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Diary

A.J.P. Taylor: Save the Round Reading-Room! , 20 February 1986

... The late Professor Tate of Manchester University, I have been told, made his last ascent of Scafell pike at the age of 93. I made my last ascent of Pillar at the age of little more than seventy. I used to go abroad at least once a year and often twice. Now I have put all that behind me and have been content for a long time with Yarmouth mill in the Isle of Wight ...

Shoy-Hoys

Paul Foot: The not-so-great Reform Act, 6 May 2004

Reform! The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act 
by Edward Pearce.
Cape, 343 pp., £20, November 2003, 0 224 06199 2
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... moved to say so. Such were the sixty thousand trade unionists who met in St Peter’s Fields in Manchester in August 1819 and were greeted by the yeomanry, who charged at them with sabres, killing 11 and wounding around four hundred. After the Peterloo massacre, however, politics seemed to settle down again into its accustomed unrepresentative groove. The ...

Soldier, Sailor, Poacher

E.S. Turner, 3 October 1985

Great Britons: 20th-Century Lives 
by Harold Oxbury.
Oxford, 371 pp., £14.95, September 1985, 0 19 211599 5
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The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes 
edited by Max Hastings.
Oxford, 514 pp., £9.50, October 1985, 0 19 214107 4
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The Long Affray: The Poaching Wars in Britain 
by Harry Hopkins.
Secker, 344 pp., £12.95, August 1985, 9780436201028
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... the first woman barrister, Ivy Williams. The first private to win a field-marshal’s baton, Sir William Robertson, is missing. Billy Smart, the circus proprietor, is in, though not Sir Alan Cobham, whose private air force introduced millions to flying, or Sir Donald Wolfit. Tom Webster, the sports cartoonist, gains his niche, but not ...

Brief Shining Moments

Christopher Hitchens: Donkey Business in the White House, 19 February 1998

Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 
by Taylor Branch.
Simon and Schuster, 746 pp., $30, February 1998, 0 684 80819 6
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‘One Hell of a Gamble’: Khrushchev, Castro and Kennedy, 1958-64 
by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali.
Murray, 416 pp., September 1997, 0 7195 5518 3
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The Dark Side of Camelot 
by Seymour Hersh.
HarperCollins, 497 pp., £8.99, February 1998, 9780006530770
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Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson , Bobby Kennedy and the Feud that Defined a Decade 
by Jeff Shesol.
Norton, 591 pp., £23.50, January 1998, 9780393040784
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The Year the Dream Died 
by Jules Witcover.
Warner, 512 pp., £25, June 1997, 0 446 51849 2
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Without Honor: The Impeachment of President Nixon and the Crimes of Camelot 
by Jerry Zeifman.
Thunder's Mouth, 262 pp., $24.95, November 1996, 9781560251286
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The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis 
edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow.
Howard, 740 pp., £23.50, September 1997, 0 674 17926 9
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Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam Papers: A Documentary Collection 
edited by David Barrett.
Texas A & M, 906 pp., $94, June 1997, 0 89096 741 5
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Taking Charge: The Johnson Whitehouse Tapes 1963-64 
edited by Michael Beschloss.
Simon and Schuster, 624 pp., £20, April 1998, 0 684 80407 7
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Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes 
edited by Stanley Kutler.
Free Press, 675 pp., $30, November 1997, 0 684 84127 4
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The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the Jupiters, 1957-63 
by Philip Nash.
North Carolina, 231 pp., £34.70, October 1997, 0 8078 4647 3
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... can one object, except aesthetically, to the silly term ‘Camelot’. Mrs Kennedy did indeed tell William Manchester, for a fawning profile that he wrote just after the assassination, that her late husband – who loathed the classical music soirées that she arranged at the White House for artists like Pablo Casals – had thoroughly enjoyed the ...

We want our Mars Bars!

Will Frears: Arsène Who?, 7 January 2021

My Life in Red and White 
by Arsène Wenger, translated by Daniel Hahn and Andrea Reece.
Weidenfeld, 352 pp., £25, October 2020, 978 1 4746 1824 3
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... to qualify for the World Cup. The most important managers in English football were Scottish. Manchester United were beginning their winning streak under Alex Ferguson (from Govan); his rivals were George Graham (Bargeddie) and Kenny Dalglish (Dalmarnock). Poor Eric Cantona had to do the whole moody Frenchman act by himself. But by 1996 football was ...

The Railway Hobby

Ian Jack, 7 January 2021

... children need it’) and Sunlight Soap.Ian Allan once had shops in Birmingham, Cardiff and Manchester as well as London; Glasgow had the Clyde Model Dockyard in the Argyll Arcade; Edinburgh still has Harburn Hobbies in Elm Row; and London, Manchester and Edinburgh all had branches of Bassett-Lowke, their windows ...

Spaced

Michael Neve, 3 September 1981

The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas de Quincey 
by Grevel Lindop.
Dent, 433 pp., £12, July 1981, 0 460 04358 7
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... most conventional kind of biographical description. De Quincey was born in 1785 at Greenhays, in Manchester, the fifth child of a successful merchant. The beginnings of his career are visible in his parental influences and their fate: his father died when Thomas was seven, leaving a gap in nature that de Quincey would spend many anxious years trying to ...

