Love, Loss and Family Advantage

Rosalind Mitchison, 1 September 1983

Family Forms in Historic Europe 
edited by Richard Wall.
Cambridge, 606 pp., £37.50, March 1983, 0 521 24547 8
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Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England 
by Ann Kussmaul.
Cambridge, 245 pp., £22, December 1981, 0 521 23566 9
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The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage 
by Ferdinand Mount.
Cape, 282 pp., £9.50, July 1982, 0 224 01999 6
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... household, they can be coped with. But in the nuclear family structure they provide a problem. David Gaunt discusses the systems in Medieval and Early Modern Scandinavia and Central Europe by which support of some kind was elicited for the old. This might be by the mortgaging of the family farm, or by contracts entered into with the younger generation for ...

Literature and the Left

Marilyn Butler, 18 August 1983

English Literature in History: 1730-80: An Equal, Wide Survey 
edited by Raymond Williams, by John Barrell.
Hutchinson, 228 pp., £13.50, March 1983, 0 09 149820 1
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English Literature in History: 1350-1400: Medieval Readers and Writers 
edited by Raymond Williams, by Janet Coleman.
Hutchinson, 337 pp., £12, July 1981, 0 09 144100 5
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English Literature in History: 1780-1830: Pastoral and Politics 
edited by Raymond Williams, by Roger Sales.
Hutchinson, 247 pp., £13.50, March 1983, 0 09 149830 9
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The Cambridge Guide to English Literature 
by Michael Stapleton.
Cambridge/Newnes Books, 992 pp., £15, April 1983, 9780521256476
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... the Communist Party. Within Cambridge English his main intellectual affinity was eventually with F.R. Leavis, but he selected from Leavis what chimed with his own socialism, and discarded what didn’t. Leavis’s power as a critic is based on close readings of individual poets and novelists or of passages in poems and novels – readings executed with ...

Coalition Phobia

Brian Harrison, 4 June 1987

Labour People, Leaders and Lieutenants: Hardie to Kinnock 
by Kenneth O. Morgan.
Oxford, 370 pp., £12.95, April 1987, 0 19 822929 1
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J. Ramsay MacDonald 
by Austen Morgan.
Manchester, 276 pp., £19.50, June 1987, 0 7190 2168 5
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Sylvia Pankhurst: Portrait of a Radical 
by Patricia Romero.
Yale, 334 pp., £17.50, March 1987, 0 300 03691 4
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Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst 
by Barbara Castle.
Penguin, 159 pp., £3.95, May 1987, 0 14 008761 3
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... virtues, however, Austen Morgan diverges less from the standard biography (published in 1977 by David Marquand, now of the Social Democratic Party) than his Marxian perspectives might lead one to expect; he does not even put the case of MacDonald’s critics when he decided on a strategy of respectability on taking office in 1924. What he has done is to ...
Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot 
by Michael Rogin.
California, 320 pp., $24.95, May 1996, 0 520 20407 7
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... version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, and David O. Selznick’s 1939 super-production Gone with the Wind ‘provide the scaffolding for American film history’ – although it takes us no further than the eve of the Second World War. This reading of Hollywood is anticipated by Leslie Fiedler’s ...

Mandelson’s Pleasure Dome

Iain Sinclair, 2 October 1997

... of British Airways. For Ian Ash, British Telecom’s Director of Corporate Relations. For David Quarmby, Chairman of the British Tourist Authority and the English Tourist Board. You get the picture. A kind of mega musical set on a desert island (Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Tempest). Something so new and adventurous and breathtakingly original that it ...

Thatcher’s Artists

Peter Wollen, 30 October 1997

Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection 
by Norman Rosenthal.
Thames and Hudson, 222 pp., £29.95, September 1997, 0 500 23752 2
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... be justified by reference back to Bosch or Goya, or the D’Este court or even to Francis Bacon or David Hockney. It stands on its own feet as a marker of the tension felt in the art world between the legacy of a lost Modernism and the ascendant culture of the spectacle, the transformed and triumphal forces of everything which Clement Greenberg dismissed as ...

