Where will the judges sit?

Stephen Sedley: What will happen to the Law Lords?, 16 September 1999

The House of Lords: Its Parliamentary and Judicial Roles 
edited by Brice Dickson and Paul Carmichael.
Hart, 258 pp., £30, December 1998, 1 84113 020 6
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Constitutional Futures: A History of the Next Ten Years 
edited by Robert Hazell.
Oxford, 263 pp., £17.99, January 1999, 0 19 829801 3
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The Law and Parliament 
edited by Dawn Olivier and Gavin Drewry.
Butterworth, 219 pp., £15.95, September 1998, 0 406 98092 6
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Crown Powers: Subject and Citizens 
by Christopher Vincenzi.
Pinter, 343 pp., £47.50, April 1998, 1 85567 454 8
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... of Commons bars selling drink outside the hours which Parliament had laid down for everyone else. Geoffrey Lock acerbically analyses the decision (and its author) in his chapter on the law governing Parliament in the Oliver and Drewry volume. Part of the reason for the decision, and not a wholly discreditable one, is that in the absence of a constitutional ...

Plimsoll’s Story

Stephen Sedley, 28 April 2011

The Oxford History of the Laws of England 1820-1914: Vol. XI, English Legal System; Vol. XII, Private Law; Vol. XIII, Fields of Development 
edited by William Cornish et al.
Oxford, 3571 pp., £495, February 2010, 978 0 19 925883 3
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... doyen of them, William Cornish, has a distinguished record both as a legal historian – his and Geoffrey Clark’s Law and Society in England 1750-1950 remains an important work – and as an authority on intellectual property, on which he contributes an excellent section linking controversy and change in the law to economic interest and scientific ...

Musical Chairs with Ribbentrop

Bee Wilson: Nancy Astor, 20 December 2012

Nancy: The Story of Lady Astor 
by Adrian Fort.
Cape, 378 pp., £25, October 2012, 978 0 224 09016 2
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... both at Cliveden and in St James’s Square – had evolved. Now, the Astors frequently invited Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times, Nevile Henderson, ambassador to Germany, and Philip Kerr, the Marquess of Lothian, a Christian Scientist like Nancy, and one of several to express the view that in marching into the Rhineland, Germany was merely walking into ...

Ladders last a long time

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Reading Raphael Samuel, 23 May 2024

Workshop of the World: Essays in People’s History 
by Raphael Samuel, edited by John Merrick.
Verso, 295 pp., £25, January, 978 1 80429 280 8
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... of British Communism, a volume of essays combining research and recollections. Today Samuel is best known for his work on popular memory and for History Workshop. John Merrick’s new selection of his essays aims to rectify that: it brings together a sample of Samuel’s historical studies, several of which are still thrilling to read, and most of which ...

Olivier Rex

Ronald Bryden, 1 September 1988

Olivier 
by Anthony Holden.
Weidenfeld, 504 pp., £16, May 1988, 0 297 79089 7
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... in the book has a through-line, it is the battle of his ‘I’ with his ‘want’. Father Geoffrey Heald, the priest who introduced Olivier to acting at the choir school of All Saints Margaret Street, and played Petruchio to his 13-year-old Katharina in The Shrew, told him to read Dickens – as an actor, he would never want for characterisations. The ...

Trapped with an Incubus

Clair Wills: Shirley Hazzard, 21 September 2023

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life 
by Brigitta Olubas.
Virago, 564 pp., £12.99, June, 978 0 349 01286 5
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... who had by then published several major biographies (Flaubert, Maupassant, Apollinaire), but was best known as a translator of Flaubert – had met Greene years before in America, when he was still with his first wife. Hazzard would go on to write a clutch of spiky, ambitious novels including The Bay of Noon (1970), The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great ...

Boomerang

Sylvia Lawson, 18 February 1988

Australians: A Historical Library 
Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, AUS $695Show More
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... Bierce, The Devil’s DictionaryStalemate beneath the dense sky of moratorium agreements: the best we can hope for Europe ... But there is no escape route in sight. You feel you are standing at bay. Australia is not a way out.Christa Wolf, CassandraThe city of Sydney has one decent road to the airport because of the Queen’s visit in 1963; the royal ...

What was it that drove him?

