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So long as you drub the foe

Geoffrey Best: Army-Society Relations, 11 May 2006

Military Identities: The Regimental System, The British Army and The British People c.1870-2000 
by David French.
Oxford, 404 pp., £45, July 2005, 0 19 925803 1
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... it can be risky in some Latin American states, as also in Turkey, to be thought to impugn the ‘honour’ of the army. And nearer home, in Spain, we recently witnessed a gasp of the old militaristic spirit when an unreconstructed general heavily hinted that the army would not take kindly to the government’s proposed settlement of the national claims of ...

Madly Excited

John Bayley, 1 June 1989

The Life of Graham Greene. Vol. I: 1904-1939 
by Norman Sherry.
Cape, 783 pp., £16.95, April 1989, 0 224 02654 2
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... of a spare Racinian kind: whisky priest and puritan policeman present, as it were, love and honour; Scobie, his wife Louise and his girlfriend Helen afford a ready-made tableau like Orestes and Hermione and Andromaque. The complete arbitrariness available to the Classical stage is so cunningly naturalised that we hardly notice at first reading how the ...

Dingy Quadrilaterals

Ian Gilmour: The Profumo Case, 19 October 2006

Bringing the House Down: A Family Memoir 
by David Profumo.
Murray, 291 pp., £20, September 2006, 0 7195 6608 8
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... be ashamed of what he had done for the rest of his life. In fact it was Profumo’s first battle honour and something he could always be proud of. He showed similar skill and courage in the army. He became a lieutenant-colonel at the age of 28 and a brigadier two years later. He was mentioned in dispatches and won a military OBE. He was, though, not entirely ...

Fools

P.N. Furbank, 15 October 1981

Ford Madox Ford: Prose and Politics 
by Robert Green.
Cambridge, 218 pp., £16.50, July 1981, 9780521236102
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... they liked to present to themselves, as an artistic problem, the deep mystery of English ‘honour’, English manners and English impassiveness. The rendering of the supposed English ‘inarticulacy’ was the sort of challenge they loved. And it is a fact worth remembering that, during the period of Ford’s collaboration with Conrad, Ford’s idea of ...

I ain’t a child

Roy Porter, 5 September 1996

Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street 1870-1914 
by Anna Davin.
Rivers Oram, 289 pp., £19.95, January 1996, 9781854890627
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... rearguard action against exploitation and embourgeoisement. Vindications of working-class ‘honour’ along these lines used to be uncomplicated, drawing as they did on the Marxist scenario of class struggle – Gareth Stedman Jones’s classic Outcast London (1971) was significantly subtitled ‘A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian ...

Possessed

A.N. Wilson, 14 May 1992

Evelyn Waugh: No Abiding City 1939-1966 
by Martin Stannard.
Dent, 523 pp., £25, April 1992, 0 460 86062 3
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... an appalling bore’ himself. His war had begun, like Guy Crouchback’s in the ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy, as a crusade against the forces of atheism and modernism; he was a bit old for service, but he was courageous, and, even when sober, enthusiastic for the cause. Unfortunately, his fellow officers in the Marines disliked him intensely, and he ...

Were I a cloud

Patricia Beer, 28 January 1993

Robert Bridges: A Biography 
by Catherine Phillips.
Oxford, 363 pp., £25, August 1992, 0 19 212251 7
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... with any reputation to risk who said we’d better not be vindictive.’ More startling is Sir Hugh Allen’s tribute: ‘I like him best when he’s violent but then he usually is,’ In a way he undermines this praise by revealing that what Bridges was being violent about was the use of Gregorian chants for the English Psalter, the grounds of his wrath ...

Hasped and Hooped and Hirpling

Terry Eagleton: Beowulf, 11 November 1999

Beowulf 
translated by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 104 pp., £14.99, October 1999, 9780571201136
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... Ireland, this is a community caught up in a cycle of violence, bound by its death-dealing codes of honour and loyalty; but as a poem written near the millennium it also has a broader political resonance. ‘A world is passing away,’ Heaney writes of these bickering Danes, ‘the Swedes and others are massing on the borders to attack and there is no lord or ...
... literature building a nation, a virtual nation, an imagined nation’. He offers as an example Hugh MacDiarmid’s Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry, which he calls ‘a construct, a fabulous construct of a country’. Warner shows with a fine candour how different artists are. Most people, after all, experience no desire to have their country constructed ...

