Ruthless and Truthless

Ferdinand Mount: Rotten Government, 6 May 2021

The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism 
by Peter Oborne.
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 3985 0100 3Show More
Political Advice: Past, Present and Future 
edited by Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose.
I.B. Tauris, 240 pp., £21.99, February 2021, 978 1 83860 120 1Show More
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“... of slim volumes, bound in burgundy rexine, which carries among other stern injunctions – ‘Do not “see” anything in the Members’ Lobby’, ‘Do not run after a minister’ – the overarching commandment: ‘Members of the lobby are under an obligation to keep secret the fact that such meetings are held and to ...”

Getting on

Paul Addison, 9 October 1986

On Living in an Old Country 
by Patrick Wright.
Verso, 262 pp., £5.95, September 1985, 0 86091 833 5Show More
Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England. Vol. II: Assaults 
by Maurice Cowling.
Cambridge, 375 pp., £30, November 1985, 0 521 25959 2Show More
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“... much weight to the outlook of the gentrified classes, whether Guardian or Telegraph readers. They do indeed feel pushed aside by forces beyond their control, and long for the old decencies of Attlee and Churchill. But they have some compensation. A modernising society has to put the past in its place, and the best way of doing this is by romanticising it as a ...”

More than a Million Names

Mattathias Schwartz: American Intelligence, 16 June 2016

Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror 
by Michael Hayden.
Penguin, 464 pp., £21.99, February 2016, 978 1 59420 656 6Show More
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“... the ‘Salt Pit’, a black site in Afghanistan. He told his American captors the same thing he’d told the Macedonians: he was an innocent man, a German citizen on vacation. He made a living selling cars. He had no connections to al-Qaida or any other jihadis. After el-Masri had spent 149 days in captivity, the CIA realised he was telling the truth. The man ...”

Year of the Viking

Patrick Wormald, 17 July 1980

The Vikings 
by James Graham-Campbell and D. Kidd.
British Museum, 192 pp., £8.95, February 1980, 0 7141 1352 2Show More
The Viking World 
edited by James Graham-Campbell.
Weidenfeld, 220 pp., £11.95, March 1980, 0 906459 04 4Show More
The Northern World 
edited by David Wilson.
Thames and Hudson, 248 pp., £15, February 1980, 0 500 25070 7Show More
Vikings! 
by Magnus Magnusson.
Bodley Head, 320 pp., £10, May 1980, 0 370 30272 9Show More
The Vikings 
by Johannes Bronsted.
Penguin, 347 pp., £1.95, April 1980, 0 14 020459 8Show More
Viking Age Sculpture 
by Richard Bailey.
Collins, 288 pp., £10.95, February 1980, 0 00 216228 8Show More
The Viking Age in Denmark 
by Klaus Randsborg.
Duckworth, 206 pp., £7.95, February 1980, 0 7156 1466 5Show More
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“... This may well be reasonable for domestic bowls and buckets. But Dark Age churchmen did not do business by ripping the ornaments off their books and shrines. At some stage in its journey to pagan graves, metalwork with these origins (and it includes what may well have been panels from the shrine of St Columba on Iona) simply must have been looted. In a ...”

Things Keep Happening

Geoffrey Hawthorn: Histories of Histories, 20 November 2008

A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the 20th Century 
by John Burrow.
Allen Lane, 553 pp., £25, December 2007, 978 0 7139 9337 0Show More
What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe 
by Anthony Grafton.
Cambridge, 319 pp., £13.99, March 2007, 978 0 521 69714 9Show More
The Theft of History 
by Jack Goody.
Cambridge, 342 pp., £14.99, January 2007, 978 0 521 69105 5Show More
Thucydides and the Philosophical Origins of History 
by Darien Shanske.
Cambridge, 268 pp., £54, January 2007, 978 0 521 86411 4Show More
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“... builders and a crooked monk who died shouting ‘Take him, Satan!’ on a distant privy; Jocelin de Brakelonde’s contributions to the chronicle of his local abbey at Bury St Edmunds, which include an arrestingly delicate account of opening the tomb of the saint; and some crusader and chivalric histories. The secular Florentines that follow are illuminated ...”

Theory of Texts

Jerome McGann, 18 February 1988

Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts: The Panizzi Lectures 1985 
by D.F. McKenzie.
British Library, 80 pp., £10, December 1986, 0 7123 0085 6Show More
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“... to history is one signal, or perhaps one aspect, of something more fundamental, something which D.F. McKenzie’s three lectures on bibliography and the sociology of texts call more clearly to our attention. In a series of initial, critical remarks on theory of bibliography, McKenzie suggests that ‘historical bibliography’ should now probably be placed ...”

How Molly Bloom Got Her Apostrophes

Lawrence Rainey, 19 June 1997

Ulysses 
by James Joyce, edited by Danis Rose.
Picador, 739 pp., £20, June 1997, 0 330 35229 6Show More
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“... errors,’ Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver at the beginning of November 1921. ‘Working as I do amid piles of notes at a table in an hotel I cannot possibly do this mechanical part with my wretched eye and a half. Are these to be perpetuated in future editions? I hope not.’ These words suggest something of the ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... We shall soon find out whether its citizens now wish that nation to become a state. I hope they do. It will not only open up new opportunities for their own country but will break up the atrophied, decaying British state and reduce its efficacy as a US vassal. Hence the appeals from Obama and Hillary Clinton to vote ‘No’, a sentiment Blair fully shares ...”

The New Piracy

Charles Glass: Terror on the High Seas, 18 December 2003

“... put in at any other port with what appeared to be a valid document. ‘All the pirates had to do was kill the crew and then go to another port, sell the ship or just get away,’ Farooq told me. He and the rest of the crew were terrified that the pirates would murder them as soon as the Wilby set sail. After midnight, Blyth and a crewman who spoke some ...”

Liquidator

Neal Ascherson: Hugh Trevor-Roper, 19 August 2010

Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography 
by Adam Sisman.
Weidenfeld, 598 pp., £25, July 2010, 978 0 297 85214 8Show More
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“... writings that are now being tidied up, edited and steadily published (see for instance Colin Kidd’s review of two such posthumous volumes in the LRB of 22 May 2008). Sisman’s biography gives evidence that he felt this as a failure himself. Even Mrs Thatcher scolded him for weak book productivity. ‘On the stocks? On the stocks? A fat lot of good ...”