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Bertie Wooster in Murmansk

Sheila Fitzpatrick, 25 January 2024

A Nasty Little War: The West’s Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution 
by Anna Reid.
John Murray, 366 pp., £25, November 2023, 978 1 5293 2676 5
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... that the intervention was something best forgotten. Indeed, both Richard Nixon in 1972 and Margaret Thatcher twelve years later succeeded so well in this that they were able to assure Soviet interlocutors that their countries had never been at war with each other.There was plenty of reason to see the intervention as nasty – for starters, lack of ...

Goodness me

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 26 October 1989

Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice: A Politician’s Psycho-Biography of Margaret Thatcher 
by Leo Abse.
Cape, 288 pp., £13.95, September 1989, 0 224 02726 3
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... Mrs Thatcher, like Hedda Gabler, thinks of herself as her father’s daughter. For a hero, Alderman Roberts may be lacking in style. ‘A cautious, thrifty fellow’ is how Hugo Young describes him and it’s easy to tell he isn’t impressed. But Alfred Roberts was an imposing figure in Grantham and his businesses worked at a time when a great many failed ...

England’s Isaiah

Perry Anderson, 20 December 1990

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas 
by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy.
Murray, 276 pp., £18.95, October 1990, 9780719547898
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... Intellectual hero to Noel Annan, whose political heroine is Margaret Thatcher, should Isaiah Berlin be left to the – ‘unfashionable’ – enthusiasms of Our Age? Or consigned to the plaudits that have broken out for his latest volume from the Spectator to the New Statesman? He himself strikes a more modest note ...

Why did we not know?

Ian Jack: Who is hoarding the land?, 23 May 2019

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain 
by Brett Christophers.
Verso, 394 pp., £20, November 2018, 978 1 78663 158 9
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... of land from state to private ownership is the biggest of the privatisations that began under Margaret Thatcher and have continued under every administration since, dwarfing in both scope and value the more prominent sales of utilities such as gas, electricity and water, or social housing under the Right to Buy scheme, or nationalised industries such ...

Cartwheels over Broken Glass

Andrew O’Hagan: Worshipping Morrissey, 4 March 2004

Saint Morrissey 
by Mark Simpson.
SAF, 224 pp., £16.99, December 2003, 0 946719 65 9
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The Smiths: Songs that Saved Your Life 
by Simon Goddard.
Reynolds/Hearn, 272 pp., £14.99, December 2002, 1 903111 47 1
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... hero-worship in such a manner as to make him a new sort of hero. He also knew how to hate Margaret Thatcher and the royal family, and he sent them up with an intoxicating vaudevillian glee: So I broke into the palace, With a sponge and a rusty spanner. She said: ‘Eh I know you and you cannot sing.’ I said: ‘That’s nothing, you should ...

This Sporting Life

R.W. Johnson, 8 December 1994

Iain Macleod 
by Robert Shepherd.
Hutchinson, 608 pp., £25, November 1994, 0 09 178567 7
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... asked him to be Shadow Chancellor – and was surprised by his choice of deputy. ‘Let me have Margaret Thatcher,’ he said – for he had noted her drive and energy. Macleod was passionately anti-hanging, pro-abortion and broke finally with Powell over his ‘rivers of blood’ speech (‘Enoch’s gone mad and hates the blacks’). ...

Didn’t they notice?

David Runciman: Offshore, 14 April 2011

Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World 
by Nicholas Shaxson.
Bodley Head, 329 pp., £14.99, January 2011, 978 1 84792 110 9
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Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class 
by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson.
Simon and Schuster, 368 pp., £11.50, March 2011, 978 1 4165 8870 2
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... election of the pro-big business, anti-big government Ronald Reagan in 1980 (and concomitantly, Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979). But Hacker and Pierson argue that the real turning point came in 1978, during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. This was the year the lobbyists and other organised groups who were pushing hard to relax the burden of tax ...

