The Seductions of Declinism

William Davies: Stagnation Nation, 4 August 2022

... A low-income household in Britain is typically £3800 a year worse off than the equivalent one in France, something that makes a world of difference to the way this new inflationary crisis is experienced. Meanwhile, total household wealth (what people own, rather than what they make from wages) rose from three times GDP in ...

Ahead lies – what?

R.W. Johnson, 12 March 1992

Paradigms Lost: The Post Cold War Era 
edited by Chester Hartman and Pedro Vilanova.
Pluto, 205 pp., £10.95, November 1991, 0 7453 0638 1
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The Crisis of Socialism in Europe 
edited by Christiane Lemke and Gary Marks.
Duke, 253 pp., £37.95, March 1992, 0 8223 1197 6
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... d’être. The end of polarisation has also removed the underpinnings of many a foreign policy: France looks lost now that Gaullism no longer makes any sense, and the Chinese have reacted with outright dismay (and growing anti-Americanism) to their similar loss of leverage. Throughout the Third World the ending of the Cold War is a diplomatic disaster. Now ...

Light on a rich country

Rosalind Mitchison, 17 June 1982

The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction 
by E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield.
Edward Arnold, 779 pp., £45, October 1981, 0 7131 6264 3
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... buoyant in the 16th century, with high fertility and, normally, low mortality, so that the total rose from some two and three-quarter million in 1541 to 4.1 million in 1601 and 5.13 million in 1656. But the age of marriage was rising, and also the percentage not marrying. The age of marriage reached a plateau level in the mid-17th century and stayed there ...

Mrs Stitch in Time

Clive James, 4 February 1982

Lady Diana Cooper 
by Philip Ziegler.
Hamish Hamilton, 336 pp., £9.95, September 1981, 0 241 10659 1
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... distance, to be sure of what it was that Duff Cooper actually did, apart from being Ambassador to France. But that lay in the future. First the Coopers had to be poor in Gower Street, with nobody except Rubinstein to play the piano, while Chaliapin sang and rose-petals descended on the guests. Getting to know absolutely ...

Hunter-Capitalists

Roger Hodge: The Comanches, 15 December 2011

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanche Tribe 
by S.C. Gwynne.
Constable, 483 pp., £9.99, July 2011, 978 1 84901 703 9
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... that the Comanches lacked any politics, properly speaking; that their social organisation never rose above the level of the hunting party or war band. More recently, scholars such as Thomas Kavanagh and Hämäläinen have found considerable evidence of a sophisticated if highly decentralised politics. Unlike the rigid hierarchies familiar to ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: The Peruvian Corporation of London, 10 October 2019

... grafting now cohabited with another less focused compulsion, the urge to write. The village boy rose at 4 a.m. to cultivate his own small patch among a ‘wilderness of moorland farms’. His special pride was a plot of potatoes. He bathed in a burn and caught trout. The pattern of his life, the intimacy with the ground, the eye on the weather, the threats ...

Bring me bimagrumab

Liam Shaw: Insulin Wars, 2 April 2026

The Discovery of Insulin: Enlarged Edition 
by Michael Bliss.
Chicago, 304 pp., £25, October 2025, 978 0 226 83913 4
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... In​ 1889 Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, a 72-year-old professor at the Collège de France, wrote a letter to the Lancet in which he reported the effects of injecting himself with guinea pig semen. The results were remarkable. He could once more lift heavy weights, no longer had to hold the banister when going down the stairs and his youthful vigour had returned in other areas too ...

Frognal Days

Zachary Leader: Files on the Fifties, 4 June 1998

Previous Convictions: A Journey Through the Fifties 
by Nora Sayre.
Rutgers, 464 pp., £27.95, April 1997, 0 8135 2231 5
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... if it was ‘mature’, a word always on the lips of tutors and graduate assistants: mature art ‘rose above the passions of faction’; mature people ‘accepted society as it was and didn’t seek to alter it’ (in a spirit of Christian or Eliot-like resignation); mature judgment was ‘objective’ or ‘impersonal’ – that is, uncompromised by passion ...

