After Gibraltar

Conor Gearty, 16 November 1995

... which to oversee executive discretion, a task that the courts here already have well in hand, as Michael Howard and other ministers would be the first angrily to testify. This is not the prize that most advocates of the Convention are after. What excites them is the notion that after incorporation the judiciary would be able to strike down Parliamentary ...

The Thing

Michael Wood: Versions of Proust, 6 January 2005

In Search of Lost Time: Vol. I: The Way by Swann’s 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Lydia Davis.
Penguin, 496 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118031 5
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol.II: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by James Grieve.
Penguin, 576 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118032 3
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol. III: The Guermantes Way 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Mark Treharne.
Penguin, 640 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118033 1
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol. IV: Sodom and Gomorrah 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by John Sturrock.
Penguin, 576 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 9780141180342
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol. V: ‘The Prisoner’ and ‘The Fugitive’ 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Carol Clark and Peter Collier.
Penguin, 720 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118035 8
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In Search of Lost Time: Vol. VI: Finding Time Again 
by Marcel Proust, edited by Christopher Prendergast, translated by Ian Patterson.
Penguin, 400 pp., £8.99, October 2003, 0 14 118036 6
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The Proust Project 
edited by André Aciman.
Farrar, Straus, 224 pp., $25, November 2004, 0 374 23832 4
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... of grave riches or solemn assets, if that’s where the adjectives belong. Then I read Richard Howard’s version in his brief essay in The Proust Project: Considered in its entirety at any given moment, the human soul has no more than a fictitious value for all its array of riches, since now some of these, now others, whether actual or imaginary, are ...

We Are Many

Tom Crewe: In the Corbyn Camp, 11 August 2016

... as wide as 16 points. Corbyn is the most unpopular opposition leader on record, polling worse than Michael Foot, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband, all of whom went on to lose general elections by significant margins, or did not get to contest them. There are 230 Labour MPs; on 28 ...

Why can’t she just do as she ought?

Michael Newton: ‘Gone with the Wind’, 6 August 2009

Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone with the Wind’ Revisited 
by Molly Haskell.
Yale, 244 pp., £16.99, March 2009, 978 0 300 11752 3
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... family in Georgia. Fervent, flirtatious Scarlett loves the wan Ashley Wilkes (played by Leslie Howard), but Ashley, it quickly turns out, is betrothed to another, the Quakerish, quivering and ever sincere Melanie Hamilton (Olivia de Havilland). For the rest of the film, although she marries three other men (the first out of pique, the second out of ...

Lucky’s Dip

James Fox, 12 November 1987

Trail of Havoc: In the Steps of Lord Lucan 
by Patrick Marnham.
Viking, 204 pp., £10.95, October 1987, 0 670 81391 5
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Lucan: Not Guilty 
by Sally Moore.
Sidgwick, 271 pp., £12.95, October 1987, 9780283995361
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... dummy runs with an eight-stone sack to the coast. That fits with Lucan’s remarks to Greville Howard some weeks before the murder that he planned to drop his wife’s body into the Solent. As for the Lucan ‘set’, once so besieged and worried for its survival, this has long since been amalgamated into the Thatcher revolution. It’s a pity that neither ...

Conspire Slowly, Act Quickly

David Runciman: Thatcher Undone, 2 January 2020

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. III: Herself Alone 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 1072 pp., £35, October 2019, 978 0 241 32474 5
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... of a leadership election among Conservative MPs in which she secured more votes than her rival Michael Heseltine but not quite enough to prevent the contest going to a second round. At that point her cabinet collectively turned against her and let her know that she needed to step down for their sake. They couched it as a plea to save the party from ...