A Dog in the Fight

William Davies: Am I a fan?, 18 May 2023

A Fan’s Life: The Agony of Victory and the Thrill of Defeat 
by Paul Campos.
Chicago, 176 pp., £15, September 2022, 978 0 226 82348 5
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... Phil Daniels to be a guest vocalist on their follow-up, Parklife. Oasis’s very public love for Manchester City FC (then the hopeless, pre-oil-money rival to the all-conquering Manchester United) made clear their authenticity as real, which is to say long-suffering, football fans.The status of football in this festival of ...

Gissing may damage your health

Jane Miller, 7 March 1991

The Collected Letters of George Gissing. Vol. I: 1863-1880 
edited by Paul Mattheisen, Arthur Young and Pierre Coustillas.
Ohio, 334 pp., £47.50, September 1990, 0 8214 0955 7
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... any claim to being considered middle-class. At 15 Gissing won a scholarship to Owens College in Manchester, which was at that time still principally an institution for preparing students for entry to Oxford, Cambridge and London. Gissing was a star student until the moment in his third year when he was caught stealing money, and was expelled and then gaoled ...

Let’s go to Croydon

Jonathan Meades, 13 April 2023

Iconicon: A Journey around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain 
by John Grindrod.
Faber, 478 pp., £10.99, March, 978 0 571 34814 5
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... as his suburb.’ He was right – but only partly right, there are no absolutes here. What he and William Morris, George Gissing, Ebenezer Howard and a sprawl of anti-urbanists didn’t foresee was a time when that choice would, inconceivably, be in favour of the centripetal. Of course, in a faute de mieux-ish way, the city was always an unwanted lure, a ...

Punk-U-Like

Dave Haslam, 20 July 1995

The Black Album 
by Hanif Kureishi.
Faber, 230 pp., £14.99, March 1995, 0 571 15086 1
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The Faber Book of Pop 
edited by Hanif Kureishi and Jon Savage.
Faber, 813 pp., £16.99, May 1995, 0 571 16992 9
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... record labels like EMI, Decca and Pye had started to refine the art of hit-making, and Manchester had an import record shop bringing American rhythm and blues direct to Northern youth. By the mid-Sixties Jamaican sound systems in South London, Birmingham and the North of England were playing the bluebeat and ska records that marked the ripening of ...

Trains in Space

James Meek: The Great Train Robbery, 5 May 2016

The Railways: Nation, Network and People 
by Simon Bradley.
Profile, 645 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 1 84668 209 4
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... into conflict is illustrated by the saga of the Ordsall Chord, a sliver of new line being built in Manchester. It’s only 370 yards long and will cost £260,000 a yard – there’s a new bridge involved – but will, for the first time, link Manchester’s two main stations, Victoria and Piccadilly. This tiny bit of ...

Holy Terrors

Penelope Fitzgerald, 4 December 1986

‘Elizabeth’: The Author of ‘Elizabeth and her German Garden’ 
by Karen Usborne.
Bodley Head, 341 pp., £15, October 1986, 0 370 30887 5
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Alison Uttley: The Life of a Country Child 
by Denis Judd.
Joseph, 264 pp., £15.95, October 1986, 0 7181 2449 9
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Richmal Crompton: The Woman behind William 
by Mary Cadogan.
Allen and Unwin, 169 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 04 928054 6
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... mythmakers. Alison Uttley created Little Grey Rabbit (1929-1973), Richmal Crompton thought of Just William and kept him going for 48 years, May Annette Beauchamp invented herself as Elizabeth. All three of them were, and had to be, resilient women, gallant survivors, Elizabeth in particular. As May Beauchamp, she had, after all, a doubtful start. Her father ...

Dykes, Drongs, Sarns, Snickets

David Craig: Walking England, 20 December 2012

The English Lakes: A History 
by Ian Thompson.
Bloomsbury, 343 pp., £16.99, March 2012, 978 1 4088 0958 7
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The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot 
by Robert Macfarlane.
Hamish Hamilton, 432 pp., £20, June 2012, 978 0 241 14381 0
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... and Wythburn Waters to form one lake, Thirlmere, so that water could be piped ninety miles to Manchester – in the teeth of fulminations from Canon Rawnsley, Ruskin and Carlyle – is told in detail but from a managerial or public-speaker viewpoint. There is little about the workers who developed a whole culture of school and chapel while they were ...

Accidents

Paul Foot, 4 August 1988

Britain’s Nuclear Nightmare 
by James Cutler and Rob Edwards.
Sphere, 200 pp., £3.99, April 1988, 0 7221 2759 6
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... or an accident or a coincidence. But what if something rather like that happens again? What if William McRae, a radical Glasgow solicitor, and a prominent objector to the dumping of nuclear waste in the Galloway hills, is found shot dead in his car with the revolver some twenty yards away in a stream? Are we to assume, as the authorities in Scotland ...

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