Women beware men

Margaret Anne Doody, 23 July 1992

Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women 
by Susan Faludi.
Chatto, 592 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 7011 4643 5
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The War against Women 
by Marilyn French.
Hamish Hamilton, 229 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 241 13271 1
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... in hard times that they agreed. These women were later to seek legal relief, and it was Judge Robert Bork as Federal appellate judge who in 1984 ‘ruled in favour of the company’. It may be that American Cyanamid had expected all its female employees would go away rather than undergo sterilisation, and the protection policy (which offered no ...

Issues of Truth and Invention

Colm Tóibín: Francis Stuart’s wartime broadcasts, 4 January 2001

The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart 
edited by Brendan Barrington.
Lilliput, 192 pp., £25, September 2000, 1 901866 54 8
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... was that the writer was an elderly man whose name carried with it an uncertain stigma. In 1983 Robert Fisk published In Time of War: Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939-45 and this seemed to settle the argument about what Stuart had been doing in Germany. Fisk’s account of the episode was based on transcripts of Stuart’s broadcasts in the ...

Confronting Defeat

Perry Anderson: Hobsbawm’s Histories, 17 October 2002

... be put on them. Yet they remain conventional, and surprisingly unaffected by contrary indications. Robert Brenner has shown, pretty conclusively, how little the onset of the Slump in America can be explained by wage repression, or the end of the postwar boom by wage explosion. He has also proposed a genuine theoretical explanation, of the kind Kondratiev was ...

Carnival of Self-Harm

Tom Crewe: Good Riddance to the Tories, 20 June 2024

Haywire: A Political History of Britain since 2000 
by Andrew Hindmoor.
Allen Lane, 628 pp., £35, June 2024, 978 0 241 65171 1
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No Way Out: Brexit from the Backstop to Boris 
by Tim Shipman.
William Collins, 698 pp., £26, April 2024, 978 0 00 830894 0
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The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life 
by Theresa May.
Headline, 368 pp., £12.99, May 2024, 978 1 0354 0991 4
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The Conservative Party after Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation 
by Tim Bale.
Polity, 368 pp., £25, March 2023, 978 1 5095 4601 5
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Johnson at 10: The Inside Story 
by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell.
Atlantic, 640 pp., £12.99, April 2024, 978 1 83895 804 6
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The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson 
by Nadine Dorries.
HarperCollins, 336 pp., £25, November 2023, 978 0 00 862342 5
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Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within 
by Rory Stewart.
Vintage, 454 pp., £10.99, June 2024, 978 1 5299 2286 8
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Ten Years to Save the West: Lessons from the Only Conservative in the Room 
by Liz Truss.
Biteback, 311 pp., £20, April 2024, 978 1 78590 857 6
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Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party 
by Samuel Earle.
Simon and Schuster, 294 pp., £10.99, February 2024, 978 1 3985 1853 7
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... announced on TV: ‘I’m not saying this, but many people are saying the judges are biased’). Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, was found to have been lobbied by a property developer whom he then helped to avoid millions in tax (the developer followed up with a donation to the Conservative Party), but faced no punishment. Priti Patel, the home ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... and Kerr-Bell suggest, however, that the TMO became more intermeshed with the council under Robert Black, who was chief executive at the time of the refurbishment. ‘He instilled a culture where you couldn’t complain,’ I was told. I contacted Black, trying to get him to respond to this allegation, but he preferred not to. The Grenfell Action ...

It’s already happened

James Meek: The NHS Goes Private, 22 September 2011

... 1960s in the Pentagon, one of the cerebral ‘whizz kids’ on the staff of the defence secretary Robert McNamara. McNamara was a wonk, confident that no mystery could withstand statistical analysis, and Enthoven was the chief wonk’s wonk, crunching numbers to judge whether the new weapons the generals wanted were worth it. In 1973, Enthoven reinvented ...

Festival of Punishment

Thomas Laqueur: On Death Row, 5 October 2000

Proximity to Death 
by William McFeely.
Norton, 206 pp., £17.95, January 2000, 0 393 04819 5
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Death Row: The Encyclopedia of Capital Punishment 
edited by Bonnie Bobit.
Bobit, 311 pp., $24.95, September 1999, 0 9624857 6 4
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... to allow full expression of the old pleasures. ‘Retribution,’ the one-time Solicitor General Robert Bork argued before the Supreme Court, ‘is itself an important, perhaps a vital, social function.’ But retribution must be ‘stripped of its vindictiveness’. What sort of retribution, I wonder, is not intended to cause anguish or hurt? What ...