But You Married Him

Rosemary Hill: Princess Margaret and Lady Anne, 4 June 2020

Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown 
by Anne Glenconner.
Hodder, 336 pp., £20, October 2019, 978 1 5293 5906 0
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... It was the moment, in the mid-1950s, when worlds were beginning to collide. Tennant’s uncle David ran the louche but artistic Gargoyle Club in Soho, where the old aristocracy mixed with the new celebrity. Princess Margaret met Lucian Freud and Ian Fleming; Tennant’s previous girlfriend, Ivy Nicholson, became part of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and Jeanne ...

Follow the Science

James Butler, 16 April 2020

... early response. It was used by government experts in media appearances: notoriously by David Halpern, head of the Behavioural Insights Team (aka the ‘Nudge Unit’), in a BBC News interview, but also by Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser. As late as 13 March, he told Radio 4 that one of the ‘key things we need to do ...

Agents of Their Own Abuse

Jacqueline Rose: The Treatment of Migrant Women, 10 October 2019

... child. Before the law, or outside it? ‘How is the institution of the removal centre legal?’ David Herd asks in his afterword to Refugee Tales (2016), a collection of stories gathered from refugees by campaigners. ‘Since, in conventional terms, it plainly offends legal principles, what relation does such a site have to the law?’ There are for the ...

Diamonds on your collarbone

Anne Hollander, 10 September 1992

Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham 
by Agnes DeMille.
Hutchinson, 509 pp., £20, April 1992, 0 09 175219 1
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Blood Memory: An Autobiography 
by Martha Graham.
Macmillan, 279 pp., £20, March 1992, 0 333 57441 9
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... expound her work through her own body: eternally ‘an athlete of God’, as she herself says; a David before the Ark. Graham’s own book, finished just before she died and burdened with a reluctant acceptance of mortality in its last pages, nevertheless begins briskly: ‘I am a dancer.’ She knew she still was, although she gave her last performance in ...

Let us breakfast in splendour

Charles Nicholl: Francis Barber, 16 July 2015

The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir 
by Michael Bundock.
Yale, 282 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 20710 1
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... after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In ...

Putin in Syria

Jonathan Steele, 21 April 2016

... agreed, among them Saleh Muslim, the leader of the PYD, the YPG’s political arm. In Britain David Richards, the former chief of the defence staff, called on Cameron to accept that Assad’s army was best placed to take the fight to IS. ‘At the moment we’ve got contradictory war aims,’ he told the BBC. ‘We want to deal with Isis but we also want ...

Why did we not know?

Ian Jack: Who is hoarding the land?, 23 May 2019

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain 
by Brett Christophers.
Verso, 394 pp., £20, November 2018, 978 1 78663 158 9
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... were preventing the private sector taking on public land to build badly needed new homes. In 2010 David Cameron commissioned Philip Green to conduct an ‘efficiency review’ for the new coalition government, and he duly reported that the state, ‘the largest tenant/owner in the country’, was ‘wholly inefficient’ when it came to the use and management ...

The Most Beautiful Icicle

Inigo Thomas: Apollo 11, 15 August 2019

Reaching for the Moon: A Short History of the Space Race 
by Roger D. Launius.
Yale, 256 pp., £20, July 2019, 978 0 300 23046 8
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The Moon: A History for the Future 
by Oliver Morton.
Economist Books, 334 pp., £20, May 2019, 978 1 78816 254 8
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... Morton in The Moon: A History for the Future describes as the ‘ludicrously powerful’ five F-1 engines at its base. At lift-off, the rocket weighed three thousand tonnes. ‘The shell of ice that had clung to the super cool metal,’ Morton writes, ‘fell in shattered sheets into the inferno below.’ Between them, the engines – still the most ...

Chimps and Bulldogs

Stefan Collini: The Huxley Inheritance, 8 September 2022

An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family 
by Alison Bashford.
Allen Lane, 529 pp., £30, September 2022, 978 0 241 43432 1
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... writing and filmmaking (in 1938 he had won an Oscar for The Private Life of the Gannets). In 1951 David Attenborough’s first TV production was narrated by Huxley.An early fascination with Africa (and a lifelong love of travel) slowly developed into one of the two dominating preoccupations of his final decades, the preservation of African wildlife, where his ...