It’s as if he’d never existed

Anthony Pagden, 18 July 1985

The Transformation of Spain: From Franco to the Constitutional Monarchy 
by David Gilmour.
Quartet, 306 pp., £12.95, March 1985, 9780704324619
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... of La Codorniz, a semi-clandestine Spanish version of Le Canard Enchaîné, went as follows: the young prince Felipe asks the king, whether there will be a public holiday when Franco dies. Yes, he replies. And, papa, will there be a holiday when you are declared king? Yes, says the king. And, papa, will there be a holiday when the Republic is restored? I ...

Are we doomed?

David Runciman: The End of the Species, 20 November 2025

After the Spike: The Risks of Global Depopulation and the Case for People 
by Dean Spears and Michael Geruso.
Bodley Head, 307 pp., £22, July 2025, 978 1 84792 835 1
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No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children 
by Paul Morland.
Swift, 264 pp., £12.99, March 2025, 978 1 80075 412 6
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The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire: Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction 
by Henry Gee.
Picador, 278 pp., £18.99, March 2025, 978 1 0350 3083 5
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... other things that matter.Spears and Geruso offer a range of arguments for having more children: young people create dynamism; larger populations are more likely to produce exceptional talent; dense urban environments are where innovation happens. And the presence of more children would help to redress a steady and subtle shift in social priorities away from ...

Diary

Melanie McFadyean: In the Wrong Crowd, 25 September 2014

... and sent to jail,’ Detective Inspector John McFarlane said after the conviction of 17 of the 20 young people jointly charged with the murder of 15-year-old Sofyen Belamouadden at Victoria Station in March 2010: ‘the law on joint enterprise is clear and unforgiving.’ To be found guilty of murder as an individual it must be proved beyond reasonable doubt ...

Buildings of England

T.J. Clark, 19 March 2015

... of a (botched) dream of fatherhood into The available space, I had read the kids the opening of David Copperfield – the terrible Murdstone chapters – And Ruby had exited after a page or so, going along the landing to say to her stepmother, White-faced but calm, frightened, considerate, as if taking pity on my mistake, ‘I think I am too ...

Three feet on the ground

Marilyn Butler, 7 July 1983

William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision 
by Jonathan Wordsworth.
Oxford, 496 pp., £25, February 1983, 0 19 812097 4
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William Wordsworth: The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness 
by David Pirie.
Methuen, 301 pp., £14.95, March 1982, 0 416 31300 0
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Benjamin the Waggoner 
by William Wordsworth, edited by Paul Betz.
Cornell/Harvester, 356 pp., £40, September 1981, 0 85527 513 8
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... and a commentator on Wordsworth’s oeuvre in its best years, 1797-1805. Another British critic, David Pirie, writes in The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness from a point of view which often resembles Jonathan Wordsworth’s. Pirie’s book is less obviously biographical in its orientation, yet in the end its goal is a portrait of Wordsworth’s mind and ...

Somewhere else

Rosalind Mitchison, 19 May 1988

The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction 
by Bernard Bailyn.
Tauris, 177 pp., £12.95, April 1987, 1 85043 037 3
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Voyagers to the West: Emigration from Britain to America on the Eve of the Revolution 
by Bernard Bailyn.
Tauris, 668 pp., £29.50, April 1987, 1 85043 038 1
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Migration and Society in Early Modern England 
edited by Peter Clark and David Souden.
Hutchinson, 355 pp., £25, February 1988, 0 09 173220 4
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Gypsy-Travellers in 19th-Century Society 
by David Mayall.
Cambridge, 261 pp., £25, February 1988, 0 521 32397 5
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... involved in the study of the mechanisms and motives which brought together work opportunities and young people, new lands and their settlers, advertising techniques and land speculators, penology and the need for a labour force. They also show that in the task of laboriously finding out who went where, and why, migration theory has little to offer to the ...

Coe and Ovett & Co

Russell Davies, 1 October 1981

Running Free 
by Sebastian Coe and David Miller.
Sidgwick, 174 pp., £6.95, May 1981, 0 283 98684 0
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... that is traditionally the soul-food of champions, but there has been dark talk of links with the Young Conservatives. Coe’s sister Miranda is an elegant model – the family is strong on legs – though she doubles (possibly a concession here to the Ovett style of things) as a ‘cabaret dancer’. Above all, Coe has been coached by his father, Peter, who ...

