Alternative Tories

Jose Harris, 23 April 1987

Baldwin 
by Roy Jenkins.
Collins, 204 pp., £12.95, March 1987, 9780002175869
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Rab: The Life of R.A. Butler 
by Anthony Howard.
Cape, 422 pp., £15, March 1987, 0 224 01862 0
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The Political Culture of Modern Britain: Studies in Memory of Stephen Koss 
edited by J.M.W. Bean.
Hamish Hamilton, 306 pp., £15, January 1987, 0 241 12026 8
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... the governments of Wilson and Thatcher, the titans of British political history emerge as pretty small beer. Such a change in popular expectations did not of course occur overnight, and there was a long-drawn-out period in which both political cultures co-existed with and rivalled each other. From the 1880s onwards the careers of nearly all major politicians ...
... it’s clear that the result of electricity privatisation was to take power away from the people. Small British shareholders have no influence over the overwhelmingly non-British owners of the firms that generate and distribute power in Britain. The fact that individual households and small businesses can choose to switch ...

Playboys of the GPO

Colm Tóibín, 18 April 1996

Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation 
by Declan Kiberd.
Cape, 719 pp., £20, November 1995, 0 224 04197 5
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... as ‘an occupied city’. It is hard not to feel that it was occupied by Leopold and Molly Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan and others too numerous to mention. Later, he writes: ‘After all, one of the first policies formulated by the Norman occupiers was to erase Gaelic culture.’ Once again, there is no footnote, no explanation. A few hundred pages ...

Poor Cow

Tim Radford, 5 September 1996

Lethal Legacy: BSE – The Search for Truth 
by Stephen Dealler.
Bloomsbury, 307 pp., £5.99, April 1996, 9780747529408
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BSE: The Facts 
by Brian Ford.
Corgi, 208 pp., £4.99, May 1996, 0 552 14530 0
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Agriculture and Health Committees. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD): Recent Developments 
HMSO, 149 pp., £17, May 1996, 0 10 237796 0Show More
Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture 
by Jeremy Rifkin.
Thorsons, 353 pp., £8.99, June 1996, 0 7225 2979 1
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... and began spreading among the dairy herd, there were two sets of reactions. One set came from a small number of vets, microbiologists and public health officials, who said: this is something to worry about. This reaction was countered by a larger group of ministry officials, chief medical officers, other vets and animal scientists, and above all ministers ...

Fine-Tuned for Life

John Leslie: Cosmology, 1 January 1998

Before the Beginning 
by Martin Rees.
Simon and Schuster, 288 pp., £7.99, January 1998, 0 684 81660 1
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The Life of the Cosmos 
by Lee Smolin.
Weidenfeld, 358 pp., £20, September 1997, 0 297 81727 2
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... These might nowadays be ending their ‘black hole evaporation’ (a process discovered by Stephen Hawking) in bangs detectable from two million light years away. Bigger black holes, their evaporation too slow to be detected, probably litter our galaxy in large numbers as the remnants of stellar explosions. Other such remnants are neutron ...

Mae West and the British Raj

Wendy Doniger: Dinosaur Icons, 18 February 1999

The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon 
by W.J.T. Mitchell.
Chicago, 321 pp., £25, November 1998, 0 226 53204 6
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... giants, the Arche meets the Stereo, the Perennial meets the Fad. Mitchell cites at the start Stephen Jay Gould’s reference to the ‘archetypal fascination’ with dinosaurs (giving rise, as Gould puts it, to schemes to ‘turn the Jungian substrate into profits’) and wonders if dinomania is not, rather, a matter of ‘something specific to certain ...

Why read Clausewitz when Shock and Awe can make a clean sweep of things?

Andrew Bacevich: The Rumsfeld Doctrine, 8 June 2006

Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq 
by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor.
Atlantic, 603 pp., £25, March 2006, 1 84354 352 4
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... of war with considerable enthusiasm. In addition to Wolfowitz and Feith, the group included Stephen Cambone, Lawrence Di Rita, William Luti and, on a part-time basis, Richard Perle, who chaired the Defense Policy Board. Several of them had had a hand in rebuilding the armed forces, kicking the Vietnam syndrome, and winning the Cold War in the 1980s in ...

