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Managing the Nation

Jonathan Parry, 18 March 2021

Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition 
by Edmund Fawcett.
Princeton, 525 pp., £30, October 2020, 978 0 691 17410 5
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... capitalist interests. Liberals presented this as a dismantling of the oppressive, arbitrary powers of an ancien régime. They were not hostile to order, but believed that a more supple, just and acceptable form of it would emerge from discussion and consensus-building in national political institutions.Fawcett’s argument is that conservative political ...

Princely Pride

Jonathan Steinberg: Emperor Frederick III, 10 May 2012

Our Fritz: Emperor Frederick III and the Political Culture of Imperial Germany 
by Frank Lorenz Müller.
Harvard, 340 pp., £33.95, October 2011, 978 0 674 04838 6
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... and with his theatricality, intemperate speeches and romantic conception of imperial rights and powers, he created an image of the German Reich as a militaristic, feudal and irresponsible actor in international affairs. The most modern and technologically advanced state in the world, with the most productive industries, the finest engineers and ...

Dastardly Poltroons

Jonathan Fenby: Madame Chiang Kai-shek, 21 October 2010

The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China 
by Hannah Pakula.
Weidenfeld, 787 pp., £25, January 2010, 978 0 297 85975 8
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... Japan and enabled him to resume his civil war with Mao. The scratchy alliance with the Allied powers provided a wonderful stage for China’s star figure of the Second World War. The daughter of a rich Shanghai businessman, mysterious yet fluent enough in Western culture, Soong Meiling was perfectly cast for the role of alluring Eastern Dragon Lady. At ...

Out of the jiffybag

Frank Kermode, 12 November 1987

For Love and Money: Writing, Reading, Travelling 1969-1987 
by Jonathan Raban.
Collins Harvill, 350 pp., £11.50, November 1987, 0 00 272279 8
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Original Copy: Selected Reviews and Journalism 1969-1986 
by John Carey.
Faber, 278 pp., £9.95, August 1987, 0 571 14879 4
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... by authors who save their best efforts for quite different sorts of writing. They may, as Jonathan Raban’s title suggests, be working for love as well as money, and it is easy to understand their wish to give their best work in this kind a more permanent form. Raban has some engaging remarks on this subject. As he says, very few people can now make ...

Alien Heat

Jonathan Gil Harris: ‘The Island Princess’, 17 March 2016

The Island Princess 
by John Fletcher, edited by Clare McManus.
Arden, 338 pp., £16.99, December 2012, 978 1 904271 53 6
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... they might help us realise that ‘The Scene India’ suggests a world in which the contagious powers of the playhouse and of ‘India’ overlap. It’s not just that the governor’s priestly disguise and the religion Quisara offers Armusia are both ‘false’. More important, Fletcher’s ‘India’ transforms the bodies of the Europeans exposed to ...

Rug Time

Jonathan Steinberg, 20 October 1983

Kissinger: The Price of Power 
by Seymour Hersh.
Faber, 699 pp., £15, October 1983, 0 571 13175 1
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... be dangerous to liberty. Hence they hedged it round as best they could with counter-balancing powers and bits and pieces of 18th-century political machinery to keep rampant ambition under control. Yet it was, and remains, a one-man executive. As Truman said, ‘the buck stops here.’ In this respect, Kissinger stood to Nixon as Bismarck had stood to ...

This Modern Mafia

Jonathan Steinberg, 7 October 1982

... from the beginning and during the summer complained bitterly that he had not been given full powers by Rome. It may have cost him his life. His successor, Emanuele De Francesco, will have more power on paper, but will face shrill cries that regional rights have been invaded. The 1950s and 1960s brought the ‘great transformation’ of the Italian ...

Adrenaline Junkie

Jonathan Parry: John Tyndall’s Ascent, 21 March 2019

The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer and Public Intellectual 
by Roland Jackson.
Oxford, 556 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 0 19 878895 9
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... Observing that the evolution of plants and animals could now be understood without reference to powers of special creation, he said that in future men of science must wrest from theology ‘the entire domain of cosmological theory’. Tyndall was here setting himself not against religion but against priests and mystics who used empty providential language ...

