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‘They Mean us no Harm’

Ross McKibbin: John Maynard Keynes, 8 February 2001

John Maynard Keynes: Vol. III: Fighting for Britain 1937-46 
by Robert Skidelsky.
Macmillan, 580 pp., £25, November 2000, 0 333 60456 3
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... via the (mild) heresies of Hicks, James Meade and Roy Harrod rather than via the true belief of Richard Kahn or Joan Robinson. In any event, Keynes made no further important theoretical contribution to economics. The running was left to others. For Skidelsky, however, this is an unreal problem since the third volume is dominated by what he sees as the ...

Serious Dr Sonne

Philip Purser, 6 December 1990

The Play of the Eyes 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Ralph Manheim.
Deutsch, 329 pp., £14.95, August 1990, 0 233 98570 0
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Yellow Street 
by Veza Canetti, translated by Ian Mitchell.
Halban, 139 pp., £11.95, November 1990, 1 870015 36 3
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... from his unpublished novel or unperformed plays; and as for gossip – wow! up in the class of Richard Aldington, particularly when the target is someone he doesn’t like. Alma Mahler is that ‘noisy, witless woman’ who ‘dominates the scene through boasting, greed and liquor’. At the funeral of her daughter Manon Gropius, she produces ...

Being there

Ian Hamilton, 7 October 1993

Up at Oxford 
by Ved Mehta.
Murray, 432 pp., £17.99, September 1993, 0 7195 5287 7
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... words and phrases. Such discussions could take place only at Oxford, I thought. It’s so English. People here are so intelligent.’ And these were just the students. Next he had to face the Master, heir to the fabled Jowett. At a welcoming interview, Mehta was asked, ‘Do you play games?’ and when he reminded the Master that blindness barred him ...

Boom

Arthur Marwick, 18 October 1984

War and Society in Europe 1870-1970 
by Brian Bond.
Leicester University Press/Fontana, 256 pp., £12, December 1983, 0 7185 1227 8
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Wars and Welfare: Britain 1914-1945 
by Max Beloff.
Arnold, 281 pp., £18.95, April 1984, 0 7131 6163 9
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The Causes of Wars, and Other Essays 
by Michael Howard.
Counterpoint, 291 pp., £3.95, April 1984, 0 04 940073 8
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... it drew on still earlier work in social science (Sorokin, Andreski and Janowitz), social policy (Richard Titmuss’s rather naive equation of ‘the Dunkirk spirit’ with social reform, for example, is now very familiar) and Medieval studies. In the early Sixties at Edinburgh University, I launched special subjects on ‘The War and the Welfare State in ...

Just Look at Them

Jonathan Beckman: Ears and Fingers, 27 January 2022

The Life of Giovanni Morelli in Risorgimento Italy 
by Jaynie Anderson.
Officina Libraria, 271 pp., £29.95, November 2019, 978 88 99765 95 8
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... the Russian art critic Ivan Lermolieff published Die Werke italienischer Meister (translated into English as Italian Painters), a study of the Italian artworks held in German collections. He disputed dozens of attributions to Renaissance artists in the state galleries of Munich, Dresden, Berlin and elsewhere. ‘It has been a very common mistake,’ he ...

Paddling in the Gravy

E.S. Turner: Bath’s panderer-in-chief, 21 July 2005

The Imaginary Autocrat: Beau Nash and the Invention of Bath 
by John Eglin.
Profile, 292 pp., £20, May 2005, 1 86197 302 0
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... justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply. The ‘King of Bath’, as he liked to be known, was the gamester son of a Swansea bottlemaker, a heavyweight playboy whose abundant assurance, or chutzpah, had qualified him to act as arbiter of elegance ...

Freaks of Empire

V.G. Kiernan, 16 July 1981

Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the 15th Century to the 1780s 
by Angus Calder.
Cape, 916 pp., £16.50, April 1981, 0 224 01452 8
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... emergence of blatant imperial boasting as a factor in British public affairs’. Calder adds that English literature had already been taking up the swelling theme of empire – a new book by John McVeagh has much to say about this. ‘How can one write the history of the English-speaking peoples and their empires?’ – a ...

Going underground

Elaine Showalter, 12 May 1994

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes 
by Janet Malcolm.
Knopf, 208 pp., $23, April 1994, 0 679 43158 6
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... in the United States. In the New York Times Book Review, Caryn James observed that ‘while the English fuss about poets’ graves, Americans gossip about litigation and celebrity journalists.’Malcolm sees biographers and readers allied in a transgressive and titillating conspiracy against the dead. She writes that ‘the biographer at work ... is like ...

