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The Parliamentary Peloton

Peter Mair: Money and Politics, 25 February 2010

A Very British Revolution: The Expenses Scandal and How to Save Our Democracy 
by Martin Bell.
Icon, 246 pp., £11.99, October 2009, 978 1 84831 096 4
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... for their votes on planning and rezoning issues. Among the worst offenders was the overbearing Ray Burke, a former minister, who was eventually jailed for tax evasion, but had earlier pocketed almost £3 million when he sold his family home to the property developers Flynn and O’Flaherty. The lavish lifestyle of Charles Haughey, the former Fianna Fáil ...

Regular Terrors

Alison Light: Window-Smashing Suffragettes, 25 January 2007

Rebel Girls: Their Fight for the Vote 
by Jill Liddington.
Virago, 402 pp., £14.99, May 2006, 1 84408 168 0
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... son, and selling newspapers and making marmalade for the WSPU. When Asquith suddenly announced a man-only suffrage bill in November of that year, reneging yet again on a commitment to women, she turned to direct action. Her subsequent hunger strikes, and refusal to accept fluids, in Armley jail in Leeds nearly killed her. After her husband bombarded the Home ...

God bless Italy

Christopher Clark: Rome, Vienna, 1848, 10 May 2018

The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe 
by David I. Kertzer.
Oxford, 474 pp., £25, May 2018, 978 0 19 882749 8
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... the stern and reactionary Gregory XVI. The old pope had died at the age of eighty; the new man, who adopted the name Pius IX, was 54, with a warm personality and a cheerful, winning manner. Whereas Gregory had begun his reign in 1831 with a campaign of violent repression, Pius’s first official act was to proclaim a blanket amnesty for the political ...

Oh, the curse!

David Runciman: A home run, 19 February 2004

Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball 
by Stephen Jay Gould.
Cape, 342 pp., £16.99, January 2004, 0 224 05042 7
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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game 
by Michael Lewis.
Norton, 288 pp., $24.95, June 2003, 0 393 05765 8
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... as it dribbled between his legs, bending down, in the timeless phrase of one journalist, ‘like a man on the crapper trying to get to the telephone’. Ray Knight scored from third for the Mets, and downstairs in the Red Sox changing area Costas watched the staff unpeeling clingfilm from the lockers before the distraught ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Bennett’s Dissection, 1 January 2009

... Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old lady came to know this is a mystery, and how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than ...

North and South

Raphael Samuel, 22 June 1995

Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village 
by Mark Hudson.
Cape, 320 pp., £16.99, October 1994, 0 224 04170 3
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... of the pits in Ashington, Northumberland fairly represents her distinctive voice: Ashington man was the archetypal proletarian, the arehetypal patriarch ... As in the Army and the Stock Exchange, men’s companionship did not produce social cohesion; if fostered power and privilege for men within their own class and community ... No day matched Sunday ...

Juiced

David Runciman: Winners Do Drugs, 3 August 2006

Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, Balco and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports 
by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams.
Gotham, 332 pp., $26, March 2006, 1 59240 199 6
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... hadn’t liked it at all. In 1961, he was for a few weeks the most celebrated and the most reviled man in America. That year, Maris (who grew up in Fargo as Roger Maras but changed his name in 1955 to make it harder for opposing fans to come up with offensive rhyming chants) broke the most precious record in American sports, Babe Ruth’s mark of 60 home runs ...

Hubbub

Nicholas Spice, 6 July 1995

Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and its Effects on Music 
by Michael Chanan.
Verso, 204 pp., £39.95, May 1995, 1 85984 012 4
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Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak Easy Listening and other Moodsong 
by Joseph Lanza.
Quartet, 280 pp., £10, January 1995, 0 7043 0226 8
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... is mainly interesting as a work of inadvertent autobiography, for the portrait it suggests of a man who really does seem to believe that ‘a world without elevator music would be much grimmer than its detractors ... could ever realise,’ a portrait animated as much by anger as by enthusiasm. Lanza the supernerd, the techno-freak, the fetishist of cultural ...

