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We’ve done awfully well

Karl Miller: The Late 1950s, 18 July 2013

Modernity Britain: Opening the Box, 1957-59 
by David Kynaston.
Bloomsbury, 432 pp., £25, June 2013, 978 0 7475 8893 1
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... can be surmised for the romantic socialism of Aneurin Bevan, and for the romantic sociology of Michael Young and Raymond Williams, as the views of these three have been characterised. One of the best sayings culled for the new volume is drawn from Bevan, and is as good as the ‘poetry’ heard by someone in his speeches. ‘Lazy? Lazy?’ Bevan responded ...

All Woman

Michael Mason, 23 May 1985

‘Men’: A Documentary 
by Anna Ford.
Weidenfeld, 196 pp., £10.95, March 1985, 0 297 78468 4
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Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure 
by John Cleland, edited by Peter Sabor.
Oxford, 256 pp., £1.95, February 1985, 0 19 281634 9
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... among the range of human experiences. Sex is suddenly momentous – and we, evidently, continue to grant it an extraordinary status. Our fiction, our biographies, our memoirs, our journalism, high and low, serious and comic, all treat sex as a topic of overriding, peculiar interest. (For example, the chapter on ‘Sex’ is by far the longest in Ms Ford’s ...

Once a Syrian, always a Syrian

Maria Margaronis: Joseph O’Neill, 8 March 2001

Blood-Dark Track: A Family History 
by Joseph O'Neill.
Granta, 338 pp., £16.99, February 2001, 1 86207 288 4
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... when he began this book could, he says, ‘be written out on a luggage tag’. But (like Cary Grant, perhaps, in North by Northwest) he found himself irresistibly drawn in. His thoroughness and energy are phenomenal. He visits every place important to his grandfathers in Ireland, Turkey and the Middle East, tracks down every relevant surviving functionary ...

Beware Kite-Flyers

Stephen Sedley: The British Constitution, 12 September 2013

The British Constitution: A Very Short Introduction 
by Martin Loughlin.
Oxford, 152 pp., £7.99, April 2013, 978 0 19 969769 4
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... That levying money for or to the use of the Crowne by [pretence] of prerogative without grant of Parlyament … is illegal. Although it took a while to settle in (monarchs continued purporting to suspend legislation into the early 18th century), the essential purpose and effect of the Bill of Rights were to make the crown, which had long since been ...

Adipose Tumorous Growths and All

Kevin Kopelson, 18 May 2000

Franz Liszt. Vol. III: The Final Years, 1861-86 
by Alan Walker.
Faber, 594 pp., £45, February 1998, 0 571 19034 0
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The Romantic Generation 
by Charles Rosen.
HarperCollins, 720 pp., £14.99, March 1999, 0 00 255712 6
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Franz Liszt: Selected Letters 
edited by Adrian Williams.
Oxford, 1063 pp., £70, January 1999, 0 19 816688 5
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... home.) There’s the one about Liszt the lady-killer. In reality, Liszt was more of a Cary Grant than a Clark Gable, more Don Ottavio than Don Giovanni – although he did play the latter on stage. According to Charles Rosen: ‘With his international reputation for erotic conquest already set’, Liszt must have known that the public would take ...

Heathrow to Canary Wharf

Nick Richardson: Crossrail, 11 October 2012

... new station means the area is being ‘regenerated’, which makes the authorities more likely to grant planning permission and businesses more likely to move in and commission Canary Wharf Contractors to build for them. Since CWG started on the new station they’ve been contracted to build a public plaza on the estate as well as the new HQ of the European ...

Shady Acquisitions

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Corporate Imperialism, 21 September 2023

Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism 
by Philip J. Stern.
Harvard, 408 pp., £30.95, May, 978 0 674 98812 5
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... coronation, the Guardian flourished its discovery of a document recording Edward Colston’s grant to William III of shares in the Royal African Company, which shipped more enslaved people across the Atlantic than any other organisation. It was an embarrassing but hardly revelatory find: the king was the company’s titular governor and historians have ...

