Women beware men

Margaret Anne Doody, 23 July 1992

Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women 
by Susan Faludi.
Chatto, 592 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 7011 4643 5
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The War against Women 
by Marilyn French.
Hamish Hamilton, 229 pp., £9.99, March 1992, 0 241 13271 1
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... the young have not had their spirit broken nor their minds unhinged by coming of age in the Reagan-Thatcher era. Susan Faludi discovered her topic, as she tells us in her prefatory Acknowledgments, when she began work on a ‘magazine story on the Harvard-Yale “man shortage” study’. That Harvard-Yale ‘study’ provides clues and metaphors for ...

Matsanga

Jeremy Harding, 16 February 1989

... months earlier at her first Commonwealth Conference. By April 1980 the weeping was done and the Thatcher Government had a foreign policy triumph to its credit. Today Britain’s relations with Frelimo are good and it supplies Mozambique with generous aid, including £27.5 million in bilateral emergency relief over the last two years and £22.8 million in ...

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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... Hosking is left-leaning, Trumpington is a Conservative (she went to the Lords in 1980 under Mrs Thatcher, her great mentor). Hosking is gay, Trumpington was heterosexual – the happiest years of her life, she tells us, were spent with her late husband, ‘Barker’, who was headmaster of The Leys school in Cambridge. Hosking’s family was ...

What can be done

Leo Pliatzky, 2 August 1984

Government and the Governed 
by Douglas Wass.
Routledge, 120 pp., £8.95, April 1984, 0 7102 0312 8
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... Cabinet and Cabinet committees, but which went into decline and was put out of its misery by Mrs Thatcher after the 1983 Election. Son of CPRS would have greater resources and an enhanced role, especially in the annual public expenditure survey; it would, for instance, sit in at all the bilaterals between the Treasury and spending ministers, and would ...

Not Many Dead

Linda Colley, 10 September 1992

Riot, Risings and Revolution: Governance and Violence in 18th-Century England 
by Ian Gilmour.
Hutchinson, 504 pp., £25, May 1992, 0 09 175330 9
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... of Defence under Heath, and then as Lord Privy Seal and Deputy Foreign Secretary. Then came Margaret Thatcher’s consolidation of her own style of party leadership and, on 14 September 1981, the end of his political progress. There were clear intellectual as well as tactical, sociological and (doubtless) personality reasons why he was purged in ...

England prepares to leave the world

Neal Ascherson, 17 November 2016

... fainter, as the mainland falls behind. The first performance was in the 1980s. Who could forget Margaret Thatcher’s ear-splitting arias? But she never took the raft to the horizon, and never finally cast off the cross-Channel hawser mooring her to Europe. This revival is different. Theresa May says she’s bound for the ocean, and she means it. Or ...

Through Plate-Glass

Ian Sansom: Jonathan Coe, 10 May 2001

The Rotters’ Club 
by Jonathan Coe.
Viking, 405 pp., £14.99, April 2001, 0 670 89252 1
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... the book’s main characters become misplaced and the footnote ‘Much praised, recently, by Denis Thatcher, who said they had given him “six of the most enjoyable hours of my life”. His wife Margaret later joked that he was “stiff for hours afterwards”,’ which should have been attached to a sentence ...

When the Floods Came

James Meek: England’s Water, 31 July 2008

... the ageing water and sewage systems, but there seemed little danger that the government of Margaret Thatcher would prevent shareholders making a fat return. And so it has proved, even unto her successors. The simplest way to understand the way the water set-up works in England now is to think of it as a form of buy-to-let scheme, with us, the ...

Favoured Irregulars

Andy Beckett: The Paras, 24 January 2019

Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper 
by Helen Parr.
Allen Lane, 382 pp., £20, September 2018, 978 0 241 28894 8
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... Parr’s big-picture account of the war and its British political dimension is standard stuff: Margaret Thatcher’s use of the crisis to rescue her premiership, her manipulative description of the task force as ‘our boys’, the islands’ challenging weather and terrain, the huge difficulty of keeping the wet, cold British troops properly ...

Trouble at the Fees Office

Jonathan Raban: Alice in Expenses Land, 11 June 2009

... to Members’ Allowances, it’s not surprising that most MPs seem to have followed the example of Margaret Beckett, who confessed: ‘I just grabbed together the relevant things and bunged them into the Fees Office and left it to them to sort it out.’ So Gerald Kaufman, having spent £8865 on a Bang & Olufsen 40” BeoVision LCD TV, described by its ...

Why can’t she just do as she ought?

Michael Newton: ‘Gone with the Wind’, 6 August 2009

Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone with the Wind’ Revisited 
by Molly Haskell.
Yale, 244 pp., £16.99, March 2009, 978 0 300 11752 3
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... search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible. As in a proto-Pop Idol, lines of would-be Scarletts queued up for ...

Literary Friction

Jenny Turner: Kathy Acker’s Ashes, 19 October 2017

After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography 
by Chris Kraus.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 1 63590 006 4
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... do. It was as though there could be one and one only of each available option: one politician, Margaret Thatcher; one princess, Princess Di; one blonde superstar, Madonna; one lean and androgynous rock’n’roll performer, Patti Smith. In Kraus’s view, Acker went along with this weird logic, too. ‘Acker is in London, at a peak of notoriety that ...

Who will stop them?

Owen Hatherley: The Neo-Elite, 23 October 2014

The Establishment and How They Get Away with It 
by Owen Jones.
Allen Lane, 335 pp., £16.99, September 2014, 978 1 84614 719 7
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... and later, in the UK, through Madsen Pirie’s Adam Smith Institute, and adopted as policy by Thatcher from the mid-1970s onwards. He persists in using the term ‘establishment’ mainly as a way of shaming neoliberals who like to present themselves as in some way ‘anti-establishment’. Although he rightly ridicules the ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: On Trade-Unionism, 5 May 1988

... Strike of 1926. Then, if ever, you might expect to have seen legislation enacted which would leave Margaret Thatcher’s industrial relations policy far behind in left field. But as Anderson documents, the 1927 Act is remarkable not for what it includes, but for what it omits: the compromises on which the Committee eventually agreed are as much an echo of ...

After the May Day Flood

Seumas Milne, 5 June 1997

... dispensing with such footling restrictions, left-of-centre figures such as Cook, John Prescott, Margaret Beckett and Chris Smith have been allowed to surround themselves with like-minded ministers. The man who has replaced the Blairite factotum Stephen Byers, for example, in charge of minimum wage and trade-union rights, is Ian McCartney – a Prescott ...