Votes for Women, Chastity for Men

Brian Harrison, 21 January 1988

Troublesome People: Enemies of War, 1916-1986 
by Caroline Moorehead.
Hamish Hamilton, 344 pp., £14.95, April 1987, 0 241 12105 1
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Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 
by Susan Kingsley Kent.
Princeton, 295 pp., £22, June 1987, 0 691 05497 5
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Women, Marriage and Politics, 1860-1914 
by Pat Jalland.
Oxford, 366 pp., £19.50, November 1986, 0 19 822668 3
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An Edwardian Mixed Doubles: The Bosanquets versus the Webbs. A Study in British Social Policy, 1890-1929 
by A.M. McBriar.
Oxford, 407 pp., £35, July 1987, 0 19 820111 7
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... and public health, to name only a few. Yet almost at once there came rumblings from Cambridge. Maurice Cowling, John Vincent, Andrew Jones and others rightly emphasised the Victorian politician’s relative autonomy from popular pressure, and cleverly unveiled the feebleness of provincial and popular reformers when they tried to operate at Westminster ...

Tory History

Alan Ryan, 23 January 1986

English Society 1688-1832 
by J.C.D. Clark.
Cambridge, 439 pp., £30, November 1985, 0 521 30922 0
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Virtue, Commerce and History 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 321 pp., £25, November 1985, 0 521 25701 8
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... those of Clark, but he relishes ‘high politics’ and concentrates as hard as any disciple of Maurice Cowling could wish on the details of élite manoeuvre. Nor is Plumb an uncritical admirer of the Whig supremacy or taken in by the England the Whigs governed – it was coarse, provincial and brutal, and infinitely less chic than contemporary ...

Do you think he didn’t know?

Stefan Collini: Kingsley Amis, 14 December 2006

The Life of Kingsley Amis 
by Zachary Leader.
Cape, 996 pp., £25, November 2006, 0 224 06227 1
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... much sign that Micheldene or his creator did feel sorry afterwards. The Cambridge historian Maurice Cowling, who overlapped with Amis’s circle in the early 1960s when Amis was in his pomp, spoke of their having ‘a doctrine about being rude’, a topic on which Cowling spoke with some authority. One of the ...

Whigissimo

Stefan Collini: Herbert Butterfield, 21 July 2005

Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter 
by C.T. McIntire.
Yale, 499 pp., £30, August 2005, 0 300 09807 3
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... of as a progenitor of the so-called ‘Peterhouse Tory’ school, exemplified by such figures as Maurice Cowling and John Vincent, though he did not share their leaning towards reactionary populism or their combative delight in sheer bloodiness. It is wholly appropriate that, by his teaching and example, Butterfield, subtle celebrant of the play of ...