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Triumph of the Termites

Tom Nairn: Gordon Brown, 8 April 2010

The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour 
by Andrew Rawnsley.
Viking, 802 pp., £25, March 2010, 978 0 670 91851 5
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What Went Wrong, Gordon Brown?: How the Dream Job Turned Sour 
edited by Colin Hughes.
Guardian, 294 pp., £8.99, January 2010, 978 0 85265 219 0
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Broonland: The Last Days of Gordon Brown 
by Christopher Harvie.
Verso, 206 pp., £8.99, February 2010, 978 1 84467 439 8
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... dithering photo of the prime minister fronts What Went Wrong, Gordon Brown? The cover of Christopher Harvie’s book features a cartoon from the Independent: an apocalyptic lightning flash strikes and anoints David Cameron, while Brown and Alistair Darling flee London as Parliament quakes against the background of a setting sun. Andrew Rawnsley’s ...

This is the new communism

Mark Philip Bradley: Modern Vietnam, 15 December 2016

The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam 
by Christopher Goscha.
Allen Lane, 634 pp., £30, June 2016, 978 1 84614 310 6
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... AK-47s. The film documents what happens on the shooting range. The camera moves back and forth on a track behind the targets, showing the tourists being set up with weapons by Vietnamese ‘guards’ dressed in military fatigues. It captures their reactions – intense concentration, laughter and high-fives recorded by friends wielding cameras and ...

Torday’s Scorpion

Basil Davidson, 9 April 1992

The African Experience 
by Roland Oliver.
Weidenfeld, 284 pp., £19.99, August 1991, 0 297 82022 2
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A Thousand Years of East Africa 
by John Sutton.
British Institute in Eastern Africa, 111 pp., £8, November 1990, 1 872566 00 6
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When the grass is gone 
edited by P.W.T. Baxter.
Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 215 pp., December 1991, 91 7106 318 8
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The Scramble for Africa 
by Thomas Pakenham.
Weidenfeld, 738 pp., £20, October 1991, 0 297 81130 4
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... of Africa’s languages from which substantial enlightenments have begun to arrive: as finely set forth by Christopher Ehret and Merrick Posnansky in Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History of 1982. In applied archaeology the quantity of research now being published in a panoply of journals goes ...

Coe and Ovett & Co

Russell Davies, 1 October 1981

Running Free 
by Sebastian Coe and David Miller.
Sidgwick, 174 pp., £6.95, May 1981, 0 283 98684 0
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... an athletically underdeveloped country, a combination of propitious circumstances has brought forth two world-beating runners. Nobody can hope to account for this, but the luck is worth glorying in. It embraces even the principals’ names: Coe and Ovett – as snappy as trademarks, and eminently saleable on the vowel-happy continent of Europe where the ...

Losers

Conrad Russell, 4 October 1984

The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries 
by Christopher Hill.
Faber, 342 pp., £12.50, July 1984, 0 571 13237 5
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... was that which is summed up in the slogan ‘sell-out’. Fifth Monarchists, Levellers and so forth regularly accused Cromwellians and grandees of abandoning their principles for the sake of power, place and profit. This analysis would suggest that the cause failed because its leaders, like Oscar Wilde, could resist anything except temptation. No doubt ...

Runagately Rogue

Tobias Gregory: Puritans and Others, 25 August 2011

The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570-1640 
by Christopher Haigh.
Oxford, 284 pp., £32, September 2009, 978 0 19 921650 5
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... Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601) and Lewis Bayley’s The Practice of Piety (1611) aimed to set forth the rudiments of soul-saving doctrine in plain English. Their authors were Puritan ministers, who drew on their own experience in addressing parishioners’ spiritual concerns, and their books help us understand what those concerns were. These books sold ...

Short Cuts

Patrick Wright: The Moral of Brenley Corner, 6 December 2018

... lorries shaking ancient villages to their (largely absent) foundations as they thundered back and forth along the road from London to Dover. For the first part of that journey drivers had the use of the M2, but thanks to a decision made in 1963, the new motorway came to an abrupt end at Brenley Corner. Politicians and planners would give various excuses for ...
Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-17 
by T.S. Eliot, edited by Christopher Ricks.
Faber, 428 pp., £30, September 1996, 0 571 17895 2
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... papers). Valerie Eliot has now allowed the entire notebook to be published, superbly edited by Christopher Ricks, whose T.S. Eliot and Prejudice is still the most acute and fine-grained investigation of the vexed question of the place of prejudice in Eliot’s writing.It is impossible to over-praise Ricks’s work in this edition. His annotations draw on ...

