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‘Just get us out’

Ferdinand Mount, 21 March 2019

... nemesis in Walt Disney and Monty Python’. The king lapped it all up, and now so do the Jacob Rees-Moggs and Iain Duncan-Smiths, whose freedom to practise their Catholic faith is no thanks to Henry VIII. Today these harkings back are semi-playful, but under them lies an adamantine insistence that the white cliffs of the nation-state shall not be eroded by ...
... down to earth’. Michael Foot is a moderate, but he is a moderate socialist – not a moderate in Rees-Mogg’s and Ronald Butt’s sense. Theirs is a sense which relates to the whole political spectrum. To Moggish minds, ‘centre’ seems to mean ‘right’, and it is only the left they fear. The words ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ are meaningless ...

Intimated Disunion

Colin Kidd, 13 July 2023

Ties That Bind? Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Union 
by Graham Walker and James Greer.
Irish Academic Press, 269 pp., £17.99, February, 978 1 78855 817 4
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The Case of Ireland: Commerce, Empire and the European Order, 1750-1848 
by James Stafford.
Cambridge, 298 pp., £75, January 2022, 978 1 316 51612 6
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... at the best of times – failed to perceive their good fortune; they still don’t.Although David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had played a central role in negotiating the agreement, many unionists believed they had been conned. While the agreement won the near unanimous endorsement of nationalists in Northern Ireland, it was ...

Orwell and Biography

Bernard Crick, 7 October 1982

... of a Christian without God to find a cause; while the gentle and well-meaning Sir Richard Rees, who had known Orwell very well, did write a book about Orwell as ‘almost a saint’. If one must say that biographies are about character rather than about the lives people led, then at least it is prudent to adopt, as philosophers would say, a soft ...

Quarrelling

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 29 October 1987

Tears before Bedtime 
by Barbara Skelton.
Hamish Hamilton, 205 pp., £12.95, September 1987, 0 241 12326 7
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In the Pink 
by Caroline Blackwood.
Bloomsbury, 164 pp., £11.95, October 1987, 0 7475 0050 9
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... have heard’). ‘Barbara,’ Edmund Wilson decided, ‘is really a bad lot’: so bad that when David Pryce-Jones came to write his memoir of Connolly he thought it best to say nothing about her at all. On the other hand, it is part both of her disobliging character and its attraction that in compiling her own memoirs she does nothing to minimise her ...

Take a bullet for the team

David Runciman: The Profumo Affair, 21 February 2013

An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo 
by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Harper, 400 pp., £20, January 2013, 978 0 00 743584 5
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... delayed sending troops into Northern Ireland as the violence was getting out of hand, Merlyn Rees, the secretary of state, was asked by a journalist why they waited so long. ‘My dear boy,’ he replied (doing his best Macmillan), ‘the army is a very blunt instrument.’ So too is the Metropolitan Police. In its pursuit of Ward the Met trampled all ...

Travelling in the Wrong Direction

Lorna Finlayson: Popular Feminism, 4 July 2019

Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny 
by Sarah Banet-Weiser.
Duke, 220 pp., £18.99, November 2018, 978 1 4780 0291 8
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Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy’s Resurgence and Feminist Resistance 
by Carol Gilligan and David Richards.
Cambridge, 162 pp., £21.99, August 2018, 978 1 108 47065 0
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Feminism for the 99 Per Cent: A Manifesto 
by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser.
Verso, 85 pp., £7.99, March 2019, 978 1 78873 442 4
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... bigotries, but the anti-abortion views of such prominent Tory Brexiteers as Dominic Raab and Jacob Rees-Mogg, as well as the Ukip MEP candidate Carl Benjamin’s public speculation as to whether or not he would be willing to rape the Labour MP Jess Phillips, show that the potential exists in this country too. In the world beyond formal politics, Britain’s ...

Family History

Miles Taylor: Tony Benn, 25 September 2003

Free at Last: Diaries 1991-2001 
by Tony Benn.
Hutchinson, 738 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 09 179352 1
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Free Radical: New Century Essays 
by Tony Benn.
Continuum, 246 pp., £9.95, May 2003, 9780826465962
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... the sons of his friends and former colleagues are swimming with the New Labour tide: Edward and David Miliband, sons of his old friend Ralph; Charles Clarke, son of Benn’s former Permanent Secretary, and so on. Some of the most poignant moments come when the Millbank machine tries to whip in its oldest member, reducing him in May 1999 to writing ...

What Europeans Talk about when They Talk about Brexit

LRB Contributors: On Brexit, 3 January 2019

... Pacino) not to get high on his own supply. Cataclysms like Brexit, and politicians like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, are what happens when an entire country gets high on its own supply, but everyone else stopped buying long ago. I was in Brussels recently, taking my son to watch Anderlecht play, when I heard some English people in a café asking the ...

Après Brexit

Ferdinand Mount, 20 February 2020

... involvement in Britain’s 5G network, and the bombardiers of Brexit – Iain Duncan Smith, David Davis, Liam Fox et al – are furious too. The industry points out that Huawei kit has already been installed in dozens of cities across the UK and to a more sophisticated standard than the US can currently provide. Ripping it all out would cost billions ...

Cancelled

Amia Srinivasan: Can I speak freely?, 29 June 2023

... the ‘desire to abolish … capitalism’. Under a new speaker vetting scheme introduced by Jacob Rees-Mogg last year, eight people have been disinvited from speaking at government events, including Dan Kaszeta, a chemical weapons expert, and Kate Devlin, who studies the interaction between humans and technology. Both were told their invitations had been ...

The Breakaway

Perry Anderson: Goodbye Europe, 21 January 2021

... surprised when it was trounced at the polls in 2010.Three years​ before the financial crisis, David Cameron had been elected to lead the Conservatives, promising to make them a more appealing alternative to Labour after the serial fiascos of his predecessors. Unlike them, he was not a Eurosceptic and made sure he got into office without damaging ...

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