No one is further right than me

Jan-Werner Müller: Mussolini to Meloni, 20 March 2025

Brothers of Italy and the Rise of the Italian National Conservative Right under Giorgia Meloni 
by Salvatore Vassallo and Rinaldo Vignati.
Palgrave Macmillan, 284 pp., £109.99, August 2024, 978 3 031 52188 1
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... Lega was already in another far-right grouping). The ECR had been the creature of the Tories since David Cameron turned his back on the mainstream conservative European Peoples Party (EPP), historically the driving force of European integration. But Brexit meant that the Conservatives didn’t contest the 2019 European election. This was another stroke of luck ...

Diary

Sheila Fitzpatrick: Two Cultures of Denunciation, 25 September 2025

... a bad look). In between, the denunciation of the ‘Unabomber’, Ted Kaczynski, by his brother David in 1996 made many Americans uneasy: against the undoubted ‘good’ of catching a terrorist was the ‘bad’ of snitching on his own family, something uncomfortably close to the Pavlik Morozov story. Then, in 1998, came the scandal of Monica Lewinsky’s ...

‘I’m not a radical, Dad’

Adam Mars-Jones: Gurnaik Johal’s ‘Saraswati’, 22 January 2026

Saraswati 
by Gurnaik Johal.
Serpent’s Tail, 375 pp., £16.99, June 2025, 978 1 78816 948 6
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... and political one.An epigraph to one section of Saraswati quotes an American administrator called David E. Lilienthal, writing soon after Partition, who suggested that the Indus pays no heed to borders but ‘just keeps running along’. Lilienthal was head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which may explain the slightly blurred quotation from ‘Ol’ Man ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Notes on 1997, 1 January 1998

... the same from one abbey to the next.2 April, Yorkshire. Come across a thirty-year-old note from David Vaisey, at that time a postgraduate student at Bodley and subsequently its Librarian. The note just has a crudely drawn swastika and the slogan ‘A.L. Raus’.14 April. Pass two slightly cheeky-looking middle-aged businessmen in Hanover Square, one of whom ...

Last Exit

Murray Sayle, 27 November 1997

The Last Governor: Chris Patten and the Handover of Hong Kong 
by Jonathan Dimbleby.
Little, Brown, 461 pp., £22.50, July 1997, 0 316 64018 2
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In Pursuit of British Interests: Reflections on Foreign Policy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major 
by Percy Cradock.
Murray, 228 pp., £18.99, September 1997, 0 7195 5464 0
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Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule: The Economic and Political Implications of Reversion 
edited by Warren Cohen and Li Zhao.
Cambridge, 255 pp., £45, August 1997, 0 521 62158 5
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The Hong Kong Advantage 
by Michael Enright, Edith Scott and David Dodwell.
Oxford, 369 pp., £20, July 1997, 0 19 590322 6
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... to do.’ Dimbleby adds, by way of rumour, that Major and Hurd regarded the outgoing governor, Sir David Wilson (who was sacked to make way for Patten), ‘as one of the principal advocates of the “appeasement” of China, an approach which they believed could no longer be sustained after the atrocity of Tiananmen Square in June 1989’. But, while he avoids ...

The Lives of Ronald Pinn

Andrew O’Hagan, 8 January 2015

... and she went in search of him. At a pub near Avondale Square she met a friend of Ronnie’s called David. He said he’d been with Ronnie the day before and that Ronnie was in bed the last time he saw him. (The coroner would later describe this man as an ‘unsavoury witness’ without detailing why.) Mrs Pinn, in company with another boy from the bar, went to ...

My Darlings

Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007

... baggy-trousered, plays the proprietor with a weasel brilliance I have not seen since the heyday of F.J. McCormick.’ MacGowran was a lead Irish actor who could hold the stage in the central plays in the Irish repertory. But these plays were few – notably the plays of Synge and Shaw and O’Casey, and perhaps O’Neill if you agreed that he was Irish ...