Is this what life is like?

Nicole Flattery: ‘My Phantoms’, 9 September 2021

My Phantoms 
by Gwendoline Riley.
Granta, 199 pp., £12.99, April, 978 1 78378 326 7
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... and kicking.In My Phantoms, Riley’s latest novel, the mother character takes centre stage. Helen Grant has the disposition of a wounded animal, twice-divorced and in permanent need of distraction. Manipulative and wildly self-absorbed, she is capable of inflicting Livia Soprano levels of damage on her offspring. Helen hasn’t exactly got the life she wanted ...

Victim’s Voice

Julie Davidson, 24 January 1991

Rape: My Story 
by Jill Saward and Wendy Green.
Bloomsbury, 153 pp., £13.99, September 1990, 0 7475 0751 1
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... Ealing Vicarage rape judgment was critical to the climate which allowed the law to change and to grant victims the right of appeal against sentences which don’t fit the crime. Other respectable readers of Rape will include some of those few committed Christians which our secular society is capable of producing. They will want to take heart from Jill ...

Double-Time Seabird

Michael Hofmann: Halldór Laxness does both, 4 April 2024

The Islander: A Biography of Halldór Laxness 
by Halldór Guðmundsson, translated by Philip Roughton.
MacLehose, 486 pp., £25, September 2023, 978 1 5294 3373 9
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... Halldór respected all his life,’ Guðmundsson writes, ‘it was Hemingway.’ In an early grant application (Laxness was not quite 23), he claimed to have written six long novels by the age of twenty and destroyed five of them. He wrote poems when young and plays when old, essays and memoirs of various stripes all along. By ...

Carpetbagging in Bermondsey

Nicholas Murray, 19 August 1982

... partly on evidence from North Southwark where he worked in a community planning centre until its grant was cut by a council no longer prepared to go on funding a thorn in its side. Nothing is resented more bitterly amongst the traditionalist old guard of Bermondsey than the fact that the new oppositionists were ‘outsiders’ and even in some cases actually ...

Born Again

Phillip Whitehead, 19 February 1981

Face the future 
by David Owen.
Cape, 552 pp., £12.50, January 1981, 0 224 01956 2
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... Local government is to be made more independent of the block grants of Whitehall. (Paradoxically, Michael Heseltine is already achieving this result in spite of himself by his punitive use of the grant system, which is forcing some councils to raise almost all their own revenue.) The ‘embarrassingly radical ...

Hurt in the Guts

Joe Dunthorne: A Masterpiece and a Disaster, 1 April 2021

Michael Kohlhaas 
by Heinrich von Kleist, translated by Michael Hofmann.
New Directions, 112 pp., £11.99, April 2020, 978 0 8112 2834 3
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... of Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, who died together on 21 November 1811. ‘May heaven grant you a death even half as joyous and inexpressibly cheerful as mine,’ Kleist wrote to his sister. He was ‘blissfully happy’, he told his cousin, and looking forward to this ‘most splendid and pleasurable of deaths’. Vogel called it ‘their great ...

The Benefactor

Nicholas Wade, 19 April 1984

Alexander Fleming: The Man and the Myth 
by Gwyn Macfarlane.
Chatto, 304 pp., £12.50, February 1984, 0 7011 2683 3
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... inaccurate. Credit tends to gravitate to the senior scientists because it is they who sit on the grant and prize committees and they tend to assume the lab chief deserves credit for what comes out of his laboratory. The Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin went to John Macleod and Frederick Banting, whereas it was Banting and Charles Best who did the ...

Testing Woes

Jonathan Flint, 6 May 2021

... the grounds that vaccines could cause infertility in women. One of the petition’s co-authors was Michael Yeadon, a former vice president of Pfizer, where he spent sixteen years as an allergy and respiratory researcher.Perhaps the real problem is hubris. There have been so many things we thought we knew but didn’t. How many people reassured us Covid-19 ...

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