The Last Days of Bhambayi

R.W. Johnson, 6 January 1994

... were not on their side the whole rationale of radical politics was undermined. But what price self-respect if one had to look cravenly for favour from a white establishment which, under Leo Boyd, the Durban mayor of the time, was urging that the solution to ‘the Indian problem’ was ‘boats, not votes’ (i.e. ship them back to India rather than ...

How frightened should we be?

John Lloyd, 10 February 1994

Russia 2010 
by Daniel Yergin and Thane Gustafson.
Random House, 302 pp., $32, October 1993, 0 679 42995 6
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What About the workers: Workers and the Transition to Capitalism in Russia 
by Simon Clarke.
Verso, 248 pp., £34.95, September 1993, 0 86091 650 2
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After the Soviet Union: From Empire to Nation 
edited by Timothy Colton and Robert Levgold.
Norton, 208 pp., $24.95, November 1992, 0 393 03420 8
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... web of production, were, at the same time, and much more than their capitalist equivalents, self-contained worlds. Heads of enterprises may have been divorced from decisions on price, marketing and quality, but they were intimately engaged in the role of ‘father to their workers’ – for whom they provided food, medical services, education and ...

Patron Saints

Jean McNicol, 12 May 1994

Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich 
by Alison Owings.
Rutgers, 494 pp., £24.95, October 1993, 0 8135 1992 6
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Solidarity and Treason: Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940 
by Lisa Fittko, translated by Roslyn Theobald.
Northwestern, 160 pp., £29.95, December 1993, 0 8101 1129 2
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... male relatives witnessed at the front. Although their memories are partial and to some degree self-serving, Owings believes that most of the women told her what they thought was the truth most of the time. She records their hesitations and evasions but tries not to judge them. She also admits her original hope that women would prove to have been better ...

Man and Wife

Rosalind Mitchison, 22 May 1986

Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840 
by Alan Macfarlane.
Blackwell, 380 pp., £19.50, January 1986, 0 631 13992 3
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For Better, For Worse: British Marriages 1600 to the Present 
by John Gillis.
Oxford, 417 pp., £19.50, February 1986, 9780195036145
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Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home and Family 1850-1940 
edited by Jane Lewis.
Blackwell, 274 pp., £25, February 1986, 0 631 13957 5
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... of writing skill and the absence of the two basic needs of a good diarist, leisure and a sense of self-importance, mean that we have few first-hand accounts of the decision-making process from the female side, and the historian ought to have set out what the choice was. Implicit in Macfarlane’s position is that the marital decision was one made by the male ...

Misunderstandings

J.H. Burns, 20 March 1986

Henry Brougham 1778-1868: His Public Career 
by Robert Stewart.
Bodley Head, 406 pp., £18, January 1986, 0 370 30271 0
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Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society: The ‘Edinburgh Review’ 1802-1832 
by Biancamaria Fontana.
Cambridge, 256 pp., £22.50, December 1985, 0 521 30335 4
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... which he was committed were wholly admirable: the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery it-self; Catholic emancipation and the relief of the Dissenters; the systematic reform of the tortuous and burdensome processes of the law; the extension of political rights; the improvement of educational opportunities, and above all the diffusion of ‘useful ...

The Nazi Miracle

Alan Milward, 23 January 1986

Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant 
edited by Henry Ashby Turner, translated by Ruth Hein.
Yale, 333 pp., £25, September 1985, 0 300 03294 3
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Blood and Soil: Walther Darré and Hitler’s ‘Green Party’ 
by Anna Bramwell.
Kensal Press, 288 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 946041 33 4
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Industry and Politics in the Third Reich: Ruhr Coal, Hitler and Europe 
by John Gillingham.
Methuen, 183 pp., £15.95, October 1985, 0 416 39570 8
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Geschichte der Deutschen Kriegswirtschaft 1939-1945. Vol. II: 1941-1943 
by Dietrich Eichholtz.
Akademie Verlag, 713 pp., January 1986
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... has probably envisaged only in her worst nightmares into full employment? Where did jobs and self-respect come from?Not, it must be said, from accepting the advice of businessmen and bankers. Depression and recovery took place against the background of a monotonous litany, familiar now to British ears, intoned by the world of big business: that wages and ...

Here in Canada

D.A.N. Jones, 21 March 1985

The Engineer of Human Souls 
by Josef Skvorecky, translated by Paul Wilson.
Chatto, 571 pp., £9.95, February 1985, 9780701129316
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The Governess 
by Patricia Angadi.
Gollancz, 181 pp., £8.95, February 1985, 0 575 03485 8
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The Anderson Question 
by Bel Mooney.
Hamish Hamilton, 185 pp., £8.95, March 1985, 9780241114568
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The Centre of the Universe is 18 Baedekerstrasse 
by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy.
Hamish Hamilton, 199 pp., £8.95, March 1985, 0 241 11492 6
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... This stimulating fantasy may be useful for Hakim’s education, perhaps. The idea about self-styled ‘people’s parties’, Nazi or Communist, echoes a quotation from Mussolini’s theorist, Argento Soffici, which appears as one of the 20 epigraphs to the chapters. At Edenvale, outside the classroom, there are other political matters to concern ...

