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Diary

Tobias Jones: The Politics of Football, 7 May 1998

... football-mad cabinet ministers from taking up freebies at the Finals, the merchant bank Deutsch Morgan Grenfell has admitted to having 1600 seats already booked. (At England’s Euro 96 semi-final against Germany, an astonishing 14,000 people in the stadium were on corporate entertaining packages.) Of the ten venues, now commemorated on postage stamps, the ...

The Triumph of Plunder

James Morone: Gore Vidal on the venal history of America, 23 September 2004

Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson 
by Gore Vidal.
Yale, 198 pp., £8.99, September 2004, 0 300 10592 4
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... imagines the early American legislators blinking in astonished awe as Congress gets Washington’s bill and ‘coughs up $100,000’ for expenses. All the lesser characters echo his obsession. John Adams, the first vice-president, thought his salary (a quarter of the president’s) ‘a sort of "curiosity"’; it has not been recorded, Vidal writes, whether ...

Daisy Chains

Emma Hogan: Sappho 1900, 20 May 2021

No Modernism without Lesbians 
by Diana Souhami.
Head of Zeus, 464 pp., £9.99, February, 978 1 78669 487 4
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... But the pair started to get on his nerves, and he wrote them snippy notes about the gas bill, the cost of laundry and other domestic problems. ‘I told you one time since that I found it very disagreeable to come downstairs or into the house in the morning and find the light burning in the front hall.’ In 1909 Stein and Toklas started looking for ...

Get a Brazilian

Maggie Doherty: Millennial Memoirists, 13 September 2018

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis 
by J.D. Vance.
William Collins, 257 pp., £9.99, June 2017, 978 0 00 822056 3
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The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath 
by Leslie Jamison.
Granta, 544 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 78378 152 2
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How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir 
by Cat Marnell.
Ebury, 384 pp., £7.99, February 2018, 978 0 09 195736 0
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Everything I Know about Love 
by Dolly Alderton.
Fig Tree, 336 pp., £12.99, February 2018, 978 0 241 32271 0
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This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America 
by Morgan Jerkins.
Harper Collins, 272 pp., £10.99, February 2018, 978 0 06 266615 4
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Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials 
by Malcolm Harris.
Little Brown, 272 pp., £18.99, February 2018, 978 0 316 51086 8
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Educated: A Memoir 
by Tara Westover.
Hutchinson, 385 pp., £14.99, February 2018, 978 1 78633 051 2
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... Will Be My Undoing, an essay collection with an allusion to intersectionality in its subtitle, Morgan Jerkins argues that skin colour and hair type contribute to a hierarchical system within the black community. Vance is the lone open conservative in this group. US Millennials lean further left than their baby boomer parents: according to one recent ...

Tons of Sums

Michael Mason, 16 September 1982

Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer 
by Anthony Hyman.
Oxford, 287 pp., £12.50, July 1982, 9780198581703
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... is the work of a real thinker,’ and the social links between the two men (Augustus De Morgan, for example) seem to be thought of as mitigations, but they can only be the opposite. Babbage did not even try to meet Boole before 1862. A close involvement with the hardware of his machines was far from uncongenial to Babbage: a well-to-do ...

All of Denmark was at his feet

John Sutherland, 12 May 1994

John Steinbeck: A Biography 
by Jay Parini.
Heinemann, 605 pp., £20, March 1994, 0 434 57492 9
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... first novel, Cup of Gold (1929, based on the adventures of the Elizabethan buccaneer, Henry Morgan) was an acknowledged homage to James Branch Cabell’s florid historical romances. In 1929 Steinbeck was introduced to Hemingway’s work by his future wife, Carol Henning, who gave him a copy of ‘The Killers’. It was to be as formative as Malory and ...

Heathrow to Canary Wharf

Nick Richardson: Crossrail, 11 October 2012

... many passengers from the Ealing area would use Crossrail in preference to the Underground. A bill was submitted to Parliament in 1991, and reluctantly thrown out, because, as in the 1970s, there was a recession and so no available funds. In 2001, Cross London Rail Links, a company set up by the newly formed Transport for London and the Strategic Rail ...

Hush-Hush Boom-Boom

Charles Glass: Spymasters, 12 August 2021

The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War – A Tragedy in Three Acts 
by Scott Anderson.
Picador, 576 pp., £20, February, 978 1 5290 4247 4
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... non-departmental intelligence organisation’.Fleming delivered the report to William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, a much decorated First World War veteran who had been lobbying Roosevelt to establish an American spy agency separate from the Navy, War and State Departments. A month later Donovan submitted his ‘Memorandum of Establishment of Service of ...

More ‘out’ than ‘on’

Glen Newey: Chris Mullin’s Diaries, 27 August 2009

A View from the Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin 
by Chris Mullin.
Profile, 590 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 1 84668 223 0
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... than backbench MPs, who can at least hope to leave their mark by sponsoring a private member’s bill, select committee membership, tenacious single-issue campaigning, or the odd rebellion in the division lobbies. Parliamentary under-secretaries get their mouths stuffed with gold, or at least with an extra £27,000 a year – as Mullin is reminded by the ...