David Runciman: Gordon Brown, 4 January 2018

My Life, Our Times 
by Gordon Brown.
Bodley Head, 512 pp., £25, November 2017, 978 1 84792 497 1
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... career, and he often succeeded. His closest colleagues from his time at the Treasury, including Geoffrey Robinson, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, remained remarkably loyal. But there was​ , inevitably, a downside. The higher he rose, the more political these friendships became. Being part of Gordon’s band was not a costless enterprise – it deeply alienated ...

Computers that want things

James Meek, 9 October 2025

... perfect tool for an authoritarian communist government; in 2025 he said that AI was humanity’s best chance to escape technological stagnation. And yet a careful parsing of his long, rambling interviews suggests greater consistency – a man whose greatest concern about AI was never that it was dangerous, but that it wasn’t going to work.One resolution of ...

Cityphilia

John Lanchester: The credit crunch, 3 January 2008

... piss it off – was the windfall tax on profits imposed in 1981 by Mrs Thatcher’s chancellor Geoffrey Howe. (Blair or Brown would never dream of doing anything like that to the City.) But the abolition of exchange controls in 1979 and the increasingly international flow of capital, combined with the abolition of restrictions on trading practices which ...

Bad News at the ‘Observer’

Colin Legum, 4 November 1982

Powers of the Press: The World’s Great Newspapers 
by Martin Walker.
Quartet, 401 pp., £15, July 1982, 0 7043 2271 4
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Goodbye Gutenberg: The Newspaper Revolution of the 1980s 
by Anthony Smith.
Oxford, 367 pp., £3.95, January 1982, 9780198272434
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New Technology and Industrial Relations in Fleet Street 
by Roderick Martin.
Oxford, 367 pp., £17.50, October 1981, 9780198272434
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News Ltd: Why you can’t read all about it 
by Brian Whitaker.
Minority Press Group, 176 pp., £3.25, June 1981, 0 906890 04 7
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... although the media may have been important in spreading knowledge about these developments. At its best, the press has been able to influence opinion, but it has never enjoyed the power to determine the course of events, or the way people think. Nonetheless, one of the popular myths about the press is that it enjoys independent power – for example, the power ...

The natives did a bunk

Malcolm Gaskill: The Little Ice Age, 19 July 2018

A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America 
by Sam White.
Harvard, 361 pp., £23.95, October 2017, 978 0 674 97192 9
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... were so serious that they couldn’t be contained politically. In a 2013 study, the historian Geoffrey Parker argued that the ‘general crisis’ of the 17th century, a litany of wars, invasions, rebellions, massacres, epidemics and famines, can be explained by the Little Ice Age. Others have seen the origins of the French Revolution in climate ...

During Her Majesty’s Pleasure

Ronan Bennett, 20 February 1997

... silly, but the mimicry gave them some satisfaction, a small revenge on the man who was doing his best to send them to prison for the rest of their lives – and if Terry McCluskie and Raymond Reynolds, on trial for murder, with the experience of Brixton’s hospital wing etched in their memories, behaved ‘unattractively’ in court, it was to show that ...

In the Hyacinth Garden

Richard Poirier: ‘But oh – Vivienne!’, 3 April 2003

Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot 
by Carole Seymour-Jones.
Constable, 702 pp., £9.99, September 2002, 1 84119 636 3
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... admirer Ezra Pound, to whom he had shown some of his work. Europe, Pound could testify, was the best, the only place for any American aspirant to literary or artistic preferment. If you can make it there, he insisted, you can make it anywhere, especially back home in a cultural dependency like America. The most conspicuous instance was Eliot’s hero (and ...

Tolerant Repression

Blair Worden, 10 May 1990

Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal 
by Tom Mayer.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £32.50, April 1989, 0 521 36104 4
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Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII 
by Alistair Fox.
Blackwell, 317 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 631 13566 9
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The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Portraits at the Court of Henry VIII 
by Retha Warnicke.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 521 37000 0
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English Travellers Abroad 1604-1667 
by John Stoye.
Yale, 448 pp., £12.95, January 1990, 0 300 04180 2
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... More’s praise of the first two Tudors could hardly have been more perfunctory. To More the best form of government was an aristocracy, not a monarchy. His preference was shared by Thomas Starkey, whose Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, dated too late by Mayer’s predecessors, is placed by his careful scholarship around 1529-32. Time and again the ...