Two Men in a Boat

Ian Aitken, 15 August 1991

John Major: The Making of the Prime Minister 
by Bruce Anderson.
Fourth Estate, 324 pp., £16.99, June 1991, 9781872180540
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‘My Style of Government’: The Thatcher Years 
by Nicholas Ridley.
Hutchinson, 275 pp., £16.99, July 1991, 0 09 175051 2
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... herself was being worn down by the relentless pressure. So he got his way, with a little help from Douglas Hurd, and it is arguably the sole significant achievement of his political career up until the moment he became PM. It is also arguably the most significant factor in condemning this country to the most sustained and damaging recession since the ...

Furibundo de la Serna

Laurence Whitehead, 2 November 1995

The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey around South America 
by Ernesto Che Guevara, translated by Ann Wright.
Verso, 155 pp., £19.95, June 1995, 1 85984 942 3
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Che Guevara 
by Jean Cormier, with Hilda Guevara and Alberto Grando.
Editions du Rocher, 448 pp., frs 139, August 1995, 2 268 01967 5
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Journal de Bolivie 
by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, translated by Fanchita Gonzalez- Batlle and France Binard.
La Découverte, 256 pp., frs 120, August 1995, 2 7071 2482 6
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L’Année ou nous n’étions nulle part: Extraits du journal de Che Guevara en Afrique 
edited by Paco Ignacio Taibo, Froilán Escóbar and Félix Guerra, translated by Mara Hernandez and René Solis.
Métaillié, 281 pp., frs 120, September 1995, 2 86424 205 2
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... of Bolivia, General Rene Barrientos, apparently first consulted with the American Ambassador Douglas Henderson, then ordered Che to be summarily shot. (Jean Cormier’s new biography follows the Cuban line that this was a decision made in Washington.) Che’s diary of the Bolivian campaign was subsequently extracted from his captors, and published in ...

Idi Roi

Victoria Brittain, 21 August 1980

Ghosts of Kampala: The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin 
by George Ivan Smith.
Weidenfeld, 198 pp., £7.95, June 1980, 0 297 77721 1
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African Upheavals since Independence 
by G.S. Ibingira.
Westview/Benn, 349 pp., £14.95, January 1980, 0 89158 585 0
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A Political History of Uganda 
by S.R. Karugire.
Heinemann, 240 pp., £7.50, May 1980, 0 435 94524 6
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... when the Presidents of Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia met in an emergency summit to discuss Sir Alec Douglas Home’s announcement in July 1970 that Britain would sell arms to South Africa. Mr Smith was invited to join the Presidents’ meeting and he brings out well the unbridgeable chasm of mistrust which opened between Britain and Obote and Nyerere. Unlike ...

High Priest of Mumbo-Jumbo

R.W. Johnson, 13 November 1997

Lord Hailsham: A Life 
by Geoffrey Lewis.
Cape, 403 pp., £25, October 1997, 0 224 04252 1
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... is dead: he writes that Hogg defended Munich ‘to the end of his days’ and ‘to his dying day’.) But his reasons have changed over time and were never entirely coherent. The fact that his father was in the Cabinet that made the deal, and appears, indeed, to have been the first to apply the phrase ‘peace with honour’ to the occasion, may have ...

His Whiskers Trimmed

Matthew Karp: Robert E. Lee in Defeat, 7 April 2022

Robert E. Lee: A Life 
by Allen Guelzo.
Knopf, 585 pp., $27.99, September 2021, 978 1 101 94622 0
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... as the passing of a more graceful age. Lee’s biographers used to fall into the second camp. Douglas Southall Freeman’s four-volume biography, published in 1934 and 1935, was the standard text for many decades. Freeman drove past Lee’s statue in Richmond every day on his way to work and saluted it. But more recent ...

Bad Timing

R.W. Johnson: All about Eden, 22 May 2003

Eden: The Life and Times of Anthony Eden, First Earl of Avon 1897-1977 
by D.R. Thorpe.
Chatto, 758 pp., £25, March 2003, 0 7011 6744 0
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The Macmillan Diaries: The Cabinet Years 1950-57 
edited by Peter Catterall.
Macmillan, 676 pp., £25, April 2003, 9780333711675
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... so badly over this and for his flat opposition to British membership of the EEC, rather as latter-day Gaitskellites are inclined to perform elaborate contortions to prove that his famous ‘No, no and no again’ speech about Europe somehow meant yes. Thorpe treats us to all manner of sophistical argument to justify lying in politics but never faces up to the ...

Why read Clausewitz when Shock and Awe can make a clean sweep of things?

