Staggering on

Stephen Howe, 23 May 1996

The ‘New Statesman’: Portrait of a Political Weekly, 1913-31 
by Adrian Smith.
Cass, 340 pp., £30, February 1996, 0 7146 4645 8
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“... Clennell Wilkinson, the pompous and plagiaristic Ellis Roberts. And there were writers who, like David Garnett, simply couldn’t manage the world of journalistic deadlines. Today, leftish journals face an ever-widening gulf between the concerns of ‘cultural politics’ and the day-to-day agenda of professional politicians, which remains overwhelmingly ...”

Diary

Lulu Norman: In Ethiopia, 4 September 1997

“... came to Ethiopia in 1769 to look for the source of the Nile and took away with him the Songs of David, Kibre Negest (‘Glory of the Kings’) and the Book of Enoch, which he no doubt considered as souvenirs or going-home presents to himself. As well as being a sacred artefact, the Kibre Negest relates much of Ethiopia’s early history. It was returned to ...”

Allergic to Depths

Terry Eagleton: Gothic, 18 March 1999

Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin 
by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Fourth Estate, 438 pp., £20, December 1998, 1 85702 498 2
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“... Piranesi, Fuseli, William Shenstone, Byron, Hawthorne, Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Poppy Z. Brite and David Lynch. ‘Gothic’ is no doubt as variable in definition as it is in quality, but one can’t avoid the sense of a certain arbitrariness of selection. It is not so much that any obvious authors have been left out; it is rather that there are a few ...”

A Pickwick among Poets, Exiled in the Fatherland of Pickled Fish

Colin Burrow: British Latin verse, 19 August 1999

The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the Traditions of British Latin Verse 
by D.K. Money.
Oxford, 406 pp., £38, December 1998, 0 19 726184 1
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“... metrical form), the stately Latin transformation of Absalom and Achitophel by Francis Atterbury. David Money’s learned book seeks to rescue one exponent of this cliqueish art-form from the dust-heap. His hero is Anthony Alsop (1669-1726), Pickwick among poets, a figure whose donnish and parsonical life was disturbed only when in 1716 he married the widow ...”

Who shall we blame it on?

Yitzhak Laor: Lament for the Israeli Left, 20 February 2003

“... according to which ‘former Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians everything at Camp David, but they wanted even more.’ So where did the handful of members of the radical Left go? They voted for the Democratic Front (the Communist Party and others), or for Balad, Dr Azmi Bishara’s Arab nationalist party. Most remained secluded inside the ...”

McNed

Gillian Darley: Lutyens, 17 April 2003

The Architect and His Wife: A Life of Edwin Lutyens 
by Jane Ridley.
Chatto, 524 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 7011 7201 0
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Edwin Lutyens, Country Houses: From the Archives of ‘Country Life’ 
by Gavin Stamp.
Aurum, 192 pp., £35, May 2001, 1 85410 763 1
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Lutyens Abroad 
edited by Andrew Hopkins and Gavin Stamp.
British School at Rome, 260 pp., £34.95, March 2002, 0 904152 37 5
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“... of Victorian Gothic larded with Islamic motifs, resoundingly to flight.’ Architecture, as David Cannadine has pointed out, played a part in the consolidation of the Indian Empire, and the Viceroy’s House, ‘a ducal domain-cum-country house-cum-princely palace’, complete with six thousand servants, was a metaphor for the social hierarchy and ...”

The other side have got one

Ian Gilmour: Lady Thatcher’s Latest, 6 June 2002

Ideologies of Conservatism: Conservative Political Ideas in the 20th Century 
by E.H.H. Green.
Oxford, 309 pp., £25, February 2002, 0 19 820593 7
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Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World 
by Margaret Thatcher.
HarperCollins, 486 pp., £25, April 2002, 0 00 710752 8
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“... too close to it may in many cases be destructive. Circumstances must come in.’ In the 18th, David Hume believed that ‘parties from principle, especially abstract speculative principle’, were ‘perhaps the most extraordinary and unaccountable phenomenon’ that had yet appeared, and that ‘all general maxims in politics ought to be established with ...”

