Round Things

T.J. Binyon, 24 October 1991

Maurice Baring: A Citizen of Europe 
by Emma Letley.
Constable, 269 pp., £18.95, September 1991, 0 09 469870 8
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... stones At Horses, People, Passing Trains But specially at Window-panes. Like many of the Upper Class, He liked the sound of Broken Glass. To this last line is appended the footnote: A line I stole with subtle daring From Wing-Commander Maurice Baring. Though in his time Baring was the author of some sixty books, and had a collected edition of his works ...

Breathtaking Co-ordination

Jonathan Wright: Hitler’s Wartime Economy, 19 July 2007

The Third Reich in Power 
by Richard J. Evans.
Penguin, 941 pp., £12.99, May 2006, 0 14 100976 4
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The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy 
by Adam Tooze.
Penguin, 800 pp., £12.99, August 2007, 978 0 14 100348 1
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... Evans’s history of the Third Reich – it will be completed by a third volume covering the war – is an invaluable work of synthesis. The mass of specialist studies we now have makes a general history all the more useful, and not only, as Evans suggests, for those who know little about the subject. Evans, a social historian, aims to cover ‘not only ...

Christian v. Cannibal

Michael Rogin: Norman Mailer and American history, 1 April 1999

The American Century 
by Harold Evans.
Cape, 710 pp., £40, November 1998, 0 224 05217 9
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The Time of Our Time 
by Norman Mailer.
Little, Brown, 1286 pp., £25, September 1998, 0 316 64571 0
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... Populist movement against corporate power and political corruption, and sides with the working class in a chapter subtitled ‘The Class Struggle in America’, which not only celebrates such working-class heroes as Frank Little and Big Bill Haywood of the IWW, the Communist Elizabeth ...

How frightened should we be?

John Lloyd, 10 February 1994

Russia 2010 
by Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson.
Random House, 302 pp., $32, October 1993, 0 679 42995 6
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What About the workers: Workers and the Transition to Capitalism in Russia 
by Simon Clarke.
Verso, 248 pp., £34.95, September 1993, 0 86091 650 2
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After the Soviet Union: From Empire to Nation 
edited by Timothy Colton and Robert Levgold.
Norton, 208 pp., $24.95, November 1992, 0 393 03420 8
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... is the same kind of growth rate that Russia enjoyed in its economic miracle before the First World War, as Russian excellence in electronics, material science and applied mathematics, allied with Western partners, begins to achieve breakthroughs in world markets ... it is Russia’s path to the 21st century.   Is such a story possible by 2010 or ...

Long March

Martin Pugh, 2 June 1983

Renewal: Labour’s Britain in the 1980s 
by Shadow Cabinet, edited by Gerald Kaufman.
Penguin, 201 pp., £2.50, April 1983, 0 14 052351 0
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Socialism in a Cold Climate 
edited by John Griffith.
Allen and Unwin, 230 pp., £2.95, April 1983, 9780043350508
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Liberal Party Politics 
edited by Vernon Bogdanor.
Oxford, 302 pp., £17.50, April 1983, 0 19 827465 3
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... international than British in character. Second, if Labour is obliged to defend the whole post-war status quo in social-economic affairs, it must comprehensively exploit the fears of all sections of society who suffer from Conservative attempts to demolish it. Peter Shore displays the greatest awareness of such an approach when he writes what is a ...

Eurocommunism

Peter Sedgwick, 17 September 1981

The Changing Face of Western Communism 
edited by David Childs.
Croom Helm, 288 pp., £12.50, March 1980, 0 85664 734 9
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The Politics of Eurocommunism: Socialism in Transition 
edited by Carl Boggs and David Plotke.
Macmillan, 476 pp., £12.50, June 1980, 0 333 29546 3
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Power and the Party: Changing Faces of Communism in Western Europe 
by Keith Middlemas.
Deutsch, 400 pp., £14.95, July 1980, 0 233 97151 3
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... used within the media that are consumed by mass publics, who are instead offered a classical Cold War view of Western Communism where the only facts ever retailed about, for instance, the Italian Left have to do with terror, bombings, kidnappings and other forms of disorder. The advantages of the term, as the indicator of a flexible and democratic version of ...

Doctor Feelgood

R.W. Johnson, 3 March 1988

Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home 
by Garry Wills.
Heinemann, 488 pp., £14.95, February 1988, 0 434 86623 7
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... A pretty shocking figure, you might think, for the Golden State in the midst of the Vietnam War boom: no wonder Reagan’s well-heeled backers were so righteously indignant about all their tax money going to all those layabouts. But we haven’t answered the question: would you believe it? Well no, actually – the real figure was 5.1 per ...

