Rational Switch

Vernon Bogdanor, 17 June 1982

Democracy at the Polls: A Comparative Study of Competitive National Elections 
edited by David Butler, Howard Penniman and Austin Ranney.
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 367 pp., £5.75, March 1982, 0 8447 3403 9
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... such as André Siegfried showed the profound historical continuity of voting patterns in France: for example, a Département hostile to the Revolution in 1789 would be likely to support a candidate of the Right a hundred and fifty years later; while a Département sympathetic to the Revolution would be found supporting the Popular Front in 1936. Even ...

Leaving it alone

R.G. Opie, 21 April 1983

Britain can work 
by Ian Gilmour.
Martin Robertson, 272 pp., £8.95, March 1983, 0 85520 571 7
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The Use of Public Power 
by Andrew Shonfield, edited by Zuzanna Shonfield.
Oxford, 140 pp., £9.95, January 1983, 0 19 215357 9
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... ancient ‘quantity theory of money’ which, two centuries after it was so elegantly spelt out by David Hume and a century after it was translated into snappy but empty symbols – MV = PT – by Irving Fisher, is still the basis of so much analysis of inflation. As Sir Ian says, ‘old doctrines never die: in economics, they never even fade away.’ He ...

Marks of Inferiority

Freya Johnston: Wollstonecraft’s Distinction, 4 February 2021

Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion and Politics 
by Sylvana Tomaselli.
Princeton, 230 pp., £25, December 2020, 978 0 691 16903 3
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... exclamations’ and ‘pampered sensibility’ in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) would find favour with ‘the Ladies’. Her habit, in the second Vindication, of condemning female characteristics and behaviour as slavish, ignorant, mad, corrupt and infectious is even more startling. ‘After surveying the history of ...

Imperfect Knight

Gabriel Josipovici, 17 April 1980

Chaucer’s Knight: Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary 
by Terry Jones.
Weidenfeld, 319 pp., £8.95, January 1980, 0 297 77566 9
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Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination 
by David Aers.
Routledge, 236 pp., £9.75, January 1980, 9780710003515
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The Golden Age: Manuscript Painting at the Time of Jean, Duc de Berry 
by Marcel Thomas.
Chatto, 120 pp., £12.50, January 1980, 0 7011 2471 7
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... Sir John Hawkwood infested Europe in the wake of the Hundred Years’ War. Whenever England and France patched up a peace, the mercenaries suddenly found themselves without pay and with nothing to do. No wonder everyone, from the Pope down, breathed a sigh of relief when they were invited to go off and deploy their skills in North Africa or Eastern ...

Oddity’s Rainbow

Pat Rogers, 8 January 1987

Laurence Sterne: The Later Years 
by Arthur Cash.
Methuen, 390 pp., £38, September 1986, 0 416 32930 6
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Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning 
by Robert DeMaria.
Oxford, 303 pp., £20, October 1986, 9780198128861
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... with aberration and divergence. In his brave and inventive reconstruction, Wild Diversions (1972), David Thomson found a good image for it: ‘He did not live in the conventional order from day to day, but grew strong or weak like the wind.’ Obviously this has something to do with the vacillations of his physical health – Arthur Cash brings this out ...

Je m’en Foucault

Vincent Descombes, 5 March 1987

Foucault: A Critical Reader 
edited by David Hoy.
Blackwell, 246 pp., £27.50, September 1986, 0 631 14042 5
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Foucault 
by Gilles Deleuze.
Minuit, 141 pp., frs 58, February 1986, 2 7073 1086 7
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... visiting philosopher in the US: his ideas are discussed by the authors of the essays assembled by David Hoy in Foucault: A Critical Reader. The French Foucault and the American Foucault are not two sides of one and the same thinker: they are philosophers who hold entirely incompatible doctrines. People have for a long time wondered whether Foucault ...

Breeding too fast

John Ziman, 4 February 1982

The Nuclear Barons 
by Peter Pringle and James Spigelman.
Joseph, 578 pp., £12.95, January 1982, 0 7181 2061 2
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... these to other major industrial nations. Hindsight may suggest that it was folly for Britain and France to have been tempted down the road, but that wisdom was just as far from those in the seats of power then as it seems to be from most of our rulers today. In 1950 when it was decided to go ahead with the H-bomb, ...

