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Educating the Utopians

Jonathan Parry: Parliament’s Hour, 18 April 2019

The Oxford Handbook of Modern British Political History, 1800-2000 
edited by David Brown, Robert Crowcroft and Gordon Pentland.
Oxford, 626 pp., £95, April 2018, 978 0 19 871489 7
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... The clue​ is in the name. Parliament is designed for talk – for the expression of opinion and criticism. Pundits, particularly in the 19th century, wrote about ‘parliamentary government’ as the nation’s pride and Britain’s gift to a less fortunate world, but they did not mean that Parliament should actually govern. It would zealously check an overmighty executive, and scrutinise hasty ideas, but was not in itself a decisive body ...

Life on Sark

Jonathan Parry: Life on Sark, 18 May 2023

... The quirkiest​ of the British Isles is a self-governing jurisdiction between Guernsey and France just over three miles long and less than two miles wide. Sark has its own parliament, its own taxes and its own traffic laws (permitting only tractors, bikes and horse-drawn vehicles). Its central, fertile plateau is protected by cliffs on almost all sides that rise to over three hundred feet ...

To Serve My Friends

Jonathan Parry, 27 January 2022

Trust and Distrust: Corruption in Office in Britain and Its Empire, 1600-1850 
by Mark Knights.
Oxford, 488 pp., £35, December 2021, 978 0 19 879624 4
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... and triggered by controversy about financial rewards given to two Tory MPs, Neil Hamilton and Jonathan Aitken. This was when the select committee and the role of parliamentary commissioner were established, together with an extra-parliamentary Committee on Standards in Public Life. The latter drew up seven principles of public life ...

Policy Failure

Jonathan Parry: The Party Paradox, 21 November 2019

The End Is Nigh: British Politics, Power and the Road to the Second World War 
by Robert Crowcroft.
Oxford, 284 pp., £25, May 2019, 978 0 19 882369 8
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... It​ all seems very familiar. In the aftermath of a global financial shock, politicians found that the way they liked to communicate – expansive, optimistic rhetoric about democratic possibilities – no longer sounded convincing. Belt-tightening was needed. A Labour government which had already boxed itself into the language of prudence was removed as politicians plotted to find a way of combining austerity with authority ...

A Regular Grey

Jonathan Parry, 3 December 2020

Statesman of Europe: a Life of Sir Edward Grey 
by T.G. Otte.
Allen Lane, 858 pp., £35, November, 978 0 241 41336 4
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... To​ have one brother killed by an African animal would be a misfortune. To lose two, at different times, is surely remarkable. Such was the distinction of Sir Edward Grey, who served as foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916. A lion got his brother George, who was hunting in British East Africa in 1911: excited for the kill, he galloped too near his prey, missed and was mauled ...

Managing the Nation

Jonathan Parry, 18 March 2021

Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition 
by Edmund Fawcett.
Princeton, 525 pp., £30, October 2020, 978 0 691 17410 5
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... Since​ 2008, the LGBT Labour merchandising department has had massive success selling ‘Never Kissed a Tory’ T-shirts. They have generated so much fuss that in 2018 Owen Jones had to make clear: ‘If you want to kiss Tories, Momentum are not going to stop you.’ However, to large swathes of the left, the idea of doing so has remained anathema (the former lord mayor of Sheffield ruled it out, in his ‘Ten Commandments’ for the city ...

Grumpy in October

Jonathan Parry: The Anglo-French Project, 21 April 2022

Entente Imperial: British and French Power in the Age of Empire 
by Edward J. Gillin.
Amberley, 288 pp., £20, February 2022, 978 1 3981 0289 7
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... Early​ in July 1853, eighty thousand Russian troops crossed the River Pruth and invaded the Ottoman Empire. By 15 July they had occupied Bucharest, the capital of Ottoman Wallachia, as well as its other major towns. It was an unprovoked attack, justified on spurious grounds: Tsar Nicholas I claimed that more than ten million Orthodox Christians were imperilled by the indifference and barbarism of their Ottoman overlords ...

