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A Slight Dash of the Tiresome

Brian Harrison, 9 November 1989

The Blind Victorian: Henry Fawcett and British Liberalism 
edited by Lawrence Goldman.
Cambridge, 199 pp., £25, August 1989, 0 521 35032 8
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... 1938 if it refused to recommend Winston Churchill for election: such a decision, he said, would ‘mark the triumph of a tendency towards minute specialisation ... which I have long watched with concern, as likely to rob the Academy of its national character’. There is also a party-political reason for the intellectual’s retreat: the dispersal of the ...

In a Frozen Crouch

Colin Kidd: Democracy’s Ends, 13 September 2018

How Democracy Ends 
by David Runciman.
Profile, 249 pp., £14.99, May 2018, 978 1 78125 974 0
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Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth – And How to Fix It 
by Dambisa Moyo.
Little, Brown, 296 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 1 4087 1089 0
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How Democracies Die 
by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
Viking, 311 pp., £16.99, January 2018, 978 0 241 31798 3
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Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy 
by William Galston.
Yale, 158 pp., £25, June 2018, 978 0 300 22892 2
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... has opened up a space for ‘supercharged expressionism’. Unfortunately, tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, innocent about politics to the point of cluelessness, regard themselves as enhancers of democracy, not the problem but the solution. Here Runciman identifies a cluster of developments which might, cumulatively, destroy democracy: an arcadian nerd ...

Shockingly Worldly

David Runciman: The Abbé Sieyès, 23 October 2003

Emmanuel Sieyès: Political Writings 
edited by Michael Sonenscher.
Hackett, 256 pp., $34.95, September 2003, 0 87220 430 8
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... that the only things that counted in politics were individuals and their personal experiences: ‘Mark well,’ he once wrote, ‘the only real happiness is that of individuals.’ Seeking to represent them as types of individual was therefore self-defeating: the best you got was a crude caricature of social diversity on the one hand, and politically isolated ...

Flailing States

Pankaj Mishra: Anglo-America Loses its Grip, 16 July 2020

... models to be imitated across the globe. ‘The true test of a good government,’ Alexander Hamilton wrote, ‘is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.’ It is a test the United States and Britain have failed ruinously during the current crisis. Both countries had weeks of warnings about the coronavirus outbreak in ...

You’ve got it or you haven’t

Iain Sinclair, 25 February 1993

Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror 
by Tony Lambrianou and Carol Clerk.
Pan, 256 pp., £4.99, October 1992, 0 330 32284 2
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Gangland: London’s Underworld 
by James Morton.
Little, Brown, 349 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 356 20889 3
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Nipper: The Story of Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read 
by Leonard Read and James Morton.
Warner, 318 pp., £5.99, September 1992, 0 7515 0001 1
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Smash and Grab: Gangsters in the London Underworld 
by Robert Murphy.
Faber, 182 pp., £15.99, February 1993, 0 571 15442 5
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... among the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the ...

Taste, Tact and Racism

Ian Hamilton: The death of Princess Diana, 22 January 1998

Assassination of a Princess 
by Ahmad Ata.
Dar Al-Huda, 75 pp., £5, September 1997, 977 5340 23 3
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Diana: A Princess Killed by Love 
by Ilham Sharshar.
Privately published, 125 pp., £10, September 1998, 977 5190 95 9
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Who Killed Diana? 
by Muhammad Ragab.
Privately published, 127 pp., £5, September 1998, 977 08 0675 7
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Harrods: A Place in Knightsbridge 
by Tim Dale.
Harrods, 224 pp., £35, November 1995, 1 900055 01 5
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... store. Later in my Harrods book I read that ‘the Chairman’s love of Scotland has also left its mark on the store. To the surprise and delight of customers, kilted pipers are often to be found parading through the various departments.’ Nefertiti’s harp, sphinx Fayed, Ozymandias, and now ‘Scotland the Brave’ ... Once again, I was forced back to the ...
... universal consciousness from the diurnal torments of poverty, insecurity and mindless routine. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s landscapes of revolution, Edwin Morgan’s unabashed Modernism and internationalism, Sorley MacLean’s simultaneous fight for his language and for a humanist socialism. It’s not so much a matter of individual writers – and these are only ...

The Head in the Shed

Gavin Francis: Reading Bones, 21 January 2021

Written in Bone: Hidden Stories in What We Leave Behind 
by Sue Black.
Doubleday, 359 pp., £18.99, September 2020, 978 0 85752 690 8
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... Ian​ Hamilton once recounted in the LRB (22 October 1992) that ‘when William F. Buckley Jr sent a copy of his essays to Norman Mailer, he pencilled a welcoming “Hi, Norman!” in the index, next to Mailer’s name.’ The index discloses a lot about the nature of a book, and the passions of its author, more than is sometimes realised (‘acknowledgments’ are similarly illuminating ...

