Salute!

Stephen Holmes: ‘Bomb Power’, 8 April 2010

Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State 
by Garry Wills.
Penguin Press, 278 pp., $27.95, January 2010, 978 1 59420 240 7
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“... Congress and the American people. Wills nevertheless makes a strong case, elaborating on Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s argument in Secrecy: The American Experience (1998), that the short-term political advantages of concealing crimes and embarrassments and of blindsiding congressional opponents are outweighed by the long-term costs. ‘Policy,’ as he ...”

Diary

Keith Thomas: Working Methods, 10 June 2010

“... us how they set about their task. In his splendid recent autobiography, History of a History Man, Patrick Collinson reveals that when as a young man he was asked by the medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough at a job interview what his research method was, all he could say was that he tried to look at everything which was remotely relevant to his subject: ‘I had ...”

Hiatus at 4 a.m.

David Trotter: What scared Hitchcock?, 4 June 2015

Alfred Hitchcock 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Chatto, 279 pp., £12.99, April 2015, 978 0 7011 6993 0
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Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much 
by Michael Wood.
New Harvest, 129 pp., £15, March 2015, 978 1 4778 0134 5
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Hitchcock à la carte 
by Jan Olsson.
Duke, 261 pp., £16.99, March 2015, 978 0 8223 5804 6
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Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, Vol. II 
edited by Sidney Gottlieb.
California, 274 pp., £24.95, February 2015, 978 0 520 27960 5
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“... his personality has a direct bearing on his success.’ The most substantial biography to date, by Patrick McGilligan, includes plenty of anecdotes about fear, but supplies little by way of evidence of its ultimate cause, and draws no conclusions. Peter Ackroyd, however, is firmly of the Truffaut school. His Hitchcock trembles from the outset: ‘Fear fell ...”

Quite a Show

Tim Parks: Georges Simenon, 9 October 2014

A Man’s Head 
by Georges Simenon, translated by David Coward.
Penguin, 169 pp., £6.99, July 2014, 978 0 14 139351 3
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A Crime in Holland 
by Georges Simenon, translated by Siân Reynolds.
Penguin, 160 pp., £6.99, May 2014, 978 0 14 139349 0
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“... à trois. Simenon was mapping out futures, more or less tormented, for the three of them. As Patrick Marnham remarks in his excellent 1994 biography, ‘the account of the experience became part of the experience.’ Neither woman headed for the door. Simenon by this time was a multimillionaire. How does Inspector Maigret fit into all this? For if ...”

Loaded Dice

Thomas Chatterton Williams: Ta-Nehisi Coates, 3 December 2015

Between the World and Me 
by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Text, 152 pp., £10.99, September 2015, 978 1 925240 70 2
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“... within the discipline of sociology on the subject of black culture in the wake of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action and Oscar Lewis’s ‘culture of poverty’ theories, the vast majority of blacks, and especially black youth and those working on the front lines of poverty mitigation, have been ...”

Herberts & Herbertinas

Rosemary Hill: Steven Runciman, 20 October 2016

Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman 
by Minoo Dinshaw.
Penguin, 767 pp., £30, September 2016, 978 0 241 00493 7
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“... civil war, but society was lively. Among his compatriots were Osbert Lancaster, Rex Warner and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Maurice Cardiff, the army officer who ran the council temporarily before Runciman arrived, recalls him vividly dealing with his improbable staff as they all gamely muddled through. ‘He had two kinds of yesses, one short, even clipped, was ...”

Little Old Grandfather

Thomas Meaney: Djilas and Stalin, 19 May 2016

Conversations with Stalin 
by Milovan Djilas, translated by Michael Petrovich.
Penguin, 160 pp., £9.99, January 2014, 978 0 14 139309 4
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“... Michael Voslensky. In the United States in the 1960s, neoconservatives, most notably Daniel Patrick Moynihan, recycled the phrase ‘the New Class’ to refer to parasitic public sector bureaucrats who were making the US ‘a society of public affluence and private squalor’. With Khrushchev in power, Tito prepared for rapprochement. Each leader had ...”

The Most Corrupt Idea of Modern Times

Tom Stevenson: Inspecting the Troops, 1 July 2021

The Changing of the Guard: The British Army since 9/11 
by Simon Akam.
Scribe, 704 pp., £25, March, 978 1 913348 48 9
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“... by Brexit that the parliamentary debate on its findings was attended by only a handful of MPs. Patrick Porter’s Blunder: Britain’s War in Iraq (2018) showed that responsibility lay with the British elite as a whole and couldn’t be limited to Blair. But Porter’s account also perpetuated the official story that the war ‘exposed the deadliness of ...”

