On Thatcher

“... what she liked, and her own part in the Heathite reign of error only magnified her disgust. As John Ranelagh, who once worked for her at the Conservative Research Department, says, she was no intellectual. His book purports to be about the people who did her intellectual work for her, and what they undoubtedly had in common was the conviction that the ...”

Diary

Tom Crewe: The Queen and I, 1 August 2019

“... like a moth beating against a bulb, briefly altering the light. In 1832, Carlyle reviewed John Wilson Croker’s new edition of Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, and emphasised, as Hermione Lee has noted, how biography, by recording ‘many a little Reality’, can make the reader see the world as it existed around the central figure, its depths and ...”

Reports from the Not Too Distant Canon

Frank Kermode, 23 May 2002

The Invasion Handbook 
by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 201 pp., £12.99, April 2002, 0 571 20915 7Show More
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“... the Duke of Windsor will resume his throne and Henry Williamson replace the Poet Laureate, John Masefield. If these instructions and predictions derive from a genuine document, then that document is Audenesque. But Auden’s voice can be heard in less fantastic moments: the lights of a car sweeping across a bedroom, as in that fine early poem later ...”

Beware of counterfeits

Dror Wahrman: 18th-century fakery, 6 June 2002

The Perreaus and Mrs Rudd: Forgery and Betrayal in 18th-Century London 
by Donna Andrew and Randall McGowen.
California, 346 pp., £24.95, November 2001, 0 520 22062 5Show More
The Smart: The True Story of Margaret Caroline Rudd and the Unfortunate Perreau Brothers 
by Sarah Bakewell.
Chatto, 321 pp., £17.99, April 2001, 9780701171094Show More
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“... with the female lead is offset only by his boundless greed; a blind judge, the famous Sir John Fielding, who is widely believed to have been deceived by the enchanting villainess, despite his legendary reputation for discerning innocence or guilt in the voices of defendants; a rich and gullible Jewish sugar-daddy who attracts hints of anti-semitism; a ...”

A Long Silence

David A. Bell: ‘Englishness’, 14 December 2000

Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850 
by Paul Langford.
Oxford, 389 pp., £25, April 2000, 9780198206811Show More
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“... the Mahrattas after Assaye, for example – did not actually perceive the English as attractively John Mortimerish compounds of energy, candour and decency, but as something altogether less benign. It is instructive to compare Englishness Identified with Ian Buruma’s recent book, Voltaire’s Coconuts, to which an American publisher has given the more bland ...”

Giant Goody Goody

Edwin Morgan: Fairytales, 24 May 2001

The Complete Fairytales 
by George MacDonald, edited by U.C. Knoepflmacher.
Penguin, 354 pp., January 2000, 0 14 043737 1Show More
Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairytales and Femininity 
by U.C. Knoepflmacher.
Chicago, 444 pp., £24.50, June 2001, 0 226 44816 9Show More
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“... her. The scene of the rescue, with both prince and princess practically naked, caused the prudish John Ruskin, a friend of MacDonald’s, to chide him for impropriety and moral danger, but MacDonald seems on this occasion to have taken an honi soit qui mal y pense attitude. Anyhow, the princess is so delighted by the experience that she and the prince spend ...”

Diary

Eric Hobsbawm: An Assembly of Ghosts, 21 April 2005

“... for the CIA’s Polish operations at the time, is unimpressed.) Walesa has the air of a Polish John Prescott, only bigger. He has not carried the last 25 years as well as the other Poles. What is even stranger, I find myself in an assembly of political ghosts. Leaving aside the Chinese, who avoid public discussions, a surprising number of those who made ...”

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: A City of Prose, 4 August 2005

“... on the down escalator at nine o’clock in the morning. When the Number 30 passed a statue of John F. Kennedy in Marylebone Road, a teenager looked up at his mother. ‘It all started with him,’ he said. ‘I know what you mean,’ his mother said. ‘He was the first to get this amount of coverage.’ In Regent’s Park rows of old ladies were sitting ...”

Love, Lucia

Lucia Berlin: Letters to August Kleinzahler, 4 August 2005

“... Virgin Mary, who took care of me … Fight with Hope devastating. Only person I had then was Uncle John who was rarely there or sober. The disillusion when he hit the kid and dog was Awful for me. The year or so left was lonely hell. Only reason i’m telling you this is that i know i have dealt with these few years ad nauseum. Problem is everytime I am ...”

Room for the Lambs

Elizabeth Spelman: Sexual equality, 26 January 2006

Women’s Lives, Men’s Laws 
by Catharine MacKinnon.
Harvard, 558 pp., £25.95, March 2005, 0 674 01540 1Show More
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“... she knew it to have arisen. Though she would not want to be caught in a political dalliance with John Stuart Mill, MacKinnon would surely second his claim that ‘the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal.’ But MacKinnon is not without concern that many women suffer from such equiphobia as well – or rather, that ...”

Flip-flopping

Emily Wilson: Can heroes hesitate and still be heroic?, 17 November 2005

Hesitant Heroes: Private Inhibitions, Cultural Crisis 
by Theodore Ziolkowski.
Cornell, 163 pp., £17.50, March 2004, 0 8014 4203 6Show More
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“... partly as a reminder that heroism need not be incompatible with thoughtfulness or intelligence. John Kerry’s alleged ‘flip-flopping’ has been used to imply that he was not really a war hero in Vietnam: there is both moral and political danger in the assumption that hesitancy must be ...”

You, You, You, You, You, You, and Mom

Curtis Sittenfeld: Sean Wilsey’s memoir, 1 December 2005

Oh the Glory of It All 
by Sean Wilsey.
Viking, 482 pp., £14.99, September 2005, 0 670 91601 3Show More
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“... as Teachers of Peace’, Pat and the children write letters, sing songs and drop in on Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev and Indira Gandhi. If anything, Pat gets more ridiculous – she starts talking in an earnest new voice, gives ‘a Dior nightgown to a starving child in an Ethiopian famine camp’, and decides she deserves to win the Nobel Peace ...”

Antigone in middle age

Peter Parsons, 21 August 1980

“... mostly snippety truisms preserved in the most boring of ancient books, the Moral Extracts of John Stobaeus. Astydamas the Younger wrote an Antigone; it was produced in 341 BC, and that is all we know. These plays went the way of most books, as the Roman Empire sank into piety and inflation. Astydamas was too late to be rated Classical, and vanished ...”

Sir Jim

Reyner Banham, 22 May 1980

Memoirs of an Unjust Fella: An Autobiography 
by J.M. Richards.
Weidenfeld, 279 pp., £10, March 1980, 9780297777670Show More
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“... because he had been a real original, not a standard-issue stereotype British eccentric like John Betjeman, who had been Richards’s immediate predecessor. But the Shand stories were nothing like as marvellous as the legends about ‘de Cronin’, ‘H.deC.’, ‘Ivor de Wolfe’ (as he nommed himself de plume) or – to the very oldest servants of the ...”

Prince Arthur

Paul Addison, 21 August 1980

Balfour 
by Max Egremont.
Collins, 391 pp., £12.95, June 1980, 0 00 216043 9Show More
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“... But for enlightenment on the subject readers will have to turn to the first two chapters of John Ramsden’s excellent volume on the history of the party from 1902 to 1940. Whatever their merits, biographies hold for readers an indestructible core of interest. Story is more deeply rooted in our minds than theory, and the life-cycle is the oldest story ...”
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