On Thatcher

“... if ‘youths’ put the boot in after office hours. No amount of moralistic afterthoughts by the home secretary is going to alter that. Meanwhile he should look round the table.Alan Bennett, 31 March 1988Personally​ , she is neither nice nor interesting. She has immense energy, remarkable tenacity and stamina, and a good brain. But she has a shallow ...”

Devils Everywhere

David Wootton: The Terrors of the Night, 9 March 2006

At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime 
by Roger Ekirch.
Weidenfeld, 447 pp., £20, June 2005, 0 297 82992 0Show More
Saving the Daylight: Why We Put the Clocks Forward 
by David Prerau.
Granta, 256 pp., £14.99, October 2005, 1 86207 796 7Show More
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“... space’ on a moonlit night in Naples, is joined on the page by an English grazier, ‘treading home from an evening’s merriment’. ‘Would I had but as many fat bullocks as there are stars,’ he exclaims. To which his companion replies: ‘With all my heart, if I had but a meadow as large as the sky.’ In the dark, ghosts walked. Travel was ...”

The Journalistic Exemption

Jo Glanville: GDPR and Journalism, 5 July 2018

“... legal battles; some are reassessing the limits of public interest and the parameters of reporting. Lord Leveson proposed significantly limiting the scope of the exemption for journalism and giving the information commissioner stronger enforcement powers. Conducted in the long wake of his inquiry, the passage through Parliament of the new Data Protection Act ...”

In Pursuit of an Heiress

Nicholas Penny: Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, 16 June 2016

Letters of a Dead Man 
by Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, edited and translated by Linda Parshall.
Dumbarton Oaks, 753 pp., £55.95, May 2016, 978 0 88402 411 8Show More
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“... and white, with contrasting black-patinated bronzes. By chance an inventory of the contents of Lord Hertford’s villa in Regent’s Park survives which closely corresponds, although without the alarming carnal epithet. Other sources confirm his account of the extraordinary Chinese dairy at Woburn, approached through massed azaleas and rhododendrons, and ...”

At Tate Britain

Julian Bell: John Everett Millais, 15 November 2007

“... straight from the motif, with both the painter and Effie – his model – shivering in a stately-home bedroom on a December night.) No redundant symbolising dogs the brushwork here. ‘A cursive mode of painting, almost disdainful in its certitude, which rapidly envelops forms, seeking only their accent and wanting to extinguish at a blow the general ...”

A Plumless Pudding

John Sutherland: The Great John Murray Archive Disaster, 18 March 2004

“... a commodity in the saleroom, which it could never have afforded. Any publisher looking for a good home for his firm’s archive would be impressed by what the National Library of Scotland has done with the Blackwood papers, presented to it in 1942. The NLS has been similarly conscientious in its stewardship of the Constable, Oliver and Boyd, and Smith, Elder ...”

She was of the devil’s race

Barbara Newman: Eleanor of Aquitaine, 2 November 2023

Eleanor of Aquitaine, as It Was Said: Truths and Tales about the Medieval Queen 
by Karen Sullivan.
Chicago, 270 pp., £36, August, 978 0 226 82583 0Show More
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“... Eleanor and her daughter Marie of Champagne, give their verdicts. In one decision, coming close to home, Eleanor criticises a lady who wishes to stay with her lover even after he has discovered their kinship. A woman who ‘seeks to preserve an incestuous love’, she warns, ‘is going against what is right and proper’.Did courts of love exist? For many ...”

Resentment

John Sutherland, 21 March 1991

Francesca 
by Roger Scruton.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 236 pp., £13.95, February 1991, 9781856190480Show More
Slave of the Passions 
by Deirdre Wilson.
Picador, 251 pp., £14.99, February 1991, 0 330 31788 1Show More
The Invisible Worm 
by Jennifer Johnston.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 182 pp., £12.95, February 1991, 1 85619 041 2Show More
The Secret Pilgrim 
by John le Carré.
Hodder, 335 pp., £14.95, January 1991, 0 340 54381 7Show More
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“... given to swooning when his problems press, Colin falls in love with the beautiful daughter of the lord who lives on the hill (soon to be developed – to the lord’s profit – into a housing estate). One track of the story is the comedy of Colin’s adventures with a sharply-observed set of upper-class twits and the ...”

