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Cowboy Coups

Phillip Knightley, 10 October 1991

Smear! Wilson and the Secret State 
by Stephen Dorrill and Robin Ramsay.
Fourth Estate, 502 pp., £20, August 1991, 9781872180687
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... and MI5 they will remain a threat to any Labour government and thus a threat to democracy. As David Cornwell – the spy writer John le Carré, who was in the security forces himself – said in the Independent earlier this year, if a Labour government were to win the next election, ‘the secret services would be cuddling up with the Conservative Party ...

Modest House in the Judengasse

C.H. Sisson, 5 July 1984

Random Variables 
by Lord Rothschild.
Collins, 238 pp., £12.50, May 1984, 0 00 217334 4
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... about the lepidoptera. The second is an anecdote about Professor Stanley Gardiner and Inspector David of the Cambridge Police. The third records a moment in 1944 when Rothschild just happened to be the senior British officer in Paris and had a delicate passage with the Préfet and our ambassador Duff Cooper about the latter’s relations with Madame Louise ...

Happy Bunnies

John Pemble: Cousin Marriage, 25 February 2010

Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England 
by Adam Kuper.
Harvard, 296 pp., £20.95, November 2009, 978 0 674 03589 8
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... Kuper zooms in for a closer look, he selects areas already well investigated. If you’ve read David Newsome, Annan himself, Michael Holroyd and Hermione Lee on the Wilberforces, Leslie Stephen, Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf, you’re likely to know what’s coming before you’ve turned the page – and there’s a limit to the appeal even of Clapham ...

End of the Century

John Sutherland, 13 October 1988

Worlds Apart 
by David Holbrook.
Hale, 205 pp., £10.95, September 1988, 9780709033639
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Story of My Life 
by Jay McInerney.
Bloomsbury, 188 pp., £11.95, August 1988, 0 7475 0180 7
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Forgotten Life 
by Brian Aldiss.
Gollancz, 284 pp., £11.95, September 1988, 0 575 04369 5
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Incline Our hearts 
by A.N. Wilson.
Hamish Hamilton, 250 pp., £11.95, August 1988, 0 241 12256 2
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... It would be interesting to place Jay McInerney and David Holbrook as neighbours at E.M. Forster’s imaginary table. Both novelists are fascinated by decadence – that much they have in common. But their diagnoses and anatomies of the decadent condition are quite different; worlds apart, to use Holbrook’s dominant image ...

Diary

Tom Paulin: The Belfast agreement, 18 June 1998

... day I remember how precarious the talks had been. Reading an article in the Daily Telegraph where David Trimble concludes his argument for a Yes vote by saying ‘we must have confidence in ourselves to face the future, not use the troubles of the past as a comfort blanket,’ I wonder how many Unionists will follow his advice. The vote will be Yes, but he ...

Progressive Agenda

John Brewer, 18 March 1982

The Watercolours and Drawings of Thomas Bewick and his Workshop Apprentices 
by Iain Bain.
Gordon Fraser, 233 pp., £125, July 1981, 0 86092 057 7
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... for his rural descriptions, praises Bacon and Locke, refers to the poetry of Thomas Gray, Allen Ramsay and Oliver Goldsmith, casually mentions that he does not need to read David Hume on miracles, and obliquely compares his own work with that of Milton? There is a paradox here: the more Bewick strove to establish his ...

Like Boiling a Frog

David Runciman: The Future of Wikipedia, 28 May 2009

The Wikipedia Revolution 
by Andrew Lih.
Aurum, 252 pp., £14.99, March 2009, 978 1 84513 473 0
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... the Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934) and the Scottish chemist Sir William Ramsay (1852-1916). That also seems pretty clear. Wikipedia still has its advantages, however. Despairing of discovering anything about Rand that I could make sense of, I looked up the article on Jimmy Wales, to see if that shed any light on his personal ...

