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It was sheer heaven

Bee Wilson: Just Being British, 9 May 2019

Exceeding My Brief: Memoirs of a Disobedient Civil Servant 
by Barbara Hosking.
Biteback, 384 pp., £9.99, March 2019, 978 1 78590 462 2
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... at once. In the course of her life she tells us that she met Lloyd George, Beaverbrook, Jackie Kennedy and ‘every single postwar prime minister, from Clement Attlee (whom I met at the theatre) to David Cameron’, as well as other ‘formidable and extraordinarily interesting people, despite being rather dull myself’. She was born, as Jean ...

Make enemies and influence people

Ross McKibbin: Why Vote Labour?, 20 July 2000

... like Dover, where immigration politics always matter, but at the Romsey by-election Charles Kennedy made such a point of his comparatively liberal attitude to asylum-seekers that hardly any voter could have been unaware that asylum-seeking was an electoral issue. Although psephological wisdom has it that the Conservative defeat was due to ‘local ...

Rah, Rah, Cheers, Queers

Terry Castle: On Getting Married, 29 August 2013

... turn … [cry?] …) Victory is sweet, even if glimpsed from afar. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy on Sunday denied a request from Proposition 8 supporters to halt the issuance of same-sex marriage licences in California. Dozens of same-sex weddings have taken place in the state since Friday, following the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday to ...

Christopher Hitchens states a prosecution case

Christopher Hitchens, 25 October 1990

Crossman: The Pursuit of Power 
by Anthony Howard.
Cape, 361 pp., £15.95, October 1990, 0 224 02592 9
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... since Lloyd George’ (more apt than perhaps he knew) and as ‘at least as professional as Mr Kennedy’. Adoringly, he showed off his intimacy with the new leader by pointing out ‘his chair’ when visitors came to the Crossman casa in Vincent Square. I doubt that even Widmerpool would have gone that far, but it’s easy to imagine him stressing, as ...

Heavy Sledding

Chauncey Loomis, 21 December 1989

The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the Northwest Passage and the North Pole, 1818-1909 
by Pierre Berton.
Viking, 672 pp., £16.95, May 1989, 0 670 82491 7
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Overland to Starvation Cove: With the Inuit in Search of Franklin 1878-1880 
by Heinrich Klutschak and William Barr.
Toronto, 261 pp., £17.50, February 1988, 0 8020 5762 4
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Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition 
by Owen Beattie and John Geiger.
Bloomsbury, 180 pp., £12.95, November 1987, 0 7475 0101 7
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... Pullen, Collinson, M’Clure, Austin, Ommanney, Richardson, Penny, DeHaven, Kane, Forsyth, Bellot, Kennedy, Belcher, Inglefield, M’Clintock – and names of ships, such as Plover, Herald, Enterprise, Investigator, Resolute, Intrepid, Assistance, Pioneer, Lady Franklin, Sophia, Felix, Advance, Rescue, Prince Albert, Isabel, Phoenix, Talbot, Fox. Then there ...

No Bottle

Rose George: Water, 18 December 2014

Drinking Water: A History 
by James Salzman.
Overlook Duckworth, 320 pp., £9.99, October 2013, 978 0 7156 4528 4
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Parched City: A History of London’s Public and Private Drinking Water 
by Emma Jones.
Zero Books, 361 pp., £17.99, June 2013, 978 1 78099 158 0
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Water 4.0: The Past, Present and Future of the World’s Most Vital Resource 
by David Sedlak.
Yale, 352 pp., £20, March 2014, 978 0 300 17649 0
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... riches, for the companies and shareholders who monopolise our water supply today. In England, Margaret Thatcher’s government abolished state-owned regional water authorities in 1989, and water was privatised. Eleven of England’s 18 water utilities are at least partly owned by foreign entities, including the giant conglomerate Macquarie (Thames ...

Coalition Monsters

Colin Kidd, 6 March 2014

In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition Government 
by Matthew D’Ancona.
Penguin, 414 pp., £25, October 2013, 978 0 670 91993 2
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... that sits oddly with her later reputation, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, operated, like Wilson, on the sidelines of the Yes campaign. The result, in a notionally divided country, was a resounding 67 per cent majority in favour of continued EEC membership. Whitelaw confessed in his memoirs that he had rather enjoyed ...

