Nothing Natural

Jenny Turner: SurrogacyTM, 23 January 2020

Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism against Family 
by Sophie Lewis.
Verso, 216 pp., £14.99, May 2019, 978 1 78663 729 1
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Making Kin Not Population 
edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway.
Prickly Paradigm, 120 pp., £10, July 2018, 978 0 9966355 6 1
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... Lewis observes, has begun to shift on such questions. ‘As a global … organisation’, Amnesty International announced in 2015, we have ‘a responsibility to assess how best to prevent human-rights violations. As such, it is right and fitting that we should look at one of the most disadvantaged groups of people in the world, often forced to live outside ...

Who holds the welding rod?

James Meek: Our Turbine Futures, 15 July 2021

... for Hornsea One were made by a workforce that had already been laid off.I drove to the factory, a group of huge white sheds on the western side of the peninsula, the opposite side from Campbeltown. They lie among the old barracks and green security fencing of the former Machrihanish military airfield, at various times a nuclear weapons storage site, a US Navy ...

You are not Cruikshank

David Bromwich: Gillray’s Mischief, 21 September 2023

James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire 
by Tim Clayton.
Yale, 400 pp., £50, November 2022, 978 1 913107 32 1
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Uproar! Satire, Scandal and Printmakers in Georgian London 
by Alice Loxton.
Icon, 397 pp., £25, March, 978 1 78578 954 0
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Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps and Spectres 
by Joseph Monteyne.
Toronto, 301 pp., £49.99, June 2022, 978 1 4875 2774 7
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... in the long reign of Pitt the Younger; the madness of George III and the consequent Regency Crisis; the premonition of war and the actual wars with revolutionary France and then with Napoleon. But when you read about his career step by step you realise how little his perspective ever widened to become international in ...

Down the Rabbit Hole

David Runciman: Britain’s Europe Problem, 9 October 2025

Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution, 1945-2016 
by Tom McTague.
Pan Macmillan, 546 pp., £25, September, 978 1 5290 8309 5
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... environmental policies. Now most Greens think reactionary national governments are the barrier to international co-operation on climate change. In the 1975 referendum on British membership of the EEC, the SNP were as keen on getting out as anyone: they saw European integration as a plot against the idea of national independence. In the 2014 referendum on ...

Daughter of the West

Tariq Ali: The Bhuttos, 13 December 2007

... appeared on TV, trying to look like the sort of leader who wants it understood that the political crisis is to be discussed with gravity and sangfroid. Instead, he came across as a dumbed down dictator fearful for his own political future. His performance as he broadcast to the nation, first in Urdu and then in English, was incoherent. The gist was simple: he ...

Belt, Boots and Spurs

Jonathan Raban: Dunkirk, 1940, 5 October 2017

... so high, even in that era of mass unemployment, that a question was asked in Parliament about the crisis in Cradley Heath. My father had never seen anything like it, and it terrified him. This industrial slum on the further outskirts of Birmingham was beyond his comprehension. At Colley Lane School, he lost control of his class. The children never stopped ...

For ever Walsall

Angus Calder, 21 March 1985

Rural Life in England in the First World War 
by Pamela Horn.
Gill and Macmillan, 300 pp., £25, November 1984, 0 312 69604 3
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Britain in Our Century: Images and Controversies 
by Arthur Marwick.
Thames and Hudson, 224 pp., £12.95, November 1984, 9780500250914
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Labour and Society in Britain: 1918-1979 
by James Cronin.
Batsford, 248 pp., £8.95, August 1984, 0 7134 4395 2
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Women in England 1870-1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change 
by Jane Lewis.
Wheatsheaf, 240 pp., £16.95, November 1984, 0 7108 0186 6
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... agricultural workers dropped by more than 25 per cent, with the highest losses in the youngest age group. However, life for those who remained improved somewhat, thanks to falling consumer prices and the smaller size of families, ‘as contraceptive techniques became more widely known’. More country people could now afford to eat butter! Women’s ...