I tooke a bodkine

Jonathan Rée: Esoteric Newton, 10 October 2013

Newton and the Origin of Civilisation 
by Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold.
Princeton, 528 pp., £34.95, October 2012, 978 0 691 15478 7
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... theoretical programme, in two parts: first, to reduce the ‘phenomena of motions’ to hidden ‘powers’ or ‘forces’ acting according to ‘mathematical principles’, and second, to apply these principles to astronomy so as to ‘deduce the motions of the heavens a priori’ and vindicate a heliocentric system of the world. In 1684, he received a ...

In such a Labyrinth

Jonathan Rée: Hume, 17 December 2015

Hume: An Intellectual Biography 
by James Harris.
Cambridge, 621 pp., £35, September 2015, 978 0 521 83725 5
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... less adroit, but they made an ‘excusable mistake’ when they overstepped their constitutional powers; Cromwell was a ‘fanatical hypocrite’, but the civil wars were a misfortune for which ‘no party or both parties would justly bear the blame’. Even Voltaire was impressed: Hume’s History was ‘the best ever written in any language’, he ...

Breathtaking Co-ordination

Jonathan Wright: Hitler’s Wartime Economy, 19 July 2007

The Third Reich in Power 
by Richard J. Evans.
Penguin, 941 pp., £12.99, May 2006, 0 14 100976 4
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The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy 
by Adam Tooze.
Penguin, 800 pp., £12.99, August 2007, 978 0 14 100348 1
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... who wanted to renegotiate the Versailles Treaty by means of a détente with the Western powers. There are many other examples. In 1926, Paul Silverberg, a leading Ruhr industrialist and deputy chairman of the employers’ association, who had been an outspoken opponent of the nationalisation of the coal industry and of Weimar’s social ...

Judicial Politics

Stephen Sedley, 23 February 2012

... one of its greatest chief justices, Bora Laskin.) The first beneficiary of this dispensation, Jonathan Sumption QC, a noted historian as well as a leading lawyer, was sworn in in January. Last November, after he had been appointed but before he had taken office, Sumption delivered one of the law’s more prestigious annual lectures to a packed audience in ...

Ediepus

Michael Neve, 18 November 1982

Edie: An American Biography 
by Jean Stein and George Plimpton.
Cape, 455 pp., £9.95, October 1982, 0 224 02068 4
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Baby Driver: A Story About Myself 
by Jan Kerouac.
Deutsch, 208 pp., £7.95, August 1982, 0 233 97487 3
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... in the town: a gloomy Puritan history lingers, a trace, perhaps, of the ferocious Calvinist divine Jonathan Edwards. There is also the eerie emptiness of nature in New England, the dark, wooded landscape that seems hollow, and menacing, without a history. Even the streets of Stockbridge seem empty. No one is around. They are, no doubt, in their cars, and ...

Great Sums of Money

Ferdinand Mount: Swingeing Taxes, 21 October 2021

The Dreadful Monster and Its Poor Relations: Taxing, Spending and the United Kingdom, 1707-2021 
by Julian Hoppit.
Allen Lane, 324 pp., £25, May, 978 0 241 43442 0
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... of these for yourselves.’ Canadians and Australians could say much the same: the entrenched powers of their provinces and states remain the lynchpins of the remarkably successful federal systems bequeathed by their former colonial masters (the same is true, to a lesser extent, of the more centralised Indian constitution). But in the UK itself? Scarcely ...

Candle Moments

Andrew O’Hagan: Norman Lewis’s Inventions, 25 September 2008

Semi-Invisible Man: The Life of Norman Lewis 
by Julian Evans.
Cape, 792 pp., £25, June 2008, 978 0 224 07275 5
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... locating Lewis as he begins to rely not on parents and well-meaning teachers, but on his own powers of escape. To the end, he was a somewhat brutal (if you ask his wives and children) and yet talented organiser of his own life; it grew from a knowledge, maybe a conviction, as Evans has it, that ‘almost nothing any adult did for him when he was young ...

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