What happened to the Labour Party?

W.G. Runciman: The difference between then and now, 22 June 2006

... at any rate appear to be, so many more of them than there were. Some may attribute the change to Margaret Thatcher, with her outspoken determination to roll back the encroaching state, her vehement belief in free, competitive markets, her implacable hostility to the trade unions, and her famous remark that ‘there is no such thing as society.’ But as ...

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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... West’s dominant ideology – the uncompromising doctrines of the Right proclaimed by Reagan and Thatcher. For Garton Ash, then an editor and contributor at the Spectator, this was a natural and desirable evolution. For Ascherson, no friend of Thatcherism, it must have posed more difficulties. Probably, too, domestic considerations weighed in their own ...

Scotland’s Dreaming

Rory Scothorne, 21 May 2020

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: The Great Mistake of Scottish Independence 
by John Lloyd.
Polity, 224 pp., £20, April 2020, 978 1 5095 4266 6
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The Literary Politics of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, Nation 
by Scott Hames.
Edinburgh, 352 pp., £24.99, November 2019, 978 1 4744 1814 0
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... moral economy was tested, and cracked.’ Here, Lloyd usefully chips away at the notion of Margaret Thatcher as a supervillain of Scottish history. As he writes, the rot started before she took office, but where Wilson, Callaghan and even Heath sought to manage the decline of Britain’s traditional industries, ...

Beebology

Stefan Collini: What next for the BBC?, 21 April 2022

The BBC: A People’s History 
by David Hendy.
Profile, 638 pp., £25, January, 978 1 78125 525 4
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This Is the BBC: Entertaining the Nation, Speaking for Britain? 1922-2022 
by Simon J. Potter.
Oxford, 288 pp., £20, April, 978 0 19 289852 4
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... more directly under government control, a frequent reflex of disgruntled politicians.Predictably, Margaret Thatcher hated the ‘British Bastard Corporation’, as her husband liked to call it. Coverage of the Falklands War was an inevitable flashpoint, with Thatcher raging against reporters’ references to ...

In the Superstate

Wolfgang Streeck: What is technopopulism?, 27 January 2022

Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics 
by Christopher J. Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti.
Oxford, 256 pp., £75, February 2021, 978 0 19 880776 6
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... elected leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in 2000, Merkel aspired to be the German Thatcher, arguing for the full neoliberal programme, including the abolishment of free collective bargaining and worker participation in management. But when she almost lost her first election in 2005, and had to govern through a grand coalition – a coalition ...

Republican King

Philippe Marlière: François Mitterrand, 17 April 2014

Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity 
by Philip Short.
Bodley Head, 692 pp., £30, November 2013, 978 1 84792 006 5
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... verbatim private conversations between Mitterrand and other foreign leaders (in particular Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl). He also conducted interviews with Mitterrand’s wife, Danielle, and Anne Pingeot, his long-time mistress. The result is a rich, detailed and dependable biography, framed as a ‘study in ambiguity’. Who was ...

Women in Power

Mary Beard: From Medusa to Merkel, 16 March 2017

... share is a capacity to turn the symbols that usually disempower women to their own advantage. Margaret Thatcher seems to have done that with her handbags, so that eventually the most stereotypically female accessory became a verb of political power: as in ‘to handbag’.13 And I suppose that at an incomparably more junior level I did something ...

An Escalation of Reasonableness

Conor Gearty: Northern Ireland, 6 September 2001

To Raise up a New Northern Ireland: Articles and Speeches 1998-2000 
by David Trimble.
Belfast Press, 166 pp., £5.99, July 2001, 0 9539287 1 3
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... after spending 66 days on hunger strike. Speaking on the day of his death in the House of Commons, Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, described him as a ‘convicted criminal’ who ‘chose to take his own life’. This did not stop a crowd of nearly a hundred thousand people attending his funeral in Belfast. One week later, Francis Hughes died, and ...

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