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Nostalgia for the Vestry

James Buchan: Thatcherism, 30 November 2006

Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts 
by Simon Jenkins.
Allen Lane, 375 pp., £20, October 2006, 0 7139 9595 5
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... heir apparent, Gordon Brown. These men are to Jenkins Thatcher’s political ‘sons’, with David Cameron trotting along behind as a ‘grandson’. (The book was completed before Cameron’s Conservatives abandoned any formal adherence to the Thatcherite slogan of reducing the role of central government.) In the process, Jenkins says, Thatcherism lost ...

What’s it for?

Martin Loughlin: The Privy Council, 22 October 2015

By Royal Appointment: Tales from the Privy Council – the Unknown Arm of Government 
by David Rogers.
Biteback, 344 pp., £25, July 2015, 978 1 84954 856 4
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... Is there anyone​ nowadays who boasts a sure understanding of the laws and practices of the British constitution? Who today extols the ‘matchless constitution’? It was commonly accepted not so long ago – and not only by the British – that while Western civilisation had drawn its religious beliefs from the Middle East, its mathematical knowledge from the Arabs, its artistic sensibility from the Greeks and its laws from the Romans, it was from the British that it had derived the arts of political organisation ...

Praise for the Hands

Jeremy Harding: Rugby’s Early Years, 18 October 2007

The Original Rules of Rugby 
edited by Jed Smith.
Bodleian, 64 pp., £5.99, September 2007, 978 1 85124 371 6
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... can say you are.’ As with the opposition, the toilet doors ‘bang increasingly frequently’. David Kirk, acting captain from the start of the tournament: ‘Remember, you’re the All Blacks. You carry with you the memory of the past. That’s a force.’ Andy Dalton, the nominated captain who failed to play a single match because of a training ...

Bouncebackability

David Runciman: Athenian Democracy and Google, 29 January 2009

Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens 
by Josiah Ober.
Princeton, 342 pp., £17.95, November 2008, 978 0 691 13347 8
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... other for fear of being passed counterfeits. The assembly debated and then agreed a complex set of laws to deal with the crisis. The new rules established an office of approver of silver coins (in fact there were two approvers, one in the agora and one at the port in Piraeus) whose job was to decide whether the coins involved in any given transaction were ...

No More Corsets

Rosemary Hill: Dressing the Revolution, 6 March 2025

Liberty, Equality, Fashion: The Women who Styled the French Revolution 
by Anne Higonnet.
Norton, 286 pp., £25, April 2024, 978 0 393 86795 4
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... for life in Paris. The rigidity of the class structure in France was reinforced by sumptuary laws. Since 1268, all trades (métiers) had been in the iron grip of the guilds whose maîtres made clothes to order in prescribed materials. Shopping with her aunt for a trousseau, Joséphine would not have been shown Lyon silk or the elaborate embroidered ...

Buffers

David Trotter, 4 February 1988

Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture 
by William Empson, edited by John Haffenden.
Chatto, 657 pp., £25, October 1987, 0 7011 3083 0
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... and tone is part of the method. It ensures that the reviewer’s prejudices will not harden into laws; the momentum of the sentences he hands down will always carry him towards self-revelation. This use of semi-colons exemplifies Empson’s belief that ideas are created and developed through dialogue. ‘Controversy demands imagination; you must try to ...

Neo-Blairism

David Runciman: Blair’s conference speech, 21 October 2004

... have its authority, and most people will still abide by the decisions that it takes, and obey the laws that it makes. He will find himself under more pressure from the Liberal Democrats to consider the introduction of proportional representation, though the better they do, particularly if it is at the expense of the Tories, the greater will be the temptation ...

Which way to the exit?

David Runciman: The Brexit Puzzle, 3 January 2019

... If it is simply not possible for a nation to leave an international organisation with which its laws and economy have become intertwined over more than forty years then that is a lesson for all major democracies in the 21st century: you are not as sovereign as you might like to think. Certainly, that is the lesson many European leaders would like their ...
The Struggle for Civil Liberties: Political Freedom and the Rule of Law in Britain 1914-1945 
by K.D. Ewing and C.A. Gearty.
Oxford, 451 pp., £50, February 2000, 0 19 825665 5
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... and imprisoned, meetings banned, crowds beaten senseless: all in obvious defiance of existing laws straightforwardly interpreted, yet all (or nearly all) done with impunity. Tales of police violence are legion, and were fairly notorious at the time. They were the main reason for the formation of the National Council for Civil Liberties in 1934 (now more ...

