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Prussian Chic

James Sheehan: Frederick the Great, 28 July 2016

Frederick the Great: King of Prussia 
by Tim Blanning.
Allen Lane, 648 pp., £30, September 2015, 978 1 84614 182 9
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... of a potash mine in the Thuringian forest. This is where American troops found the coffin in May 1945; in Operation Bodysnatch, they discreetly transported it to Marburg and then, seven years later, allowed it to be quietly buried in the chapel of a castle near Hechingen. Following the reunification of Germany, Frederick could finally be interred where ...

Part of the Empire

Natasha Wheatley: Habsburg History, 30 August 2018

The Habsburg Empire: A New History 
by Pieter Judson.
Harvard, 567 pp., £17.95, September 2018, 978 0 674 98676 3
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... and confessions piled on top of one another in marketplaces and town halls. This pluralism may be more important for the fact that no one thought it was an issue. Much of modern European history turns on the ‘discovery’ of that pluralism (in its political, legal and demographic forms) as a problem, and varied attempts to solve it. The diagnosis and ...

Slow Waltz

Daniel Trilling: Trouble with the Troubles Act, 6 June 2024

... Andy Seaman​ felt out of place when, on 26 May 2022, he walked into the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith. Andy has little connection to Ireland; he’s from East London and his family’s roots are in Dominica. But earlier that day he had heard on the radio that the centre was hosting an event run by the organisation Troubles, Tragedy and Trauma ...

In the Alchemist’s Den

Mike Jay, 27 July 2023

Elixir: A Story of Perfume, Science and the Search for the Secret of Life 
by Theresa Levitt.
Basic, 314 pp., £20, April, 978 1 3998 0324 3
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... principle, yet to be discovered, that determined how these basic elements combined. In Elixir, Theresa Levitt tells the entwined stories of the Laugier family and the development of perfume in the first decades of what in the early 19th century would come to be called ‘organic chemistry’. The long tradition of isolating plant essences, she ...

St Marilyn

Andrew O’Hagan: The Girl and Me, 6 January 2000

The Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe 
Christie’s, 415 pp., $85, September 1999, 0 903432 64 1Show More
The Complete Marilyn Monroe 
by Adam Victor.
Thames and Hudson, 339 pp., £29.95, November 1999, 0 500 01978 9
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Marilyn Monroe 
by Barbara Leaming.
Orion, 474 pp., £8.99, October 1999, 0 7528 2692 1
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... the altar, where a glass case stood by itself, with a casket inside, containing the relics of St Theresa of Lisieux. A hundred years ago the Carmelite nun Thérèse Martin died, and she died, according to a woman I spoke to at the end of the queue, ‘with a heart as big as the world itself’. The last words of St ...

Snakes and Ladders

Stefan Collini: Versions of Meritocracy, 1 April 2021

The Crisis of the Meritocracy: Britain’s Transition to Mass Education since the Second World War 
by Peter Mandler.
Oxford, 361 pp., £25, September 2020, 978 0 19 884014 5
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The Meritocracy Trap 
by Daniel Markovits.
Allen Lane, 464 pp., £10.99, August 2020, 978 0 14 198474 2
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... it is determined by merit. And that, in a nutshell, is the history of the long 20th century.It may be a parody, but this little narrative encapsulates one of the structuring claims of contemporary public debate. We can argue over the extent to which merit is, in fact, now the chief determinant of reward, but there is remarkably wide agreement that it ...

After the Fall

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

... with the odds you would have got in 2008 on a future world in which Donald Trump was president, Theresa May was prime minister, Britain had voted to leave the European Union, and Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party – which to many close observers of Labour politics is actually the least likely thing on that list. The common factor explaining ...

Short Cuts

Inigo Thomas: Cromwell’s Seal, 4 January 2018

... just make out that the windows on the bottom level have been opened. I have a copy of the seal. It may have lost some of its definition – it’s worn or has softened and if you hold it for more than a few seconds the black wax it’s made of becomes sticky – but the detail that remains is extensive: you can tell that the hundred-odd members represented are ...

Short Cuts

Tom Crewe: Labour’s Best Cards, 29 June 2017

... poll could have predicted – its bold and comprehensive policy offer contrasting sharply with Theresa May’s grim prospectus for a grimmer Britain. No pollster could have foreseen that the contest would not after all be between statesmanlike authority and a cultish ideologue but between a hologram prime minister and a genial figure with a full and ...

Heir to Blair

Christopher Tayler: Among the New Tories, 26 April 2007

... the early favourite to succeed Howard. The Conservatives knew that they were seen, in the words of Theresa May, Duncan Smith’s party chairwoman, as the ‘nasty party’, but were too worried about upsetting the ‘core vote’ to do much about it. Hague campaigned on a platform of tax cuts, hostility to the EU, and resentment of asylum seekers; few ...

Homage to Mrs Brater

Rosemary Ashton, 7 August 1986

George Eliot 
by Gillian Beer.
Harvester, 272 pp., £16.95, May 1986, 0 7108 0506 3
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German Women in the 18th and 19th Centuries: A Social and Literary History 
edited by Ruth-Ellen Joeres and Mary Jo Maynes.
Indiana, 356 pp., $29.95, January 1986, 0 253 32578 1
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Red Jenny: A Life with Karl Marx 
by H.F. Peters.
Allen and Unwin, 182 pp., £12.95, May 1986, 0 04 928053 8
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Wives of Fame: Mary Livingstone, Jenny Marx, Emma Darwin 
by Edna Healey.
Sidgwick, 210 pp., £12.95, April 1986, 0 283 98552 6
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A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon 
by Sheila Herstein.
Yale, 224 pp., £16.95, January 1986, 0 300 03317 6
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George Eliot and Blackmail 
by Alexander Welsh.
Harvard, 400 pp., £20.50, November 1985, 0 674 34872 9
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... acts’ carried out under limiting social conditions which ensured that, unlike St Theresa, she remained ‘foundress of nothing’? Certainly, Dorothea’s sphere of action is represented as being – true to life for her class and time – confined to the domestic. She passes from eligible spinster to helpmeet, wife and mother, and on the ...

Mind the gap

G.A. Cohen, 14 May 1992

Equality and Partiality 
by Thomas Nagel.
Oxford, 186 pp., £13.95, November 1991, 0 19 506967 6
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... intuition and the desired answer is a matter of complex negotiation, in which some intuitions may have to be disregarded, it remains true that a satisfying conclusion is at peace with intuition, or, anyway, with the stronger or less deniable part of it. Nagel has been at the centre of Anglophone philosophical endeavour for twenty-five years because he ...

Doing something different

John Ellis, 27 July 1989

Doing what comes naturally: Change, Rhetoric and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies 
by Stanley Fish.
Oxford, 613 pp., £35, July 1989, 9780198129981
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... too reminiscent of the standard schoolboy cynic argument: I choose to lounge on the beach; Mother Theresa chooses to care for the poor in India; we both do what makes us feel good, and both do what we want to do; so what’s the difference? Arguments like this have long been used by adolescents to ward off burdensome distinctions like that between responsible ...

Johnson’s Downfall

James Butler, 21 July 2022

... men). Before his speech outside Number Ten on 7 July, his sole political resignation had been from Theresa May’s cabinet in 2018, the opening gambit in his successful campaign to take her job. In 2004, when his lies about his affair with Petronella Wyatt and her subsequent abortion were exposed, he refused Michael Howard’s order that he resign as a ...

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