Excellence

Patrick Wright, 21 May 1987

Creating excellence: Managing corporate culture, strategy and change in the New Age 
by Craig Hickman and Michael Silva.
Allen and Unwin, 305 pp., £12.50, April 1985, 0 04 658252 5
Show More
Intrapreneuring: Why you don’t have to leave the corporation to become an entrepreneur 
by Gifford Pinchot.
Harper and Row, 368 pp., £15.95, August 1985, 0 06 015305 9
Show More
The IBM Way: Insights into the World’s Most Successful Marketing Organisation 
by Buck Rodgers.
Harper and Row, 224 pp., £12.95, April 1986, 0 06 015522 1
Show More
Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage 
by Richard Foster.
Macmillan, 316 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 333 43511 7
Show More
Ford 
by Robert Lacey.
Heinemann, 778 pp., £15, July 1986, 0 434 40192 7
Show More
Company of Adventurers: The Story of the Hudson’s Bay Company 
by Peter Newman.
Viking, 413 pp., £14.95, March 1986, 0 670 80379 0
Show More
Augustine’s Laws 
by Norman Augustine.
Viking, 380 pp., £12.95, July 1986, 9780670809424
Show More
Peak Performers: The New Heroes in Business 
by Charles Garfield.
Hutchinson, 333 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 09 167391 7
Show More
Going for it: How to Succeed as an Entrepreneur 
by Victor Kiam.
Collins, 223 pp., £9.95, May 1986, 0 00 217603 3
Show More
Take a chance to be first: The Secrets of Entrepreneurial Success 
by Warren Avis.
Macmillan, 222 pp., £9.95, October 1986, 0 02 504410 9
Show More
The Winning Streak 
by Walter Goldsmith and David Clutterbuck.
Weidenfeld/Penguin, 224 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 297 78469 2
Show More
The Roots of Excellence 
by Ronnie Lessem.
Fontana, 318 pp., £3.95, December 1985, 0 00 636874 3
Show More
The New Management of Local Government 
by John Stewart.
Allen and Unwin, 208 pp., £20, October 1986, 0 00 435232 7
Show More
Show More
... and its success unleashed a flurry of like-minded books. Tom Peters teamed up with Nancy Austin to restate the main arguments in A Passion For Excellence2 – a second-try book which set out to be a little more practical in its recommendations and which also tried to counter the macho-zen bias of the first book by speaking to the burgeoning field of ...

Mr Toad’s Wild Ride

Jessica Olin: Leaving Graceland, 5 December 2024

From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir 
by Lisa Marie Presley with Riley Keough.
Macmillan, 281 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 1 0350 5104 5
Show More
Show More
... Her appearances were always lively. Wearing black leather and stilettos, she flirted with David Letterman, telling him that the ‘important lesson’ she learned from her father is ‘balls’: ‘I somehow grew them somewhere along the line.’ Conan O’Brien was a bit shrill for her taste, shrieking about portraits painted in blood and the time ...

After Nasrallah

Adam Shatz, 10 October 2024

... American enablers – Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin – swiftly echoed the Israeli prime minister’s celebration of Nasrallah’s death. Never mind that Netanyahu hadn’t consulted them about the bombing, which made a mockery of the American and French push for a ceasefire between Israel and Hizbullah, to ...

Staying in power

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 7 January 1988

Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era 
by Peter Jenkins.
Cape, 411 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 0 224 02516 3
Show More
De-Industrialisation and Foreign Trade 
by R.E. Rowthorn and J.R. Wells.
Cambridge, 422 pp., £40, November 1988, 0 521 26360 3
Show More
Show More
... the Conservatives 43. Notwithstanding the new blue suits and roses, it is increasingly clear, as Austin Mitchell wrote in July, that Labour is ‘being relegated to the peripheries of British life, because our structures, ethos and attitudes tie us to a world that is dying’. In Britain, as elsewhere, we may be seeing, in Jenkins’s own subtitle, ‘the ...

Out of the East

Blair Worden, 11 October 1990

The King’s Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey 
by Peter Gwyn.
Barrie and Jenkins, 666 pp., £20, May 1990, 0 7126 2190 3
Show More
Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution 
by John Morrill.
Longman, 300 pp., £17.95, May 1990, 0 582 06064 8
Show More
The Writings of William Walwyn 
edited by Jack McMichael and Barbara Taft.
Georgia, 584 pp., $45, July 1989, 0 8203 1017 4
Show More
Show More
... associated. The purge of 1519, for instance, which has so engrossed Gwyn’s bête noire David Starkey, was ‘a storm in a tea-cup’. The truth, pronounces Gwyn, is that the political world of Wolsey’s ascendancy was ‘not an environment where faction flourished’. It was nevertheless an environment where the Duke of Buckingham got his head ...

Credibility Brown

Christopher Hitchens, 17 August 1989

Where there is greed: Margaret Thatcher and the Betrayal of Britain’s Future 
by Gordon Brown.
Mainstream, 182 pp., £4.95, May 1989, 1 85158 233 9
Show More
CounterBlasts No 3: A Rational Advance for the Labour Party 
by John Lloyd.
Chatto, 57 pp., £2.99, June 1989, 0 7011 3519 0
Show More
Show More
... and provide the skills base needed by modern industry and commerce.’ To say nothing of Sir David Philips, Chairman of the Advisory Board for the Research Councils, who remarked in 1988 that ‘decisions by the Government were “progressively leading to an unstable situation”.’ Fighting words, no doubt, but they have the unmistakably musty smell of ...

