Diary

Alison Light: In Portsmouth, 7 February 2008

“... of South-East Hampshire. It perches on the slopes of Portsdown Hill, close to where in the 1860s Lord Palmerston had yet more forts built against the French (known locally as ‘Palmerston’s Follies’). My father makes the eight-mile round trip for blood tests and transfusions, including a monthly intravenous dose of pamidronate, a drug that can lessen ...”

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 ...”

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 ...”

Closed Windows

T.H. Barrett, 11 January 1990

The Question of Hu 
by Jonathan Spence.
Faber, 187 pp., £12.99, September 1989, 0 571 14118 8Show More
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“... in such a bizarre fashion that in 1723 he was committed to an asylum. In 1726 he was shipped back home alone; meanwhile Foucquet had distanced himself both from his Chinese assistant and from his own missionary colleagues, and had become a bishop in Rome. This is a sad story, simply told by Jonathan Spence – perhaps too simply for some historians. It ...”

Send them to Eton!

Linda Colley, 19 August 1993

The End of the House of Windsor: Birth of a British Republic 
by Stephen Haseler.
Tauris, 208 pp., £14.95, June 1993, 1 85043 735 1Show More
The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor 
by A.N. Wilson.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 211 pp., £16.99, May 1993, 1 85619 354 3Show More
Royal Throne: The Future of the Monarchy 
by Elizabeth Longford.
Hodder, 189 pp., £16.99, April 1993, 0 340 58587 0Show More
Diana v. Charles 
by James Whitaker.
Signet, 237 pp., £14.99, May 1993, 0 670 85245 7Show More
The Tarnished Crown 
by Anthony Holden.
Bantam, 400 pp., £16.99, May 1993, 0 593 02472 9Show More
Inheritance: A Psychological History of the Royal Family 
by Dennis Friedman.
Sidgwick, 212 pp., £14.99, April 1993, 0 283 06124 3Show More
Raine and Johnnie: The Spencers and the Scandal of Althorp 
by Angela Levin.
Weidenfeld, 297 pp., £17.99, July 1993, 0 297 81325 0Show More
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“... Establishment is that she is reputedly flirting with Roman Catholicism. This inspires those like Lord Rees-Mogg to hope that the hapless Diana may finally shatter the Act of Settlement of 1701 which banned Catholic monarchs from inheriting this kingdom, and heirs to the throne from marrying Catholics. After all, even if she divorces her husband, she will ...”

Gisgo and his Enemies

John Bayley, 13 February 1992

The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo 
by Russell Weigley.
Indiana, 608 pp., £22.50, June 1991, 0 253 36380 2Show More
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“... reasonable accuracy impossible much beyond fifty yards, but attacks were only infrequently driven home. With the cavalry generally refraining from headlong charges as well, battle degenerated into an indecisive contest.’ Wallenstein’s mercenaries would much rather pillage than take risks in battle, and the commanders, too, preferred not to lose rather ...”

War within wars

Paul Addison, 5 November 1992

War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard 
edited by Lawrence Freedman, Paul Hayes and Robert O’Neill.
Oxford, 322 pp., £35, July 1992, 0 19 822292 0Show More
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“... as a One-Nation Tory: but he was the cousin and friend of Richard Crossman and perfectly at home in the company of Labour politicians. One of his hallmarks is an interest in the ideas of the Left and a readiness to address them with a measure of respect. He is, indeed, strongly reminiscent of the type of army officer in the Second World War who believed ...”

Writing a book about it

Christopher Reid, 17 October 1985

Collected Poems 
by Norman MacCaig.
Chatto, 390 pp., £9.95, August 1985, 0 7011 3953 6Show More
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“... fly’; and its very last lines – The black cow is two native carriers Bringing its belly home, slung from a pole – are an ideal blend of the comical and the exotic. The playful, humorous, genially delighted side of MacCaig’s poetic personality is one that many of his readers may wish he had cultivated more assiduously. It is this that lends ...”