‘Where’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’

Michael Dobson: 17th-century literary culture, 11 September 2008

Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707 
by John Kerrigan.
Oxford, 599 pp., March 2008, 978 0 19 818384 6
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... what the textbooks regarded as a pillar of modern British statehood just as significant as the Bill of Rights (which William and Mary had accepted before they replaced James II): the Act of Union of 1707. I seem to recall that in the summer of 1974 we went to the Lake District. Strangely, though, when I left home for university at the end of the ...

Into the Second Term

R.W. Johnson: New Labour, 5 April 2001

Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour 
by Andrew Rawnsley.
Hamish Hamilton, 434 pp., £17.99, September 2000, 0 241 14029 3
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Mandelson and the Making of New Labour 
by Donald Macintyre.
HarperCollins, 638 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 00 653062 1
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Mo Mowlam: The Biography 
by Julia Langdon.
Little, Brown, 324 pp., £16.99, September 2000, 0 316 85304 6
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Ann Widdecombe: Right from the Beginning 
by Nicholas Kochan.
Politico’s, 302 pp., September 2000, 1 902301 55 2
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The Paymaster: Geoffrey Robinson, Maxwell and New Labour 
by Tom Bower.
Simon and Schuster, 272 pp., £17.99, March 2001, 0 7432 0689 4
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The Future of Politics 
by Charles Kennedy.
HarperCollins, 235 pp., £17.99, September 2000, 0 00 710131 7
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... constitution. Drafting such a document would not merely allow the Government to entrench the Bill of Rights but require it to think through the answers to such questions as whether it is or is not in favour of the hereditary principle (for the moment New Labour has decided in favour of a ‘partially pregnant’ view on this), whether Britain is to be a ...

What Happened?

James Butler: Autopsy of an Election, 6 February 2020

... Miliband, to commit to a milder form of austerity. Its whipped abstention on the Tories’ welfare bill shortly after its election defeat was emblematic of its lost bearings. In a field of leadership candidates remarkable only for its lack of distinction, Corbyn’s candidacy reminded the party what it had been missing: socialist principle. Since Corbyn’s ...

Whose century?

Adam Tooze: After the Shock, 30 July 2020

Schism: China, America and the Fracturing of the Global Trading System 
by Paul Blustein.
McGill-Queen’s, 356 pp., £27.99, September 2019, 978 1 928096 85 6
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Superpower Showdown: How the Battle between Trump and Xi Threatens a New Cold War 
by Bob Davis and Lingling Wei.
Harper, 480 pp., £25, June 2020, 978 0 06 295305 6
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Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace 
by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis.
Yale, 288 pp., £20, June 2020, 978 0 300 24417 5
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The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Metropolitan Elite 
by Michael Lind.
Atlantic, 224 pp., £14.99, February 2020, 978 1 78649 955 4
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... 1990s and early 2000s were chumps, suckered by the Chinese. The more sophisticated version is that Bill Clinton’s team were too committed to the kind of modernisation theory Frances Fukuyama spun in his ‘end of history’ essay in 1989. They believed the liberal story that as China’s economy matured it would inevitably develop a need for the rule of law ...

Mandela: Death of a Politician

Stephen W. Smith: Mandela, the Politician, 9 January 2014

... Mandela’s character, and his judgments, changed while he was in prison. He once confided to Bill Clinton that he had been an ‘angry man’ during the first 11 years on Robben Island. That would have been until 1975, the year his family – Winnie and their two daughters – were for the first time allowed to visit him. Only then did Mandela come to ...

Why name a ship after a defeated race?

Thomas Laqueur: New Lives of the ‘Titanic’, 24 January 2013

The Wreck of the ‘Titan’ 
by Morgan Robertson.
Hesperus, 85 pp., £8, March 2012, 978 1 84391 359 7
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Shadow of the ‘Titanic’ 
by Andrew Wilson.
Simon and Schuster, 392 pp., £8.99, March 2012, 978 1 84739 882 6
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‘Titanic’ 100th Anniversary Edition: A Night Remembered 
by Stephanie Barczewski.
Continuum, 350 pp., £15.99, December 2011, 978 1 4411 6169 7
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The Story of the Unsinkable ‘Titanic’: Day by Day Facsimile Reports 
by Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton.
Transatlantic, 127 pp., £16.99, November 2011, 978 1 907176 83 8
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‘Titanic’ Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew 
by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Harper, 404 pp., £9.99, September 2012, 978 0 00 732166 7
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Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage 
by Hugh Brewster.
Robson, 338 pp., £20, March 2012, 978 1 84954 179 4
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‘Titanic’ Calling 
edited by Michael Hughes and Katherine Bosworth.
Bodleian, 163 pp., £14.99, April 2012, 978 1 85124 377 8
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... the Atlantic Station in Atlanta and the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, where it shares a bill with the comedian Carrot Top and Menopause: The Musical. ‘Titanic’: The Experience is the bigger show; among other treats, it ‘immerses visitors in the hundred-year story as never experienced before’ – an unhappy metaphor perhaps – by allowing ...

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