Rubble from Bone

Tom Stevenson: Israel’s War, 8 February 2024

... officials continue to make constant visits to Israel to reaffirm what the defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, called the US’s ‘unshakeable’ support. Initially it claimed to be flying drones over Gaza for ‘hostage recovery’. But a freedom of information request by the American journalists Ken Klippenstein and Matthew Petti revealed that the US air force ...

Hopi Mean Time

Iain Sinclair: Jim Sallis, 18 March 1999

Eye of the Cricket 
by James Sallis.
No Exit, 190 pp., £6.99, April 1998, 1 874061 77 7
Show More
Show More
... nominate the second Confederate governor of Texas’s mansion in Bastrop, thirty miles out of Austin, as a suitable estate for his tax exile? Only the cats know. Spooky, over-refined Egyptian beasts who are let out on a leash while the dew is on the grass, but otherwise confined to quarters. Survival on the new frontier depends on three things: cats, guns ...

Ill-Suited to Reality

Tom Stevenson: Nato’s Delusions, 1 August 2024

Nato: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance 
by Sten Rynning.
Yale, 345 pp., £20, March, 978 0 300 27011 2
Show More
Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of Nato 
by Peter Apps.
Wildfire, 624 pp., £25, February, 978 1 0354 0575 6
Show More
Natopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance since the Cold War 
edited by Grey Anderson.
Verso, 356 pp., £19.99, July 2023, 978 1 80429 237 2
Show More
Show More
... powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur ...

South London Modern

Owen Hatherley, 23 October 2025

Modern Buildings in Blackheath and Greenwich, London 1950-2000 
by Ana Francisco Sutherland.
Park, 415 pp., £35, July 2024, 978 3 03860 342 9
Show More
Dulwich: Mid-Century Oasis 
by Paul Davis, Ian McInnes and Catherine Samy.
RIBA, 207 pp., £27, September 2023, 978 1 915722 31 7
Show More
Show More
... Estate) and one developer (Wates, one of the biggest at the time), by one firm of architects (Austin Vernon & Partners). This was superior suburban housing, while the new houses in Greenwich and Blackheath appear to have been hipper and more rarefied. Rock musicians were moving there in the late 1960s, along with architects, academics, Labour ...

We shall not be moved

John Bayley, 2 February 1984

Come aboard and sail away 
by John Fuller.
Salamander, 48 pp., £6, October 1983, 0 907540 37 6
Show More
Children in Exile 
by James Fenton.
Salamander, 24 pp., £5, October 1983, 0 907540 39 2
Show More
‘The Memory of War’ and ‘Children in Exile’: Poems 1968-1983 
by James Fenton.
Penguin, 110 pp., £1.95, October 1983, 0 14 006812 0
Show More
Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland: An Anthology 
edited by Michael Schmidt.
Carcanet, 184 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 85635 469 4
Show More
Nights in the Iron Hotel 
by Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 48 pp., £4, November 1983, 0 571 13116 6
Show More
The Irish Lights 
by Charles Johnston and Kyril Fitzlyon.
Bodley Head, 77 pp., £4.50, September 1983, 0 370 30557 4
Show More
Fifteen to Infinity 
by Ruth Fainlight.
Hutchinson, 62 pp., £5.95, September 1983, 0 09 152471 7
Show More
Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature 
edited by George Dekker.
Carcanet, 153 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 9780856354663
Show More
Show More
... movement, but seeming almost a normal aspect of the modern scene, like the ‘magic realism’ of David Hockney or Alex Colville. James Fenton’s ‘Dead Soldiers’, ‘A German Requiem’ and ‘Children in Exile’ are poems that work by a new and at first disconcerting technique, not to move us or to establish feeling, but to suggest a situation where ...

Boomster and the Quack

Stefan Collini: How to Get on in the Literary World, 2 November 2006

Writers, Readers and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870-1918 
by Philip Waller.
Oxford, 1181 pp., £85, April 2006, 0 19 820677 1
Show More
Show More
... of the first beneficiaries, Macmillan paying the then record sum of £7000 for American rights to David Grieve in the (disappointed) hope of repeating the phenomenal success of her previous hit, Robert Elsmere. After the ending of the three-voller in 1894, and still more with the expansion of the market in the 1900s, the possibilities for large earnings from ...

As Astonishing as Elvis

Jenny Turner: Ayn Rand, 1 December 2005

Ayn Rand 
by Jeff Britting.
Duckworth, 155 pp., £12.99, February 2005, 0 7156 3269 8
Show More
Show More
... Objectivism is also promulgated by the Objectivist Center in Washington DC, until recently run by David Kelley, the author of A Life of One’s Own: Individualism and the Welfare State. Kelley split from the ARI in 1990, ‘dismayed’ by ‘the exploding excesses’ of its ‘official, dogmatic approach’. The Center supports lectures and social events, a ...

After Nasrallah

Adam Shatz: Israel’s Forever War, 24 October 2024

... American enablers – Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the secretary of defence, Lloyd Austin – swiftly echoed the Israeli prime minister’s celebration of Nasrallah’s death. Never mind that Netanyahu hadn’t consulted them about the bombing, which made a mockery of the American and French push for a ceasefire between Israel and Hizbullah, to ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Bennett’s Dissection, 1 January 2009

... West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish waiter.’ Waiting at the lights this afternoon my bike slips out of my hands and slides to ...