Cockaigne

Frank Kermode, 24 October 1991

Orwell: The Authorised Biography 
by Michael Shelden.
Heinemann, 563 pp., £18.50, October 1991, 0 434 69517 3
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... There is already a lot of biographical writing about Orwell, including the memoir of Richard Rees and The Unknown Orwell by William Abrahams and Peter Stansky (lamed by the late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later de-authorised by her to indicate disapproval of Crick, who, much to her annoyance, had lawyers good enough to ensure that he was able to publish it anyway, quotations and all ...

Feigning a Relish

Nicholas Penny: One Tate or Two, 15 October 1998

The Tate: A History 
by Frances Spalding.
Tate Gallery, 308 pp., £25, April 1998, 1 85437 231 9
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... a leading article in the Times in March 1890 which called for a new gallery that ‘should do for English art what the Luxembourg does for the French’. The Museum of Modern British Art at Millbank, to give its original title, was meant to do exactly that, but hardly had it been founded than the model began to seem inadequate. A demand developed for a fuller ...
... as its background a society not primarily as a set of economic classes but as a patriarchy. The English class system, its pervasiveness, its endless subtleties, had once been a rich source for the English novel. The system whose laws, customs, religion and culture consistently sanction the economic ascendancy of one sex ...

Swank and Swagger

Ferdinand Mount: Deals with the Pasha, 26 May 2022

Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East 
by Jonathan Parry.
Princeton, 453 pp., £35, April, 978 0 691 18189 9
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... to the Turks, who were often denounced for degeneracy – swords, slippers and sexual excess, as Richard Cobden put it – the Arabs were often admired for manly simplicity. David Urquhart, secretary at the embassy in Constantinople, wrote that Islam was not a false religion to be ridiculed: it taught no new dogmas, propounded no fanciful revelation and ...

Lachrymatics

Ferdinand Mount: British Weeping, 17 December 2015

Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears 
by Thomas Dixon.
Oxford, 438 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 0 19 967605 7
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... Dixon’s weak – or is it strong? – tear ducts. As he reminds us of the great tear-jerkers of English culture – Sydney Carton’s imagined speech from the scaffold, Nurse Cavell’s last words, Celia Johnson’s return to her husband in Brief Encounter – the allusions alone were enough to start my eyes pricking. Now and then Dixon may be a fraction ...

Secrets are like sex

Neal Ascherson, 2 April 2020

The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain 
by Richard Norton-Taylor.
I.B. Tauris, 352 pp., £20, March 2019, 978 1 78831 218 9
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... been imported into the Anglo-British state in the form of the Freedom of Information Act. But, as Richard Norton-Taylor’s pugnacious book shows, it’s a newborn right still struggling to survive against a centuries-old tradition of government.The structure of the ‘British’ state is still essentially monarchical. Constitutionally, the rest of the ...

Battle of Britain

Patrick O’Brian, 7 July 1988

The Spanish Armada 
by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker.
Hamish Hamilton, 296 pp., £15, April 1988, 0 241 12125 6
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Armada 1588-1988 
by M.J. Rodriguez-Salgado.
Penguin and the National Maritime Museum, 295 pp., £12.95, April 1988, 0 14 010301 5
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Armada: A Celebration of the 400th Anniversary of the Defeat of the Spanish Armada 1588-1988 
by Peter Padfield.
Gollancz, 208 pp., £14.95, April 1988, 0 575 03729 6
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Froude’s ‘Spanish Story of the Armada’, and Other Essays 
edited by A.L. Rowse.
Sutton, 262 pp., £5.95, May 1988, 0 86299 500 0
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Ireland’s Armada Legacy 
by Laurence Flanagan.
Sutton, 210 pp., £9.95, April 1988, 9780862994730
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The Armada in the Public Records 
by N.A.M. Rodger.
HMSO, 76 pp., £5.95, April 1988, 0 11 440215 9
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The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588 
by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto.
Oxford, 300 pp., £14.95, June 1988, 0 19 822926 7
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... these books are concerned with what the Spaniards once called the Felicissima Armada and what the English still, with a quiet smile, call the Invincible Armada (apparently it was Burleigh who first thought of the word, shortly after the event). They differ very much in approach, in emphasis, and even in conclusion – Mia Rodrigues-Salgado, for example, feels ...

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