What Gladstone did

G.R. Searle, 24 February 1994

The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain 
by Jonathan Parry.
Yale, 383 pp., £30, January 1994, 0 300 05779 2
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... through his zealotry, restless ambition and ignorance, single-handedly proceeded to destroy it. Jonathan Parry also provides a forceful celebration of a particular kind of political system, which he sees as achieving perfection under the ‘propertied but unsnobbish’ Whig Ministers who ruled the country in early and mid-Victorian Britain. To anyone ...

How bad can it get?

LRB Contributors: On Johnson’s Britain, 15 August 2019

... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell ...

Sacred Crows

John Skorupski, 1 September 1983

Marxism and Anthropology 
by Maurice Bloch.
Oxford, 180 pp., £9.50, January 1983, 0 19 876091 4
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Death and the Regeneration of Life 
edited by Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry.
Cambridge, 236 pp., £18.50, January 1983, 0 521 24875 2
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... at which to turn to Death and the Regeneration of Life, a collection of essays edited by Bloch and Jonathan Parry, who also teaches anthropology at the London School of Economics. The essays examine mortuary rituals in a variety of primitive and traditional societies throughout the world. This is an outstanding collection. The ethnography is both detailed ...

Swank and Swagger

Ferdinand Mount: Deals with the Pasha, 26 May 2022

Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East 
by Jonathan Parry.
Princeton, 453 pp., £35, April, 978 0 691 18189 9
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... such an on-off affair, so fractious, elusive, splattered with froideurs and reconciliations. Jonathan Parry, a specialist in the 19th century, finds that his fellow historians have taken astonishingly little interest in British tangles in the Middle East in the first half of that century, though the relationship was then at its most intense. In ...

Short Cuts

Tom Crewe: High on Our Own Supply, 9 May 2019

... as well as to the large reserves of strength in the British constitution (the contention of Jonathan Parry in the LRB of 18 April). Of course, the UK – the English and Welsh parts of it anyway – is the only country that has voted to leave the EU. It’s also the only country to have been offered the choice. If we accept that this latter fact ...

Sabre-Toothed Teacher

Colin Kidd: Cowling, 31 March 2011

The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British Democracy: Maurice Cowling and Conservatism 
edited by Robert Crowcroft, S.J.D. Green and Richard Whiting.
I.B. Tauris, 327 pp., £54.50, August 2010, 978 1 84511 976 8
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... would engage in a ‘long-running and increasingly public slanging-match’, which, as Jonathan Parry notes in The Philosophy, Politics and Religion of British Democracy, ‘both men found immensely life-enhancing’. If Cowling was not taken altogether seriously in the higher reaches of the Conservative Party, he was nevertheless influential ...

Festschriftiness

Susan Pedersen, 6 October 2011

Structures and Transformations in Modern British History 
edited by David Feldman and Jon Lawrence.
Cambridge, 331 pp., £50, January 2011, 978 0 521 51882 6
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The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain 
edited by Simon Gunn and James Vernon.
California, 271 pp., £20.95, May 2011, 978 0 9845909 5 7
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Classes, Cultures and Politics: Essays on British History for Ross McKibbin 
edited by Clare Griffiths, John Nott and William Whyte.
Oxford, 320 pp., £65, April 2011, 978 0 19 957988 4
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... on claims that a concern to maintain racial purity increasingly trumped other social ambitions; Jonathan Parry offers a careful account of the decline of institutional reform. All these historians are reliable, sober and meticulous. But they appear to have forgotten that we need strong arguments, even wrong arguments: the job of the historian is to ...

Squeak

Jonathan Heawood: Adam Thorpe’s new novel, 18 August 2005

The Rules of Perspective 
by Adam Thorpe.
Cape, 341 pp., £12.99, May 2005, 0 224 05187 3
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... have found it increasingly hard to express themselves. Heinrich Hoffer and Corporal Neal Parry in The Rules of Perspective are typical Thorpe characters. By the end of the Second World War, Hoffer has outlived enough of his colleagues to be appointed Acting Acting Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Lohenfelde, a fictional Westphalian ...

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