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D.A.N. Jones, 17 November 1983

Peter Hall’s Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle 
edited by John Goodwin.
Hamish Hamilton, 507 pp., £12.95, November 1983, 0 241 11047 5
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... Nattke in order to outvote the happy band of brothers; another tactic was to give a Note to John Wilson, the general secretary of Nattke, telling him to keep his men in order. That’s what union leaders are for, aren’t they? Reading Goodwin’s book, Sir Peter also discovered how often and how bitterly he had complained about his bad press: he supposes he ...

Oh God, can we face it?

Daniel Finn: ‘The BBC’s Irish Troubles’, 19 May 2016

The BBC’s ‘Irish Troubles’: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland 
by Robert Savage.
Manchester, 298 pp., £70, May 2015, 978 0 7190 8733 2
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... sectarian violence in Belfast forced hundreds of (mostly Catholic) families to leave their homes. Harold Wilson’s decision to send in the army – nominally on a mission to protect civilians, but really in support of the ‘civil power’ whose writ no longer ran in Derry – changed the parameters of reporting for the BBC and other media outlets. With ...

Destined to Disappear

Susan Pedersen: ‘Race Studies’, 20 October 2016

White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations 
by Robert Vitalis.
Cornell, 272 pp., $29.95, November 2015, 978 0 8014 5397 7
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... field’s core concepts (realism, liberal internationalism) back to Thucydides or Machiavelli or Wilson is, Vitalis insists, a post-1945 invention. Instead, at the moment of its American birth, ‘international relations meant race relations.’ Races, not states or nations, were considered humanity’s foundational political units; ‘race war’ – not ...

Lace the air with LSD

Mike Jay: Brain Warfare, 4 February 2021

Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control 
by Stephen Kinzer.
Henry Holt, 384 pp., £11.99, November 2020, 978 1 250 76262 7
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... were attempts to bring the CIA to heel. In 1953, for example, the US secretary of defence, Charles Wilson, issued a memo stating that all experiments involving volunteers required their consent, in compliance with the Nuremberg Code. But this clearly wasn’t going to fly with the men in charge of finding ways to force individuals to provide information ...

Had he not run

David Reynolds: America’s longest-serving president, 2 June 2005

Franklin Delano Roosevelt 
by Roy Jenkins.
Pan, 208 pp., £7.99, May 2005, 0 330 43206 0
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Franklin D. Roosevelt 
by Patrick Renshaw.
Longman, 223 pp., $16.95, December 2003, 0 582 43803 9
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom 
by Conrad Black.
Weidenfeld, 1280 pp., £17.99, October 2004, 0 7538 1848 5
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... him hard to read. ‘You keep your cards close up against your belly,’ his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, complained. ‘You never put them on the table.’ Roosevelt played off one adviser against another as a matter of course. ‘Never let your left hand know what your right is doing,’ he told Henry Morgenthau, his treasury secretary and a close ...

An Easy Lay

James Davidson: Greek tragedy, 30 September 1999

Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy 
edited by Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne.
Cambridge, 417 pp., £45, June 1997, 0 521 64247 7
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The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy 
edited by P.E. Easterling.
Cambridge, 410 pp., £14.95, October 1997, 0 521 42351 1
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Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning 
by David Wiles.
Cambridge, 130 pp., £13.95, August 1999, 0 521 66615 5
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... Aeschylus’ rival Phrynichus was particularly noted for his choreographies, or learn from Peter Wilson in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy that the shawm (aulos) which always accompanied a performance came in various shapes and sizes depending on the musical context (the ‘wedding shawm’, for example, consisted of one ‘male’ and one ...

Darling Clem

Paul Addison, 17 April 1986

Clement Attlee 
by Trevor Burridge.
Cape, 401 pp., £20, January 1986, 0 224 02318 7
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The Second World War Diary of Hugh Dalton 1940-1945 
edited by Ben Pimlott.
Cape in association with the London School of Economics, 913 pp., £40, February 1986, 9780224020657
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Loyalists and Loners 
by Michael Foot.
Collins, 315 pp., £15, March 1986, 0 00 217583 5
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... in 1967, Attlee began to be missed and appreciated. As the Labour Party ran slowly downhill under Wilson, Callaghan and Foot, Attlee shuffled uphill to join the immortals. Comparisons between past and present told heavily in Attlee’s favour, and the golden age of 1945 took its place in Labour mythology. Both Left and Right of the Party looked back to 1945 ...