Andrew Bacevich: The Rumsfeld Doctrine, 8 June 2006

Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq 
by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor.
Atlantic, 603 pp., £25, March 2006, 1 84354 352 4
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... of a showdown with Saddam. ‘In crafting a strategy for Iraq,’ the undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith insisted to one baffled US general, ‘we cannot accept surrender.’ The object of the exercise was to demolish constraints on the subsequent employment of American power. Merely promulgating a doctrine of preventive war would not be enough: it was ...

Judicial Politics

Stephen Sedley, 23 February 2012

... on which the court intervened was that the grant was not authorised by the statute under which Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, had purportedly made it, because it was not capable of fulfilling the statutory purpose of promoting development. In other words, the court was doing its job of testing the legality of executive action against the relevant ...

Plonking

Ferdinand Mount: Edward Heath, 22 July 2010

Edward Heath 
by Philip Ziegler.
Harper, 654 pp., £25, June 2010, 978 0 00 724740 0
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... would lie in bringing about the unification of all Ireland.’ The foreign secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, also believed that ‘the real British interest would … be served best by pushing them [the Unionists] towards a United Ireland.’ How revealing the apposition between ‘British’ and ‘them’. The signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 ...

‘His eyes were literally on fire’

David Trotter: Fu Manchu, 5 March 2015

The Yellow Peril: Dr Fu Manchu & the Rise of Chinaphobia 
by Christopher Frayling.
Thames and Hudson, 360 pp., £24.95, October 2014, 978 0 500 25207 9
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... In Ridley Scott’s Black Rain (1989), two New York City cops, maverick Nick Conklin (Michael Douglas) and happy-go-lucky (i.e. obviously doomed) Charlie Vincent (Andy Garcia) escort a Japanese gangster by the name of Sato (Yusaku Matsuda) back to Osaka to face charges. They manage to lose him at Osaka airport, and thereafter have a hard time imposing ...

Don’t Panic

Bruce Ackerman: States of Emergency, 7 February 2002

... Democratic National Convention and to liberate eight thousand Confederate prisoners at nearby Camp Douglas. Lincoln convened a military tribunal to punish these men, but the Supreme Court stopped the process cold. The conspiracy occurred in Indiana, which was not a war zone. Since the civil courts were open, the Justices unanimously required the President to ...

Rumour Is Utterly Unfounded

Jenny Diski: Family Newspapers, 8 October 2009

Family Newspapers?: Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press 1918-78 
by Adrian Bingham.
Oxford, 298 pp., £55, February 2009, 978 0 19 927958 6
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... This roughly describes the ideal content of the popular family newspaper from 1918 to the present day. In 1963, the Profumo scandal offered scope for reporting all or most of the prohibited subjects (allowing for the odd change in terminology), including, if I remember rightly, something about animals – dogs, I think, not rabbits. Yet very few of the grubby ...

In a Frozen Crouch

Colin Kidd: Democracy’s Ends, 13 September 2018

How Democracy Ends 
by David Runciman.
Profile, 249 pp., £14.99, May 2018, 978 1 78125 974 0
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Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth – And How to Fix It 
by Dambisa Moyo.
Little, Brown, 296 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 1 4087 1089 0
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How Democracies Die 
by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
Viking, 311 pp., £16.99, January 2018, 978 0 241 31798 3
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Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy 
by William Galston.
Yale, 158 pp., £25, June 2018, 978 0 300 22892 2
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... in the miners’ confrontation with Ted Heath’s government. When Armstrong’s colleague Sir Douglas Allen, the permanent secretary at the Treasury, speculated openly about coming in to work and finding tanks drawn up on Horse Guards Parade, his colleagues couldn’t tell whether or not he was joking. Was the UK on the brink of a left-wing revolution or ...

About to Pop

Madeleine Schwartz: Kathleen Collins, 4 July 2019

Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? 
by Kathleen Collins.
Granta, 192 pp., £8.99, February 2018, 978 1 78378 341 0
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Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary: Selected Works 
by Kathleen Collins.
Ecco, 464 pp., £14, February 2019, 978 0 06 280095 4
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... Co-ordinating Committee, where she registered black voters in Georgia. During college she met Douglas Collins, ‘white, a compulsive philanderer, and a charismatic poet/painter/commodities trader/onetime inmate’, in their daughter’s words. After they divorced, Collins raised her two children in upstate New York while teaching film history and ...

Deskbound Party Bastards

Thomas Jones: Len Deighton’s Spy World, 7 May 2026

... with two bullets in it is discovered at a flat in Shepherd Market, and Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer of Scotland Yard is called to investigate. ‘As long as the Germans let him get on with the job of catching murderers,’ Archer thinks, ‘he’d do his work as he’d always done it.’ It isn’t that simple, of course: in part because the ...