Short Cuts

Chase Madar: Human Rights Window Dressing, 2 July 2015

... dozens of legal scholars, including a great many progressive luminaries like Thomas Buergenthal, David Cole and Burt Neuborne. Other more right-wing figures vouching for Koh include William Taft, the State Department’s senior lawyer in 2003, who provided the Bush-Cheney administration with its legal rationale for invading Iraq, and John Yoo, the ...

The Big Show

David Blackbourn, 3 March 1983

‘Hitler’: A Film from Germany 
by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, introduced by Susan Sontag.
Carcanet, 268 pp., £9.95, December 1982, 0 85635 405 8
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... projectionist (‘SS-man Ellerkamp’) and the Cosmologist (a Strangelove figure set in a Caspar David Friedrich icescape) add to the richness of the texture while reinforcing the central ideal that what we are seeing is no more than a film about a film. Hitler, muses Ellerkamp, was ‘the greatest film-maker of all time’. Two principal narrators, Harry ...

People Like You

David Edgar: In Burnley, 23 September 2021

On Burnley Road: Class, Race and Politics in a Northern English Town 
by Mike Makin-Waite.
Lawrence and Wishart, 274 pp., £17, May, 978 1 913546 02 1
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... to this nation’.) Opposition to multiculturalism became a key part of the Ukip platform, and of David Cameron’s attempt to protect his government’s right flank from Nigel Farage.Punitive prison sentences (often four or five years long) were handed out to the young British-Asian men charged with rioting in Bradford, many of whom had been taken by their ...

Parliamentary Sovereignty

Betty Kemp, 22 December 1983

The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Vol. II: Party, Parliament and the American Crisis, 1766-1774 
edited by Paul Langford.
Oxford, 508 pp., £40, April 1981, 0 19 822416 8
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The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Vol. V: India: Madras and Bengal, 1774-1785 
edited by P.J. Marshall.
Oxford, 667 pp., £55, July 1983, 0 19 822417 6
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The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Constitutional Code, Vol. I 
edited by F. Rosen and J.H. Burns.
Oxford, 612 pp., £48, April 1983, 9780198226086
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The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Deontology, together with a Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitarianism 
edited by Amnon Goldworth.
Oxford, 394 pp., £38, July 1983, 0 19 822609 8
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The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Chrestomathia 
edited by M.J. Smith and W.H. Burston.
Oxford, 451 pp., £40, November 1983, 0 19 822610 1
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Bentham and Bureaucracy 
by L.J. Hume.
Cambridge, 320 pp., £22.50, September 1981, 0 521 23542 1
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Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democracy: A Study of the Constitutional Code 
by Frederick Rosen.
Oxford, 255 pp., £19.50, May 1983, 9780198226567
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Bentham 
by Ross Harrison.
Routledge, 286 pp., £14.95, September 1983, 0 7100 9526 0
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... in 1765, saw no incompatibility between it and the law of nature, ‘the eternal, immutable laws of good and evil ... which [God] has enabled human reason to discover’. Since the devil can make as well as quote scripture, Hobbes himself might have been quoted, for he wrote of ‘equity ... to which, being a precept of the law of nature, a sovereign is ...

Short Cuts

Francis FitzGibbon: Raab’s British Rights, 7 October 2021

... him before he could put them into practice. Liz Truss showed barely any interest in the job. David Lidington came and went without a trace in just seven months. David Gauke, a relative fixture with a term of eighteen months, had to renationalise the probation service, at a cost of about half a billion pounds. Raab’s ...

Short Cuts

John Sturrock: John Reid tries to out-Blunkett Blunkett, 2 November 2006

... imagine that the changes that would be required to the present more than adequate anti-terrorist laws to enable the Home Office’s hitherto frustrated torturers to be let loose on selected inmates of Abu Belmarsh, could be got through the House of Commons, let alone the Lords. But how depressing that he should first have let it be known at the recent Labour ...

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