Goldthorpe, Halsey and Social Class

Edmund Leach, 20 March 1980

Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain 
by John Goldthorpe.
Oxford, 310 pp., £12, January 1980, 0 19 827239 1
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Origins and Destinations: Family, Class and Education in Modern Britain 
by A.H. Halsey.
Oxford, 240 pp., £14, January 1980, 0 19 827224 3
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... team has tried to evade the difficulties noted by Williams by playing down the distinction between self-identification (class-consciousness) – ‘I am a member of the working class’ – and reference: ‘He is a member of the working class.’ The tabulations throughout are concerned with reference categories: the hypothetical social classes, based on ...

Killing the dragon

Andrew Cockburn, 19 April 1984

The Road to Berlin: Stalin’s War with Germany 
by John Erickson.
Weidenfeld, 877 pp., £20, November 1983, 0 297 77238 4
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The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin’s War with Germany 
by John Erickson.
Weidenfeld, 594 pp., £10, November 1983, 0 297 78350 5
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... With this increased military proficiency among the senior officer corps came a certain political self-confidence as well. By 1943, Stalin had conceded the important principle of ‘unity of command’, which meant that the political commissars were now subordinate to the unit’s military commander. In a more visible bolstering of professional military ...

At the Hydropathic

T.J. Binyon, 6 December 1984

Agatha Christie 
by Janet Morgan.
Collins, 393 pp., £12.95, September 1984, 0 00 216330 6
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... debris of three generations. In August Archie and Rosalind arrived. Archie seemed unlike his usual self: pressed, he admitted that he had fallen in love with his golf partner, Miss Nancy Neele. An impossible three months followed. Archie blew hot and cold, moving from his London club to Styles, and then back to the club. Agatha’s only friend was her ...

V.

Tony Harrison, 24 January 1985

... Leeds United play but disappoint their fans week after week, which makes them lose their sense of self-esteem and taking a short cut home through these graves here they reassert the glory of their team by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer. This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit. Subsidence makes the obelisks all list. One leaning left’s ...

Uncle Max

Patricia Craig, 20 December 1984

The man who was M: The Life of Maxwell Knight 
by Anthony Masters.
Blackwell, 205 pp., £9.95, November 1984, 0 631 13392 5
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Unreliable Witness: Espionage Myths of the Second World War 
by Nigel West.
Weidenfeld, 166 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 297 78481 1
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The Great Betrayal: The Untold Story of Kim Philby’s Biggest Coup 
by Nicholas Bethell.
Hodder, 214 pp., £9.95, October 1984, 0 340 35701 0
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... of another of Knight’s agents, a Belgian girl named Hélène de Monck. I don’t think it was self-aggrandisement that made Joan Miller put herself exclusively at the forefront of the action, but plain misrecollection after forty-odd years. When she read the Sunday Times article she admitted certain things were wrong; characteristically, she held the ...

Human Wishes

Irvin Ehrenpreis, 20 December 1984

Samuel Johnson 
by Walter Jackson Bate.
Hogarth, 646 pp., £6.95, July 1984, 0 7012 0562 8
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A Preliminary Handlist of Copies of Books Associated with Dr Samuel Johnson 
by J.D. Fleeman.
Oxford Bibliographical Society, 101 pp., £5, March 1984, 0 901420 41 7
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Samuel Johnson 1709-84: A Bicentenary Exhibition 
edited by K.K. Yung.
Arts Council/Herbert Press, 144 pp., £9.95, July 1984, 9780906969458
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Samuel Johnson 
by Donald Greene.
Oxford, 872 pp., £15, June 1984, 9780192541796
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... disagreed about their first principles, but that moral philosophers based their arguments on self-evident truths. (An unclerical example is Sir William Temple, in his essay on Epicurus.) It was also commonly agreed that few men bowed voluntarily to the constraints of morality; nearly all had to be driven into it by supernatural warnings. Objectors, like ...

Transparent Criticism

Anne Barton, 21 June 1984

A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality 
by A.D. Nuttall.
Methuen, 209 pp., £12.95, September 1983, 0 416 31780 4
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... One thing seems clear about the ‘Transparent’ method: if it is not to degenerate into mere self-indulgence, it must be based upon the most careful close reading. It will not do to ‘infer’ at arm’s length from the text, nor to ignore passages which qualify or contradict a particular interpretation. It is also unwise, in the case of ...

Anger and Dismay

Denis Donoghue, 19 July 1984

Literary Education: A Revaluation 
by James Gribble.
Cambridge, 182 pp., £16.50, November 1983, 0 521 25315 2
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Reconstructing Literature 
edited by Laurence Lerner.
Blackwell, 218 pp., £15, August 1983, 0 631 13323 2
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Counter-Modernism in Current Critical Theory 
by Geoffrey Thurley.
Macmillan, 216 pp., £20, October 1983, 0 333 33436 1
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... that is invulnerable to criticism and irony; but that it is the work of a distinctive, gifted, self-conscious “author” is never in doubt.’ It has never been in doubt, so the assertion is ...