Boundary Books

Margaret Meek, 21 February 1980

Kate Crackernuts 
by Katharine Briggs.
Kestrel, 224 pp., £2.95, September 1980, 0 7226 5557 6Show More
Socialisation through Children’s Literature: The Soviet Example 
by Felicity Ann O’Dell.
Cambridge, 278 pp., £14, January 1979, 9780521219686Show More
Divide and Rule 
by Jan Mark.
Kestrel, 248 pp., £3.50, October 1980, 0 7226 5620 3Show More
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“... A shared territory is the fairy-tale and its modern derivatives, of which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the best-known examples. Tolkien is also a subtle apologist for the creators of the secondary world of enchantment ‘into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its ...”

Julia Caesar

Marilyn Butler, 17 March 1983

The Prince and the Wild Geese 
by Brigid Brophy.
Hamish Hamilton, 62 pp., £5.95, February 1983, 0 241 10894 2Show More
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“... current head of the family, their half-brother, another John Taaffe, to visit a distant kinsman, Lord William Fitzgerald. Actually they have been sent, all too transparently, to get themselves off the shelf. Gagarin is younger, 22, and a Roman resident. He has lived there since he was six, and now occupies his leisure studying art in the studio of the ...”

His Secret Opening

Joe Dunthorne: Revism, 2 April 2020

Childhood 
by Gerard Reve.
Pushkin, 160 pp., £9.99, October 2019, 978 1 78227 459 9Show More
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“... that book of yours – did you know that I wept while reading some of its passages?’ ‘My Lord and my God! Praised be Your Name to all Eternity! I love You so immensely,’ I would try to say, but would burst out crying halfway, and start to kiss Him and pull Him inside, and after a colossal climb up the stairs to the little bedroom, I would possess ...”

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 ...”

People’s War

John Ellis, 19 February 1981

Tomorrow at Dawn 
by J.G. de Beus.
Norton, 191 pp., £5.75, April 1980, 0 393 01263 8Show More
The Crucible of War 
by Barrie Pitt.
Cape, 506 pp., £8.95, June 1980, 0 224 01771 3Show More
Chindit 
by Richard Rhodes James.
Murray, 214 pp., £10.50, August 1980, 0 7195 3746 0Show More
The Chief 
by Ronald Lewin.
Hutchinson, 282 pp., £7.95, September 1980, 9780091425005Show More
Special Operations Europe: Scenes from the Anti-Nazi War 
by Basil Davidson.
Gollancz, 288 pp., £8.50, July 1980, 0 575 02820 3Show More
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“... refuse to believe that he had no further aggressive intentions were given little credence back home. One such was the Dutch Military Attaché, Major Gijsbert Sas, whose intuitive fears were greatly heightened when he made contact with a member of Canaris’s counter-intelligence department, Colonel Hans Oster, who was for a time privy to the innermost ...”

Sweet Fifteen

James Campbell, 3 November 1983

Bad Blood: A Family Murder 
by Richard Levine.
Hutchinson, 351 pp., £8.95, May 1983, 0 09 152360 5Show More
The Glasgow Rape Case 
by Ross Harper and Arnot McWhinnie.
Hutchinson, 259 pp., £5.95, June 1983, 0 09 151731 1Show More
Notes from a Waiting-Room 
by Alan Reeve.
Heretic Books, 203 pp., £3.50, May 1983, 0 946097 09 7Show More
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“... the blood-soaked room, and went off to the beach with friends. Being under instructions to return home early at night, Marlene phoned from a restaurant and told the silence at the other end that she would be back by ten. She may have been trying to fool her friends, but the trick was aimed at least as much at herself: it was as if she hoped her father would ...”

Memoriousness

E.S. Turner, 15 September 1988

Memories of Times Past 
by Louis Heren.
Hamish Hamilton, 313 pp., £15.95, July 1988, 0 241 12427 1Show More
Chances: An Autobiography 
by Mervyn Jones.
Verso, 311 pp., £14.95, September 1987, 0 86091 167 5Show More
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“... or lightly paraphrased. At times it is as if the writer is sitting, glass in hand, in a sunset home for retired correspondents, holding forth once more with his favourite tales: my row with Adenauer, my bigger row with General Templer, my ‘scoop’ of the Dead Sea Scrolls, my meeting with Glubb Pasha (again likened to a chubby curate), my air crash in ...”
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