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Le Roi Jean Quinze

Stefan Collini: Roy Jenkins and Labour, 5 June 2014

Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life 
by John Campbell.
Cape, 818 pp., £30, March 2014, 978 0 224 08750 6
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... released instead into the free upper air where good arguments are sovereign. It was the fate of Roy Jenkins more than of any other recent figure in British politics to serve, during his life and in some ways since his death in 2003, as the incarnation of these dreams. Over and above his actual achievements and failures, Jenkins carried the burden of ...

Water, Water

Asa Briggs, 9 November 1989

The Conquest of Water: The Advent of Health in the Industrial Age 
by Jean-Pierre Goubert.
Polity, 300 pp., £25, April 1989, 0 7456 0508 7
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... as active. It was a landmark when Lavoisier described water as H2O. Introduced concisely by Le Roy Ladurie, who adds nothing and subtracts a little from what the author of this valuable monograph has to say, The Conquest of Water is mainly about France, and the perspectives throughout are indubitably French. Britain and the United States appear from time ...

The Tories’ Death-Wish

Kenneth O. Morgan, 15 May 1980

Tariff Reform in British Politics 
by Alan Sykes.
Oxford, 352 pp., £16, December 1979, 0 19 822483 4
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... new centre bloc in politics failed ignominiously: judged against their example, the prospects for Roy Jenkins in serving as pied piper of the centrists today cannot be encouraging. Of the 157 Unionists returned in the rout in January 1906, no more than 33, and probably even fewer, were free traders. The ‘whole hoggers’ had won the game, at least for the ...
Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England 
by Stephen Greenblatt.
Oxford, 205 pp., £22.50, April 1988, 0 19 812980 7
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Representing the English Renaissance 
edited by Stephen Greenblatt.
California, 372 pp., $42, February 1988, 0 520 06129 2
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... the relation between orthodoxy and subversion in Harriot’s text’ will give us a fuller understanding of Henry IV. An example may serve to show how Greenblatt’s approach works. One of his essays, to my mind the most successful in the whole collection, deals with ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’. At the end of Elizabeth’s reign the ...

Two Giant Brothers

Amit Chaudhuri: Tagore’s Modernism, 20 April 2006

Selected Poems 
by Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri.
Oxford India, 449 pp., £23.99, April 2004, 0 19 566867 7
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... of the Upanishads, a text that his father’s friend, the scholar, reformer and thinker Rammohun Roy, had translated into English in the early 19th century, and which Anquetil-Duperron, too, had played his part in bringing to the world’s attention. The Upanishads became, for both Roy and Debendranath Tagore, a prism ...

Bevan’s Boy

John Campbell, 20 September 1984

The Making of Neil Kinnock 
by Robert Harris.
Faber, 256 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 571 13266 9
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Neil Kinnock: The Path to Leadership 
by G.M.F. Drower.
Weidenfeld, 162 pp., £8.95, July 1984, 0 297 78467 6
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... subject and little understanding of the politics of the Labour Party. Robert Harris’s is longer, fuller and excellently researched: among the sources he has been able to see and uses very well are the GMC minutes of the Bedwellty Constituency Labour Party; he is thoroughly at home in Labour’s civil war and is able to chart Kinnock’s skilful course ...

Oh God, can we face it?

Daniel Finn: ‘The BBC’s Irish Troubles’, 19 May 2016

The BBC’s ‘Irish Troubles’: Television, Conflict and Northern Ireland 
by Robert Savage.
Manchester, 298 pp., £70, May 2015, 978 0 7190 8733 2
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... of its local premises, and to welcome the new secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Labour’s Roy Mason. Mason took the opportunity to launch a ferocious attack – ‘a thermonuclear explosion of rage and spleen’, according to one of those in attendance – on the BBC’s record in Northern Ireland. One BBC veteran described the evening as ‘the most ...

After Andropov

John Barber, 19 April 1984

Andropov 
by Zhores Medvedev.
Blackwell, 227 pp., £7.50, June 1983, 0 631 13401 8
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Andropov in Power: From Komsomol to Kremlin 
by Jonathan Steele and Eric Abraham.
Martin Robertson, 216 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 85520 641 1
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Life in Russia 
by Michael Binyon.
Hamish Hamilton, 286 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 241 10982 5
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The Soviet Union after Brezhnev 
edited by Martin McCauley.
Heinemann, 160 pp., £14.50, November 1983, 0 8419 0918 0
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Yuri Andropov: A Secret Passage into the Kremlin 
by Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, translated by Guy Daniels.
Robert Hale, 302 pp., £11.50, February 1984, 0 7090 1630 1
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... his likely behaviour in office. The biographies by Medvedev and Steele and Abraham provide a much fuller picture of the man. It is interesting that until his appointment as head of the KGB in 1967, Andropov had tended to be associated with the more reformist wing of the Soviet establishment. The young Andropov was a protégé of Otto Kuusinen, one of the more ...