Bunnymooning

Philip French, 6 June 1996

The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives 
by Sebastian Faulks.
Hutchinson, 309 pp., £16.99, April 1996, 0 09 179211 8
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... Vice-Chancellor of Reading University from 1950 to 1963) he seemed destined, towards the world of international journalism. The first was Neal Ascherson, two years ahead of him at Eton, a formidable intelligence, who went to Cambridge and subsequently became a distinguished reporter on Eastern European affairs and an influential left-wing thinker. The second ...

The Finchley Factor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Thatcher in Israel, 13 September 2018

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East 
by Azriel Bermant.
Cambridge, 274 pp., £22.99, September 2017, 978 1 316 60630 8
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... receded from view until the dramas of the Six Day War in 1967, the next war in 1973, and the oil crisis. This had a direct impact on British politics, leading to Harold Wilson’s return to Downing Street in 1974. He resigned two years later in a miasma of dark suspicion, not much brightened by his resignation honours list, with its bizarre collection of ...

Divinely Ordained

Jackson Lears: God loves America, 19 May 2011

A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided 
by Amanda Foreman.
Penguin, 988 pp., £12.99, June 2011, 978 0 14 104058 5
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... at Antietam, Gladstone and the foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, agreed that a humanitarian crisis was at hand in America; Gladstone feared one in Lancashire as well, among the cotton mill workers. He called for an end to the war through arbitration, declaring that the Confederates ‘have made a nation’. Charles Francis Adams shuddered, conceding ...

All This Love Business

Jean McNicol: Vanessa and Julian Bell, 24 January 2013

Julian Bell: From Bloomsbury to the Spanish Civil War 
by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams.
Stanford, 314 pp., £38.95, 0 8047 7413 7
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... Vanessa the unwelcome opportunity to see whether she was right. Sue ‘rose to the occasion of a crisis, as she always does,’ Julian told his mother, ‘and was very superb – it’s a pity furious women attract me so much. And so completely charming.’ He resigned; she turned down his offer of marriage. Bell didn’t leave China until early ...

Balfour, Weizmann and the Creation of Israel

Charles Glass: Palestine, 7 June 2001

One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate 
by Tom Segev, translated by Haim Watzman.
Little, Brown, 612 pp., £25, January 2001, 0 316 64859 0
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Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine 1917-48 
by Naomi Shepherd.
Murray, 290 pp., £12.99, September 2000, 0 7195 6322 4
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... of the Young Turks of 1908, a complete nonsense. ‘I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews,’ the Foreign Office Under-Secretary Lord Robert Cecil said. Segev quotes a character in The Thirty-Nine Steps airing the common prejudice that ‘the Jew is everywhere . . . He’s the man who is ruling the world just ...

How to be a wife

Colm Tóibín: The Discretion of Jackie Kennedy, 6 June 2002

Janet & Jackie: The Story of a Mother and Her Daughter, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 
by Jan Pottker.
St Martin’s, 381 pp., $24.95, October 2001, 0 312 26607 3
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Mrs Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years 
by Barbara Leaming.
Weidenfeld, 389 pp., £20, October 2001, 0 297 64333 9
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... car’) and how much her daughter depended on her (‘Janet also stepped in when a particular group bored Jackie, as did the coffee hour at the White House for the wives of the New York Stock Exchange members or the social for the International Council of Women’), but Pottker’s most telling sentence concerns that ...

I came with a sword

Toril Moi: Simone Weil’s Way, 1 July 2021

The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas 
by Robert Zaretsky.
Chicago, 181 pp., £16, February 2021, 978 0 226 54933 0
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... 1936, Weil crossed the Spanish border and made her way to Barcelona. There she managed to join a group of international volunteers in the small town of Pina de Ebro. Noticing her short-sightedness, her comrades at first refused to give her a weapon. But she demanded so vociferously to be allowed to carry a rifle like ...

The sea is the same sea

Adam Shatz: Bibi goes to Washington, 30 August 2018

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu 
by Anshel Pfeffer.
Hurst, 423 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 84904 988 7
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... project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ – a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are for ever excluded – is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an ...