Time to think again

Michael Neve, 3 March 1988

Benjamin Disraeli: Letters 1838-1841 
edited by M.G Wiebe, J.B. Conacher, John Matthews and M.S. Millar.
Toronto, 458 pp., £40, March 1987, 0 8020 5736 5Show More
Salisbury: The Man and his Policies 
edited by Lord Blake and Hugh Cecil.
Macmillan, 298 pp., £29.50, May 1987, 0 333 36876 2Show More
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“... nervous, fifty-cigarettes-a-day daughter Gwendolen, also her father’s biographer, entitled ‘Lord Salisbury in Private Life’, the political a priori of the refurbished Tory intellectual can be revealed. The third Marquis’s contribution to the politics of the future was a loathing for the mass of the human race, and especially for their political ...”

How to Kowtow

D.J. Enright: The thoughts of China, 29 July 1999

The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds 
by Jonathan Spence.
Penguin, 279 pp., £20, May 1999, 0 7139 9313 8Show More
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“... the love of flowers, the porcelain, bronzes and calligraphy. Footbinding kept women chastely at home, while the arduous labour of mastering the language discouraged young men from getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, and other delinquencies lamented by Shakespeare’s Old Shepherd. Even the Chinese mode of consuming alcohol was so well ...”

Great Tradition

D.G. Wright, 20 October 1983

Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears 
by Geoffrey Pearson.
Macmillan, 243 pp., £15, July 1983, 0 333 23399 9Show More
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“... a landslide victory and fully aware of the potency of the Falklands factor, Tory politicians like Lord Hugh Thomas, the distinguished historian of Spain and Cuba, see the task of historians as the creation of a usable past which will confirm the version of history peddled in the popular press, furnish yet another justification of their claim to authority and ...”

Access to Ultra

Brian Bond, 16 June 1983

Hidden Weapons: Allied Secret or Undercover Services in World War Two 
by Basil Collier.
Hamish Hamilton, 386 pp., £15, April 1982, 0 241 10788 1Show More
The Other Ultra: Codes, Ciphers and the Defeat of Japan 
by Ronald Lewin.
Hutchinson, 332 pp., £10.95, April 1982, 0 09 147470 1Show More
The Puzzle Palace 
by James Bamford.
Sidgwick, 465 pp., £9.95, April 1983, 0 283 98976 9Show More
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“... period. In his foreword to Hidden Weapons, Professor R.V. Jones recalls expressing disquiet to Lord Vansittart that MI6 was recruited on the basis of friendship rather than competence. Vansittart agreed, but added that the pay was so bad it was only your friends you could persuade to take the job. Ironically, Kim Philby was initially discouraged from ...”

At the Gay Hussar

John Sutherland, 20 August 1981

One and Last Love 
by John Braine.
Eyre Methuen, 175 pp., £6.50, June 1981, 0 413 47990 0Show More
Sweetsir 
by Helen Yglesias.
Hodder, 332 pp., £6.95, August 1981, 9780340270424Show More
On the Yankee Station 
by William Boyd.
Hamish Hamilton, 184 pp., £7.95, July 1981, 0 241 10426 2Show More
Byzantium endures 
by Michael Moorcock.
Secker, 404 pp., £6.95, June 1981, 0 436 28458 8Show More
Heavy Sand 
by Anatoli Rybakov, translated by Harold Shuckman.
Allen Lane, 380 pp., £7.95, June 1981, 0 7139 1343 6Show More
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“... make sophisticated table-talk about their fellow guests: ‘That’s George Melly. And there’s Lord Longford!’    ‘Not together? That would make the mind boggle.’    ‘No, at separate tables.’ It adds ‘sparkle’ to life, the narrator complacently observes, and ‘it can only happen in the metropolis.’ It would seem, too, that the ...”

The Great Percy

C.H. Sisson, 18 November 1982

Stranger and Brother: A Portrait of C.P. Snow 
by Philip Snow.
Macmillan, 206 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 333 32680 6Show More
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“... refers to his brother throughout as ‘Charles’, and it is time to reveal that he was known at home as Percy, and Percy he remained for the first 45 years, ‘distant relatives’ so addressing him even after that. For the world in which he was rising ‘Snow’ was enough – surnames were, after all, then the common form of address. To call him ...”

Churchill has nothing to hide

Paul Addison, 7 May 1987

Road to Victory: Winston Churchill 1941-1945 
by Martin Gilbert.
Heinemann, 1417 pp., £20, September 1986, 0 434 29186 2Show More
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“... by no means indifferent and maintained a personal team of economists and statisticians, headed by Lord Cherwell, to advise him on economic issues. Questions like rationing and the extent of government controls awoke in his breast a fear of creeping socialism. It would have been interesting to learn more of Churchill’s thinking in these areas, but Gilbert ...”
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