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Snobs v. Herbivores

Colin Kidd: Non-Vanilla One-Nation Conservatism, 7 May 2020

Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism 
by Nick Timothy.
Polity, 275 pp., £20, March 2020, 978 1 5095 3917 8
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... one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Ian Gilmour – but also Keith Joseph and Nicholas Ridley. The politics of the Tory left were actually advanced in various factional groupings and dining clubs, such as Nick’s Diner, the Lollards and the Tory Reform Group.The term, however, remains a well-understood code in the party for a ...

Like Frogs around a Pond

Nigel McGilchrist: The Mediterranean, 22 March 2012

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean 
by David Abulafia.
Allen Lane, 783 pp., £30, May 2011, 978 0 7139 9934 1
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... of 1998, in which Braudel turns his gaze back into antiquity, as well as to Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s meditation on the ‘connectivity’ afforded by the Mediterranean, The Corrupting Sea, which appeared in 2000. There is magic in Braudel’s writing and in his ability to cut through historical material to reveal the underlying structure of ...

Boots the Bishop

Barbara Newman: Albert the Magnificent, 1 December 2022

Albertus Magnus and the World of Nature 
by Irven Resnick and Kenneth Kitchell.
Reaktion, 272 pp., £16.95, August 2022, 978 1 78914 513 7
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... draws on extensive conversations with jewellers and miners, and he interviewed cooks about the best ways to prepare broths from animal fat or to curdle milk to produce different kinds of cheese. Noting that people get hungrier in cold places than in warm, he remarks with some hyperbole that ‘one Pole or German eats more in a single day than a Lombard or ...

Other People’s Mail

Bernard Porter: MI5, 19 November 2009

The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 
by Christopher Andrew.
Allen Lane, 1032 pp., £30, October 2009, 978 0 7139 9885 6
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... over the traces. (That happens in history.) Or does this make me a ‘conspiracy theorist’ too? Best, I think, to dump the phrase, certainly when it’s used as loosely as this. It doesn’t help. It may however be thought to help MI5. Restoring or boosting its reputation was the main reason this book was commissioned. Whatever the truth or otherwise of the ...

The Comeuppance Button

Colin Burrow: Dreadful Mr Dahl, 15 December 2022

Teller of the Unexpected: The Life of Roald Dahl, an Unofficial Biography 
by Matthew Dennison.
Head of Zeus, 264 pp., £20, August 2022, 978 1 78854 941 7
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... and the huge ‘official’ one by Donald Sturrock, which, while seeking to bring out the best in Dahl, doesn’t conceal his self-aggrandising side.Through the mid-1960s Dahl wrote film scripts, variously hacked about and supplemented by other hands, including the screenplay for the Bond movie You Only Live Twice. The marriage to Neal had become more ...

A Susceptible Man

Ian Sansom: The Unhappy Laureate, 4 March 1999

Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis 
by Albert Gelpi.
Oxford, 246 pp., £30, March 1998, 0 19 509863 3
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... As a comment about the fear of brutality this is almost as stupid as Auden’s aphorism (‘The best reason I have for opposing Fascism,’ he wrote in an essay published in 1934, ‘is that at school I lived in a Fascist state’), but without the saving grace of having been made before the full facts of Nazism were known. To write about public school ...

On Some Days of the Week

Colm Tóibín: Mrs Oscar Wilde, 10 May 2012

Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde 
by Franny Moyle.
John Murray, 374 pp., £9.99, February 2012, 978 1 84854 164 1
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The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition 
by Oscar Wilde, edited by Nicholas Frankel.
Harvard, 295 pp., £25.95, April 2011, 978 0 674 05792 0
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... completes his portrait of Dorian Gray in Wilde’s novel, Lord Henry Wotton says: ‘It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done. You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. The Grosvenor is really the only place.’ Constance Lloyd’s grandmother and ...

