What Is Great about Ourselves

Pankaj Mishra: Closing Time, 21 September 2017

The Retreat of Western Liberalism 
by Edward Luce.
Little, Brown, 240 pp., £16.99, May 2017, 978 1 4087 1041 8Show More
The Fate of the West: Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea 
by Bill Emmott.
Economist, 257 pp., £22, May 2017, 978 1 61039 780 3Show More
The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics 
by David Goodhart.
Hurst, 256 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 84904 799 9Show More
The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics 
by Mark Lilla.
Harper, 143 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 0 06 269743 1Show More
The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam 
by Douglas Murray.
Bloomsbury, 343 pp., £18.99, May 2017, 978 1 4729 4224 1Show More
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“... man will have the whip hand over the white man’; ten years later, the prime minister-in-waiting Margaret Thatcher claimed in a television interview that British people were ‘really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture’. A moral panic about people with a different culture is central to Goodhart’s ...”

You haven’t got your sister pregnant, have you?

Jacqueline Rose and Sam Frears: No Secrets in Albert Square, 23 June 2022

“... neglect but from a major head injury: someone has assaulted him.It is 1985, two years after Margaret Thatcher’s second election victory, the beginning of the end of the welfare state in which Lou, like so many in the postwar country, had invested her dreams. Perhaps, EastEnders suggests, this might be the real reason things are going ...”

A Degenerate Assemblage

Anthony Grafton: Bibliomania, 13 April 2023

Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America 
by Denise Gigante.
Yale, 378 pp., £25, January 2023, 978 0 300 24848 7Show More
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“... scholars, traces these in detail. The erudite merchant Prosper Montgomery Wetmore took home Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters, which Lamb’s friend James Kenney had not only borrowed but taken to live with him at Versailles (Lamb had to make a special trip to recover it). The ‘Conant’ who picked up Cavendish’s World’s Olio was ...”

Lotti’s Leap

Penelope Fitzgerald, 1 July 1982

Collected Poems and Prose 
by Charlotte Mew, edited by Val Warner.
Carcanet/Virago, 445 pp., £9.95, October 1981, 0 85635 260 8Show More
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“... soppy side: the Brownings, the Brontës, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Tagore’s ‘King of the Dark Chamber’ and ‘The Post Office’. When Charlotte Mew found her individual voice, all these influences persisted, just as her school friends remained her first and last refuge throughout her life. With them, there was less need for ...”

The Moral Solipsism of Global Ethics Inc

Alex de Waal: Human rights, democracy and Amnesty International, 23 August 2001

Like Water on Stone: The Story of Amnesty International 
by Jonathan Power.
Allen Lane, 332 pp., £12.99, May 2001, 0 7139 9319 7Show More
Future Positive: International Co-operation in the 21st Century 
by Michael Edwards.
Earthscan, 292 pp., £12.99, September 2000, 1 85383 740 7Show More
East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia 
by Daniel Bell.
Princeton, 369 pp., £12.50, May 2000, 0 691 00508 7Show More
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“... watershed was the Pinochet case. The fact that the former dictator, Cold War ally and friend of Margaret Thatcher, could be arrested on the instructions of a Spanish magistrate elicited guffaws of delighted disbelief from at least three generations of human rights activists. The principle of global jurisdiction covering outrageous human rights abuses, and ...”

Hangchow Retrouvé

Emma Rothschild, 22 May 1980

“... eels of Archestratus and the oyster sausages of Apicius, Catherine de Medici’s pastry cooks and Margaret of York’s stuffed whale: all are the imperfect precursors of the Parisian cuisine of the 19th and 20th centuries. There is a grande cuisine internationale according to Revel, and it is French: not because French cooking has invaded the world, but ...”

Camden Town Toreros

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Corey Fah Does Social Mobility’, 4 January 2024

Corey Fah Does Social Mobility 
by Isabel Waidner.
Hamish Hamilton, 160 pp., £12.99, July, 978 0 241 63253 6Show More
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“... of values comes uncomfortably close to arriving, by way of a strange ideological wormhole, in Margaret Thatcher’s lap.Actual wormholes​ – back doors that connect different places and times – orchestrate the action in Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, Waidner’s follow-up to Sterling Karat Gold. In 2024 Corey Fah encounters in a run-down park ...”

Heroes of Our Time

Karl Miller, 19 May 1988

The Monument 
by T. Behrens.
Cape, 258 pp., £11.95, May 1988, 0 224 02510 4Show More
The Passion of John Aspinall 
by Brian Masters.
Cape, 360 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 0 224 02353 5Show More
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“... and belonged to a glittering group of gamblers, ravers, spendthrifts and eccentrics which included Margaret Thatcher, whose enterprise culture of the Eighties, with its poor view of poverty and failure, must have done something to temper Aspinall’s scorn at the degeneration of the species in the modern Britain of social welfare, and who should surely have ...”

Diary

Tom Paulin: Summer in Donegal, 16 September 1999

“... this glove, I tell him. ‘Oh I used to have an apron,’ he says in a camp Cockney accent, ‘but Margaret won’t let me wear it’ – I laugh at this East End butcher’s Masonic joke. I go back to our place and begin opening the oysters. I hackle them open and lay them out – alive and violated – on a metal tray. I’m thinking they are a shade ...”

Gatsby of the Boulevards

Hermione Lee: Morton Fullerton, 8 March 2001

Mysteries of Paris: The Quest for Morton Fullerton 
by Marion Mainwaring.
New England, 327 pp., £23, March 2001, 1 58465 008 7Show More
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“... Picture of Dorian Gray), the theatre designer Percy Anderson, and ‘the Ranee of Sarawak’, Lady Margaret Brooke. He knew Wilde, and developed flirtatious friendships with the much older playwright and composer Hamilton Aïdé and with Henry James, who looked back wistfully years later on ‘something – ah, so tender! – in me that was only quite ...”

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, 9780719547898Show More
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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 ...”

Conspire Slowly, Act Quickly

David Runciman: Thatcher Undone, 2 January 2020

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. III: Herself Alone 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 1072 pp., £35, October 2019, 978 0 241 32474 5Show More
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“... When​ King Fahd of Saudi Arabia discovered in late November 1990 that his friend Margaret Thatcher had been turfed out of Downing Street after 11 years he thought she must have been the victim of a coup d’état. How else to explain it? She was undefeated in general elections and, more puzzling still, she was about to send her armed forces into battle ...”

Watching Me Watching Them Watching You

Andrew O’Hagan: Surveillance, 9 October 2003

“... at that time, in British waters that seemed grey with miscare, the nation that existed between Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there’s no such thing as society’ and John Major’s ‘it’s time to understand a bit less and condemn a bit more.’ I felt for the boy being led away but also for the boys leading him, and I believed there was not only a terrible ...”

‘A Naughty House’

Charles Nicholl: Shakespeare’s Landlord, 24 June 2010

“... he was a supplier of headgear à la mode to an upmarket clientele which had at one time included King James’s fashion-mad consort, Queen Anne, and he was – not least – a familiar acquaintance of Shakespeare. A rather respectable figure, it may seem from this summary, an immigrant success story, though there is also some evidence to suggest ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... wants the best for Scotland, but if he’s wrong, he threatens to destroy more Scottish jobs than Margaret Thatcher, to ruin more pension plans than Robert Maxwell. Colin Kidd In​ an ideal world a fully independent Scotland might be a better place than the quasi-independent state it is now, but why is almost impossible to see given the evasions and silences ...”
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