When the Balloon Goes up

Michael Wood, 4 September 1997

Enduring Love 
by Ian McEwan.
Cape, 247 pp., £15.99, September 1997, 0 224 05031 1
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... black dogs.’ She is referring to her mother’s encounter with two huge German attack dogs in France after the war. The dogs were not only literally dangerous, possibly rabid, they were for their victim the incarnation of the human minds which had trained them, ‘creations of debased imaginations, of perverted spirits no amount of social theory could ...

Post-Photographic

Peter Campbell, 19 June 1997

Early Impressionism and the French State 
by Jane Mayo Roos.
Cambridge, 300 pp., £45, October 1996, 0 521 55244 3
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Adolph Menzel 
edited by Claude Keisch and Marie Ursula Riemann-Reyher.
Yale, 480 pp., £45, September 1996, 0 300 06954 5
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... From the artist’s point of view, as Roos shows, the reasons are clear. In mid-19th-century France, the Salon was the public exhibition which mattered, the only dunghill on which the competing cocks could crow. No other way of showing your work – private exhibitions, group exhibitions, displays by picture dealers, sales of prints – could equal ...

Thank you, Disney

Jenny Diski: The Town that Disney Built, 24 August 2000

The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town 
by Andrew Ross.
Verso, 340 pp., £17, June 2000, 1 85984 772 2
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Celebration, USA: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town 
by Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins.
Holt, 342 pp., £18.99, September 1999, 0 8050 5560 6
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... or rising from the rubble of General Sherman’s march through the South. In fact, Celebration rose from a swampy lot at the edge of the Magic Kingdom that was used to relocate alligators once they grew too big for the ponds beside the golf courses and theme parks. It was a flourishing wetland of ten thousand acres, which, if left undeveloped, was in ...

Vibrations of Madame de V***

John Mullan: Malcolm Bradbury, 20 July 2000

To the Hermitage 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Picador, 498 pp., £16, May 2000, 0 330 37662 4
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... collection). Finally, after much coaxing, she persuaded the 60-year-old Philosophe to leave France for the first time in his life and come to Russia to converse with her. Diderot stayed for four months, meeting the monarch each afternoon for mutually improving interviews. More dialogues. Though informally conducted, each conversation had its ...

Law v. Order

Neal Ascherson: Putin’s strategy, 20 May 2004

Inside Putin's Russia 
by Andrew Jack.
Granta, 350 pp., £20, February 2004, 1 86207 640 5
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Putin's Progress 
by Peter Truscott.
Simon and Schuster, 370 pp., £17.99, March 2004, 0 7432 4005 7
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Putin, Russia's Choice 
by Richard Sakwa.
Taylor and Francis, 307 pp., £15.99, February 2004, 0 415 29664 1
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... Sobchak, any more than Putin’s admission that he was a KGB officer (he soon resigned). Putin rose rapidly to become deputy mayor, where he gained a reputation for silent, chilly efficiency. In a period of wild gangsterism and corruption, he was considered clean. Some who knew him think that he suffered from pathological coldness, a deficit of ...

Ruthless and Truthless

Ferdinand Mount: Rotten Government, 6 May 2021

The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism 
by Peter Oborne.
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 3985 0100 3
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Political Advice: Past, Present and Future 
edited by Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose.
I.B. Tauris, 240 pp., £21.99, February 2021, 978 1 83860 120 1
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... was genuinely believed to be the national interest.’ ‘I have always thought collusion [with France and Israel, which he denied in the Commons] a red herring – I did not mislead the House of Commons – I certainly did not tell them the whole story.’ The unanswered question, according to Lloyd, was ‘supposing we had reoccupied Egypt, what would we ...

Opium of the Elite

Jonathan Rée: Hayek in England, 2 February 2023

Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950 
by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger.
Chicago, 840 pp., £35, November 2022, 978 0 226 81682 1
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... which Hayek was working on when he arrived in Cambridge in 1940. The opening scene was set in France in the 1790s, when Napoleon started to dismantle institutions of humanistic education and replace them with schools of engineering and natural science. Napoleon’s grand design prospered, breathing life into the conceptual monster which Hayek referred to ...