Sacred Text

Richard Gott: Guatemala, 27 May 1999

Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans 
by David Stoll.
Westview, 336 pp., £20, February 1999, 0 8133 3574 4
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... to recover from its association with a dominant imperialism, and not just in Latin America. David Stoll is another talented US academic, from a younger generation, specialising in Central America, and with a particular interest in Guatemala, about which he has written a couple of interesting, and indeed path-breaking books. Is Latin America Turning ...

Diary

Ian Hamilton: The World Cup, 30 July 1998

... goal had been achieved by, dare we say, a Leap of Faith. The clips of Beckham’s sending-off may well have staying power. I doubt it, though. Already the forces of forgiveness are rallying on his behalf, as so they should be. In four years’ time, it will surely be thought of as bad form to highlight the lad’s callow petulance. Bad karma, too: in four ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: Like a Prep School, 10 January 1991

... The publisher’s launching party for David Cannadine’s Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy in the Moses Room of the House of Lords on 22 October was the third occasion on which I had been inside that curious place since taking my seat as a hereditary member of it. The Moses Room is evidently so called because its walls depict, in tableaux more impressive for their size than their quality, the appropriate Old Testament scenes ...

The NHS Dismantled

John Furse, 7 November 2019

... the passage of the 1973 HMO Act: ‘The less care they give them the more money they make.’ In May 2016 Jeremy Hunt, then health minister, admitted at a Commons Health Committee hearing that Kaiser was a model for his planned NHS reforms. When a trial of ACOs was announced in the UK in 2017, it caused an outcry from campaigners and NHS England quickly ...

Looking back

Hugh Thomas, 7 July 1983

The Spanish Civil War 
by David Mitchell.
Granada, 208 pp., £9.95, December 1982, 0 246 11916 0
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... has been published by Granada publishers to capitalise on the success of the series. The author is David Mitchell, a writer not previously known in this field. His mission was to incorporate, not only the material used in the television series, but the numerous other interviews which the producers could not use. Granada’s publicity team add the quite false ...

Funhouse Mirror

Christopher L. Brown: ‘Capitalism and Slavery’, 14 December 2023

Capitalism and Slavery 
by Eric Williams.
Penguin, 304 pp., £9.99, February 2022, 978 0 241 54816 5
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... a doctorate in modern history at Oxford.A Barclays publicist responded a few days later. ‘David Barclay formed a committee of London Quakers to oppose the slave trade, and later became involved with the committee in taking the Quaker anti-slave trade message nationwide within the United Kingdom.’ He belonged on the list of slavery’s opponents, not ...

Be careful what you wish for

Stephen Sedley: Human Rights Acts, 30 August 2018

The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics and the Origins of the European Convention 
by Marco Duranti.
Oxford, 502 pp., £59, February 2017, 978 0 19 981138 0
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... director of operations was Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys. Its legal draftsman was Sir David Maxwell Fyfe QC, a right-wing libertarian with potent credentials as a principal prosecutor at Nuremberg. It was Maxwell Fyfe who told a Conservative Party rally in 1948 that just as Nazism had crept first gradually and then irresistibly into German ...

The centre fights back

Lynn Hunt, 22 July 1993

Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking 
by David Bromwich.
Yale, 296 pp., £20, October 1992, 0 300 05702 4
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Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts can Revitalise American Education 
by Gerald Graff.
Norton, 224 pp., £13.95, March 1993, 0 393 03424 0
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... Thanks to David Mamet’s new play Oleanna, the distracted, bumbling and self-regarding male professor has now become the archetypal victim of political correctness. Mamet’s John is victimised by Carol, the ultimate female intellectual mediocrity who gets her revenge on his patronising didacticism by turning him in to the university tenure committee on grounds of sexual impropriety ...

