Endless Uncertainty

Colin Kidd: Adam Smith’s Legacy, 19 July 2001

Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment 
by Emma Rothschild.
Harvard, 366 pp., £30.95, June 2001, 0 674 00489 2
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... labourers and workmen’: on the contrary, in the second edition of the Wealth of Nations, Smith held that ‘high profits tend much more to raise the price of work than high wages.’ Above all, he hoped that a universal system of public instruction in science and philosophy would enable working people to transcend the narrow perspectives and ...

How to put the politics back into Labour

Ross McKibbin: Origins of the Present Mess, 7 August 2003

... from Dreyfus, we can see what Proust meant. Yet the Iraq crisis had been unfolding before Dr David Kelly’s death – whatever Lord Justice Hutton’s inquiry concludes – and the sense that Iraq did not cause but nevertheless represents a crisis of the Labour Party has been with us for months now. The extent of the continued underfunding of the public ...

McNed

Gillian Darley: Lutyens, 17 April 2003

The Architect and His Wife: A Life of Edwin Lutyens 
by Jane Ridley.
Chatto, 524 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 7011 7201 0
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Edwin Lutyens, Country Houses: From the Archives of ‘Country Life’ 
by Gavin Stamp.
Aurum, 192 pp., £35, May 2001, 1 85410 763 1
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Lutyens Abroad 
edited by Andrew Hopkins and Gavin Stamp.
British School at Rome, 260 pp., £34.95, March 2002, 0 904152 37 5
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... of Victorian Gothic larded with Islamic motifs, resoundingly to flight.’ Architecture, as David Cannadine has pointed out, played a part in the consolidation of the Indian Empire, and the Viceroy’s House, ‘a ducal domain-cum-country house-cum-princely palace’, complete with six thousand servants, was a metaphor for the social hierarchy and ...

Stand and Die

Richard Overy: Rückzug, 10 October 2013

Rückzug: The German Retreat from France, 1944 
by Joachim Ludewig, edited by David Zabecki.
Kentucky, 435 pp., £33.95, September 2012, 978 0 8131 4079 7
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... Rome in early June 1944, might have secured a more stable and defensible line in France and have held up the Allies for longer. But Hitler was also convinced that the main weight of the Allied attack would come in the Pas de Calais, making a powerful counter-offensive absolutely vital to protect the Ruhr. In the event, it had to be improvised far to the ...

So Many Handbags, So Little Time

Andrew O’Hagan: The Bling Ring, 20 June 2013

The Bling Ring 
by Nancy Jo Sales.
HarperCollins, 288 pp., £7.99, May 2013, 978 0 00 751822 7
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... in the Century Regional Detention Facility in Lynwood) Alexis Neiers found that she was being held in the cell Paris Hilton had occupied during her own bad spell in 2007. Paris learned from her experience, we gather, and became stronger. Neiers spends time on her blog telling her ‘fans’ she is feeling much better since she got sober and has some ...

Double Doctrine

Colin Kidd: The Enlightenment, 5 December 2013

The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters 
by Anthony Pagden.
Oxford, 436 pp., £20, May 2013, 978 0 19 966093 3
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... and early 21st centuries, agnostic clerics such as John Robinson, the author of Honest to God, David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies of the Enlightenment on the Christian ...

Phantom Gold

John Pemble: Victorian Capitalism, 7 January 2016

Forging Capitalism: Rogues, Swindlers, Frauds and the Rise of Modern Finance 
by Ian Klaus.
Yale, 287 pp., £18.99, January 2015, 978 0 300 18194 4
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... in the US Department of State, and his ideas about capitalism are very close to those that Keynes held in the 1920s and 1930s. Capitalism is the best system on offer, but it realises its beneficial potential only if regulated by the wisdom of the few. Laissez-faire doesn’t work because self-regulation fails. Business that’s ethical and less competitive is ...

