No Ordinary Law

Stephen Sedley: Constitution-Makers, 5 June 2008

... envisaged both by Article 53 of the convention and by Section 11 of the Human Rights Act itself. David Cameron advocates replacement of the Human Rights Act with a bill of rights and responsibilities entrenched against repeal. Gordon Brown advocates a new constitutional document ‘in parallel’, as the recent green paper puts it, with a bill of rights and ...

Imagine Tintin

Michael Hofmann: Basil Bunting, 9 January 2014

A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting 
by Richard Burton.
Infinite Ideas, 618 pp., £30, September 2013, 978 1 908984 18 0
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... in its history) and Northern Arts. The scoutmaster was elbowed aside by a strange new act: the Grand Old Man, the English Celt (listen to the recording of Briggflatts). Oxford published his Collected Poems in 1978, and a posthumous Uncollected Poems in 1991. He continued to be shunted around from house to house (he never seemed to find rest or ...

Post-its, push pins, pencils

Jenny Diski: In the Stationery Cupboard, 31 July 2014

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace 
by Nikil Saval.
Doubleday, 288 pp., £20, June 2014, 978 0 385 53657 8
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... refuser (1853). Perhaps the two portrayals are not coincidental. In 1851, the Melville family read David Copperfield aloud as their evening entertainment. The pre-20th-century office worker saw himself as a cut above the unsalaried labouring masses, and was as ambivalent about his superiors, who were his only means of rising, as the rest of the working world ...

In the Shallow End

Conor Gearty, 27 January 2022

... rules is seen as old-fashioned nonsense.In 2010 an early list of the quangos to be abolished by David Cameron’s new coalition included the administrative branch of the Supreme Court. Now even more direct threats have been made, with government supporters openly questioning the need for such an adjudicative body and various reviews being conducted into ...

An Infinity of Novels

Philip Horne, 14 September 1989

A Short Guide to the World Novel: From Myth to Modernism 
by Gilbert Phelps.
Routledge, 397 pp., £30, September 1988, 0 415 00765 8
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The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction 
by John Sutherland.
Longman, 696 pp., £35, March 1989, 0 582 49040 5
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The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875-1914 
by Peter Keating.
Secker, 533 pp., £30, September 1989, 0 436 23248 0
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... out, or sidling into some bastardly digression ...’ Any ‘straight lines’ of descent the grand schematist might be tempted to draw between, say The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Bonfire of the Vanities seem unlikely to trace a true genealogy, and we need the ‘bastardly digressions’ to do justice to what actually happened. The mildest of ...

Why did we not know?

Ian Jack: Who is hoarding the land?, 23 May 2019

The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain 
by Brett Christophers.
Verso, 394 pp., £20, November 2018, 978 1 78663 158 9
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... interests in the postwar decades, but the Cold War meant that much more was retained, while the grand total of publicly owned land was increased by the nationalisation of coal mines and railways, the creation of the NHS and New Towns, and the spread of local authority housing schemes. In big cities, the proportion of public land varied between 33 per cent ...

Heroes of Our Time

Karl Miller, 19 May 1988

The Monument 
by T. Behrens.
Cape, 258 pp., £11.95, May 1988, 0 224 02510 4
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The Passion of John Aspinall 
by Brian Masters.
Cape, 360 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 0 224 02353 5
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... Ursula’s life resembles John Aspinall’s in certain respects. Each is an eccentric. Each is a grand or smart person, of an equivocal kind. Each of these narratives has a Douglas-Home, and there are some similar fatalities. Aspinall is the son of parted parents, a ‘pseudo-orphan’ who rapidly became larger than life. He is by far the more convivial ...

Doctor in the Dock

Stephen Sedley, 20 October 1994

Medical Negligence 
edited by Michael Powers and Nigel Harris.
Butterworth, 1188 pp., £155, July 1994, 0 406 00452 8
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... fallen below an established standard of care, calls not only for judgment but for information on a grand scale. It is to these and similar ends that experts enter the witness box in medical negligence actions. There may anyway be a need for specialist evidence about the plaintiff’s condition and prognosis in order that damages can be assessed; and there may ...
Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot 
by Michael Rogin.
California, 320 pp., $24.95, May 1996, 0 520 20407 7
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... version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, and David O. Selznick’s 1939 super-production Gone with the Wind ‘provide the scaffolding for American film history’ – although it takes us no further than the eve of the Second World War. This reading of Hollywood is anticipated by Leslie Fiedler’s ...

We are our apps

Hal Foster: Visual Revolutions, 5 October 2023

Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle 
by Jonathan Crary.
Zone, 262 pp., £25, October, 978 1 942130 85 7
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... strictly experimental or popular but both, like Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and David Cronenberg. Also distinctive is his selection of novelists; his semi-paranoid view of our ‘techno-institutional worlds’ leads Crary to turn to Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard.In 1982, Crary published a brilliant essay on horror ...

Holed below the Waterline

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Liverpool’s Losses, 6 November 2025

Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain 
by Sam Wetherell.
Apollo, 438 pp., £25, February, 978 1 80110 888 1
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... at the dilapidated Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. The officer in charge, chief superintendent David Duckenfield, was grossly underprepared. When a crush developed at the entrance for Liverpool fans shortly before kick-off, Duckenfield refused to delay the start time, but belatedly opened one of the exit gates, letting fans flood into the Liverpool ...

Professor Heathrow

Neal Ascherson: Asa Briggs says yes, 9 October 2025

The Indefatigable Asa Briggs 
by Adam Sisman.
William Collins, 485 pp., £30, August, 978 0 00 855641 9
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... the practical work of bringing the new idea to reality – a point Sisman makes well. The only grand schemes to which he stayed loyal and (with interruptions) committed were the new University of Sussex and the Open University, of which he was chancellor from 1978 to 1994.His own politics were flexible: left or leftish. It’s impossible to imagine the ...

Who Are They?

Jenny Turner: The Institute of Ideas, 8 July 2010

... Furedi hardly engaged at all with what actually happens inside British schools. There were instead grand-looking historical generalisations – ‘in the 21st century, conservation of the past is a radical act’ – and a lot of anecdotes of the sort that make people start going on about political correctness gone mad: ‘They’re even expelling ...

Forgive us our debts

Benjamin Kunkel: The History of Debt, 10 May 2012

Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order 
by Philip Coggan.
Allen Lane, 294 pp., £20, December 2011, 978 1 84614 510 0
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Debt: The First 5000 Years 
by David Graeber.
Melville House, 534 pp., £21.99, July 2011, 978 1 933633 86 2
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... writer Philip Coggan, and in Debt: The First 5000 Years by the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, which situates the same stretch of modern history within the vast tidal shifts, across five millennia of Eurasian history, between monetary regimes founded on precious metals and those based on ‘virtual credit money’. In August 1971, Nixon ...

Ruthless and Truthless

Ferdinand Mount: Rotten Government, 6 May 2021

The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism 
by Peter Oborne.
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 3985 0100 3
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Political Advice: Past, Present and Future 
edited by Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose.
I.B. Tauris, 240 pp., £21.99, February 2021, 978 1 83860 120 1
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... outside the cabinet-committee structure.’At the same time, the role of Parliament as the grand inquisitor of the nation seemed to be slipping. By 1995, the Labour MP Jack Straw was lamenting that ‘in the last six years, every serious newspaper has abandoned its straight reporting of Parliament.’ Almost overnight, a tradition that dated back to ...