Anger and Dismay

Denis Donoghue, 19 July 1984

Literary Education: A Revaluation 
by James Gribble.
Cambridge, 182 pp., £16.50, November 1983, 0 521 25315 2
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Reconstructing Literature 
edited by Laurence Lerner.
Blackwell, 218 pp., £15, August 1983, 0 631 13323 2
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Counter-Modernism in Current Critical Theory 
by Geoffrey Thurley.
Macmillan, 216 pp., £20, October 1983, 0 333 33436 1
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“... are fairly recent. It has long been assumed that the niceties of theory are congenial to French Cartesians, and to Americans, whose literature, in any case, floats free of terrestrial commitment, but that the few English critics who bother with theory are tourists: mid-Atlantic figures like Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner, or Francophiles like Stephen ...”

Secretly Sublime

Iain Sinclair: The Great Ian Penman, 19 March 1998

Vital Signs 
by Ian Penman.
Serpent’s Tail, 374 pp., £10.99, February 1998, 1 85242 523 7
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“... north Norfolk coast. Some edge of the golf course, out of season resort like Sheringham – where Patrick Hamilton dried out, on a regimen of no booze before lunchtime, Hopalong Cassidy novels, and the occasional glimpse from behind net curtains of schoolgirls on horseback. They should have known the real story, because it was there from the start. Staring ...”

Crapper

Thomas Lynch, 21 March 1996

“... addition of a toilet and shower. I added on a room out the back door and put in a bathroom like a French bordello, all tile and glowing figures. I had a septic tank sunk in the back haggard and declared the place all the more habitable for the trouble. But for every luxury there is a loss. Just as the installation of a phone when Nora was 80 cost her the ...”

Simply Doing It

Thomas Laqueur, 22 February 1996

The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain 1650-1950 
by Roy Porter and Lesley Hall.
Yale, 414 pp., £19.95, January 1995, 0 300 06221 4
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“... 17th-century mélange of folk wisdom, medical knowledge and social commonplaces – and the French physician Nicolas Venette’s The Art of Conjugal Love provided pro-natalist, heterosocial, guilt-free guides to better sex within marriage for the artisanal classes and their betters of the middling sort, respectively. Both extolled the naturalness of sex ...”

Red Power

Thomas Meaney: Indigenous Political Strategies, 18 July 2024

Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America 
by Pekka Hämäläinen.
Norton, 571 pp., £17.99, October 2023, 978 1 324 09406 7
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The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History 
by Ned Blackhawk.
Yale, 596 pp., £28, April 2023, 978 0 300 24405 2
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Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance 
by Nick Estes.
Haymarket, 320 pp., £14.99, July, 979 8 88890 082 6
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“... the early English colonists. They could not afford the more languid colonialism of the Russian and French empires, whose fur traders established tributaries and commerce over the course of centuries, as well as making occasional attempts at the religious indoctrination of peoples in the tundra and wilderness that no settler planned to inhabit. The strength and ...”

Collected Works

Angus Calder, 5 January 1989

Men, Women and Work: Class, Gender and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910 
by Mary Blewett.
Illinois, 444 pp., $29.95, July 1988, 0 252 01484 7
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Men’s Lives 
by Peter Matthiessen.
Collins Harvill, 335 pp., £15, August 1988, 0 00 272519 3
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On Work: Historical, Comparative and Theoretical Approaches 
edited by R.E. Pahl.
Blackwell, 752 pp., £39.95, July 1988, 9780631157625
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Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour 
edited by Léonie Archer.
Routledge, 307 pp., £28, August 1988, 0 415 00203 6
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The Historical Meanings of Work 
edited by Patrick Joyce.
Cambridge, 320 pp., £27.50, September 1987, 0 521 30897 6
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Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century 1590-1710 
by David Stevenson.
Cambridge, 246 pp., £25, November 1988, 0 521 35326 2
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“... the means of self-definition provided by sub-cultures. In The Historical Meanings of Work, Patrick Joyce and his contributors concern themselves with ‘work as a cultural activity, rather than simply an economic one’. Joyce argues that the idea of ‘work in general’ as a ‘discrete activity in a distinct “economic” realm’ derives merely ...”

Diary

Keith Thomas: Working Methods, 10 June 2010

“... us how they set about their task. In his splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man he was asked by the medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough at a job interview what his research method was, all he could say was that he tried to look at everything which was remotely relevant to his subject: ‘I had ...”