At the Top Table

Tom Stevenson: The Defence Intelligentsia, 6 October 2022

Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine 
by Lawrence Freedman.
Allen Lane, 574 pp., £30, September 2022, 978 0 241 45699 6
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“... At RUSI’s annual land warfare conference in June, the current chief of the general staff, Patrick Sanders, praised the British army’s response to the crisis and said he would now have an answer for his grandchildren if they asked what he did in 2022.These institutions do make some less boosterish contributions. Chatham House publishes International ...”

Diary

Paul Theroux: Out of Sir Vidia’s Shadow, 24 February 2022

“... posterity, he had interviewed a number of potential writers to undertake an authorised biography. Patrick French got the job. The World Is What It Is (2008) is long, detailed and discursive. It was a painful book to read, because much of Naipaul’s life was lived in struggle, pain, occasionally rage, depression and disturbance. But there was a ...”

Napoleon was wrong

Ian Gilmour, 24 June 1993

Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain 1750-1990 
by W.D. Rubinstein.
Routledge, 182 pp., £25, April 1993, 0 415 03718 2
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British Multinational Banking 
by Geoffrey Jones.
Oxford, 511 pp., £48, March 1993, 0 19 820273 3
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Going for Broke: How Banking Mismanagement in the Eighties Lost Thousands of Billions of Pounds 
by Russell Taylor.
Simon and Schuster, 384 pp., £17.50, April 1993, 0 671 71128 8
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“... The best way, after all, of denying a decline is to minimise the original rise. Yet, as Professor Patrick O’Brien points out in one of the essays in a very valuable collection, the rate of industrialisation in Britain was ‘unprecedented’ and was perceived as ‘rapid and astonishing particularly [by] observers from the mainland of Europe’. He ...”

So much for shame

Colm Tóibín, 10 June 1993

Haughey: His Life and Unlucky Deeds 
by Bruce Arnold.
HarperCollins, 299 pp., £17.50, May 1993, 0 00 255212 4
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“... Independence and the Civil War. Their agenda was nationalist rather than social or economic. On St Patrick’s Day 1943 de Valera broadcast a version of his dream for Ireland: ‘a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests ...”

Strong Government

Linda Colley, 7 December 1989

The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1788 
by John Brewer.
Unwin Hyman, 289 pp., £28, April 1989, 0 04 445292 6
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Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution 
by John Gascoigne.
Cambridge, 358 pp., £32.50, June 1989, 0 521 35139 1
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Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 
by C.A. Bayly.
Longman, 295 pp., £16.95, June 1989, 0 582 04287 9
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“... taxes on domestically-produced goods. Like some economic historians such as Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, Brewer suggests that the taxes may well have been heavier in Britain than in many other European states, and may also have fallen disproportionately hard on the middling and lower classes, rather than the landed and rich. Plus ça change ...”

The Paranoid Sublime

Andrew O’Hagan, 26 May 1994

How late it was, how late 
by James Kelman.
Secker, 374 pp., £14.99, March 1994, 0 436 23292 8
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“... is Tammas, the signing-on gambler and lover and leaver in Kelman’s second novel, A Chancer, or Patrick Doyle, the floundering schoolteacher in A Disaffection, who blows into a pair of industrial pipes he finds at the back of a club, captivated and comforted by their moaning. Like all these others, Sammy is the kind of man Kelman can commune with ...”

New Mortality

Iain McGilchrist, 7 June 1984

The AIDS Epidemic 
edited by Kevin Cahill.
Hutchinson, 175 pp., £3.95, January 1984, 0 09 154921 3
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AIDS: Your Questions Answered 
by Richard Fisher.
Gay Men’s Press, 126 pp., £1.95, April 1984, 0 907040 29 2
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Fighting for Our Lives 
by Kit Mouat.
Heretic Books, 160 pp., £2.50, April 1984, 0 946097 14 3
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“... their affliction on themselves (but then so were lepers). ‘The poor homosexuals’, wrote Patrick Buchanan, a columnist in the New York Post, ‘they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.’ Sickened by this sort of mumbo-jumbo, homosexuals have tended to be suspicious of the establishment, which naturally ...”