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It took a Scot

Colin Kidd: English Nationalism, 30 July 2015

The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century 
by George Molyneaux.
Oxford, 302 pp., £65, May 2015, 978 0 19 871791 1
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The English and Their History 
by Robert Tombs.
Allen Lane, 1012 pp., £14.99, June 2015, 978 0 14 103165 1
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Conquests, Catastrophe and Recovery: Britain and Ireland 1066-1485 
by John Gillingham.
Vintage, 345 pp., £10.99, October 2014, 978 0 09 956324 2
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From Restoration to Reform: The British Isles 1660-1832 
by Jonathan Clark.
Vintage, 364 pp., £10.99, October 2014, 978 0 09 956323 5
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Britain since 1900: A Success Story? 
by Robert Skidelsky.
Vintage, 472 pp., £10.99, October 2014, 978 0 09 957239 8
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... of Whig historians Englishness is now a matter of the shrill nativism of a forgotten white working class, and the pained nostalgia of the elderly, who can remember a straight-faced version of our ‘island’ story. Even if England has never been an island, a vagueness about the contours of its political geography was for centuries a core ingredient of the ...

Short Cuts

Jeff Kingston: Abe’s Blind Spot, 10 September 2015

... August​ in Japan is a month for remembering war. Ceremonies marking the atomic bombings of Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August) are followed by a commemoration of Japan’s surrender to the Allies on 15 August. More than three million Japanese were killed in what is variously called the Pacific War, the Fifteen-Year War or the Greater East Asia War, depending on one’s view of history ...

Jingo Joe

Paul Addison, 2 July 1981

Joseph Chamberlain: A Political Study 
by Richard Jay.
Oxford, 383 pp., £16.95, March 1981, 0 19 822623 3
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... and the whole party was nothing but a confederacy directed against the traditional ruling class. Their leader, Mr Gladstone, was a dangerous old man and a firebrand at heart, and after him worse would surely follow. On the left of the Party, where the real crackpots and doctrinaires gathered, stood the lean, arrogant and transparently ambitious figure ...

The Miners’ Strike

Michael Stewart, 6 September 1984

... dim memories of 1926; the feeling that in Britain perhaps there was never a peace treaty in the class war, just a truce; that the country, split more than ever into two nations by the recession, is evolving in ways that nobody can predict; the first tremors of an earthquake that might merely dislodge a few tiles from the roof – but could also shake ...

Questions of Class

Peter Green: Alcibiades the Vandal, 25 April 2013

The Mutilation of the Herms: Unpacking an Ancient Mystery 
by Debra Hamel.
CreateSpace, 54 pp., £5, March 2012, 978 1 4750 5193 3
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... situation in Athens at the time: the conservatives were the well-heeled and well-established upper-class aristocrats and landowners. These old political families had never felt entirely happy with the post-Cleisthenic democracy, and regarded Cleisthenes himself as a traitor to his class: not surprisingly, since his extension ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: On Peregrine Worsthorne, 4 November 1993

... come across as a sort of Catholic version of Gray. His father was a member of that Belgian ruling class on whose behalf we used to be told we fought the First World War, and seems to have suffered from a near-terminal vagueness and languor. Mama, in bold contrast, possessed a sense of noblesse oblige that the Koch de ...

The Tories’ Death-Wish

Kenneth O. Morgan, 15 May 1980

Tariff Reform in British Politics 
by Alan Sykes.
Oxford, 352 pp., £16, December 1979, 0 19 822483 4
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... was highly probable. The speed with which the deep divisions within Liberal ranks over the Boer War were healed was entirely due to the incompetence of their opponents. Saddled with the Dear Loaf and Rome on the Rates, with Chinese Slavery and Taff Vale, with Randlords and Landlords, Unionist candidates in constituency after constituency went down to ...

Grandmother’s Footsteps

Penelope Fitzgerald, 9 April 1992

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China 
by Jung Chang.
HarperCollins, 524 pp., £17.50, March 1992, 0 00 215357 2
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... powers anxious to help themselves to territory, to face the Japanese invasion and the civil war. The People’s Republic was created out of poverty and weakness, on the world’s most disastrous model, and worked out in a long series of crazy experiments. The withdrawal of Soviet experts in 1960 meant, as it had to, the Smile Policy towards the ...

