The Party in Government

Conor Gearty, 9 March 1995

“... of Hanson, an adviser to Cable & Wireless (of which the former Secretary of State for Trade, Lord Young, is head) and ICL, and a director of both Torrey Investments Inc. and the UK-Japan 2000 Group. Tom King became a director of the Electra Investment Trust after he had left his post as Defence Secretary. The Register of Members’ Interests for April 1994 ...”

Gentlemen and ladies came to see the poet’s cottage

Tom Paulin: Clare’s anti-pastoral, 19 February 2004

John Clare: A Biography 
by Jonathan Bate.
Picador, 650 pp., £25, October 2003, 0 330 37106 1
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‘I Am’: The Selected Poetry of John Clare 
edited by Jonathan Bate.
Farrar, Straus, 318 pp., $17, November 2003, 0 374 52869 1
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John Clare, Politics and Poetry 
by Alan Vardy.
Palgrave, 221 pp., £45, October 2003, 0 333 96617 1
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John Clare Vol. V: Poems of the Middle Period 1822-37 
edited by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson.
Oxford, 822 pp., £105, January 2003, 0 19 812386 8
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“... than Keats, with whom he shared a publisher). Clare was discovered in 1819, when Edward Drury, a young Stamford bookseller, wrote to his cousin John Taylor, who was also a bookseller – what we would now call a publisher – and told him that he had discovered a wholly untutored genius: Your hopes of good grammar and correct verse, depend on the ...”

Let him be Caesar!

Michael Dobson: The Astor Place Riot, 2 August 2007

The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama and Death in 19th-Century America 
by Nigel Cliff.
Random House, 312 pp., $26.95, April 2007, 978 0 345 48694 3
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“... included Spartacus, depicted as a virtuous rebel against some very British-looking patricians in Robert Montgomery Bird’s melodrama The Gladiator (1831), and the anti-aristocratic hero of Robert Conrad’s Jack Cade (1835), a martyr who dies with the words: ‘The bondman is avenged, my country free!’ Perhaps ...”

Criminal Justice

Ronan Bennett, 24 June 1993

“... of the Guildford Four are a politically heterogeneous bunch: at one end, Cardinal Basil Hume, Robert Kee, Merlyn Rees, Lord Scarman and the late Lord Devlin; at the other, rhetoric-ridden, far-left Trotskyist groupings. And in between the world and its dog. The only thing on which all are agreed – some with more knowledge of the facts than others – is ...”

After the Fall

John Lanchester: Ten Years after the Crash, 5 July 2018

“... the most important thing. In a presidential address to the American Economic Association in 2003, Robert Lucas, Nobel prizewinner and one of the most prominent macroeconomists in the world, put it plainly: Macroeconomics was born as a distinct field in the 1940s, as a part of the intellectual response to the Great Depression. The term then referred to the ...”

Just one more species doing its best

Richard Rorty, 25 July 1991

The Later Works 1925-1953. Vol. XVII: Miscellaneous Writings, 1885-1953 
by John Dewey, edited by Jo Ann Boydston.
Southern Illinois, 786 pp., $50, August 1990, 0 8093 1661 7
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Dewey 
by J.E. Tiles.
Routledge, 256 pp., £35, December 1988, 0 415 00908 1
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John Dewey and American Democracy 
by Robert Westbrook.
Cornell, 608 pp., $32.95, May 1991, 0 8014 2560 3
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Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford 
by Casey Blake.
North Carolina, 370 pp., $38.45, November 1990, 0 8078 1935 2
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“... latter mood, he would become condescending and puckish, and would draw contrasts between bumptious young America and old experienced Europe. In 1919 Russell traced the pragmatism that Dewey shared with William James to ‘that instinctive belief in the omnipotence of Man and the creative power of his beliefs which is perhaps natural in a ...”

A History of Disappointment

Jackson Lears: Obama’s Parents, 5 January 2012

The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama’s Father 
by Sally Jacobs.
Public Affairs, 336 pp., £20, July 2011, 978 1 58648 793 5
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A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother 
by Janny Scott.
Riverhead, 384 pp., £18.99, May 2011, 978 1 59448 797 2
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“... staff and cabinet appointments (Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates et al) it was clear that Obama meant to play by the same Washington rules that created the policy disasters he inherited from George W. Bush. Obama had retreated into politics as usual. He never looked back. One did not have to be a sentimental ...”