Diary

Colin Kidd: After the Referendum, 18 February 2016

... referendum desired by Alex Salmond, but were forced in the two-option referendum permitted by David Cameron to choose between the stark alternatives of Union or independence.* In the latter stages of the campaign, as Devine warns his readers, he lent his name to the ‘Yes’ camp. But Devine is diffident about venturing into the political arena, and in ...

Friendly Fire

Bernard Porter: Torching the White House, 21 February 2008

Fusiliers: Eight Years with the Redcoats in America 
by Mark Urban.
Faber, 384 pp., £20, September 2007, 978 0 571 22486 9
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1812: War with America 
by Jon Latimer.
Harvard, 637 pp., £22.95, October 2007, 978 0 674 02584 4
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... to sell supplies to the British invaders (on one occasion sleds, when the British advance was held up by snow). ‘They do say it is wrong to supply an innimy and I think so too,’ one militia officer confessed; ‘but I don’t call that man my innimy who buys what I have to sell, and gives such a genteel price for it. We have worse innimies than you ...

You’ll Love the Way It Makes You Feel

Mark Greif: ‘Mad Men’, 23 October 2008

Mad Men: Season One 
Lionsgate Home Entertainment, £29.99, October 2008Show More
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... and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (whose eponymous antihero worked in PR). Emerging stars like David Ogilvy and Norman B. Norman publicised the ad man’s mystique of deep creative force, genius and restraint, as an up-to-date alternative to the old market barker’s persistence. Industry opened its purses to pay for strange approaches (Louis Cheskin’s ...

What to Wear to School

Jeremy Harding: Marianne gets rid of the veil, 19 February 2004

... the veil everywhere except the home, so much as an attempt to end the intrusion of dogmas held by private individuals and groups into public space. Nor is it as brazen as the German approach, which is shaping up, in some regions, as a piece of discrimination against Islamic signs alone, leaving crosses and yarmulkas within the law; in the French ...

Termagant

Ian Gilmour: The Cliveden Set, 19 October 2000

The Cliveden Set: Portrait of an Exclusive Fraternity 
by Norman Rose.
Cape, 277 pp., £20, August 2000, 0 224 06093 7
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... continued their South African practice of convening regular ‘moots’, which were frequently held at Cliveden, a palatial house near Windsor. This book deals with the core members of the set: Lothian, judged by another member to be ‘airy and viewy’, a Roman Catholic who converted to Christian Science, became private secretary to Lloyd George in the ...

Inside the Barrel

Brent Hayes Edwards: The French Slave Trade, 10 September 2009

Memoires des esclavages: la fondation d’un centre national pour la memoire des esclavages et de leurs abolitions 
by Edouard Glissant.
Gallimard, 192 pp., €14.90, May 2007, 978 2 07 078554 4
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The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade 
by Christopher Miller.
Duke, 571 pp., £20.99, March 2008, 978 0 8223 4151 2
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... is usually credited with providing the philosophical foundation for abolitionism; according to David Brion Davis, by the mid-1700s ‘the classical justifications for slavery, already discredited by Montesquieu and Hutcheson, were being demolished by the arguments of Rousseau, Diderot and other philosophes.’ Miller acknowledges the existence of powerful ...

At Dulwich

Alice Spawls: Vanessa Bell, 18 May 2017

... More remarkable, if not so successful in totality, are Bell’s paintings of Lytton Strachey and David Garnett, from 1913 and 1915. The former’s glasses and beard are painted bright yellow in a strange experiment; the latter, a topless portrait, has a mother-of-pearl luminescence to its skin tones, the small dark dots of Garnett’s eyes and set mouth ...

Tremendous in His Wrath

Eric Foner: George Washington, Slave Owner, 19 December 2019

‘The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret’: George Washington, Slavery and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon 
by Mary Thompson.
Virginia, 502 pp., £32.50, January 2019, 978 0 8139 4184 4
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... irrelevant. During a visit to Richmond soon after the end of the Civil War, the Scottish minister David Macrae met a slave who complained of past mistreatment while acknowledging that he had never been whipped. ‘How were you cruelly treated then?’ Macrae asked. ‘I was cruelly treated,’ the freedman answered, ‘because I was ...