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The world we have lost

The Whig interpretation of history, a relentlessly progressive account of the emergence of our parliamentary system, has long been out of fashion when it comes to politics. But histories of social policy are all too often complacent accounts of ‘the development’ or ‘evolution’ of state provision. This excellent book breaks with that tradition by reminding

Patriot and appeaser

Since appeasement is in the air again, this is a timely book. It tells the story of how Lord Londonderry, secretary of state for air in the National government of 1931-5, sought to avert what would be the second world war by befriending the Nazi leaders. Londonderry, 7th Marquis and directly descended from Lord Castlereagh

Saved by comic relief

There is one glorious surrealistic sentence on page 6. Describing Clarissa Eden’s early adventures in magazine journalism, the authors write, ‘Her first published article, in 1944, was a dispatch from Berlin for Horizon.’ Eh? Only it gets stranger: ‘…reporting on what remained of theatre and cultured life in the devastated city’. I knew things were

Morality and mortality

At the start of this sixth and final volume of Ferdinand Mount’s novel sequence A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, the narrator Aldous (Gus) Cotton is about to take premature retirement from the Civil Service, having found, to his chagrin, that he has been passed over for the promotion that he thought to be his due.

Doctors’ dilemma unsolved

This is a brilliant tract against the times. Tallis records how the traditional vocation in medicine is ceasing to be renewed. What he says has a wider application to all professions and, indeed, to work generally. How can Britain sit casually by as a profession which, under oath, brings a lifetime of learning and dedication

An exercise with jerks

Reviewers coming to this book, the second volume of Roddy Doyle’s The Last Roundup trilogy without having read the first, must be a frustration for the author. I had a struggle connecting with Doyle’s character, Henry Smart. The first volume might have endeared him to me and set him in context — it followed his

A prodigy of a politician

William Pitt the Younger always was the politician’s politician: an MP at 21, prime minister at 24 and dead at 46, with only two years out of office in between. Pitt dominated British politics for his entire adult life. He lived for the House of Commons and for the daily grind of government service. He

Descending and condescending

When asked to name a British prime minister other than the present one or Mrs Thatcher, my young adult patients are inclined to reply, ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t born then.’ Such an answer would not surprise Frank Furedi, the author of this attack on cultural populism; it is the natural consequence of an educational

Somewhat concerning food

Alice Thomas Ellis is not a person to be trusted — in the kitchen. I am surprised to find this. I have always admired her elsewhere, in her novels for instance. But there is no doubt that when it comes to food she is simply left-wing. She makes steak and kidney pudding without the kidney.

From Africa back to Scotland

The publishing world is full of romantic stories, not every one with a happy ending. (I was brought up on the tale, possibly apocryphal, that Evelyn Waugh’s brother-in-law, Edward Grant, kept a framed copy of his letter turning down Gone with the Wind in his office.) One truly happy story, however, so far without an

A time of zero tolerance

Born in 1956, Ronan Bennett is a Belfast writer of great gifts. His last novel, The Catastrophist, was a tense parable of conscience set in the Belgian Congo at the time of independence in 1960. Havoc, his fourth book, unfolds in 1630s England in the years prior to the Civil War. While Graham Greene is

Julie Burchill

Sob sisters and scolders

Without meaning to come the Big I-Am, I’ve got issues with the whole premise of this book, which probably stem from my very healthy level of self-esteem. I mean, once we’re out of our teens (when admittedly I spent rather too many nights pining after a dreamy 19-year-old Oxbridge undergraduate called Max, of all the

The fine art of appreciation

A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen by Richard Jenkyns OUP, £12.99, pp. 200, ISBN 0199276617 ‘Each of us has a private Austen’ is the first line of Karen Joy Fowler’s readable and ingenious novel. This sentence, and her title, encapsulate her theme. The West Coast book club in question consists of

Professional to his fingertips

Perhaps not uniquely, I was discouraged from reading V. S. Pritchett by nothing more than the old Penguin cover of his 1982 Collected Stories. It was simply a photograph of the author, wearing a suit, holding a pipe, with an expression of mild elderly benevolence. To callow youth, that was not what genius was supposed

Birds in a gilded cage

George III freely acknowledged he was in no hurry to see his daughters married: ‘I am happy in their company, and do not in the least want a separation.’ As a consequence, three of them (Augusta, Sophia and Amelia) never married; the others did so late: Charlotte at 31, Mary at 40 and Elizabeth at

The pilgrims’ progress

A hundred million years ago, our ancestors were nocturnal mouse-like creatures, living in the shadows of the dinosaurs. Five hundred million years ago, our ancestors were fish, living near (or even in) the sea bottom. Two thousand million years ago, they were single-celled microbes, floating in the sea. Almost 4,000 million years ago, they were

Losing your heart — or your nose

If a car is travelling behind a tractor for five miles on a narrow road, and at last the tractor turns off down a side street, often you will see that car, from its driver’s pent-up frustration, suddenly shoot forward, trashing the speed limit. Something similar happened to writing about sex after the Lady Chatterley

It really was a knockout

On 25 June 2003, the day on which Alastair Campbell declar- ed all-out war against the BBC in his evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC), the BBC’s Director-General, Greg Dyke, was engaged in country dancing in Surrey. He and other top BBC executives were attending one of their regular strategy conferences