Starting up

Peter Clarke, 6 November 1986

The German Slump: Politics and Economics 1924-1936 
by Harold James.
Oxford, 469 pp., £30, March 1986, 0 19 821972 5
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The Making of Keynes’s General Theory 
by Richard Kahn.
Cambridge, 327 pp., £20, May 1984, 9780521253734
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Towards the Managed Economy: Keynes, the Treasury and the Fiscal Policy Debate of the 1930s 
by Roger Middleton.
Methuen, 244 pp., £25, September 1985, 0 416 35830 6
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Keynes and his Contemporaries 
edited by G.C. Harcourt.
Macmillan, 195 pp., £22.50, October 1985, 0 333 34687 4
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The Policy Consequences of John Maynard Keynes 
edited by Harold Wattel.
Macmillan, 157 pp., £29.50, April 1986, 0 333 41340 7
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... Ramsay MacDonald christened it an ‘economic blizzard’, suggesting that the world slump of 1929-32 was an Act of God which his hapless Labour Government could not be expected to have foreseen or averted, much less mastered. John Maynard Keynes, by contrast, reached for a mechanical metaphor appropriate to the current state of the art ...

Diary

Ian Aitken: Party Fairy-Tales, 22 March 1990

... Liberals as just a gentler, kindlier version of the Tories. That may sum up their role since Lloyd George launched his embryonic welfare state before the Great War. But it certainly is not a true picture of the Victorian Liberal Party, many of whose members were much nearer to Mrs Thatcher than to David Lloyd George. But it ...

A Great Wall to Batter Down

Adom Getachew, 21 May 2020

Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent 
by Priyamvada Gopal.
Verso, 607 pp., £25, June 2019, 978 1 78478 412 6
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... she finds, were met over and over again with an excessive response. From the execution of George William Gordon, a member of the Jamaican National Assembly, for allegedly inciting the 1865 rebellion at Morant Bay, to the conviction for conspiracy of the Meerut defendants in India in 1933 for organising a railway strike, the dynamic of rebellion and ...

In Time of Schism

Fraser MacDonald, 16 March 2023

... Why do you use such discriminatory language?’ In June 2020, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Yousaf made a speech at Holyrood about Scotland’s failure to confront its own racism. ‘One of the most racist and divisive speeches I have ever heard,’ Robertson said. ‘A middle-class, private school privileged man, playing the victim.’ He ...

Elegy for an Anarchist

George Woodcock, 19 January 1984

... rather bizarre ‘Letters’ about American affairs for NOW which East Coast radicals, like Dwight Macdonald and Paul Goodman, were always assuring me should be disregarded as entirely mythomaniacal; they were nevertheless extremely entertaining. Reading his poems at the same time as his personal letters and his scurrilous public letters, I soon developed the ...

Necessary Bishop

John Robinson, 3 July 1980

Ahead of his Age: Bishop Barnes of Birmingham 
by John Barnes.
Collins, 487 pp., £12.95, November 1979, 0 00 216087 0
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... for nearly thirty years Bishop of Birmingham, an office to which he was nominated by Ramsay MacDonald, who also appointed Hewlett Johnson as ‘red’ Dean of Canterbury. Barnes’s career could scarcely have been more different from that of another near-contemporary who was also a scientist, theologian and prophet – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. While ...

The Trouble with HRH

Christopher Hitchens, 5 June 1997

Princess Margaret: A Biography 
by Theo Aronson.
O’Mara, 336 pp., £16.99, February 1997, 1 85479 248 2
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... delivered covertly to his consort, Mary of Modena.) So J.R. Clynes, Home Secretary to Ramsay MacDonald, had to journey to Glamis Castle and wait for 16 days for the waters to break. He passed the time profitably enough being shown around the local estates by Lady Airlie, a lady-in-waiting, who was pleased to find ‘under his homely exterior a deeply ...