The Cadaver Club

Iain Sinclair, 22 December 1994

Original Sin 
by P.D. James.
Faber, 426 pp., £14.99, October 1994, 0 571 17253 9
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Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 282 pp., £14.99, September 1994, 1 85619 507 4
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The Hidden Files: An Autobiography 
by Derek Raymond.
Warner, 342 pp., £5.99, December 1994, 0 7515 1184 6
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Not till the Red Fog Rises 
by Derek Raymond.
Little, Brown, 248 pp., £15.99, December 1994, 0 316 91014 7
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... aliens, the parrots, the peglegs: all press-ganged upstream with Adam Dalgleish’s impersonator, Roy Marsden, for the Long John Silver show at the Mermaid. James is left with a heritage trail of selective quotations, a London Dungeon of waxwork crimes exhibited in authentic locations. This is an empty set, a set defined by its architecture (where even Mandy ...

In Praise of Middle Government

Ian Gilmour, 12 July 1990

Liberalisms. Essays in Political Philosophy 
by John Gray.
Routledge, 273 pp., £35, August 1989, 0 415 00744 5
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The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education 
edited by Timothy Fuller.
Yale, 169 pp., £20, April 1990, 0 300 04344 9
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The Political Philosophy of Michael Oakeshott 
by Paul Franco.
Yale, 277 pp., £20, April 1990, 0 300 04686 3
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Conservatism 
by Ted Honderich.
Hamish Hamilton, 255 pp., £16.99, June 1990, 0 241 12999 0
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... by Honderich to disallow books by all practising politicians, were it not that he does include Roy Hattersley and Gordon Brown. Much the same happens with work by non-politicians. Two very good non-extremist studies, Anthony Quinton’s The Politics of Imperfection and Noel O’Sullivan’s Conservatism, appear, but they are almost alone. Norton and ...

Masses and Classes

Ferdinand Mount: Gladstone, 17 February 2005

The Mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer and Politics 
by David Bebbington.
Oxford, 331 pp., £55, March 2004, 0 19 926765 0
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... two as ‘somewhat crackbrained’, to quote Richard Shannon. Shannon’s two-volume life offers a fuller account of Gladstone’s intellectual development than other modern biographies, yet even he allots as much space to Macaulay’s mesmerisingly destructive review of The State in Its Relations with the Church as he does to the contents of the book ...

Leaping on Tables

Norman Vance: Thomas Carlyle, 2 November 2000

Sartor Resartus 
by Thomas Carlyle, edited by Rodger Tarr and Mark Engel.
California, 774 pp., £38, April 2000, 0 520 20928 1
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... for stated reasons, and a comprehensive textual commentary is supplied. The annotation is much fuller than that in the World’s Classics edition which is its only rival. In the face of all this it seems ungracious to grumble at Carlyle’s Dryasdust editors or to poke fun at the triumph of computerisation in producing a new edition of this supremely ...

Did he want the job?

Tobias Gregory: Montaigne’s Career, 8 March 2018

Montaigne: A Life 
by Philippe Desan, translated by Steven Rendall and Lisa Neal.
Princeton, 796 pp., £32.95, January 2017, 978 0 691 16787 9
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... position at court, which had use for capable new men. But to be perceived as noble in a fuller sense, it was not enough to hold a magistrate’s office or own a seigneurial estate. Your family had to be known to have ‘lived nobly’ on its estate for at least a hundred years: that is, to reside principally there, and to derive its main income from ...

Wringing out the Fault

Stephen Sedley: The Right to Silence, 7 March 2002

... is the one conventionally adopted in modern common law judgments. But recent scholarship, with fuller access to early sources, has called this account in question. This revised version has, in its turn, been contested, not least because of its unaccountably benign view of the inquisitorial proceedings of the medieval Church, but it does shed important ...

A Susceptible Man

Ian Sansom: The Unhappy Laureate, 4 March 1999

Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis 
by Albert Gelpi.
Oxford, 246 pp., £30, March 1998, 0 19 509863 3
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... poetry with a special psychological and moral function: psychological in that it brings us to fuller, deeper consciousness of ourselves and our private and social lives, moral because that comprehension can then inform the discriminations and choices by which we sustain and determine our lives, individually and collectively. In his preface to The Tenth ...

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