Goodbye to the Comintern

Martin Kettle, 21 February 1991

About Turn. The Communist Party and the Outbreak of the Second World War: The Verbatim Record of the Central Committee Meetings 1939 
edited by Francis King and George Matthews.
Lawrence and Wishart, 318 pp., £34.95, November 1990, 9780853157267
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... controls these proceedings with a Catoesque monomania and a forensically inflexible vocabulary. As David Edgar has pointed out, Dutt is the one person in the whole drama who takes exactly the same line at the beginning, the middle and the end. He is determined, not just that the Central Committee should bow to Big Brother but that they should love him ...

A Pickwick among Poets, Exiled in the Fatherland of Pickled Fish

Colin Burrow: British Latin verse, 19 August 1999

The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the Traditions of British Latin Verse 
by D.K. Money.
Oxford, 406 pp., £38, December 1998, 0 19 726184 1
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... motorem bum’) but no more. The majority is unspeakably donnish. The Master of Magdalen A.B. Ramsay wrote ‘Horatian’ poems on how good it was to be blown apart for your country in the First World War. These were the product of the same delicate sensibility that forced his pupils to stand dazzled in a shaft of sunlight while they recited huge chunks ...

Men in Aprons

Colin Kidd: Freemasonry, 7 May 1998

Who’s Afraid of Freemasons? The Phenomenon of Freemasonry 
by Alexander Piatigorsky.
Harvill, 398 pp., £25, August 1997, 1 86046 029 1
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... provides a fascinating sub-plot to Linda Colley’s story of the making of Britons. Recently, David Stevenson’s innovative The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century 1590-1710 (1988) has attempted to shift the focus of Masonic reorganisation away from 18th-century England, to investigate the experience of Scottish Masonry between the Schaw ...

Make enemies and influence people

Ross McKibbin: Why Vote Labour?, 20 July 2000

... the euro and his domination of economic policy remind one alarmingly of the relationship between Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden in 1931: between a Prime Minister who senses that there is probably a better alternative but who lacks the authority or self-confidence to choose it and a Chancellor of formidable personality who is a rigidly orthodox ...

To the End of the Line

Ferdinand Mount: The Red Dean, 26 April 2012

The Red Dean of Canterbury: The Public and Private Faces of Hewlett Johnson 
by John Butler.
Scala, 292 pp., £16.95, September 2011, 978 1 85759 736 3
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... which got him the deanery, through the rare coincidence of a Labour prime minister in the shape of Ramsay MacDonald and a leftish archbishop of York, William Temple. This is an excellent biography, crisp, sometimes cutting, but never less than fair and always as sympathetic as humanly possible to its subject even in his most maddening moments. Aided by access ...

It’s Our Turn

Rory Scothorne: Where the North Begins, 4 August 2022

The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country 
by Tom Hazeldine.
Verso, 290 pp., £11.99, September 2021, 978 1 78663 409 2
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... in power is scathing, showing the failure to disrupt the pattern of southern capture and control. Ramsay MacDonald’s chancellor, Philip Snowden, was one of several senior northerners in the fragile interwar Labour governments. He bought a ‘big house’ in Surrey and was so ‘awestruck’ by the Bank of England that he agreed to ‘balance the books on ...

Radical Democrats

Ross McKibbin, 7 March 1991

Conflicts of Interest: Diaries 1977-80 
by Tony Benn, edited by Ruth Winstone.
Hutchinson, 675 pp., £20, September 1990, 0 09 174321 4
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Words as Weapons: Selected Writings 1980-1990 
by Paul Foot.
Verso, 281 pp., £29.95, November 1990, 0 86091 310 4
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... turn is sometimes justified by a recourse to non-facts. He tells Ronald Butt that, among others, Ramsay MacDonald and Herbert Morrison were Marxists: a good debating-point, but wrong. Indeed, one of the many striking things about the diaries is how often Labour leaders attempt to validate their opinions by such a recourse to the Party’s history; and how ...

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