President Gore

Inigo Thomas: Gore Vidal, 10 May 2007

Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, 1964-2006 
by Gore Vidal.
Little, Brown, 278 pp., £17.99, November 2006, 0 316 02727 8
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... father in 1935 and next married Hughdie Auchincloss, who later became stepfather to Jackie Kennedy. She had eight children with different husbands, but wasn’t apparently much of a mother to any of them. She was a drinker, and a lover of Clark Gable’s. Vidal isn’t entirely forthcoming about his mother and father: his parents’ lovers, it ...

Making It

Melissa Benn: New Feminism?, 5 February 1998

Different for Girls: How Culture Creates Women 
by Joan Smith.
Chatto, 176 pp., £10.99, September 1997, 9780701165123
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The New Feminism 
by Natasha Walter.
Little, Brown, 278 pp., £17.50, January 1998, 0 316 88234 8
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A Century of Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States 
by Sheila Rowbotham.
Penguin, 752 pp., £20, June 1997, 0 670 87420 5
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... It is more likely to be Harriet Harman, Clare Short, Barbara Follett, the recently ennobled Helena Kennedy or even Cherie Booth, of whom the ‘ordinary woman’ will have heard and whom she will admire. As Joan Smith notes in Different for Girls, a collection of writings on women and culture, the most loved female figures of recent decades, the true ...

Lobbying

Richard J. Evans: Hitler’s Aristocratic Go-Betweens, 17 March 2016

Go-Betweens for Hitler 
by Karina Urbach.
Oxford, 389 pp., £20, July 2015, 978 0 19 870366 2
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... be surprised that he taught his young nieces, Princess Elizabeth (the future queen) and Princess Margaret, the Nazi salute – not as a satirical gesture, but as a trivialising piece of play. More surprising is the evidence Urbach presents that his brother, who became George VI after Edward was forced to abdicate in 1936, had ‘great sympathies’, as a ...

Woke Capital

Laleh Khalili, 7 September 2023

The Key Man: How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale 
by Simon Clark and Will Louch.
Penguin, 342 pp., £10.99, February, 978 0 241 98894 7
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Icarus: The Life and Death of the Abraaj Group 
by Brian Brivati.
Biteback, 349 pp., £9.99, January 2022, 978 1 78590 733 3
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Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World 
by Brett Christophers.
Verso, 310 pp., £20, April, 978 1 83976 898 9
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... UK National Conservatism Conference, one fascinating sideshow was the brawl over the carcass of Margaret Thatcher. A few weeks before the event, Ryan Bourne, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute, had warned those attending the conference against ‘importing the worst American narratives into British politics’ and in the process abandoning ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... 11 of Moser, or in Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis (2012) – highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a shoestring, got right to business: ‘How do you ...

This Sporting Life

R.W. Johnson, 8 December 1994

Iain Macleod 
by Robert Shepherd.
Hutchinson, 608 pp., £25, November 1994, 0 09 178567 7
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... asked him to be Shadow Chancellor – and was surprised by his choice of deputy. ‘Let me have Margaret Thatcher,’ he said – for he had noted her drive and energy. Macleod was passionately anti-hanging, pro-abortion and broke finally with Powell over his ‘rivers of blood’ speech (‘Enoch’s gone mad and hates the blacks’). Thatcher shared few ...

At the Skunk Works

R.W. Johnson, 23 February 1995

Fool’s Gold: The Story of North Sea Oil 
by Christopher Harvie.
Hamish Hamilton, 408 pp., £18.99, October 1994, 0 241 13352 1
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... were larger than life too: ex-Governor John Connally of Texas, for example, still scarred from the Kennedy shooting, hustling for oil companies and on the way down to the bankruptcy that broke him, and T. Boone Pickens, the greenmail king, so thrilled with his acquisition of the Mesa field (which he renamed after his wife, Beatrice) that he buzzed Balmoral ...

Didn’t they notice?

David Runciman: Offshore, 14 April 2011

Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World 
by Nicholas Shaxson.
Bodley Head, 329 pp., £14.99, January 2011, 978 1 84792 110 9
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Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class 
by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson.
Simon and Schuster, 368 pp., £11.50, March 2011, 978 1 4165 8870 2
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... were not so happy: they feared a balance of payments crisis. But when in 1963 President Kennedy tried to stem currency outflows by taxing the interest on foreign securities, in an effort to reduce the incentive to export dollars to more lucrative overseas markets, it had the opposite effect, and produced what Shaxson calls ‘a stampede for the ...

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