Carré on spying

John Sutherland, 3 April 1986

A Perfect Spy 
by John le Carré.
Hodder, 463 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 9780340387849
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The Novels of John le Carré 
by David Monaghan.
Blackwell, 207 pp., £12.50, September 1985, 0 631 14283 5
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Taking sides: The Fiction of John le Carré 
by Tony Barley.
Open University, 175 pp., £20, March 1986, 0 335 15251 1
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John le Carré 
by Peter Lewis.
Ungar, 228 pp., £10.95, August 1985, 0 8044 2243 5
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A Servant’s Tale 
by Paula Fox.
Virago, 321 pp., £9.95, February 1986, 0 86068 702 3
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A State of Independence 
by Caryl Phillips.
Faber, 158 pp., £8.95, February 1986, 0 571 13910 8
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... the family lived in the ‘style of millionaire paupers’, and care was taken to give the young David Cornwell the best of public school educations, and a thorough grounding in the codes of upper-class Englishness. The son of a crook, Cornwell was brought up a gent. By his own account, the young Cornwell, subjected to these strange contradictions, ‘became ...

He ate peas with a knife

John Sutherland: Douglas Jerrold, 3 April 2003

Douglas Jerrold: 1803-57 
by Michael Slater.
Duckworth, 340 pp., £25, September 2002, 0 7156 2824 0
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... and Thackeray were pall-bearers at Jerrold’s funeral and, according to their contemporary David Masson, ‘the three do form a triad so that it is hardly possible to discuss the merits of any one of them without referring to the other two.’ Posterity has found it very possible. And, richly informative as Slater’s biography is (he has been at it ...

Jane Austen’s Latest

Marilyn Butler, 21 May 1981

Jane Austen’s ‘Sir Charles Grandison’ 
edited by Brian Southam.
Oxford, 150 pp., £7.95, March 1981, 0 19 812637 9
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... kind of noise – the sound of scholars breaking lances. Some of the likely murmurs of complaint may prove a bit churlish. Of course we should have preferred a novel, and a polished performance rather than one written as a family entertainment, and an original Austen work rather than one initiated by Richardson. Yet, if it had to be an adaptation, no work by ...

He huffs and he puffs

John Upton: David Blunkett, the Lifers and the Judges, 19 June 2003

... of the Human Rights Act 1998, together with the subsequent tabloid outrage, that provoked David Blunkett’s latest strike against the criminal justice system. He announced that legislation would soon be introduced severely to restrict judicial participation in determining the length of sentences for murderers, a group whose harsh treatment is ...

Short Cuts

Rory Scothorne: Under New Management, 13 August 2020

... Formby, who replaced Iain McNicol as general secretary under Corbyn, has now been replaced by David Evans, a figure popular on the Labour right. Rebecca Long-Bailey, the left’s candidate to replace Corbyn, has already been sacked from the shadow cabinet. The party’s National Executive Committee has a majority defined ostensibly by loyalty to ...

Art and Men

Michael Shelden, 5 December 1991

Bachelors of Art: Edward Perry Warren and the Lewes House Brotherhood 
by David Sox.
Fourth Estate, 296 pp., £18.99, September 1991, 1 872180 11 6
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... dean said of women: ‘Inferior to us God made you, and inferior to the end you will remain.’ David Sox does not try to disguise the ugliness of his subject’s attitude towards women, nor does he shy away from highlighting other faults. Ned was arrogant, possessive, gullible and hopelessly unrealistic. But his devotion to art makes his story worth ...

Had he not run

David Reynolds: America’s longest-serving president, 2 June 2005

Franklin Delano Roosevelt 
by Roy Jenkins.
Pan, 208 pp., £7.99, May 2005, 0 330 43206 0
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Franklin D. Roosevelt 
by Patrick Renshaw.
Longman, 223 pp., $16.95, December 2003, 0 582 43803 9
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom 
by Conrad Black.
Weidenfeld, 1280 pp., £17.99, October 2004, 0 7538 1848 5
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... thing we have to fear is fear itself’: the phrase, used by Roosevelt in his inaugural address, may have been adapted from Thoreau but the sentiment was authentically his own. Roosevelt’s personal courage and confidence was undoubtedly a major ingredient in the political recovery that followed. His regular informal press conferences and ‘fireside ...