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Whitehall Farce

Paul Foot, 12 October 1989

The Intelligence Game: Illusions and Delusions of International Espionage 
by James Rusbridger.
Bodley Head, 320 pp., £12.95, August 1989, 0 370 31242 2
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The Truth about Hollis 
by W.J. West.
Duckworth, 230 pp., £14.95, September 1989, 0 7156 2286 2
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... that the secretary of the committee which planned it was the British MI6 officer and Russian spy, George Blake, who passed details of the entire operation to the Russians two years before the tunnel was completed. Here, too, is the story of MI6’s courageous decision to order Commander Lionel Crabb to swim under a Russian warship in Portsmouth to take ...

Ramadhin and Valentine

J.R. Pole, 13 October 1988

A History of West Indies Cricket 
by Michael Manley.
Deutsch, 575 pp., £17.95, May 1988, 0 233 98259 0
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Sobers: Twenty Years at the Top 
by Garfield Sobers and Brian Scovell.
Macmillan, 204 pp., £11.95, June 1988, 0 333 37267 0
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... was one of the most widely discussed public questions of the late Fifties. It is true that George Headley had been appointed to lead in two matches against England as far back as 1947 (he was unfit to play in the second of them), but no black player had thenceforth been entrusted with this socially significant responsibility. Worrell, a sensitive and ...

You’ve got it or you haven’t

Iain Sinclair, 25 February 1993

Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror 
by Tony Lambrianou and Carol Clerk.
Pan, 256 pp., £4.99, October 1992, 0 330 32284 2
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Gangland: London’s Underworld 
by James Morton.
Little, Brown, 349 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 356 20889 3
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Nipper: The Story of Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read 
by Leonard Read and James Morton.
Warner, 318 pp., £5.99, September 1992, 0 7515 0001 1
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Smash and Grab: Gangsters in the London Underworld 
by Robert Murphy.
Faber, 182 pp., £15.99, February 1993, 0 571 15442 5
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... businessman, the boxer in the boardroom. (A high-profile exemplar of this style was the magnate, George Walker; once, according to James Morton, an ‘ally’ of Billy Hill and Eddie Chapman, later a frequently puffed adornment of the Thatcherite open market culture.) There is nothing new in the concept, quality tailoring ...

Portrait of a Failure

Daniel Aaron, 25 January 1990

Henry Adams 
by Ernest Samuels.
Harvard, 504 pp., £19.95, November 1989, 9780674387355
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The Letters of Henry Adams: Vols I-VI 
edited by J.C Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee and Viola Hopkins-Winner.
Harvard, 2016 pp., £100.75, July 1990, 0 674 52685 6
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... shared in varying degrees by other ‘improvised Europeans’ like Henry James, Edith Wharton, George Santayana, T.S. Eliot and Pound. His interpreters haven’t ignored or condoned his obsession, but neither have they explored its possible bearing on other aspects of his thought and personality. He seems to have looked upon Jews as an unsavoury mix of the ...

Bring some Madeira

Thomas Keymer: Thomas Love Peacock, 8 February 2018

Nightmare Abbey 
by Thomas Love Peacock, edited by Nicholas A. Joukovsky.
Cambridge, 297 pp., £84.99, December 2016, 978 1 107 03186 9
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Crotchet Castle 
by Thomas Love Peacock, edited by Freya Johnston and Matthew Bevis.
Cambridge, 328 pp., £79.99, December 2016, 978 1 107 03072 5
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... hunting estate at Spring-gun and Treadmill. Some of the names indicate real-life targets such as George Canning, the Tory statesman who started out as the attack dog of the Anti-Jacobin, and Wordsworth, whose acceptance of a government post as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland in 1813 confirmed his apostasy from radical politics. Other names aim at ...

But she read Freud

Alice Spawls: Flora Thompson, 19 February 2015

Dreams of the Good Life: The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of ‘Lark Rise to Candleford’ 
by Richard Mabey.
Allen Lane, 208 pp., £9.99, March 2015, 978 0 14 104481 1
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... Selborne Circle of Rural Writers reading group alongside White, William Cobbett, W.H. Hudson and George Sturt. Unfortunately for Mabey, who hoped to find in Thompson an undiscovered nature writer, she was no White (some of the best bits of Mabey’s book are about him) and the Grayshott literary scene made her even less sure of own ambitions. Grayshott was ...

Showing the sights

D.J. Enright, 15 August 1991

The New Oxford Book of 16th-Century Verse 
edited by Emrys Jones.
Oxford, 809 pp., £25, June 1991, 0 19 214126 0
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... my happy home’ is missing (Quiller-Couch dated his version 1601), and so is George Herbert, who was only six when the century ended, and whose absence is partly compensated for by William Alabaster’s religious sonnets. Chambers left Donne for the 17th-century volume, but Emrys Jones is right to give him a handsome showing, if only on ...

