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The butler didn’t do it

Bee Wilson: The First Detectives, 19 June 2008

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher or the Murder at Road Hill House 
by Kate Summerscale.
Bloomsbury, 334 pp., £14.99, April 2008, 978 0 7475 8215 1
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... shown up by Whicher’s energy – briefed the press against him. Constance’s defence lawyer, Peter Edlin of Bristol, accused him of too much ‘professional eagerness in the pursuit of the criminal’. It was ‘improper’, Edlin said, to question Constance’s schoolfriends. Edlin succeeded in persuading the magistrates that the case had no ...

Diary

Colin Robinson: Publishing’s Demise, 26 February 2009

... happen here. But the prevailing breeziness in the UK seems to me ill-founded, and I’m not alone. Peter Olson, until recently the chairman and CEO of Random House, wrote in Publishers Weekly last month: ‘While 2008 ended on a disappointing and even discouraging note for many in the book industry, the outlook for the new year is even bleaker. One-time ...

Home Office Rules

William Davies, 3 November 2016

... after people. This is very different from the neoliberal state, whose job was characterised by Peter Mandelson, Bill Clinton and other Third Wayers in the 1990s as ‘steering not rowing’. The target political audience of the neoliberal politician was always the ‘hard-working family’. This imaginary unit had ‘aspiration’ and wanted to ‘get ...

Not Even a Might-Have Been

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Chips’s Adventures, 19 January 2023

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1024 pp., £35, March 2021, 978 1 78633 181 6
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1120 pp., £35, September 2021, 978 1 78633 182 3
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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1943-57 
edited by Simon Heffer.
Hutchinson, 1168 pp., £35, September 2022, 978 1 5291 5172 5
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... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...

The Suitcase: Part Three

Frances Stonor Saunders, 10 September 2020

... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...

Conrad and Prejudice

Craig Raine, 22 June 1989

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1967-87 
by Chinua Achebe.
Heinemann, 130 pp., £10.95, January 1988, 0 435 91000 0
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... Dr Abse’s analogy is false. There are clear differences of degree in anti-semitism. Reviewing Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Eliot (LRB, Vol. 6, No 20), Professor Ricks began: ‘Peter Ackroyd has written a benign life of T.S. Eliot. Given the malignity visited on Eliot, this is a good deal.’ I ...

Higher Man

John Sutherland, 22 May 1997

The Turner Diaries 
by ‘Andrew Macdonald’.
National Vauguard Books, 211 pp., $12.95, May 1978, 0 937944 02 5
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... Rage and Betrayal, the highly prejudicial ABC programme of 12 April 1996, in which the newscaster Peter Jennings called McVeigh a ‘monster’ and cited passages from Pierce’s book. Parallels between bomb-making in The Turner Diaries and by McVeigh were made much of in Joseph Hartzler’s opening address to the jury. The only material evidence produced by ...

The Great Scots Education Hoax

Rosalind Mitchison, 18 October 1984

The Companion to Gaelic Scotland 
edited by Derick Thomson.
Blackwell, 363 pp., £25, December 1983, 0 631 12502 7
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Experience and Enlightenment: Socialisation for Cultural Changes in 18th-Century Scotland 
by Charles Camic.
Edinburgh, 301 pp., £20, January 1984, 0 85224 483 5
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Knee Deep in Claret: A Celebration of Wine and Scotland 
by Billy Kay and Cailean Maclean.
Mainstream, 232 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 906391 45 8
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Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland: Schools and Universities 
by R.D. Anderson.
Oxford, 384 pp., £25, July 1983, 0 19 822696 9
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Scotland: The Real Divide 
edited by Gordon Brown and Robin Cook.
Mainstream, 251 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 906391 18 0
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Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment 
edited by Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff.
Cambridge, 371 pp., £35, November 1983, 0 521 23397 6
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... leaver. It may be difficult to decide on any one standard and stick to it. The editors are not keen on the line put forward by Peter Townshend, of 140 per cent of the supplementary benefit level, because it would leave over one and a half million people receiving less than half the average wage. An even stronger ...