Capture the Flag

Rory Scothorne: Labour in Scotland, 4 June 2026

A History of the Scottish Labour Party 
by David Torrance.
Edinburgh, 314 pp., £24.99, January, 978 1 3995 4480 1
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... the LRC break through in 1906, winning 29 seats (two of them in Scotland). With Scots like Ramsay MacDonald and Hardie already at the heart of ‘British’ Labour, thanks to their parliamentary seats in England (MacDonald) and Wales (Hardie), the SWRC dissolved itself into the new Labour Party in 1909.The ILP retained a ...

Spadework

John Brown, 18 November 1982

Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett 
by Richard Layman.
Junction, 285 pp., £9.95, August 1981, 0 86245 027 6
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... of these novelists – and he certainly suffers badly by comparison with James Crumley, John D. MacDonald and George V. Higgins, the present-day masters – he deserves more serious critical attention than Layman can manage. The next section of Shadow Man returns to biography proper, and the book picks up, weaving ...

The Obdurate Knoll

Colin Kidd: The Obdurate Knoll, 1 December 2011

Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan 
by Jeff Greenfield.
Putnam, 434 pp., £20.25, March 2011, 978 0 399 15706 6
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11.22.63 
by Stephen King.
Hodder, 740 pp., £19.99, November 2011, 978 1 4447 2729 6
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... version, dissident theories have proliferated. One of the more baroque was advanced by George C. Thomson, a swimming-pool engineer from Glendale, California, who argued that five people were killed in Dealey Plaza by the 22 shots fired there (but not Kennedy, who was impersonated in the presidential limousine by Officer Tippit, the Dallas policeman ...

Maastricht or no Maastricht

Peter Clarke, 19 November 1992

... government, in which he had carefully contrived a Liberal dominance, was challenged by Lloyd George, with the acquiescence of most Liberal backbenchers and the support of the Unionist leadership. Their common view was that under Asquith’s direction – or lack of it – the war would be lost, whereas it could be won under an alternative government led ...

Higher Man

John Sutherland, 22 May 1997

The Turner Diaries 
by ‘Andrew Macdonald.
National Vauguard Books, 211 pp., $12.95, May 1978, 0 937944 02 5
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... book’s rabidly Nazi contents. The Turner Diaries was first issued under the pseudonym ‘Andrew Macdonald’. William Luther Pierce, a resolutely secretive figure, was born on 11 September 1933, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was evidendy brought up in the South-West, and graduated BA from Rice in 1955. He spent the year 1955-6 at Caltech, as a graduate student in ...

Diary

A.J.P. Taylor: Living with Prime Ministers, 2 December 1982

... containing very few documents – whether this last is a merit or a fault I cannot decide. Lloyd George I suppose has been written about quite enough already. If he had appeared in my present list it would have contained most significant prime ministers for the last two centuries. During my devoted reading of the last few months I have acquired enough ...

First past the post

Peter Clarke, 17 February 1983

The People of England 
by Maurice Ashley.
Weidenfeld, 240 pp., £11.50, October 1982, 0 297 78178 2
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A New History of England, 410-1975 
by L.C.B. Seaman.
Macmillan, 576 pp., £6.95, August 1982, 0 333 33415 9
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The Making of Modern British Politics, 1867-1939 
by Martin Pugh.
Blackwell, 337 pp., £19.50, May 1982, 0 631 12985 5
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... matured under Arthur Henderson’s direction in the months following his departure from the Lloyd George Government, were premised upon this assumption. Thus we find Henderson assuring the Liberal editor C.P. Scott in December 1917 that ‘in the majority of cases he would depend on the alternative vote and on a friendly understanding between Liberalism and ...

Not Even a Might-Have Been

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Chips’s Adventures, 19 January 2023

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1024 pp., £35, March 2021, 978 1 78633 181 6
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1120 pp., £35, September 2021, 978 1 78633 182 3
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1943-57 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1168 pp., £35, September 2022, 978 1 5291 5172 5
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... and powerful Lord Channon has become! There is his house in Belgrave Square next door to Prince George, duke of Kent, and duchess of ditto and little Prince Edward. The house is all Regency upstairs with very carefully draped curtains and Madame Récamier sofas and wall paintings. Then the dining room is entered through an orange lobby and discloses itself ...