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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 5
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... When Hague lost to Blair just as badly four years later, Thatcher gave her support to Iain Duncan-Smith, helping him to see off Michael Portillo and Kenneth Clarke. When Duncan-Smith proved even less successful than his predecessor, he was replaced by another Thatcherite, Michael Howard, who went down to defeat against ...
... I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. Elizabeth Taylor was more famous than ...

Shades of Peterloo

Ferdinand Mount: Indecent Government, 7 July 2022

Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London 
by Vic Gatrell.
Cambridge, 451 pp., £25, May 2022, 978 1 108 83848 1
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... view of the period. He might also have marked those optimistic economists such as Adam Smith, who remarked in The Wealth of Nations on ‘the universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people’. Britain around this time is portrayed by Gatrell as a chronically unsettled country. There had been two hundred sedition trials in ...

Libel on the Human Race

Steven Shapin: Malthus, 5 June 2014

Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet 
by Robert Mayhew.
Harvard, 284 pp., £20, April 2014, 978 0 674 72871 4
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... to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government. Condorcet foresaw endless social progress, an egalitarian society in which technological advance would provide for an ...

They rudely stare about

Tobias Gregory: Thomas Browne, 4 July 2013

‘Religio Medici’ and ‘Urne-Buriall’ 
by Thomas Browne, edited by Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff.
NYRB, 170 pp., £7.99, September 2012, 978 1 59017 488 3
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... factual claims. The god Yahweh promised the land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants; Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from golden plates received from the angel Moroni; Jesus of Nazareth is seated at the right hand of the Father, and will return to judge the living and the dead. Religion, whatever else it involves, has an irreducible core of ...

‘It was everything’

Eliot Weinberger: The Republican Convention, 11 August 2016

... a dictator’ and should be impeached. She told an NRA convention that she’d take up her Smith & Wesson against the government ‘should they decide that my rights are no longer important’, and thinks states should be free to nullify federal laws. She is an Agenda 21 conspiracist and believes that George Soros and the United Nations want to move ...

What I Heard about Iraq

Eliot Weinberger: Watch and listen, 3 February 2005

... they got.’ On 1 May 2003, I heard that 140 American soldiers had died in combat in Iraq. I heard Richard Perle tell Americans to ‘relax and celebrate victory’. I heard him say: ‘The predictions of those who opposed this war can be discarded like spent cartridges.’ I heard Lieutenant-General Jay Garner say: ‘We ought to look in a mirror and get ...

Who to Be

Colm Tóibín: Beckett’s Letters, 6 August 2009

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-40 
edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck.
Cambridge, 782 pp., £30, February 2009, 978 0 521 86793 1
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... Jack Yeats and some poems, a few of them masterpieces of their kind, he wrote books on Eliot and Richard Aldington for the same series as Beckett’s book on Proust, the publication of which he arranged. He later wrote a monograph on Poussin and was director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963. McGreevy flits in and out of the lives of ...

Forgive us our debts

Benjamin Kunkel: The History of Debt, 10 May 2012

Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order 
by Philip Coggan.
Allen Lane, 294 pp., £20, December 2011, 978 1 84614 510 0
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Debt: The First 5000 Years 
by David Graeber.
Melville House, 534 pp., £21.99, July 2011, 978 1 933633 86 2
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... in order to dispel the anthropological premise of modern economics: ‘the myth of barter’. Adam Smith supposed – as primers on economics complacently repeat – that economic life emerged from a propensity of the species to truck and barter. The Wealth of Nations imagines ‘a tribe of hunters or shepherds’ among whom producers of arrowheads, tanned ...

Oswaldworld

Andrew O’Hagan, 14 December 1995

Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery 
by Norman Mailer.
Little, Brown, 791 pp., £25, September 1995, 0 316 87620 8
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... had not always got on. ‘When it comes to lying,’ Mailer warbled to gossip-columnist Liz Smith of the New York Daily News in the mid-Eighties, ‘Larry Schiller makes Baron von Munchausen look like George Washington.’ Yet at the beginning of this new book there is an appreciation: ‘to Larry Schiller, my skilled and wily colleague in interview and ...

Old Europe

Jeremy Harding: Britain in Bosnia, 20 February 2003

Indictment at The Hague: The Milosevic Regime and the Crimes of the Balkan Wars 
by Norman Cigar and Paul Williams.
New York, 339 pp., $24.95, July 2002, 0 8147 1626 1
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Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia 
by Brendan Simms.
Penguin, 464 pp., £8.99, July 2002, 0 14 028983 6
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Under Orders: War Crimes in Kosovo 
by Fred Abrahams.
Human Rights Watch, 593 pp., £18, October 2001, 1 56432 264 5
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Milosevic: A Biography 
by Adam LeBor.
Bloomsbury, 386 pp., £20, October 2002, 0 7475 6090 0
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... of him at the end of the 1980s was his undoing a decade later. By the time the US negotiator Richard Holbrooke met him days before the bombing began, there was no going back. Holbrooke told Milosevic, ‘It will start very soon after I leave,’ and Milosevic told Holbrooke: ‘There is nothing more I can say.’ The most intriguing aspect of the bombing ...

Comrades in Monetarism

John Lloyd, 28 May 1992

... and who had spotted all the members of Gaidar’s group years before they became a team, and Richard Layard, an LSE professor specialising in labour markets and wages, who with his wife Molly Meacher, another labour-market specialist, embraced the reform process and Russia and moved into a flat in Central Moscow to work full-time with Shokhin. Round them ...

Here was a plague

Tom Crewe, 27 September 2018

How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed Aids 
by David France.
Picador, 624 pp., £12.99, September 2017, 978 1 5098 3940 7
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Patient Zero and the Making of the Aids Epidemic 
by Richard A. McKay.
Chicago, 432 pp., £26.50, November 2017, 978 0 226 06395 9
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Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1989-90 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 314 pp., £9.99, May 2018, 978 1 78487 387 5
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Smiling in Slow Motion: The Journals of Derek Jarman, 1991-94 
by Derek Jarman.
Vintage, 388 pp., £9.99, August 2018, 978 1 78487 516 9
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The Ward 
by Gideon Mendel.
Trolley, 88 pp., £25, December 2017, 978 1 907112 56 0
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... a constellation of needs that are dealt with in straight society outside the arena of sex,’ Richard Goldstein argued in the Village Voice in 1983. ‘For gay men, sex, that most powerful implement of attachment and arousal, is also an agent of communion, replacing an often hostile family and even shaping politics. It represents an ecstatic break with ...

You have to take it

Joanne O’Leary: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Style, 17 November 2022

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick 
by Cathy Curtis.
Norton, 400 pp., £25, January, 978 1 324 00552 0
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The Uncollected Essays 
by Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse.
NYRB, 304 pp., £15.99, May, 978 1 68137 623 3
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... her to the attention of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2011, 5 January 2012

... book, which is altogether too languorous. The film also stars, almost inevitably, Sir C. Aubrey Smith who, as in many films before and during the Second War, stood for probity and honour (though with a twinkle).5 July. Anna Massey dies. She was always fun and she got better as an actress as she got older, though I only worked with her twice. None of the ...

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