Funny Mummy

E.S. Turner, 2 December 1982

The Penguin Stephen Leacock 
by Robertson Davies.
Penguin, 527 pp., £2.95, October 1981, 0 14 005890 7
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Jerome K. Jerome: A Critical Biography 
by Joseph Connolly.
Orbis, 208 pp., £7.95, August 1982, 0 85613 349 3
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Three Men in a Boat 
by Jerome K. Jerome, annotated and introduced by Christopher Matthew and Benny Green.
Joseph, 192 pp., £12.50, August 1982, 0 907516 08 4
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The Lost Stories of W.S. Gilbert 
edited by Peter Haining.
Robson, 255 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 0 86051 200 2
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... you not pack my dress shirt? PS: I have just found it’ that it is hard to see why Jerome was so keen they should ‘do business together’. He was no fool, however, and screwed up the publisher’s terms to his advantage. Most of Jerome’s papers were destroyed after his death, but there is no suggestion that they harboured dark secrets. In 1928, a year ...

Glasnost

John Barber, 29 October 1987

Socialism, Peace and Democracy: Writings, Speeches and Reports 
by Mikhail Gorbachev.
Zwan, 210 pp., £14.95, October 1987, 1 85305 011 3
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Gorbachev 
by Zhores Medvedev.
Blackwell, 314 pp., £5.95, May 1987, 0 631 15880 4
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The Sixth Continent: Russia and Mikhail Gorbachov 
by Mark Frankland.
Hamish Hamilton, 292 pp., £12.95, June 1987, 0 241 12122 1
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Shadows and Whispers: Power Politics inside the Kremlin from Brezhnev to Gorbachev 
by Dusko Doder.
Harrap, 349 pp., £12.95, July 1987, 0 245 54577 8
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Pravda: Inside the Soviet News Machine 
by Angus Roxburgh.
Gollancz, 285 pp., £16.95, May 1987, 0 575 03734 2
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Utopia in Power: A History of the USSR from 1917 to the Present 
by Michel Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich.
Hutchinson, 877 pp., £25, August 1987, 0 09 155620 1
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... likely to cause his downfall. At least this is less bizarre than the bracketing of Gorbachev with Peter the Great and Alexander II as ‘Russian rulers who seized their country by the scruff of the neck and hurled it onto a new level of change and growth’. Quite apart from the highly inappropriate characterisation of Alexander II, the analogy sheds little ...

Ghosts in the Land

Adam Shatz, 3 June 2021

... to bypass the Palestinian question through ‘normalisation’ between Israel and Arab autocrats keen to do business with the Jewish state (and to buy its surveillance technology to monitor their own dissidents). If Netanyahu imagined that by attacking Gaza he could inflict defeat on Hamas, and rescue his own precarious political career, he has ...

Three Weeks Wide

Rosemary Hill: A Psychohistory of France, 7 July 2022

France: An Adventure History 
by Graham Robb.
Picador, 527 pp., £25, March, 978 1 5290 0762 6
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... relies principally on intuition and imagination has its own drawbacks. Robb himself is sometimes keen on dates and facts, but only, in keeping with the Stukeleyesque tradition, when they suit. At its best, his overlay of the present onto the deep past is illuminating. Following Caesar’s Gallic campaign he finds a point in the streets of Hautmont that gives ...

Forget the Klingons

James Hamilton-Paterson: Is there anybody out there?, 6 March 2003

Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life 
by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart.
Ebury, 369 pp., £17.99, September 2002, 0 09 187927 2
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XTL: Extraterrestrial Life and How to Find It 
by Simon Goodwin and John Gribbin.
Weidenfeld, 191 pp., £12.99, August 2002, 1 84188 193 7
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... of Jack&Ian’s despised astrobiology. Unlike Jack&Ian, Simon Goodwin and John Gribbin are very keen on habitable zones, drawing two concentric spheres of habitability out from the Sun to mark the limits between which it might be worth looking for life. After reading Evolving the Alien this feels conservative, as well it might when one sees Goodwin and ...

Suppose the Archduke had ducked

Andrew Berry: Game theory and human evolution, 7 September 2000

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny 
by Robert Wright.
Little, Brown, 435 pp., £22.50, March 2000, 0 316 64485 4
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... viable direction of evolution was towards greater complexity. Even John Maynard Smith, usually as keen a Gould-basher as Wright, is with Gould on this: ‘Since the first living things were necessarily simple, it is not surprising that the most complex things alive today are more complex than their first progenitors.’ This is a default trend, not a ...

Medes and Persians

Paul Foot: The Government’s Favourite Accountants, 2 November 2000

... many millions of pounds of public money. Arthur Andersen replied that the Government had been so keen to get public money into Northern Ireland that it had not investigated De Lorean properly. Ministers grew increasingly irritated as Arthur Andersen’s lawyers got hold of Cabinet minutes and even a statement from Margaret Thatcher. Relations between the ...

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