Troglodytes

Patrick Parrinder, 25 October 1990

Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society and the Imagination 
by Rosalind Williams.
MIT, 265 pp., £22.50, March 1990, 9780262231459
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The Mask of the Prophet: The Extraordinary Fictions of Jules Verne 
by Andrew Martin.
Oxford, 222 pp., £27.50, May 1990, 0 19 815798 3
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... in 1750, and is still continuing. An early collector of Pompeian antiquities was Sir William Hamilton, British Envoy to the Court of Naples in the 1770s, whose frequent observations of the crater of the volcano were communicated to the Royal Society. Bulwer-Lytton stayed in Naples long enough to write his hugely popular romance The Last Days of Pompeii ...

Secretly Sublime

Iain Sinclair: The Great Ian Penman, 19 March 1998

Vital Signs 
by Ian Penman.
Serpent’s Tail, 374 pp., £10.99, February 1998, 1 85242 523 7
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... coast. Some edge of the golf course, out of season resort like Sheringham – where Patrick Hamilton dried out, on a regimen of no booze before lunchtime, Hopalong Cassidy novels, and the occasional glimpse from behind net curtains of schoolgirls on horseback. They should have known the real story, because it was there from the start. Staring them in ...

Lucky Lad

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Harold Evans, 17 December 2009

My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times – An Autobiography 
by Harold Evans.
Little, Brown, 515 pp., £25, September 2009, 978 1 4087 0203 1
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... It was clear that he was an unusually gifted newspaperman, and by the time he had made enough of a mark to be offered the editorship of the Northern Echo he had grown so ‘inordinately ambitious’ that he jumped at it. In Darlington he waged his first campaign, against pollution caused by an ICI factory, in which he received no help at all from the health ...

From the Outer Edge

Rory Scothorne: ‘Painting Nationalism Red’, 6 December 2018

Tom Nairn: ‘Painting Nationalism Red’? 
by Neal Ascherson.
Democratic Left Scotland, 27 pp., £4, February 2018
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... they partially paid for – at the McManus Gallery in Dundee. Being painted by Moffat has become a mark of entry into Scotland’s intellectual pantheon, formalising Nairn’s place alongside figures like Hugh MacDiarmid, Muriel Spark and Ascherson himself. Ascherson is keen that this process of national canonisation should not become one of pacification and ...

If I Turn and Run

Iain Sinclair: In Hoxton, 1 June 2000

45 
by Bill Drummond.
Little, Brown, 361 pp., £12.99, March 2000, 0 316 85385 2
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Crucify Me Again 
by Mark Manning.
Codex, 190 pp., £8.95, May 2000, 0 18 995814 6
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... is deserted. In a splendid street-facing room there is an art manifestation, an exhibition by Mark Reeves, tagged Glamour, which consists of groups of monochrome prints, photographs of photographs. In the Zone there are essentially two types of pitch: small photographs (such as these) or very large photographs, such as those by Marc Atkins in the ...

Damnable Deficient

Colin Kidd: The American Revolution, 17 November 2005

1776: America and Britain at War 
by David McCullough.
Allen Lane, 386 pp., £25, June 2005, 0 7139 9863 6
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... Society, named in honour of the Federalist Papers (1787-88) published by Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, is a conservative law society dedicated to upholding with unswerving rigidity the original intent of the constitution’s founders. By 1998, the Society had around five thousand student members at 145 law schools, as well as fifteen ...

The Getaway Car

Glen Newey: Machiavelli, 21 January 2016

Machiavellian Democracy 
by John McCormick.
Cambridge, 252 pp., £21.99, March 2011, 978 0 521 53090 3
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Machiavelli in the Making 
by Claude Lefort, translated by Michael Smith.
Northwestern, 512 pp., £32.50, January 2012, 978 0 8101 2438 7
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Redeeming ‘The Prince’: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece 
by Maurizio Viroli.
Princeton, 189 pp., £18.95, October 2013, 978 0 691 16001 6
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... was voiced by Rousseau in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: material abundance becomes a mark of status and so casts down the poor. Another is that commercialism excites a servile pandering to buyers. In 1766 the Charleston Tribune noted that ‘luxury naturally creates want, and that want, whether artificial or real, has a tendency to make men venal ...

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