Years 1892 to 1940 
edited by John Vincent.
Manchester, 645 pp., £35, October 1984, 0 7190 0948 0
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... though we were a public meeting... never letting anybody else get a word in’. Worthy of F.E. Smith’s gibe that he was the sort of gentleman who always played the game and always lost it, Austen waited for his adversary to depart before having ‘his revenge – pouring out an incessant flow of reminiscence which might be amusing were it crisp and ...

Diary

C.K. Stead: A New Zealander in London, 18 October 1984

... Labour. That accord, and the fact that it held, owes a lot to the personality and strengths of David Lange: but if the Left had split, as it has split here between socialists and SDP, we would have had yet another term of the execrable Muldoon and the yes-men he gathered around him. In our SW9 house there is evidence that our landlord and his wife have ...

Black, White and Female

Betty Wood, 2 May 1985

The Limits of Liberty: American History 1607-1980 
by Maldwyn Jones.
Oxford, 696 pp., £22.50, November 1983, 0 19 913074 4
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America: A Narrative History 
by Charles Brown Tindall.
Norton, 1425 pp., £16.95, July 1984, 0 393 95435 8
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The Longman History of the United States 
by Hugh Brogan.
Longman, 740 pp., £19.95, March 1985, 0 582 35385 8
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American Tough: The Tough-Guy Tradition and American Character 
by Rupert Wilkinson.
Greenwood, 221 pp., £27.95, March 1984, 0 313 23797 2
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... particularly disappointing not to find any mention of Gary Nash’s The Urban Crucible (1979) or David Galenson’s White Servitude in Colonial America (1981). Student readers of Jones and Brogan could be forgiven for thinking that little of relevance has been published in this area of American history since the mid-1970s, while nothing could be further from ...

Rational Switch

Vernon Bogdanor, 17 June 1982

Democracy at the Polls: A Comparative Study of Competitive National Elections 
edited by David Butler, Howard Penniman and Austin Ranney.
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 367 pp., £5.75, March 1982, 0 8447 3403 9
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... It was R. B. McCallum who invented the word ‘psephology’ to describe the study of elections. Yet in 1955 he wrote of the act of voting as the last haven of free choice in an increasingly bureaucratised society, an ultimate redoubt to be defended at all costs against the assault of the social sciences. ‘The secrecy of the ballot, the pencilled cross in the secluded polling booth’, was, he said, ‘the great eleusinian mystery of the democratic state ...

Under the Staircase

Robert Neild, 1 April 1983

War Plan UK: The Truth about Civil Defence in Britain 
by Duncan Campbell.
Burnett, 488 pp., £12.95, November 1982, 0 09 150670 0
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With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War 
by Robert Scheer.
Secker, 279 pp., £8.95, February 1983, 0 436 44355 4
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... home and sit under the staircase. And his conclusion is consistent with that scathingly drawn by David Owen: ‘the Royal Family, central government and local government politicians, the admirals, generals and air marshals and senior administrators all survive. But millions of others lose their lives. Money is to be spent on Sub-Regional Headquarters; the ...

Diary

Ian Hamilton: New New Grub Street, 3 February 1983

... him, too, for his lovable obsessions – with Barbara Woodhouse, with Sue-Ellen’s mouth, with David Vine, and with all things Japanese – and for his willingness to admit that vulgar stuff is best watched fairly vulgarly: ‘You would have to be dead not to be thrilled to bits by her.’ There is a good joke about every fifth page of this volume, and the ...

Leaving it alone

R.G. Opie, 21 April 1983

Britain can work 
by Ian Gilmour.
Martin Robertson, 272 pp., £8.95, March 1983, 0 85520 571 7
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The Use of Public Power 
by Andrew Shonfield, edited by Zuzanna Shonfield.
Oxford, 140 pp., £9.95, January 1983, 0 19 215357 9
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... ancient ‘quantity theory of money’ which, two centuries after it was so elegantly spelt out by David Hume and a century after it was translated into snappy but empty symbols – MV = PT – by Irving Fisher, is still the basis of so much analysis of inflation. As Sir Ian says, ‘old doctrines never die: in economics, they never even fade away.’ He ...

Infidels

Malise Ruthven, 2 June 1983

The Helen Smith Story 
by Paul Foot and Ron Smith.
Fontana, 418 pp., £1.95, February 1983, 0 00 636536 1
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... of several witnesses, including Mr Arnot (represented at the local ratepayers’ expense by Sir David Napley) and three pathologists, returned an open verdict on the death of Helen Smith. The Foreign Office case, of course, though officials latterly pretended to be disinterested, required a verdict of ‘accidental death’. Allah is All-knowing: were ...

Funnies

Caroline Moorehead, 5 February 1981

Siege! Princes Gate 
by the Sunday Times ‘Insight’ Team.
Hamlyn, 131 pp., May 1980, 0 600 20337 9
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Siege: Six Days at the Iranian Embassy 
by George Brock.
Macmillan, 144 pp., £1.95, May 1980, 0 333 30951 0
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Who dares wins 
by Tony Geraghty.
Arms and Armour, 256 pp., £8.95, July 1980, 9780853684572
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... urban counter-terrorist force does not make edifying reading. In 1941, a subaltern in the Guards, David Stirling, fighting Rommel in the Western Desert, decided that what the campaign needed was guerrilla tactics: small units of highly-trained commandos striking by stealth. After the war, the skills of the first Special Air Service were transferred to the ...

Putting down

Emma Rothschild, 4 June 1981

The Zero-Sum Society 
by Lester Thurow.
Harper and Row, 230 pp., £7.95, February 1981, 0 465 09384 1
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... jobs and food, but excluding Social Security, Medicaid and unemployment insurance). To this Mr David Stockman, Director of the Office of Management and Budget (who found the book about single men so Promethean) responds with optimism. Of 16.5 million poor people (living on less than $12,600 a year for a family of four), only ‘47 per cent would suffer a ...

Mad or bad?

Michael Ignatieff, 18 June 1981

Trial by Medicine: Insanity and Responsibility in Victorian Trials 
by Roger Smith.
Edinburgh, 288 pp., £15, March 1981, 9780852244074
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... treatment and the public discourse has already been charted by Andrew Scull, Michel Foucault and David Rothman. Roger Smith’s contribution is to show that the legal conceptions of mens rea and free will provided the basis for resisting medical claims to hegemoney, not only within the courtroom, but in ‘public opinion’ at large. The ...

Goethe In Britain

Rosemary Ashton, 19 March 1981

Goethe’s Plays 
translated by Charles Passage.
Benn, 626 pp., £12.95, July 1980, 0 510 00087 8
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The Classical Centre: Goethe and Weimar 1775-1832 
by T.J. Reed.
Croom Helm, 271 pp., £14.95, November 1979, 0 85664 356 4
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Goethe on Art 
translated by John Gage.
Scolar, 251 pp., £10, March 1980, 0 85967 494 0
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The Younger Goethe and the Visual Arts 
by W.D. Robson-Scott.
Cambridge, 175 pp., £19.50, February 1981, 0 521 23321 6
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... his teacher, Oeser, the mannerist classicism of Fuseli and Girodet, and the realist classicism of David. Goethe, for long a serious and mediocre painter, was a better critic than he was a theorist. Against the arid connoisseurship of the proselytising essays in his periodical Propyläen – too conscious an attempt to educate public taste – the essays on ...