Even If You Have to Starve

Ian Penman: Mod v. Trad, 29 August 2013

Mod: A Very British Style 
by Richard Weight.
Bodley Head, 478 pp., £25, April 2013, 978 0 224 07391 2
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... of Chet Baker & Crew, Pacific Records, 1956) wasn’t it ‘Existence precedes essence’? Or: ‘Man is condemned to be free’? Or (surely a contender for a TV quiz show clincher): ‘Hell is … other people!’? I fed the ‘famous dictum’ into Google and it was nowhere to be found (Weight supplies no attribution). Existentialism likewise gets a single ...

Entrepreneurship

Tom Paulin: Ted Hughes and the Hare, 29 November 2007

Letters of Ted Hughes 
edited by Christopher Reid.
Faber, 756 pp., £30, November 2007, 978 0 571 22138 7
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... overhead thunder, with great long swells coming along the gunwales, pouring in on both sides, one man bailing like mad, the rest paddling & yelling, & our sail like a map of the world in giant rips and holes, and those fish, unbelievable, their eyes glaring like orange torches – colour of the orange on traffic lights & just as bright, actually lit from the ...

Sounding Auden

Seamus Heaney, 4 June 1987

... scenario which Martin Buber outlines in I and Thou as follows:This is the eternal source of art: a man is faced by a form which desires to be made through him into a work. This form is no offspring of his soul but is an appearance which steps up to it and demands of it the effective power. The man is concerned with an act of ...

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Adam Shatz: Mass Incarceration, 4 May 2017

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America 
by James Forman.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp., £21.98, April 2017, 978 0 374 18997 6
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... not surprisingly – but as an unending nightmare. Not least among the reasons was that a black man of unerring self-discipline and caution, bipartisan to a fault, should have provoked such ferocious white resistance – fanned by the man who questioned the validity of his birth certificate and then succeeded him as ...

Using so Little

Sean Wilsey: Life on a Skateboard, 19 June 2003

... acid at me. My chin was sore. The skin was grated off the palms of my hands. I started to run. A man and two women, all middle-aged, him in a light brown suede jacket, came running towards me. The women hollered: ‘Oh my God!’ The man bellowed: ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’ ‘Yeah, yeah – I’m fine! Fine!’ I ...

Delirium

Jeremy Harding: Arthur Rimbaud, 30 July 1998

Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91 
by Charles Nicholl.
Vintage, 336 pp., £7.99, May 1998, 0 09 976771 6
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A Season in Hell and Illuminations 
by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Mark Treharne.
Dent, 167 pp., £18.99, June 1998, 0 460 87958 8
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... the remnants of public anthems? The water is grey and blue, wide as an inlet of the sea. – A ray of white light, falling from high in the sky, obliterates this sham scene. If walking helped Rimbaud get a thought or a sequence into shape, it was not his only means of production. In 1873, during two stints at the family farm in the Ardennes – one before ...

Gentlemen and ladies came to see the poet’s cottage

Tom Paulin: Clare’s anti-pastoral, 19 February 2004

John Clare: A Biography 
by Jonathan Bate.
Picador, 650 pp., £25, October 2003, 0 330 37106 1
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‘I Am’: The Selected Poetry of John Clare 
edited by Jonathan Bate.
Farrar, Straus, 318 pp., $17, November 2003, 0 374 52869 1
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John Clare, Politics and Poetry 
by Alan Vardy.
Palgrave, 221 pp., £45, October 2003, 0 333 96617 1
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John Clare Vol. V: Poems of the Middle Period 1822-37 
edited by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson.
Oxford, 822 pp., £105, January 2003, 0 19 812386 8
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... military service involved only a few weeks of training, but he remained technically an enlisted man, and could have been called up between 1812 and 1816. He worked irregularly in these years with fencing and hedging gangs engaged in enclosure. The Clares’ cottage had been divided, and they now had only two rooms. Clare’s father wasn’t well, and from ...

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