In the Streets of Londonistan

John Upton: Terror, Muslims and the Met, 22 January 2004

... government and security officials overseas and in the UK – among them, Assistant Commissioner David Veness, head of Specialist Operations for the Metropolitan Police, the officer in overall operational charge of countering terror in the United Kingdom. Dr Ranstorp is an expert on Hizbollah, and books such as Palestinian Hamas, Defiant Patriot, The Kidnap ...

An Infinity of Novels

Philip Horne, 14 September 1989

A Short Guide to the World Novel: From Myth to Modernism 
by Gilbert Phelps.
Routledge, 397 pp., £30, September 1988, 0 415 00765 8
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The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction 
by John Sutherland.
Longman, 696 pp., £35, March 1989, 0 582 49040 5
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The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914 
by Peter Keating.
Secker, 533 pp., £30, September 1989, 0 436 23248 0
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... The Companion is as pleasurable to browse through as, in another field, the rich pastures of David Thompson’s Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. The impression it leaves – and in this it is itself like some long, densely-plotted Victorian novel – is of a mass of life, work, achievement, suffering, moral uplift and death. Mrs Humphry Ward, for ...

Arms and Saddam

Norman Dombey, 24 October 1991

... not be able to for many years.’ In the March issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, David Albright and Mark Hibbs analysed the situation and found several areas of nuclear weapon technology in which Iraq was deficient quite apart from its lack of usable fissile material. Nothing the IAEA inspectors have found so far in any way suggests that Iraq ...

Programmed to Fail

Edward Luttwak, 22 December 1994

... theme may now be in the process of creating not merely one but two new parties: one for anti-FV Republicans, and a second for socially conservative white Democrats, as opposed to old Republicans and so-called coalition Democrats (i.e. very-liberal white, feminist, black, Hispanic and homosexual voters). It is only in the state of Virginia that the four ...

Doctor in the Dock

Stephen Sedley, 20 October 1994

Medical Negligence 
edited by Michael Powers and Nigel Harris.
Butterworth, 1188 pp., £155, July 1994, 0 406 00452 8
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... the solicitor was acting. The worries do not end here. Simanowitz sees the patient’s lawyer as David confronting Goliath; but, he says, ‘there is a growing band of doctors who are prepared to help ... The danger of using a doctor who is not known to be helpful is that without the experience in medical litigation to analyse properly a medical ...

Rodinsky’s Place

Patrick Wright, 29 October 1987

White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings 
by Iain Sinclair.
Goldmark, 210 pp., £12.50, October 1987, 1 870507 00 2
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... centre’ concerned with the local history of immigration. Above the tiny synagogue is the room of David Rodinsky, a Polish Jew of increasingly mysterious reputation. Latterly described as a translator and philosopher, he is said to have lived here in some sort of caretaking capacity. One day in the Sixties Rodinsky stepped out into Princelet Street and ...

The Return of History

Raphael Samuel, 14 June 1990

... and time horizons – and a quite extraordinary proliferation of specialist journals. David Cannadine, in an influential but pessimistic article, has argued that this is a sign of the subject’s decadence: that it involves knowing more and more about less and less. I prefer to see it as a sign of history’s generosity, and its readiness to ...

Unhappy Childhoods

John Sutherland, 2 February 1989

Trollope and Character 
by Stephen Wall.
Faber, 397 pp., £17.50, September 1988, 0 571 14595 7
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The Chronicler of Barsetshire: A Life of Anthony Trollope 
by R.H. Super.
Michigan, 528 pp., $35, December 1988, 0 472 10102 1
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Dickens: A Biography 
by Fred Kaplan.
Hodder, 607 pp., £17.95, November 1988, 0 340 48558 2
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Charlotte Brontë 
by Rebecca Fraser.
Methuen, 543 pp., £14.95, October 1988, 9780413570109
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... fifth volume of the Pilgrim letters and Nina Burgis’s introduction to the Clarendon edition of David Copperfield.) But it seems that Dickens first confided the material to Forster in 1847. Forster, of course, had already lined himself up as the great inimitable’s Boswell. There was the tantalising promise that Dickens might write more – a whole ...