Diary

Adam Reiss: On a Dawn Raid, 18 November 2010

... be arrested this morning are violent and the police hold in their collective memory the death of Stephen Oake, the Special Branch detective stabbed by a suspect with a kitchen knife when a house he was searching hadn’t been secured. Much better, the theory goes, to do a lot of shouting and avoid anything more serious. For the team I’m accompanying, these ...

Diary

Paul Theroux: Out to Lunch, 13 April 2023

... into an enterprise dominated by accountants. Until then book writing was, with a few exceptions, small-scale and poorly paid. Publishing was not the corporate scheme Americans eventually made it, but still the cottage industry it had always been – or so it seemed to me, living precariously on a backstreet in Catford.Instead of being paid serious ...

The West dishes it out

Patrick Wormald, 24 February 1994

The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change 950-1350 
by Robert Bartlett.
Allen Lane, 432 pp., £22.50, May 1993, 0 7139 9074 0
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... out are resolutely practical. The coins and charters penetrating to all corners of the West are ‘small, durable objects’, whose ‘manipulation could be extremely elastic and convenient’. Christendom’s new unity is promoted by carefully cultivated contacts between the aristocracy of the diaspora and reforming Rome. The uniformity that increasingly ...

The Fred Step

Anna Swan: Frederick Ashton, 19 February 1998

Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton 
by Julie Kavanagh.
Faber, 675 pp., £12.99, October 1997, 0 571 19062 6
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... to cultivate influential people: Ashley Dukes (Rambert’s husband), the Sitwells, Cecil Beaton, Stephen Tennant, Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia Lopokova, and, most important of all, the artist Sophie Fedorovitch, who, next to Fonteyn, became his closest collaborator. Many of his friends were living hand to mouth and survived only by sponging off ...

Nutty Professors

Hal Foster: ‘Lingua Franca’, 8 May 2003

Quick Studies: The Best of ‘Lingua Franca’ 
edited by Alexander Star.
Farrar, Straus, 514 pp., $18, September 2002, 0 374 52863 2
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... as well as thoughtful reviews of significant debates, such as the contested legacy of Darwin (Stephen Jay Gould v. sociobiology), the stake of revisionist histories of the 1960s and the role of race in the formulation of law. But at times one feels that LF cut a deal with its readers: if you listen to our stories about their work, we won’t disturb your ...

Overloaded with Wasps

James Wood: Tales from Michigan, 17 March 2005

The Secret Goldfish 
by David Means.
Fourth Estate, 211 pp., £14.99, February 2005, 0 00 716487 4
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... as if he were trying to limbo-dance under an impossibly low bar’; a broken nose has its ‘small shift of cartilage’; an ‘old battered practice piano – soft from years of pounding – produced a dog-eared tone, slightly yellow’; ‘the sun sits in the sky with acetylene brilliance, chalky and pure’; the wife in the title story remembers how ...

Martinique in Burbank

David Thomson: Bogart and Bacall, 19 October 2023

Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair 
by William J. Mann.
HarperCollins, 634 pp., £35, August, 978 0 06 302639 1
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... Earle, and Bogart began to feel better about himself. His character in the film had two friends, a small dog and Ida Lupino (she had top billing on the picture; it wasn’t quite a Bogie vehicle). Quickly, Huston wanted him as Sam Spade in what would be his first directing job, The Maltese Falcon (1941). At last Bogart was a hero, yet just as hard as Dashiell ...

Berlin Diary

Adam Shatz, 14 August 2025

... regime in the US is best described as ‘fascist’, it was hard not to think about Trump, Musk, Stephen Miller and their new friends Zuckerberg and Bezos. The basic governing coalition hasn’t changed all that much: thugs, zealots, careerists, entrepreneurs and grifters. As we left, we were told that there was a café. Run by an Israeli woman, it was ...