Squealing

Ian Buruma, 13 May 1993

Gower: The Autobiography 
by David Gower and Martin Johnson.
Collins Willow, 256 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 00 218413 3
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... goes amiss in an English idol. Gower’s return, at any rate, will be heralded as a return of class. They do it everywhere, of course, but the popular sport of pulling the rich and famous off their pedestals is played with special relish in England. It is not an edifying spectacle. But then neither is the squealing of toffs when they feel put upon. Only ...

Upper-Class Contemplative

John Bayley, 7 February 1985

The Fountain 
by Charles Morgan.
Boydell, 434 pp., £4.95, November 1984, 0 85115 237 6
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... then sinks into limbo. Have such best-sellers anything in common? Obviously they are not – like War and Peace, say – hardy perennials. Their appeal is to something specific in the temper of the time. Going with that, perhaps, is a capacity to have their cake and eat it, and to give their readers the same treat. In Margaret Kennedy’s novel the constant ...

Greatness

Arthur Marwick, 21 October 1982

Attlee 
by Kenneth Harris.
Weidenfeld, 630 pp., £14.95, September 1982, 0 297 77993 1
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... the West this century has shown it? Does it only flourish when nurtured by the ecstatic opiates of war? Greatness, in this context, is what people recognise as greatness: manifest success on a national rather than a purely partisan scale. Losing both wars hasn’t helped Germany’s candidates: Clemenceau eclipses both Hindenburg and Ludendorff. De Gaulle has ...

The Vision Thing

Eyal Press: Paul Krugman, 19 June 2008

The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming America from the Right 
by Paul Krugman.
Allen Lane, 296 pp., £20, March 2008, 978 1 84614 107 2
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... income bracket was 91 per cent, compared to 35 per cent now. The US was a prosperous, middle-class society, Krugman claims, without the stark income disparities the Bush administration has worked so hard to widen. To many economists, reversing inequality is about as likely as reopening shuttered factories in Ohio or putting a stop to technological ...

The Long Con

Jackson Lears: Techno-Austerity, 16 July 2015

The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organised Wealth and Power 
by Steve Fraser.
Little, Brown, 466 pp., £21.99, February 2015, 978 0 316 18543 1
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... life. This wasn’t only an American pattern. E.P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class (1963), rescued the Luddites and other artisans from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ by showing that their apparently reactionary attachments to custom and tradition created the leading edge of working-...

For ever Walsall

Angus Calder, 21 March 1985

Rural Life in England in the First World War 
by Pamela Horn.
Gill and Macmillan, 300 pp., £25, November 1984, 0 312 69604 3
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Britain in Our Century: Images and Controversies 
by Arthur Marwick.
Thames and Hudson, 224 pp., £12.95, November 1984, 9780500250914
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Labour and Society in Britain: 1918-1979 
by James Cronin.
Batsford, 248 pp., £8.95, August 1984, 0 7134 4395 2
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Women in England 1870-1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change 
by Jane Lewis.
Wheatsheaf, 240 pp., £16.95, November 1984, 0 7108 0186 6
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... success had permitted liberal historians to mystify historical experience. No revolution, no civil war (except in Ireland). The end of empire, despite the horrific violence which attended it, did not produce political trauma as in France and Portugal. The loss of Eire, the troubles of Ulster, the bloody wars of Kenya and Zimbabwe have not shocked the average ...

Where will this voyage end?

Neal Ascherson, 14 June 1990

Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two centuries look back on the French Revolution 
by E.J. Hobsbawm.
Verso, 144 pp., £24.95, May 1990, 0 86091 282 5
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... so that capitalism can in turn be transcended by the secular triumph of the ‘universal class’, the proletariat. Hobsbawm retorts: ‘The Liberal revisionism of French Revolution history is entirely directed ... at 1917. It is an irony of history’ that it attacks ‘precisely that interpretation of the Revolution that was first formulated and ...

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