Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone

R.W. Johnson: Major and Lamont, 9 December 1999

The Autobiography 
by John Major.
HarperCollins, 774 pp., £25, October 1999, 0 00 257004 1Show More
In Office 
by Norman Lamont.
Little, Brown, 567 pp., £20, October 1999, 0 316 64707 1Show More
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“... was a fine thing (our entry was acclaimed by the whole of the press as well as by Neil Kinnock and John Smith): a view which held until, roughly, September 1992, when the conviction grew on all sides that it had been a colossal mistake. Few will argue with John Major’s asssumption that the 1997 election was lost on Black ...”

Clean Poetry

John Bayley, 18 August 1983

Collected Poems 1970-1983 
by Donald Davie.
Carcanet, 172 pp., £5.95, May 1983, 0 85635 462 7Show More
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“... on trust’. It is Larkin bracken, and also points towards those tall fronds on the heath near Bockhampton where Hardy as a child sat and pondered his intellectual future. But as well as these English inspirations – Cambridge, Barnsley, the shires of Hardy and Betjeman – there was also the bright American world of the New Criticism, ...”

Just off Lexham Gardens

John Bayley, 9 January 1992

Through a Glass Darkly: The life of Patrick Hamilton 
by Nigel Jones.
Scribner, 408 pp., £18.95, December 1991, 0 356 19701 8Show More
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“... whereas Corvo or Lowry, Hamilton or Conrad Aitken, and maybe poets like Dylan Thomas and John Berryman of more recent date, are celebrated inside their own time-warp, relished as creatures of their epoch. A disillusioned devotee is the worst that can happen to them; and although I enjoyed rereading Twenty Thousand Streets and reviewing it in these ...”

Short is sharp

John Sutherland, 3 February 1983

Firebird 2 
edited by T.J. Binding.
Penguin, 284 pp., £2.95, January 1983, 0 14 006337 4Show More
Bech is Back 
by John Updike.
Deutsch, 195 pp., £6.95, January 1983, 0 233 97512 8Show More
The Pangs of Love 
by Jane Gardam.
Hamish Hamilton, 156 pp., £7.50, February 1983, 0 241 10942 6Show More
The Man Who Sold Prayers 
by Margaret Creal.
Dent, 198 pp., £7.95, January 1983, 9780460045926Show More
Happy as a Dead Cat 
by Jill Miller.
Women’s Press, 120 pp., £2.50, January 1983, 9780704338982Show More
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“... first author is 22, the last 70 plus) and national category (the West Indian writer Roy Heath is represented), and gathers into the volume the famous and the published-here-for-the-first-time. Subtitled ‘Writing Today’, the anthology presumably aims to give the smell of what’s cooking. How well it succeeds is hard to say. But at least it ...”

At the British Library

Peter Campbell: Mapping London, 25 January 2007

“... 19th centuries was also brisk. Some transformations teetered on the brink before falling back. John Thomas Smith’s 1680 plan of Whitehall Palace shows a confused warren of a building; only the ‘modern’ Banqueting House stands broad, thick-walled and symmetrical. This could have been the ‘before’ for a spectacular ‘after’, adumbrated by a view ...”

‘Just get us out’

Ferdinand Mount, 21 March 2019

“... among the most learned Brexiteers. In fact, they often go much further back than 1689. Sir John Redwood, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and long-time Tory MP for Wokingham, has invoked the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533, quoting on his constituency blog (7 June 2012) its ringing claim that ‘by divers sundry old authentic histories and ...”

Diary

Christopher Nicholson: Rare Birds, 22 November 2018

“... called Animals, and in one edition, I think in 1968, a thrilling article by the ornithologist John Gooders described how he’d seen two hundred species of birds in Britain in a single calendar year. I never got anywhere close. There were so many more birds that I hadn’t seen than I had. I often tried to turn common birds into uncommon birds. Those ...”