Big Fish

Frank Kermode, 9 September 1993

Tell Them I’m on my Way 
by Arnold Goodman.
Chapmans, 464 pp., £20, August 1993, 1 85592 636 9
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Not an Englishman: Conversations with Lord Goodman 
by David Selbourne.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 237 pp., £17.99, August 1993, 1 85619 365 9
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... The portrait of Lord Goodman on the jacket of his memoirs is from a photograph; the one on David Selbourne’s book is from a portrait by Lucian Freud. In the first he looks severe but quizzical, a kind man but not a man to be put upon; in the second he looks quite desperately sad, as if he had done much to little or no avail, and might well have been put upon quite heavily ...

Festschriftiness

Susan Pedersen, 6 October 2011

Structures and Transformations in Modern British History 
edited by David Feldman and Jon Lawrence.
Cambridge, 331 pp., £50, January 2011, 978 0 521 51882 6
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The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain 
edited by Simon Gunn and James Vernon.
California, 271 pp., £20.95, May 2011, 978 0 9845909 5 7
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Classes, Cultures and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin 
edited by Clare Griffiths, John Nott and William Whyte.
Oxford, 320 pp., £65, April 2011, 978 0 19 957988 4
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... A layman might be forgiven for assuming that those two at least were on the same side. But when David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, two young American scholars, cited Stedman Jones and Joyce as exemplars of social history’s ‘linguistic turn’ in an essay published in Social History in 1992, a tempest ensued. Jon ...

Ghost Ions

Jonathan Coe: AA-Rated Memories, 18 August 2022

Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems 
edited by Julian Upton.
Headpress, 595 pp., £22.99, April, 978 1 909394 93 3
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The Magic Box: Viewing Britain through the Rectangular Window 
by Rob Young.
Faber, 500 pp., £12.99, August, 978 0 571 28460 3
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... in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat as soon as I saw that it contained a chapter dedicated to the history of the AA ...

The Garment of Terrorism

Azadeh Moaveni, 30 August 2018

The Making of a Salafi Muslim Woman: Paths to Conversion 
by Anabel Inge.
Oxford, 320 pp., £16.99, May 2018, 978 0 19 088920 3
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Veil 
by Rafia Zakaria.
Bloomsbury, 160 pp., £9.99, September 2017, 978 1 5013 2277 8
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... policy concern and was seen as not only un-British, but as a state security concern. In 2015 David Cameron called on institutions to devise their own ‘sensible rules’ about face veils, and Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, promised that schools would take a firm lead. He declared that ‘our liberal West values’ must be protected and added that ...

Middle-Class Hair

Carolyn Steedman: A New World for Women, 19 October 2017

... my former department to the general gaiety was to be a talk by Margaret Drabble, on the topic of young women at university in the 1960s and 1970s. I was dun gone, as we say in the trade, pensioned off, but reeled in for a last duty. ‘Or as warm-up woman,’ I said in the same breath as ‘I’d be delighted. I’ve read all her novels. I love ...

Sad Stories

Adam Begley, 5 January 1989

Capote: A Biography 
by Gerald Clarke.
Hamish Hamilton, 632 pp., £16.95, July 1988, 0 241 12549 9
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Jean Stafford: A Biography 
by David Roberts.
Chatto, 494 pp., £16.95, August 1988, 0 7011 3010 5
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... The June 1947 issue of Life Magazine contains an article called ‘Young US Writers’, a round-up of 11 promising post-war authors. Of the 11, three are well-known today; of this famous trio, one is still alive, the other two subjects of recently published biographies. The first page of the feature is dominated by a large photograph of a superbly arrogant Truman Capote – 22 years old, tiny, but potent ...

Diary

Peter Craven: On the Demidenko Affair, 16 November 1995

... of the judges of the Victorian Premier’s Prize for First Fiction, of not giving the award to a young writer who has perpetrated one of the greatest frauds in Australia’s rich history of literary hoaxes and deceptions. Before she was exposed, Helen Demidenko, as she styled herself (Helen Darville as she in fact is), might have seemed to be one of the ...

What’s Happening in the Engine-Room

Penelope Fitzgerald: Poor John Lehmann, 7 January 1999

John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure 
by Adrian Wright.
Duckworth, 308 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 7156 2871 2
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... of Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee describes Lehmann as one of the ‘ambitious, thwarted, talented young men’ who ‘rubbed up against Leonard’s adamantine proprietariness and perfectionism ... It was a well-known joke among their friends that working at the Hogarth Press drove you mad.’ After seven months at the Press Lehmann made his first appearance ...