Petting Cafés!

E.S. Turner: Wartime spivs and dodgers, 4 December 2003

An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War 
by Donald Thomas.
Murray, 429 pp., £20, July 2003, 0 7195 5732 1
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... put in uniform. Among the notorious bank robbers recruited by the Army for special tasks was Eddie Chapman, pioneer of gelignite-aided robberies, who became a double agent of great audacity and aplomb, surviving to die in his bed at the age of 83. The several pages he merits are exceeded only by those devoted to the arch-spiv Sidney Stanley, whose effronteries ...

Eliot and the Shudder

Frank Kermode, 13 May 2010

... in the New York Review of Books, John Richardson recalls that Bacon aimed his images of his friend George Dyer ‘at the nervous system’, and adds that a ‘woman admirer’ told him they did indeed induce ‘a visceral shudder’. That the shudder should be described as a violent physical response with a strong sexual element will remind us of Yeats’s ...

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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... the Spectator, can be explained in terms of his mischievous iconoclasm. But what are we to make of Chapman Pincher, who does not seem to mind the fact that the secret state regarded him as ‘a contact who could be used to plant leaks’. Did Mr Pincher never think of asking himself why the secret state wished to plant these leaks? Or did he know and ...

Heart-Stopping

Ian Hamilton, 25 January 1996

Not Playing for Celtic: Another Paradise Lost 
by David Bennie.
Mainstream, 221 pp., £12.99, October 1995, 1 85158 757 8
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Achieving the Goal 
by David Platt.
Richard Cohen, 244 pp., £12.99, October 1995, 1 86066 017 7
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Captain’s Log: The Gary McAllister Story 
by Gary McAllister and Graham Clark.
Mainstream, 192 pp., £14.99, October 1995, 9781851587902
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Blue Grit: The John Brown Story 
by John Brown and Derek Watson.
Mainstream, 176 pp., £14.99, November 1995, 1 85158 822 1
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Kicking and Screaming: An Oral History of Football in England 
by Rogan Taylor and Andrew Ward.
Robson, 370 pp., £16.95, October 1995, 0 86051 912 0
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A Passion for the Game: Real Lives in Football 
by Tom Watt.
Mainstream, 316 pp., £14.99, October 1995, 1 85158 714 4
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... seconds, before whipping out a revolver and shooting a suspiciously dark supporter in the George Fox Stand (since United fans are known colloquially as ‘Arabs’). This muddle of transdisciplinary pretentiousness comes from a book called Not Playing for Celtic: Another Paradise Lost, and, yes, the paradise in question is indeed John Milton’s ...

The Jump-out Boys

J. Robert Lennon: The Drug-Bust that Wasn’t, 3 August 2006

Tulia: Race, Cocaine and Corruption in a Small Texas Town 
by Nate Blakeslee.
PublicAffairs, 450 pp., £15.99, September 2005, 9781586482190
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... Assistance Grant. Byrne was a New York City police officer murdered in 1988 by drug dealers; George H.W. Bush used the case in his election campaign, during which he accused Michael Dukakis of being soft on crime. In November of the same year, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the opening salvo in the ‘War on Drugs’, which has done little to ...

A Bit of Ginger

Theo Tait: Gordon Burn, 5 June 2008

Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel 
by Gordon Burn.
Faber, 214 pp., £15.99, April 2008, 978 0 571 19729 3
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... if not exactly proven – assertions about the media and modern life. This one alludes to George Trow’s book Within the Context of No Context: The grid of fifty million and the grid of intimacy. There is a national life, and intimate life. The distance between these two grids is very great. There is one method, one brutal and shocking method ...

As deadly as the male

D.J. Enright, 12 September 1991

Women Who Kill 
by Ann Jones.
Gollancz, 482 pp., £4.99, August 1991, 0 575 05139 6
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... did the slaying. One of the many cases related here tells how in Pennsylvania in 1832 Lucretia Chapman, who had fallen in love with a dark handsome young stranger, was found not guilty of poisoning her husband: in part, it seems, because she was a female, ‘a female, with whose character we are ever accustomed to associate all that is lovely in ...

Black Electricities

John Sutherland, 30 October 1997

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Vol. XXV: January-December 1850 
edited by Clyde de L. Ryals and K.J. Fielding.
Duke, 364 pp., £52, September 1997, 0 8223 1986 1
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Reminiscences 
by Thomas Carlyle, edited by K.J. Fielding and Ian Campbell.
Oxford, 481 pp., £7.99, September 1997, 0 19 281748 5
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... criterion of influence, however. A book need only be read by one generation to take lasting root. George Eliot’s encomium is often quoted: ‘It is an idle question to ask whether Carlyle’s books will be read a century hence; if they were all burnt as the grandest of Suttees on his funeral pile,’ she wrote in 1855, ‘it would only be like cutting down ...

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