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It’s Our Turn

Rory Scothorne: Where the North Begins, 4 August 2022

The Northern Question: A History of a Divided Country 
by Tom Hazeldine.
Verso, 290 pp., £11.99, September 2021, 978 1 78663 409 2
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... There is a natural and perfectly viable kingdom of the North between the Humber and the Forth-Clyde isthmus,’ the historian Frank Musgrove claimed in 1990. It wasn’t the best moment to use the present tense, even if there had been an upsurge in commentary on the ‘North-South divide’ over the previous decade ...

Imperial Project

Richard Drayton, 19 September 1996

Kew: The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens 
by Ray Desmond.
Harvill/Royal Botanical Gardens, 466 pp., £25, November 1995, 1 86046 076 3
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... every Corner of the Habitable world.’ George III fostered this programme and in 1773 turned to Joseph Banks for assistance. In the half-century between the end of the Seven Years’ War and Waterloo, the East India Company took control of Moghul India, the Royal Navy began its hydrological survey of the world’s oceans, and Britain seized a string of new ...

Diary

Julian Barnes: People Will Hate Us Again, 20 April 2017

... clashing title turns out to be part of the point. The novel is set in a small French town in the north, towards Belgium; the time must be the late 1930s. The original Krull, Cornelius, was German, but has spent four-fifths of his life in France, and became naturalised before the First World War; he still barely speaks French and is losing his German. A ...

Sudden Losses of Complexity

Edmund Leach, 10 November 1988

The Collapse of Complex Societies 
by Joseph Tainter.
Cambridge, 250 pp., £27.50, June 1988, 0 521 34092 6
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... faculty and can even, on occasion, share a subject-matter, they are, in a case such as that of Joseph Tainter and myself, poles apart. This is because social anthropologists are primarily interested in a rapidly disappearing living present; they suffer from an illusion that if they do not record everything within the next ten years there will be nothing ...

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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... A century ago Joseph Chamberlain was the Tony Benn of his time, the bogeyman of moderate and conservative opinion. The point is familiar to historians of the period, but never easy to convey. Why, after all, should the upper classes have been scared of a Liberal? Were the Liberals not a party of property and wealth? Indeed they were, and from the gallery of the House of Commons one could observe a multitude of well-fed, broad-bottomed types on the Liberal benches ...

Lutfi’s bar will not be opening again

Basil Davidson, 7 January 1993

Fitzroy Maclean 
by Frank McLynn.
Murray, 413 pp., £25, October 1992, 9780719549717
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Franz Joseph 
by Jean-Paul Bled, translated by Teresa Bridgeman.
Blackwell, 359 pp., £45, September 1992, 0 631 16778 1
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... North beyond Sarajevo is where the hills of Bosnia become less grey and gaunt than they are elsewhere, and a little further north again they slope away to the plain of Semberija along the Sava River. It is a pleasant enough country in normal times although a hungry one, with its peasants inhabiting scattered hamlets and family homesteads ...

Inky Scraps

Maya Jasanoff: ‘Atlantic Families’, 5 August 2010

Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later 18th Century 
by Sarah Pearsall.
Oxford, 294 pp., £61, November 2008, 978 0 19 953299 5
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... felt like when she wrote about it in wartime Philadelphia in the fall of 1781. Grace’s husband, Joseph, a prominent Pennsylvania politician, had been a delegate to the first Continental Congress, convened in 1774 to find a resolution to the 13 colonies’ grievances against Britain. Hoping to stave off open war, Galloway proposed a plan for closer imperial ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: The Ryanverse, 11 July 2002

... and Red Rabbit will be hopping its way up the bestseller lists in a matter of weeks (Michael Joseph, £18.99). Clancy rocketed to fame – the cliché isn’t inapt for such a notorious gizmologist, though he’d no doubt give you the make and serial number of the rocket in question – in the mid-1980s with his first novel, The Hunt for Red October. The ...

Melchior

Francis Spufford, 3 May 1984

... below the gentle crest of the hill which hides the yellow walls of the convent from sight. Uncle Joseph trots to this crest for a moment to admire the view and architecture, before returning to where they have already laid out the food – all hot, all sensible – and started to chatter. Back at the car the chauffeur is leaning against the engine, which he ...

Belonging to No Nation

Abigail Green, 2 March 2023

The Shamama Case: Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean 
by Jessica M. Marglin.
Princeton, 363 pp., £30, January, 978 0 691 23587 5
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... a bold new age of industrialisation, globalisation and empire – but it was still possible for a North African Jew to become one of the wealthiest men in the world.When Shamama was making his fortune, Tunisia was on the path to financial ruin. Because this was the European century, countries like Tunisia were under pressure to modernise, in order to compete ...

The Irresistible Itch

Colin Kidd: Vandals in Bow Ties, 3 December 2009

Personal Responsibility: Why It Matters 
by Alexander Brown.
Continuum, 214 pp., £12.99, September 2009, 978 1 84706 399 1
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... to broach too obviously the ethics of personal responsibility. Had not her ally and mentor Keith Joseph seen his own leadership aspirations shrivel in the aftermath of his notorious Edgbaston speech? When Joseph addressed the Edgbaston Conservative Association at Birmingham’s Grand Hotel on 19 October 1974, the ...

JC’s Call

J.I.M. Stewart, 2 April 1981

Joseph Conrad: Times Remembered 
by Joseph Conrad.
Cambridge, 218 pp., £10.50, March 1981, 0 521 22805 0
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... Joseph Conrad died at the age of 67 on 3 August 1924, the day following the 18th birthday of his younger son, John Conrad, the author of the present book. John’s memories, which reach astonishingly far back into his earliest childhood, begin with his family living in poverty in a tiny cottage, ‘a dark and gloomy place’, at Aldington in Kent ...

More Noodling, Please

Jessica Olin: ‘The Bystander’s Scrapbook’, 4 April 2002

The Bystander's Scrapbook 
by Joseph Torra.
Weidenfeld, 186 pp., £7.99, November 2001, 0 575 06767 5
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... Joseph Torra’s latest novel, The Bystander’s Scrapbook, opens in 1984, the year Ronald Reagan was re-elected President. In Somerville, Massachusetts, as in the rest of the country, corporate growth and gentrification are changing the face of neighbourhoods that once boasted a mix of ethnic traditions: a tenement that housed Hispanic families is overhauled and made into condos for white yuppies; colourful dives, the Italian cobbler’s shop and the Greek breakfast joint are torn down to make room for a new mall ...

No Mythology, No Ghosts

Owen Hatherley: Second City?, 3 November 2022

Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain 
by Richard Vinen.
Allen Lane, 545 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 0 241 45453 4
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... in a country whose media are perennially obsessed with a caricatured contrast between a rough North and a soft South. (Manchester likes to talk tough, but is in many ways a more bourgeois city than Birmingham.) Birmingham became prominent because of its industrial power, but its history is very different from that of the ‘industrial ...

Intimidation

Sara Roy: On-campus syllabus-control, 17 February 2005

... In 2002, incoming students at the University of North Carolina were required to read Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations by Michael Sells, a translation into English of 35 of the early suras with a commentary and explication. Three students – one Jewish, two Christian – and a UNC alumna argued, with the support of a number of fundamentalist Christian organisations, that this constituted discrimination against them ...

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