“... and unsentimentally about what he calls ‘this falling silent of the countryside’. He quotes Ronald Blythe, the author of Akenfield, about rural England: ‘Some of it will be missed; the part that cannot be put into words.’In Remembering Peasants and his earlier Going to My Father’s House: A History of My Times (2021), Joyce explores the ways in ...”

“... to rescue the American hostages in Tehran. That failure was a factor in Jimmy Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan. Obama’s worries were realistic, the retired official said. ‘Was bin Laden ever there? Was the whole story a product of Pakistani deception? What about political blowback in case of failure?’ After all, as the retired official said, ‘If the ...”

“... of a revolutionary dreamer. As the mainstream right talked warily of selling off parts of the steel industry, Littlechild jumped ahead to what few others imagined could be the future: to the privatisation of the railways and the Post Office. ‘What the Post Office needs,’ he wrote, ‘is an imaginative asset stripper.’ His most extreme ideas, by the ...”