Wilsonia

Paul Foot, 2 March 1989

The Wilson Plot: The Intelligence Services and the Discrediting of a Prime Minister 
by David Leigh.
Heinemann, 271 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 0 434 41340 2Show More
A Price too High 
by Peter Rawlinson.
Weidenfeld, 284 pp., £16, March 1989, 0 297 79431 0Show More
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“... able junior minister Niall Macdermot out of office. They even circulated the fantastic notion that John Stonehouse, whose long career in the Co-operative Movement was dedicated to witch-hunting Communists, was a Communist agent. These three stories are told in detail here for the first time. David Leigh asserts that they were part of a pattern of intelligence ...”

Forty-Eighters

Peter Pulzer, 4 September 1986

Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Oxford, 304 pp., £17.50, July 1986, 0 19 212239 8Show More
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“... Reading Room, he marched with family, friends, acolytes and picnic baskets from Soho to Hampstead Heath. ‘A Sunday on Hampstead Heath,’ Wilhelm Liebknecht recalled, ‘was one of our greatest joys.’ The political exile’s greatest burden is incomprehension – of his hosts and by his hosts. He is where he is because ...”

At the V&A

Rosemary Hill: Constable , 23 October 2014

“... that the sketches had a ‘force of sensation’, but found the finished oils a ‘bore’. John Berger took the opposite view, that the completed works were rich in brilliant light effects, but the sketches were weakened by vague Romanticism. More recent left-wing critiques, especially since John Barrell’s The Dark ...”

Institutions

Alan Ryan, 26 November 1987

Ruling Performance: British Governments from Attlee to Thatcher 
edited by Peter Hennessy and Anthony Seldon.
Blackwell, 344 pp., £25, October 1987, 0 631 15645 3Show More
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Institutions 
edited by Vernon Bogdanor.
Blackwell, 667 pp., £45, September 1987, 0 631 13841 2Show More
Judges 
by David Pannick.
Oxford, 255 pp., £12.95, October 1987, 0 19 215956 9Show More
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“... success, and ending with some surprisingly detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher from the pen of John Vincent. As a final savoury, Tony Benn, Michael Fraser, David Marquand and David Butler sum up the entire era. The argument starts with the first and by some way the best piece in the collection, Paul Addison’s essay on ‘The Road from 1945’. Addison ...”

The road is still open

David Wootton: Turpin Hero?, 3 February 2005

Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman 
by James Sharpe.
Profile, 258 pp., £8.99, January 2005, 1 86197 418 3Show More
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“... he was eventually arrested, four years later, he was living in Yorkshire under the pseudonym of John Palmer. He came to the attention of the authorities only because, returning one day from hunting, he had shot a tame bird; reprimanded by a bystander, he replied that if the man would only stay while he charged his piece, he would shoot him too. Charles ...”

Diary

Peter Clarke: True or False?, 16 August 1990

“... campaigned in the 1959 Election on the slogan: ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ 7. Edward Heath gave his word to ‘cut rising prices at a stroke’. 8. Shirley Williams joined Arthur Scargill on a mass picket at Grunwicks. 9. James Callaghan said: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ 10. An experienced cabinet minister said in an interview: ‘I’m not ...”

On Thatcher

“... more scorching erasure. Discrediting, and if possible disavowing, the prime ministership of Edward Heath was one of the earliest tasks of the Thatcherite project. It was what gave coherence to an otherwise confused and erratic new leadership. The leader knew what she detested long before she knew what she liked, and her own part in the Heathite reign of error ...”

Short Cuts

Jon Day: The Journey of the Eel, 11 August 2016

“... in a doomsday vault in Svalbard in case of ‘apocalyptic extinction events’, as he called them. John was wearing a plaid shirt and a poacher’s jacket; his moustache drooped and his teeth were furred with plaque. He said he was a hunter and forager. I asked him what this involved and he told me he collected nuts and berries on Walthamstow marshes and ate ...”
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