The sea is the same sea

Adam Shatz: Bibi goes to Washington, 30 August 2018

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu 
by Anshel Pfeffer.
Hurst, 423 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 84904 988 7
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“... but Barak says he has no memory of such a meeting.) The defining drama of Netanyahu’s life as a young man took place in July 1976, when Yoni was killed at Entebbe airport, during a mission to rescue Israeli and Jewish hostages from Air France Flight 139, which had been hijacked by four members of a German cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of ...”

Did You Have Bombs?

Deborah Friedell: ‘The Other Elizabeth Taylor’, 6 August 2009

The Other Elizabeth Taylor 
by Nicola Beauman.
Persephone, 444 pp., £15, April 2009, 978 1 906462 10 9
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“... with more acuity than the world-historical events that seem only barely to have affected her. As a young woman, in the early 1930s, she had gone so far as to join the Communist Party, but Beauman is right to make little of this. Really Taylor just admired how the early British Communists seemed to follow ‘the teachings of Christ with the sharing of ...”

What sort of Scotland?

Neal Ascherson, 21 August 2014

“... its music? The musicologist and advocate of the Scots language Billy Kay feels passionately about Robert Fergusson, the wild-child poet who died in the Edinburgh bedlam at 24. In Stromness, Montrose, Lochgelly, Stirling, he recited Fergusson’s verses. And then Karine Polwart sang the song that the dying Fergusson loved more than any other: ‘The Birks of ...”

All hail, sage lady

Andrew O’Hagan: ‘The Crown’, 15 December 2016

“... genuflecting biography of the queen mother, shows us a Duke of Edinburgh just after his wedding, a young man in love writing to his mother-in-law of the new unity he has just achieved and hopes will bless the future. ‘Lilibet is the only “thing” in this world which is absolutely real to me,’ he wrote, ‘and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a ...”

More Husband than Female

Sharon Marcus: Gender Renegades, 17 June 2021

Female Husbands: A Trans History 
by Jen Manion.
Cambridge, 350 pp., £17.99, March 2020, 978 1 108 48380 3
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Before Trans: Three Gender Stories from 19th-Century France 
by Rachel Mesch.
Stanford, 344 pp., £24.99, May 2020, 978 1 5036 0673 9
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“... novel, alternates between male and female dress and becomes a female husband to an effeminate young man. Asked to account for the book by the Paris police, Rachilde described it as a tale about a woman who sexually penetrates men, ‘noting that anything was possible with the help of technology’. They stopped wearing trousers after marrying Alfred ...”

The Flower and the Bee

Irina Dumitrescu: Many Anons, 22 April 2021

Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650-1100 
by Diane Watt.
Bloomsbury, 240 pp., £28.99, February 2021, 978 1 350 23972 2
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“... work wouldn’t be the same without the patronage of John of Gaunt, or John Donne’s without Robert Drury. Given the sparseness of the documentation, it is particularly instructive to consider aspects of the creation of texts that are not what we would today think of as authorship. Watt looks at other ways in which women participated in writing, as with ...”

One for water, one for urine

Stephen Smith, 3 December 1992

An Evil Cradling 
by Brian Keenan.
Hutchinson, 297 pp., £16.99, September 1992, 0 09 175208 6
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Hostage: The Complete Story of the Lebanese Captives 
by Con Coughlin.
Little, Brown, 461 pp., £16.99, October 1992, 0 316 90304 3
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“... of the captives of Lebanon, the George Harrison of the hostage scene, the other one. The reporter Robert Fisk has confessed to him how he failed to follow up a dubious tip-off about where he was being kept in 1988. When Keenan was held hostage in Beirut journalists found themselves asking what the story was. I am not referring to the international news splash ...”

Interdisciplinarity

Dinah Birch, 27 June 1991

The Desire of My Eyes: A Life of John Ruskin 
by Wolfgang Kemp, translated by Jan Van Huerck.
HarperCollins, 526 pp., £20, March 1991, 0 00 215166 9
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“... to many aspiring Ruskin scholars, is British, but his teaching has not been in a university. Robert Hewison, one of the driving forces behind the revival that dates from the foundation of the Ruskin Association in 1969, has always steered clear of an academic career. So has Tim Hilton, whose biography of Ruskin’s early years (published in 1985) offers ...”