Top People

Luke Hughes: The ghosts of Everest, 20 July 2000

Ghosts of Everest: The Authorised Story of the Search for Mallory & Irvine 
by Jochen Hemmleb and Larry Johnson.
Macmillan, 206 pp., £20, October 1999, 9780333783146
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Lost on Everest: The Search for Mallory and Irvine 
by Peter Firstbrook.
BBC, 244 pp., £16.99, September 1999, 0 563 55129 1
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The Last Climb: The Legendary Everest Expeditions of George Mallory 
by David Breashears and Audrey Salkeld.
National Geographic, 240 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 7922 7538 1
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... quite happy and prosperous.’ Eventually, he took a commission in the Royal Artillery and went to France in May 1916, serving as a Forward Observation Officer. However, in August the ankle began to cause trouble and nine months later he was back in London for an operation; it transpired that it had never properly set. Once healed, Mallory returned to his ...

Something about Mary

Diarmaid MacCulloch: The First Queen of England, 18 October 2007

Mary Tudor: The Tragical History of the First Queen of England 
by David Loades.
National Archives, 240 pp., £19.99, September 2006, 1 903365 98 8
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... prime piece of property. At the age of two she was already signed up for a marriage to the king of France’s son; at four, diplomacy changed, and she was down to marry her cousin Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, who at the time was 20 years old. Unlikely as it would seem in 1521, this was one of the most important relationships in Mary’s life, though she ...

Judicial Politics

Stephen Sedley, 23 February 2012

... end of a spectrum of judicial interventionism. What cannot be said, as he then suggests, is that France stands at the other. France, Sumption asserts, was ‘the first country in the world to develop a coherent scheme of public or administrative law’; yet, he says, ‘successive French constitutions from 1799 to 1958 ...

At Victoria Miro

Peter Campbell: William Eggleston, 25 February 2010

... artist and has found inconsequentialities to photograph well away from Tennessee in Cuba, Russia, France, Japan and the rest of the USA. In 1976 it was the colour that set him apart. Photographers who rejected the last echoes of painting’s conventions of composition and subject matter already had a standing when Eggleston’s MoMA exhibition took place. In ...

At the Imperial War Museum

Gaby Wood: Lee Miller, 17 December 2015

... never wore the same outfit for more than a few hours. She was also a hypochondriac. Her colleague David Scherman (who took the famous picture of Miller in Hitler’s bathtub) later remembered that ‘you named a disease and Lee would imagine she had it in no time at all.’ Regina Lisso, Town Hall, Leipzig (1945) by Lee Miller. Lee Miller ...

Iran and the UN

Norman Dombey: Iran and the UN, 23 February 2006

... in 2003 for violating the agreement. The story gets more complicated. Since October 2003, the EU3 (France, Germany and Britain) have tried to negotiate a deal with Iran whereby it would voluntarily suspend its enrichment activities in return for regional security guarantees and help with nuclear technology. Iran was persuaded to sign the Additional ...

At the White Cube

Peter Campbell: Anselm Kiefer, 22 February 2007

... work, called Jericho, matches towers he has erected in his 35-acre open-air studio in the South of France. Each of the storeys is a roughly three-metre cube, made from reinforced concrete casts of the corner of a freight container. A door is cut out on each side of each cube: if you step in on the ground floor you can look up, through round, bashed-out ...

More a Voyeur

Colm Tóibín: Elton Took Me Hostage, 19 December 2019

Me 
by Elton John.
Macmillan, 376 pp., £25, October 2019, 978 1 5098 5331 1
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... voice rang out: ‘You finally did it. Good on you, you old poof!’)At his subsequent wedding to David Furnish, Elton wasas happy as I could ever remember being. And that was when my mother turned up, in character as a raving sociopath … As the years passed, she had elevated sulking to an epic level. She was the Cecil B. DeMille of bad moods, the Tolstoy ...