Keach and Shelley

Denis Donoghue, 19 September 1985

Shelley’s Style 
by William Keach.
Methuen, 269 pp., £18, April 1985, 9780416303209
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Ariel: A Shelley Romance 
by André Maurois and Ella D’Arcy.
Penguin, 252 pp., £1.95, September 1985, 0 14 000001 1
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... but no match for Leavis’s dismissive account of Shelley in Revaluation (1936). Herbert Read, G.Wilson Knight, Frederick Pottle and many other defenders argued that Shelley’s poetry is sustained by the coherence of its imagery, and that the work as a whole shows an extremely intelligent mind fully in touch with the philosophy and science available to ...

Plonking

Ferdinand Mount: Edward Heath, 22 July 2010

Edward Heath 
by Philip Ziegler.
Harper, 654 pp., £25, June 2010, 978 0 00 724740 0
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... Heath was never a wholehearted believer in ‘Selsdon Man’ – the phrase was a nifty minting of Harold Wilson’s. All he was looking for was a distinct and attractive contrast to Labour’s flounderings, and so he promised a ‘quiet revolution’, in terms which understandably convinced his right wing that he had come over to their way of ...

Bottlenecks

Partha Dasgupta: What Environmentalism Overlooks, 19 May 2005

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive 
by Jared Diamond.
Allen Lane, 575 pp., £20, January 2005, 0 7139 9286 7
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... activity inflicts. Moreover, in recent years such environmental scientists as Paul Ehrlich, Edward Wilson and, most recently, Gretchen Daily, Harold Mooney and Walter Reid, have spoken out while taking far greater care with details and qualifications than Diamond appears to believe is necessary. The more important reason why ...

The Untreatable

Gavin Francis: The Spanish Flu, 25 January 2018

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World 
by Laura Spinney.
Jonathan Cape, 352 pp., £20, June 2017, 978 1 910702 37 6
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... he banned them from theatres. When Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms came to New York in October, Harold Edel, the manager of the Strand Theatre, wrote: ‘We think it a most wonderful appreciation of Shoulder Arms that people should veritably take their lives in their hands to see it.’ Edel was dead within a week, of flu.Although there was no effective ...

You’re with your king

Jeremy Harding: Morocco’s Secret Prisons, 10 February 2022

Tazmamart: Eighteen Years in Morocco’s Secret Prison 
by Aziz BineBine, translated by Lulu Norman.
Haus, £9.99, March 2021, 978 1 913368 13 5
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... in the newly independent Algerian parliament; Willy Brandt, the future chancellor of West Germany; Harold Wilson, on the eve of his first term as prime minister; and François Mitterrand, who as minister of justice approved the execution of at least forty Algerian nationalists during the independence struggle. A separate French protest was signed by ...
... of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of Guildford, Foreign Office minister, still in government at the age of 76 under his fellow Etonian David ...

Ideas of Decline

Sheldon Rothblatt, 6 August 1981

English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 
by Martin Wiener.
Cambridge, 217 pp., £9.95, April 1981, 0 521 23418 2
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Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialisation of Europe, 1760-1970 
by Sidney Pollard.
Oxford, 451 pp., £7.95, June 1981, 0 19 877093 6
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... visible means of support. Imitation and room at the top eventually produced that trade-off which Harold Perkin memorably called the ‘viable class society’, class without ruinous conflict. The Victorian compromise, Wiener asserts, lasted right up to the present. And so the work ethic was washed down in a bumper of roses and wine. In outline this is of ...

Roth, Pinter, Berlin and Me

Christopher Tayler: Clive James, 11 March 2010

The Blaze of Obscurity: The TV Years 
by Clive James.
Picador, 325 pp., £17.99, October 2009, 978 0 330 45736 1
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... says, is ‘self-glorifying pantaloon’: ‘At the same table as David Hockney, Philip Roth, Harold Pinter and Sir Isaiah Berlin, it was flattering to be treated like one of the boys.’ We sometimes meet the man who’s concerned to share unflattering truths about himself – admissions, mostly, of getting over-accustomed to having teams of assistants ...

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