Keep the baby safe

Stephen Sedley: Corrupt and Deprave, 10 March 2022

A Matter of Obscenity: The Politics of Censorship in Modern England 
by Christopher Hilliard.
Princeton, 320 pp., £28, September 2021, 978 0 691 19798 2
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... name of morality.It would be a pity if this were attributed to a single ill-judged remark, which Christopher Hilliard describes in A Matter of Obscenity as ‘the most famous self-inflicted wound in English legal history’. There is plenty of competition for that distinction, starting with Oscar Wilde’s ‘Oh dear, no, he was a particularly plain ...

Through Trychay’s Eyes

Patrick Collinson: Reformation and rebellion, 25 April 2002

The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village 
by Eamon Duffy.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.95, August 2001, 0 300 09185 0
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... found that even in London, it was a minority sect, at least until the early years of Elizabeth. Christopher Haigh, who describes himself as an ex-Methodist Anglican agnostic, decided that this revisionist band needed a leader, and headed into battle with a stream of publications that came to full fruition in English Reformations: Religion, Politics and ...

From Plato to Nato

Christopher Norris, 7 July 1983

Literary Theory: An Introduction 
by Terry Eagleton.
Blackwell, 244 pp., £15, May 1983, 0 631 13258 9
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Essays on Fiction 1971-82 
by Frank Kermode.
Routledge, 227 pp., £9.95, May 1983, 0 7100 9442 6
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Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction 
by Vincent Leitch.
Hutchinson, 290 pp., £15, January 1983, 0 09 150690 5
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Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies 
by Peter Wollen.
Verso, 228 pp., £15, March 1983, 0 86091 055 5
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Knowing the Poor: A Case-Study in Textual Reality Construction 
by Bryan Green.
Routledge, 221 pp., £12.95, February 1983, 0 7100 9282 2
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... textual ‘freeplay’? Kermode suggests one possible response in his tentative movement back and forth between hermeneutic theory and the claims of historical demystification. A similar question is broached, in different ways, by the two books under review. Peter Wollen’s Readings and Writings is a mixed bag of texts, including a number of short stories ...

Fashion Flashes

Zoë Heller, 26 January 1995

Kenneth Tynan: Letters 
edited by Kathleen Tynan.
Weidenfeld, 669 pp., £22, November 1994, 0 297 81076 6
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... And yes, yes, when you rehit town next month we must arrange for you to meet her,’ he writes to Christopher Fry in 1952. This shrugging nonchalance successfully camouflages the scrabbling lengths to which he went in order to forge this Hepburn connection. As his wife tells us in a footnote, Tynan had met Hepburn only once before, on the set of The African ...

Portrait of the Scottish Poor

Rosalind Mitchison, 5 June 1980

The State of the Scottish Working Class in 1843 
by Ian Levitt and Christopher Smout.
Scottish Academic Press, 284 pp., £7.50, December 1979, 0 7073 0247 1
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... from the very real tradition of parochial survey and investigation which had already brought forth the Old and New Statistical Accounts of Scotland. The more famous report of the vast Royal Commission which had reformed the English Poor Law in 1834 to make life as disagreeable as possible for the unemployed, and which has drawn from later historians the ...

In a narrow pass

Derek Hirst, 19 November 1992

A Spark in the Ashes: The Pamphlets of John Warr 
edited by Stephen Sedley and Lawrence Kaplan.
Verso, 116 pp., £9.95, October 1992, 0 86091 599 9
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... Christians. So while Warr did write memorably that in his time ‘teeming freedom exerts and puts forth itself’, he may not have seen the struggle in quite the cataclysmic terms the editors assume. Indeed, he was ready to concede some validity to forms – ‘not but that there is some power [of the spirit] in the form, but ’tis a weak and inferior ...

Hatching, Splitting, Doubling

James Lasdun: Smooching the Swan, 21 August 2003

Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self 
by Marina Warner.
Oxford, 264 pp., £19.99, October 2002, 0 19 818726 2
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... shifts in religious belief, storytelling practices, property law, women’s rights and so forth, to reveal how mutable they are and how adaptable to social manipulation. Where Bruno Bettelheim believes that the motif of the lost mother and wicked stepmother is an example of fairytales’ timeless and therapeutic wisdom, providing children with images ...

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