The Breakaway

Perry Anderson: Goodbye Europe, 21 January 2021

... external to the Community and its successor. From the Schuman Plan to the victories in the ECJ of Robert Lecourt, integration was preceded and accompanied by the attentions, and often the initiatives, of the US. So too when Giscard founded the European Council, the impulse came from the breakdown of Bretton Woods and the diminution of American interest in the ...

Hooted from the Stage

Susan Eilenberg: Living with Keats, 25 January 2024

Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph 
by Lucasta Miller.
Vintage, 357 pp., £12.99, April 2023, 978 1 5291 1090 6
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Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse 
by Anahid Nersessian.
Verso, 136 pp., £12.99, November 2022, 978 1 80429 034 7
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... centre. Through Hunt, Keats met Shelley, Godwin, Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Lamb, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, and many others who would challenge and comfort him, patronise and defend him, feud over and around him, get drunk and silly with him, delight and disgust him, and otherwise matter to him during this period of explosive poetic growth in what were ...

West End Vice

Alan Hollinghurst: Queer London, 8 May 2025

Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1945-59 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 445 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 241 37060 5
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Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960-67 
edited by Peter Parker.
Penguin, 416 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 241 68370 5
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... sexual pleasure. Michael Hastings’s novel The Frauds (1960) features a gay 14-year-old, while Robert Hutton’s 1958 autobiography, Of Those Alone, gives a straightforward picture of his teenage longings, hanging round in stations and at last being seduced at the age of sixteen by a man of 35: ‘I knew that this was what, both physically and mentally, I ...
... published in 2009 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Cottam power station in Nottinghamshire, Robert Davis quotes one of the employees: There was so much wastage during the CEGB days. It was like they had money to burn. The stores were always full and we had spares for everything. Bureaucracy was part of the problem. If you signed stuff out of the ...

The Price

Dan Jacobson: The concluding part of Dan Jacobson’s interview with Ian Hamilton, 21 February 2002

... is the second part of a two-part interview. Part 1: ‘You Muddy Fools’ I want to ask you about Robert Lowell: as an influence on your work, that is, and only then as what he later became – a ‘Life’, the subject of your first full-length biography. You did and do admire him greatly as a poet, yet in his poetic practice didn’t he trample all over the ...

Where are we now?

LRB Contributors: Responses to the Referendum, 14 July 2016

... with good grace but it’s hard when it was brought about by a campaign eloquently described by Robert Harris as ‘the most depressing, divisive, duplicitous political event of my lifetime’: words which, incidentally, were written before the announcement of the murder of Jo Cox, the defacement of London’s Polish Social and Cultural Association, and the ...

If It Weren’t for Charlotte

Alice Spawls: The Brontës, 16 November 2017

... sent copies of poems they had been working on to famous poets, including the poet laureate Robert Southey. We don’t have Charlotte’s letter to Southey, or know which poems she sent, but parts of her letter are quoted in his and show her extravagant style of praise – she begs him to ‘stoop from his throne of light and glory’ – which he ...

Apartheid’s Last Stand

Jeremy Harding, 17 March 2016

Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola since the Civil War 
by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira.
Hurst, 291 pp., £25, March 2015, 978 1 84904 284 0
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A Short History of Modern Angola 
by David Birmingham.
Hurst, 256 pp., £17.99, December 2015, 978 1 84904 519 3
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Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria and the Struggle for Southern Africa 
by Piero Gleijeses.
North Carolina, 655 pp., £27.95, February 2016, 978 1 4696 0968 3
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A General Theory of Oblivion 
by José Eduardo Agualusa, translated by Daniel Hahn.
Harvill, 245 pp., £14.99, June 2015, 978 1 84655 847 4
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In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre 
by Lara Pawson.
I.B. Tauris, 271 pp., £20, April 2014, 978 1 78076 905 9
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Cuito Cuanavale: Frontline Accounts by Soviet Soldiers 
by G. Shubin, I. Zhdarkin et al, translated by Tamara Reilly.
Jacana, 222 pp., £12.95, May 2014, 978 1 4314 0963 1
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... office in an age of strongmen, between Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979 and Robert Mugabe’s in 1980. Thirty-six years later Dos Santos is still in power. Under his supervision, Angola is not just a development star, but a model of elite self-enrichment and wealth disparity. There are now said to be seven thousand millionaires while ...