English Butter

David Trotter, 9 October 1986

Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880-1920 
edited by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd.
Croom Helm, 378 pp., £25, June 1986, 0 7099 0849 0
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The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement 
by Michael Rosenthal.
Collins, 335 pp., £15, August 1986, 0 00 217604 1
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Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? 
by Richard Symonds.
Macmillan, 366 pp., £29.50, July 1986, 0 333 40206 5
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... which we have imposed on the period, or by starting to explore its differential codings. Hugh Cunningham demonstrates very effectively that the identification of the Conservative Party with patriotism was never as unproblematic and as beneficial as many have assumed. Promoted by a faction, patriotism became associated with particular policies, and ...

Long Live Aporia!

Hal Foster: William Gaddis, 24 July 2003

Agapē Agape 
by William Gaddis.
Atlantic, 113 pp., £9.99, January 2003, 1 903809 83 5
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The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings 
by William Gaddis, edited by Joseph Tabbi.
Penguin, 182 pp., $14, October 2002, 0 14 200238 0
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... man does riffs on strange dolls from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Olympia to Ian Wilmut’s Dolly, in whose honour he transforms a Blakean song of innocence into a Mephistophelean rag of experience: ‘Little lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? . . . Doctor Wilmut made thee, Doctor Ian Wilmut cloned thee outside Edinburgh.’ For the dying man ‘this ...

Staying Alive in the Ruins

Richard J. Evans: Plato to Nato, 22 April 2021

Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after World War Two 
by Paul Betts.
Profile, 536 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 1 78816 109 1
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... governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, said his aim was ‘to elevate the Polish people to the honour of European civilisation’, even as he trashed and looted the vast art collections of the Polish aristocracy, banned performances of Chopin and sent millions of Jews and other Poles to their deaths.Contemplating the heaps of dead and dying in the ...

Above it all

Stephen Sedley, 7 April 1994

Suing Judges: A Study of Judicial Immunity 
by Abimbola Olowofoyeku.
Oxford, 234 pp., £27.50, December 1993, 0 19 825793 7
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The Independence of the Judiciary: The View from the Lord Chancellor’s Office 
by Robert Stevens.
Oxford, 221 pp., £25, November 1993, 0 19 825815 1
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... when we were children,’ she said. ‘My sisters and I would be put in the nursery to play with Hugh, and he would line us all up at one end of the room and lecture, us. I could have told the Lord Chancellor he was making a mistake appointing Hugh Hallett.’ None of this, had it become public, would have done much to ...

Brief Shining Moments

Christopher Hitchens: Donkey Business in the White House, 19 February 1998

Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 
by Taylor Branch.
Simon and Schuster, 746 pp., $30, February 1998, 0 684 80819 6
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‘One Hell of a Gamble’: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-64 
by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali.
Murray, 416 pp., September 1997, 0 7195 5518 3
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The Dark Side of Camelot 
by Seymour Hersh.
HarperCollins, 497 pp., £8.99, February 1998, 9780006530770
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Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson , Bobby Kennedy and the Feud that Defined a Decade 
by Jeff Shesol.
Norton, 591 pp., £23.50, January 1998, 9780393040784
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The Year the Dream Died 
by Jules Witcover.
Warner, 512 pp., £25, June 1997, 0 446 51849 2
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Without Honor: The Impeachment of President Nixon and the Crimes of Camelot 
by Jerry Zeifman.
Thunder's Mouth, 262 pp., $24.95, November 1996, 9781560251286
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The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis 
edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow.
Howard, 740 pp., £23.50, September 1997, 0 674 17926 9
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Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam Papers: A Documentary Collection 
edited by David Barrett.
Texas A & M, 906 pp., $94, June 1997, 0 89096 741 5
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Taking Charge: The Johnson Whitehouse Tapes 1963-64 
edited by Michael Beschloss.
Simon and Schuster, 624 pp., £20, April 1998, 0 684 80407 7
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Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes 
edited by Stanley Kutler.
Free Press, 675 pp., $30, November 1997, 0 684 84127 4
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The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the Jupiters, 1957-63 
by Philip Nash.
North Carolina, 231 pp., £34.70, October 1997, 0 8078 4647 3
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... errant poolside grab while he was on a campaign trip to the West Coast. Two months before the end, Hugh Sidey, Time magazine’s White House correspondent, recalled in an interview for this book, a woman acquaintance of Sidey’s ‘came to me and told me how Kennedy tried to put the make on her at the pool. She wrenched away and [the President] fell into the ...

Boomster and the Quack

Stefan Collini: How to Get on in the Literary World, 2 November 2006

Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 
by Philip Waller.
Oxford, 1181 pp., £85, April 2006, 0 19 820677 1
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... pilgrims to Stratford-upon-Avon already knew a lot about the great writer they had come to honour. The author’s house in Church St has rather come down in the world since then and is now an outpost of Birmingham University, but in its heyday it was home to a writer with some claims to be the most widely read, in English and in translation, across the ...

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