Confronting Defeat

Perry Anderson: Hobsbawm’s Histories, 17 October 2002

... it off from its predecessors. Covering the epoch from the French Revolution to the First World War, the trilogy follows a consistent scheme, classically Marxist in its logic: each volume begins with an account of the economic foundations of the period, then a narrative of its political conflicts (in the first two volumes, headed ...

Going for Gould

R.W. Johnson, 23 July 1987

Apocalypse 2000: Economic Breakdown and the Suicide of Democracy 1989-2000 
by Peter Jay and Michael Stewart.
Sidgwick, 254 pp., £12.95, June 1987, 0 283 99440 1
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... post-mortems concentrate, reasonably enough, on how the electorate actually behaved – which class, which region or which sex swung most. In 1987 the most striking finding was surely the highly differential way in which the sexes behaved. Among men the pro-Labour swing from the Tories was a mere 0.5 per cent, but among women it was nine times greater, at ...

Keep Calm

Rosemary Hill: Desperate Housewives, 24 May 2007

Can Any Mother Help Me? Fifty Years of Friendship through a Secret Magazine 
by Jenna Bailey.
Faber, 330 pp., £16.99, March 2007, 978 0 571 23313 7
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... lifetimes, while the institutions that had seemed to frame their destiny at birth, the empire, the class system and marriage, came to count for much less. In some ways that made them fortunate, witnesses to if not participants in the forward march of emancipation. Yet in others they were particularly unlucky. As old certainties broke down behind them, the new ...

Dev and Dan

Tom Dunne, 21 April 1988

The Hereditary Bondsman: Daniel O’Connell, 1775-1829 
by Oliver MacDonagh..
Weidenfeld, 328 pp., £16.95, January 1988, 0 297 79221 0
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Eamon de Valera 
by Owen Dudley Edwards.
University of Wales Press, 161 pp., £19.95, November 1987, 0 7083 0986 0
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Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland 
edited by C.H.E. Philpin.
Cambridge, 466 pp., £27.50, November 1987, 0 521 26816 8
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Northern Ireland: Soldiers talking, 1969 to Today 
by Max Arthur.
Sidgwick, 271 pp., £13.95, October 1987, 0 283 99375 8
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War as a Way of Life: A Belfast Diary 
by John Conroy.
Heinemann, 218 pp., £12.95, February 1988, 0 434 14217 4
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... book offers a trenchant defence of its hero’s conduct in such controversial areas as the Civil War and the 1937 Constitution. De Valera was not illegitimate, in Edwards’s opinion, but ‘his social circumstances’ – especially the failure of his mother to bring him back to America after her second marriage, despite his pleas to her as a 14-year old ...

The Mantle of Jehovah

Francis Spufford, 25 June 1987

Sugar 
by A.S. Byatt.
Chatto, 224 pp., £10.95, April 1987, 0 7011 3169 1
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... where her subject is a biography of what was recently called this country’s ‘cultivated class’: from its post-war beginnings in a fusion of the lettered gentry and the old-style educationally-mobile working-class, through its maturity in the long warm years of the grammar ...

Naming the Dead

David Simpson: The politics of commemoration, 15 November 2001

... were paid for largely by public subscription). But four miles up the road, Castleacre has its own war memorial, its own list of 43 dead in the Great War. Fifty-four ‘boys’ from my old school, a small country grammar, ‘gave’ their lives in the two wars. Eleven thousand Norfolk men and boys, 2.5 per cent of the ...

One Big Murder Mystery

Adam Shatz: The Algerian army’s leading novelist, 7 October 2004

The Swallows of Kabul 
by Yasmina Khadra, translated by John Cullen.
Heinemann, 195 pp., £10.99, May 2004, 9780434011414
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Wolf Dreams 
by Yasmina Khadra, translated by Linda Black.
Toby, 272 pp., $19.95, May 2003, 1 902881 75 3
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Morituri 
by Yasmina Khadra, translated by David Herman.
Toby, 137 pp., £7.95, May 2004, 1 59264 035 4
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... Islamists formed the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), led by Abassi Madani, a veteran of the war of independence, and his fiery young deputy, Ali Benhadj, who delivered violent sermons against ‘the thieves of the FLN’ at the al-Sunna mosque in Bab el Oued, a working-class quarter of Algiers that became a hotbed of ...