Diary

Carl Elliott: The Ethics of Bioethics, 28 November 2002

“... the wickedness of the market, only to keep the market in its proper place. In Silent Theft, David Bollier shows how isolated ‘gift economies’ can flourish within a larger market economy. One example is the subculture of people who have developed software and distributed it for free on the Internet. Another example is the community gardens that ...”

No Escape

Bruce Robbins: Culture, 1 November 2001

Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress 
edited by Samuel Huntington and Lawrence Harrison.
Basic Books, 384 pp., £12.99, April 2001, 0 465 03176 5
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Culture/Metaculture 
by Francis Mulhern.
Routledge, 198 pp., £8.99, March 2000, 0 415 10230 8
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Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account 
by Adam Kuper.
Harvard, 299 pp., £12.50, November 2000, 0 674 00417 5
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“... and Kulturkritik. Kuper’s three chapter-length profiles of American anthropologists (Geertz, David Schneider and Marshall Sahlins) are followed by a composite chapter on the younger (now middle-aged) generation of James Clifford and George Marcus, co-editors of Writing Culture. Here the tone changes. Up to this point Kuper has been gently ...”

Successive Applications of Sticking-Plaster

Andrew Saint: The urban history of Britain, 1 November 2001

The Cambridge Urban History of Britain. Vol. III: 1840-1950 
edited by Martin Daunton.
Cambridge, 944 pp., £90, January 2001, 0 521 41707 4
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“... convey the broad picture, it cannot offer the sense and quality of experience. An example comes in David Feldman’s elegant chapter on migration. By defining this simply as the crossing of boundaries, he is able to embrace almost a majority of the urban population and juxtapose the longer-distance Victorian economic influx into cities with the 20th-century ...”

Capital’s Capital

Christopher Prendergast: Baron Haussmann’s Paris, 3 October 2002

Haussmann: His Life and Times, and the Making of Modern Paris 
by Michel Carmona, translated by Patrick Camiller.
Ivan Dee, 480 pp., £25, June 2002, 9781566634274
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“... a more crisply informed account we need to turn to the work of the Marxist geographer-historian, David Harvey). At the psychic and cultural level, the outcomes were often paradoxical: Haussmann’s glittering city, with its spanking new boulevards and enticing department stores, was felt by many to be a blank, empty at the heart. Edmond de Goncourt wrote in ...”

Termagant

Ian Gilmour: The Cliveden Set, 19 October 2000

The Cliveden Set: Portrait of an Exclusive Fraternity 
by Norman Rose.
Cape, 277 pp., £20, August 2000, 0 224 06093 7
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“... eldest son, Bill, was dull; and of the other three boys, all of whom were highly intelligent, only David fulfilled his potential. Against his mother’s violent and continuing opposition her husband made him editor of the Astor-owned Observer, where he proved himself to be probably the best of all British post-Second World War editors. The other two, as well ...”

Make enemies and influence people

Ross McKibbin: Why Vote Labour?, 20 July 2000

“... the minister most responsible for Parliamentary reform, has been an almost complete failure. The David Blunkett of Sheffield Council days is scarcely recognisable as the present Education Secretary; while Jack Straw’s attitudes are all too familiar. And they are the big-hitters. Furthermore, the constitutional and political powerlessness of the ...”
The Dons 
by Noël Annan.
HarperCollins, 357 pp., £17.99, November 1999, 0 00 257074 2
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A Man of Contradictions: A Life of A.L.Rowse 
by Richard Ollard.
Allen Lane, 368 pp., £20, October 1999, 0 7139 9353 7
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“... legitimate the witch-hunts of all recent governments against ‘lazy’ academics. I rather hope David Blunkett never reads The Dons. But were dons, as a group, ever, even a hundred years ago, as Annan paints them? I doubt it. Annan wittily recounts a whole series of myths of the eccentric ‘college man’ of the early to mid-20th century. These stories, to ...”

Manufacturing in Manhattan

Eric Foner, 1 June 2000

Working-Class New York: Life and Labour Since World War Two 
by Joshua Freeman.
New Press, 393 pp., $35, May 2000, 1 56584 575 7
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“... was heavily promoted by the Rockefellers (Nelson, Governor of New York, and his brother David, head of the Chase Manhattan Bank), partly because it promised to raise real estate values and create new office space by displacing hundreds of small enterprises. Meanwhile, the Port of New York Authority rebuilt the docks across the Hudson River while ...”