The Horror of Money

Michael Wood, 8 December 1988

The Pink and the Green 
by Stendhal, translated by Richard Howard.
Hamish Hamilton, 148 pp., £10.95, July 1988, 0 241 12289 9
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Stendhal’s Violin: A Novelist and his Reader 
by Roger Pearson.
Oxford, 294 pp., £30, February 1988, 0 19 815851 3
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... The Pink and the Green that it begins to seem its unfocused, perhaps undiscovered subject. Richard Howard’s version is fluent and graceful, catching as few translations do the bounce and abruptness of Stendhal’s voice, and has only a handful of small errors. Howard renders esprit variously as ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: Michael Andrews, 9 August 2001

... Michael Andrews was born in 1928 and died in 1995. He didn’t produce many paintings (although the ones he made tended to be large). In the exhibition at Tate Britain until 17 October the full range of his work can be appreciated for the first time. Andrews followed a route which depersonalises the act of looking ...

Rough Wooing

Michael Brown: Flodden, 23 January 2014

Fatal Rivalry: Flodden 1513 
by George Goodwin.
Weidenfeld, 288 pp., £20, July 2013, 978 0 297 86739 5
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... border castles and towers. In Northumberland, James awaited the English army, led by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. Though apparently possessing advantages in ground, equipment and supplies, James allowed himself to be outmanoeuvred by Surrey, who cut off the Scottish army’s route north, forcing it to move to Branxton Hill, where its cannon could not ...

God wielded the buzzer

Christian Lorentzen: The Sorrows of DFW, 11 October 2012

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace 
by D.T. Max.
Granta, 352 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 84708 494 1
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... he gave her in the 1990s.) His agent, Bonnie Nadell, became a close friend, and his editors Gerry Howard and Michael Pietsch were angelically supportive. Howard tried to persuade Wallace to give Broom ‘a brilliantly theatrical close’; instead it ends mid-sentence, with the sad sack ...

Out of Babel

Michael Hofmann: Thomas Bernhard Traduced, 14 December 2017

Collected Poems 
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by James Reidel.
Chicago, 459 pp., £25, June 2017, 978 0 85742 426 6
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... typeface devised God knows when by fuck knows who, blurbs by the well-respected likes of Richard Howard, Carolyn Forché and Franz Wright – is enough to cure one of the idiocy of reading poetry in translation. Because: why shouldn’t they all be like that? It seems harder to gain admission to a children’s playground than to publish a book of poetry ...

The Ultimate Justice Show

Michael Byers: The trial of Saddam, 8 January 2004

... penalty provides another opportunity for criticism that will get nowhere. Tony Blair and John Howard were both quick to realise that resistance to the use of the ‘ultimate punishment’ in Saddam’s case would be futile. On Bush’s first trip to Europe as President, he dismissed international concern about the widespread use of capital punishment in ...

Our Island Story

Stefan Collini: The New DNB, 20 January 2005

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 
edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison.
Oxford, sixty volumes, £7,500, September 2004, 9780198614111
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... predominate, and we get the grandmasters of the trade, such as Patrick Collinson on Elizabeth I, Michael Howard on Sir John Hackett, Eric Hobsbawm on Karl Marx (well, he lived here for thirty years, and undeniably ‘influenced the nation’s life’). Also impressive is how frequently those who have already written the authoritative intellectual ...

Believing in Unicorns

Walter Benn Michaels: Racecraft, 7 February 2013

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life 
by Karen Fields and Barbara Fields.
Verso, 302 pp., £20, October 2012, 978 1 84467 994 2
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... an idea and a reality’. In Racial Formation in the United States (1986), the theorists of race Michael Omi and Howard Winant urged us not only to resist the ‘temptation’ to think of race as a biological essence but also and especially to resist the temptation to conclude that if it isn’t biological it’s a ‘mere ...

Not Much like Consent

Daniel Trilling: Crisis at the Met, 30 March 2023

Broken Yard: The Fall of the Metropolitan Police 
by Tom Harper.
Biteback, 446 pp., £20, October 2022, 978 1 78590 768 5
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Tango Juliet Foxtrot: How Did It All Go Wrong for British Policing? 
by Iain Donnelly.
Biteback, 341 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 1 78590 716 6
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... in a rally at Wembley Arena. They got their way: the plans were shelved by Clarke’s successor, Michael Howard, in order to ‘avoid all-out war with the police’.After Labour came to power in 1997, the Blair government offered the police a new settlement. Funding increased by a quarter between 2001 and 2010, and there were a range of new powers such ...