God’s Own

Angus Calder, 12 March 1992

Empire and English Character 
by Kathryn Tidrick.
Tauris, 338 pp., £24.95, August 1990, 1 85043 191 4
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Into Africa: The story of the East African Safari 
by Kenneth Cameron.
Constable, 229 pp., £14.95, June 1990, 0 09 469770 1
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Burton: Snow upon the Desert 
by Frank McLynn.
Murray, 428 pp., £19.95, September 1990, 0 7195 4818 7
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From the Sierras to the Pampas: Richard Burton’s Travels in the Americas, 1860-69 
by Frank McLynn.
Barrie and Jenkins, 258 pp., £16.99, July 1991, 0 7126 3789 3
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The Duke of Puddle Dock: Travels in the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles 
by Nigel Barley.
Viking, 276 pp., £16.99, March 1992, 0 670 83642 7
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... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...

Bitchy Little Spinster

Joanne O’Leary: Queens of Amherst, 3 June 2021

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet 
by Julie Dobrow.
Norton, 448 pp., £13.99, January 2020, 978 0 393 35749 3
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... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...

Manchester’s Moment

Boyd Hilton, 20 August 1998

Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 
by Anthony Howe.
Oxford, 336 pp., £45, December 1997, 9780198201465
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The Origins of War Prevention: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1730-1854 
by Martin Ceadel.
Oxford, 587 pp., £55, December 1996, 0 19 822674 8
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... the jaws of defeat, to elevate triumphs of character above hard-headed victories (the ‘General Gordon syndrome’), and to indulge in le vice anglais (pleasure in being beaten at sport). Even Suez seemed awful, not so much because it was a failure of arms, but because Eden’s actions were sensed to be duplicitous and therefore a blot on England’s ...

What news?

Patrick Collinson: The Pilgrimage of Grace, 1 November 2001

The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s 
by R.W. Hoyle.
Oxford, 487 pp., £30, May 2001, 9780198208747
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... Pilgrimage of Grace (1996) and The Defeat of the Pilgrimage of Grace (1999), which he wrote with David Bownes. But to say that Hoyle shares with other historians what Bishop Sheppard of Liverpool called a bias, if not towards the poor then towards the people, a trendy bias, is not to say that he is wrong, or even that his history is prejudicial. On the ...

The Immortal Coil

Richard Barnett: Faraday’s Letters, 21 March 2013

The Correspondence of Michael Faraday Vol. VI, 1860-67 
by Frank James.
IET, 919 pp., £85, December 2011, 978 0 86341 957 7
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... on Brunel’s Great Western Railway. Studies of Faraday’s experimental sophistication (by David Gooding) and his Sandemanian faith (by Geoffrey Cantor) have deepened, rather than challenged, our sense of his eminence. James’s work, meanwhile – in his own publications and his DNB entry on Faraday – has highlighted Faraday’s importance as a ...

Did he puff his crimes to please a bloodthirsty readership?

Bernard Porter: How bad was Stanley?, 5 April 2007

Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer 
by Tim Jeal.
Faber, 570 pp., £25, March 2007, 978 0 571 22102 8
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... Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like a chamberpot with holes and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s ...

Green, Serene

Sameer Rahim: Islamic Extremism, 19 July 2007

The Islamist 
by Ed Husain.
Penguin, 288 pp., £8.99, May 2007, 978 0 14 103043 2
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... a similar culture. Husain now thinks that Hizb ut-Tahrir should be banned; in this, he agrees with David Cameron, who is upset by Gordon Brown’s refusal to follow up on his predecessor’s promise to eradicate it. In an email sent to various news organisations after reviews of The Islamist began to appear, Hizb ut-Tahrir ...

Too Big to Shut Down

Chal Ravens: Rave On, 7 March 2024

Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain 
by Ed Gillett.
Picador, 464 pp., £20, August 2023, 978 1 5290 7064 4
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... before’. The story of the former pirate radio station Kiss FM is instructive. Founded by Gordon McNamee in 1985, when the pirates were the only stations that would play the new dance music being made by Black artists, Kiss FM was home to many of the best DJs of the era, including Danny Rampling and the future Radio 1 star Trevor Nelson. But the ...

Heir to Blair

Christopher Tayler: Among the New Tories, 26 April 2007

... being the buzzword for the shearing off of voter-unfriendly associations. Before David Cameron, or ‘DC’, as he’s known, took over in December 2005, Conservative strategists had noted anxiously that focus groups would turn against almost anything – even, or especially, tax cuts – as soon as they were told it was Tory ...

Bunnymooning

Philip French, 6 June 1996

The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives 
by Sebastian Faulks.
Hutchinson, 309 pp., £16.99, April 1996, 0 09 179211 8
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... Nancy Mitford two years later to distinguish between U and non-U. From across the Atlantic came David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd, which taught us to separate modern man into the two camps of the inner directed and the other-directed. This way of observing the world suggested that there were no natural laws, that nothing was absolute or determined. Instead ...

Resistance from Elsewhere

Kevin Okoth: Black Marxism, 7 April 2022

Black Marxism 
by Cedric Robinson.
Penguin, 436 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 0 241 51417 7
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Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition 
by Joshua Myers.
Polity, 276 pp., £17.99, September 2021, 978 1 5095 3792 1
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... of Racial Capitalism in South Africa’, by the South African historians Martin Legassick and David Hemson. In the late 1970s, the official position of the UN’s International Labour Organisation was that the policy of apartheid was in direct conflict with economic growth, and that growth would eventually undermine and force an end to ...

Determined to Spin

Susan Watkins, 22 June 2000

The Clear Stream: A Life of Winifred Holtby 
by Marion Shaw.
Virago, 335 pp., £18.99, August 1999, 1 86049 537 0
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... wave of militancy among agricultural workers erupted into a harvest-time strike at Rudston Farm. David Holtby could afford the wage increases: it was the Saturday half-day that he couldn’t stomach. Baffled and defeated, he threw in his hand and sold the farm. Winifred came back from the war to find her parents living in wealthy suburban Cottingham, on the ...

Heathrow to Canary Wharf

Nick Richardson: Crossrail, 11 October 2012

... unburrowed and Abercrombie moved east to rebuild Hong Kong. The name ‘Crossrail’ was coined by David Barran, a monocle-wearing, snuff-snorting industrialist, in a 1974 report drawn up at the request of the Department of the Environment. Barran, like Abercrombie, proposed two tunnels, one from London Bridge to Victoria, the other from Paddington to ...

Hoogah-Boogah

James Wolcott: Rick Moody, 19 September 2002

The Black Veil 
by Rick Moody.
Faber, 323 pp., £16.99, August 2002, 0 571 20056 7
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... Like Eggers (whose memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was puffed by Moody), David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann, Moody spurns the eye-dropper technique of minimalism that was fashionable when he was a nervous colt in the 1980s in favour of a bachelor-guy pack-rat approach where everything the author has ever seen, read, felt or ...

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... across the panorama of blight, wheel-hubs for discuses. Trail of the Spider by Anja Kirschner and David Panos announced itself as a Situationist spaghetti western shot on Hackney Marshes; where, the makers assert, the land-grab expansionism of the Old West ‘collides with suppressed history’. Range wars erupt along ‘a vanishing frontier, swarming with ...