There is only one Harrods

Paul Foot, 23 September 1993

Tiny Rowland: A Rebel Tycoon 
by Tom Bower.
Heinemann, 659 pp., £16.99, May 1993, 0 434 07339 3
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... Gerald Percy, a direct descendant of Hotspur (he had a free house too); the former MI5 officer Nicholas Elliott, whose finest hour in the British secret service was to denounce Kim Philby in time for the spy to run to Moscow; and Paul Spicer, Rowland’s devoted bagman, who is well known to every journalist who ever asked a question about Lonrho and had it ...

Out of the Great Dark Whale

Eric Hobsbawm, 31 October 1996

A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 
by Orlando Figes.
Cape, 923 pp., £20, August 1996, 0 224 04162 2
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... to rule. The failure of the 1905 Revolution did not gain tsarism much time, and in any case Nicholas II sabotaged his most capable minister, Stolypin; and even his reforms, in Figes’s view, were not ‘capable of stabilising Russia’s social system after the crisis of 1905’. By 1912, urban Russia, he argues (following Leo Haimson’s pioneering ...

The Sword is Our Pope

Alexander Murray: Religion in Europe, 15 October 1998

The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity, 371-1386 AD 
by Richard Fletcher.
HarperCollins, 562 pp., £25, September 1997, 0 00 255203 5
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... The economic side of conversion went further than cupboard love. Christianity was the long-term ‘best buy’. It is true that preachers occasionally had to rely on ad hoc miracles to prove this point, as when Wilfred of York’s preaching in Frisia, in 678, coincided with a bumper harvest. But miracles or no miracles, the fact was that in Northern Europe ...

At the Foundling Museum

Joanne O’Leary: ‘Portraying Pregnancy’, 2 April 2020

... we can cross-reference the date of the painting with the date on which the sitter gave birth. (In Nicholas Hilliard’s portrait of his 22-year-old wife, Alice, from 1578 – a delicate miniature, watercolour on vellum – only the ear of corn and the pink rosebud pinned to her bodice allude to her pregnancy.) If we didn’t know that Princess Anne was born ...

Dozing at His Desk

Simon Schaffer: The Genius of the Periodic Table, 7 July 2005

A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table 
by Michael Gordin.
Basic Books, 364 pp., $30, May 2004, 9780465027750
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... Mendeleev soon found himself in the stifling worlds of academy and bureaucracy. Gordin is at his best documenting the vagaries of tsarist policy and St Petersburg fashion. It was hard for Mendeleev to find a place where he could make his science pay dividends for conservative politics. His private life became the stuff of a quasi-Tolstoyan romance. An ...

Short Cuts

Conor Gearty: Versions of Denial, 25 January 2024

... do only what they instinctively believe is necessary to protect themselves from harm, this is the best evidence a jury can have that they are acting in lawful self-defence. What stands for people stands also for nations.’ Nicholas Reed Langen in the Church Times was one of many who pointed out that ‘in domestic law, if ...

Saints for Supper

Alexander Bevilacqua, 26 December 2024

Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images 
by Jérémie Koering, translated by Nicholas Huckle.
Princeton, 480 pp., £30, October 2024, 978 1 890951 27 6
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... believers all pursued healing of the body and the spirit, and sought proximity to the sacred as best they could. It wasn’t so much that the ‘image’s power was fragile, relative and mysterious’, in Koering’s words, but that the workings of the godhead were inscrutable. If seeing is believing, then touching was receiving, and grinding up and ...

Speaking British

Thomas Jones, 30 March 2000

The Third Woman 
by William Cash.
Little, Brown, 318 pp., £14.99, February 2000, 0 316 85405 0
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Greene on Capri: A Memoir 
by Shirley Hazzard.
Virago, 149 pp., £12.99, January 2000, 1 86049 799 3
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... held mine in place. I said: it’s a good steak,’ and heard like poetry her reply, ‘It’s the best I’ve ever eaten.’ There was no pursuit and no seduction. We left half the good steak on our plates and a third of the bottle of claret and came out into Maiden Lane with the same intention in both our minds. At exactly the same spot as before, by the ...

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