At the Top Table

Tom Stevenson: The Defence Intelligentsia, 6 October 2022

Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine 
by Lawrence Freedman.
Allen Lane, 574 pp., £30, September 2022, 978 0 241 45699 6
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“... At RUSI’s annual land warfare conference in June, the current chief of the general staff, Patrick Sanders, praised the British army’s response to the crisis and said he would now have an answer for his grandchildren if they asked what he did in 2022.These institutions do make some less boosterish contributions. Chatham House publishes International ...”

Napoleon was wrong

Ian Gilmour, 24 June 1993

Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain 1750-1990 
by W.D. Rubinstein.
Routledge, 182 pp., £25, April 1993, 0 415 03718 2
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British Multinational Banking 
by Geoffrey Jones.
Oxford, 511 pp., £48, March 1993, 0 19 820273 3
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Going for Broke: How Banking Mismanagement in the Eighties Lost Thousands of Billions of Pounds 
by Russell Taylor.
Simon and Schuster, 384 pp., £17.50, April 1993, 0 671 71128 8
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“... that England hath over France ... [and] over every other country in Europe’.* The years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars present a little more of a problem. Britain was certainly the banker of the various coalitions, heavily subsidising the armies of her allies. Yet between 1788 and 1811 British pig-iron production multiplied by five. By the ...”

Clothes were everything to me

Lisa Cohen: Bill Cunningham, 25 October 2018

Fashion Climbing: A New York Life 
by Bill Cunningham.
Chatto, 256 pp., £16.99, October 2018, 978 1 78474 281 2
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“... Rose Cumming, of the purple hair and magnificent display windows; ‘the fascinating Mr [Herman Patrick] Tappé’, another ‘truly original designer’; and Nona Park and Sophie Shonnard of Chez Ninon, the discreet seller of approved reproductions (and modifications) of Paris couture to US society women, who took Cunningham under their wing, brought him ...”

Fatal Realism

Andrew O’Hagan: Walter Lippmann’s Warning, 25 December 2025

Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography 
by Tom Arnold-Forster.
Princeton, 353 pp., £30, July 2025, 978 0 691 21521 1
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“... the minister of foreign affairs, Maurice Couve de Murville; and the new general secretary of the French Communist Party, Waldeck Rochet. From there, Lippmann flew to Rome, where he met diplomats from the Vatican and leaders of the Italian Communist Party. When he returned, he went to the White House to explain the nature of the European alliance to Johnson ...”

Caesar wept

Jan-Werner Müller: Trolling the Libs, 4 December 2025

“... of post-liberals’ uncertainty about which direction to take was a book called Regime Change by Patrick Deneen, one of Orbán’s great fans and fellow-travellers, which was published in 2023. Deneen, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, had risen to prominence five years earlier after the appearance of his short book, Why Liberalism ...”

Raised on Spam

Owen Hatherley: British Communist Art, 9 July 2026

Comrades in Art: Artists against Fascism 1933-43 
by Andy Friend.
Thames & Hudson, 360 pp., £40, September 2025, 978 0 500 02741 7
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“... as in James Holland’s Newsreel, in which a shadowy crowd watch a film showing a painted ‘French hussy’ kissing a greatcoated soldier – but taken together, they look like nothing so much as the future décor of Communist schoolteachers’ living rooms.Although some AIA artists had a wobble during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, for the most part their work ...”

Hinsley’s History

Noël Annan, 1 August 1985

Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War: Essays in Honour of F.H. Hinsley 
edited by Richard Langhorne.
Cambridge, 329 pp., £27.50, May 1985, 0 521 26840 0
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British Intelligence and the Second World War. Vol. I: 1939-Summer 1941, Vol. II: Mid-1941-Mid-1943, Vol. III, Part I: June 1943-June 1944 
by F.H. Hinsley, E.E. Thomas, C.F.G. Ransom and R.C. Knight.
HMSO, 616 pp., £12.95, September 1979, 0 11 630933 4
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“... the professional historians descend like a flight of moths and leave these silken myths in shreds. French generals explained their defeat in 1940 by blaming the politicians for their failure to re-arm in the early Thirties. But Bradford Lee shows that the arms they had at their disposal were the product of years of debate about tactics in the field; and though ...”

A Ripple of the Polonaise

Perry Anderson: Work of the Nineties, 25 November 1999

History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the Nineties 
by Timothy Garton Ash.
Allen Lane, 441 pp., £20, June 1999, 0 7139 9323 5
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“... all others, across the genres. Between the wars, there was a strong strain of exoticism in French writing, variously surfacing in Gide, Morand, Saint-Exupéry, Michaux, Leiris, Malraux and others, to which Tristes Tropiques can be seen as a melancholy quietus. Little comparable followed. On this side of the Channel, where the tradition was always less ...”