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Wedded to the Absolute

Ferdinand Mount: Enoch Powell, 26 September 2019

Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain 
by Paul Corthorn.
Oxford, 233 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 0 19 874714 7
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... not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he couldn’t catch his glittering eye. There is only one passage in ...

Surplusage!

Elizabeth Prettejohn: Walter Pater, 6 February 2020

The Collected Works of Walter Pater, Vol. III: Imaginary Portraits 
edited by Lene Østermark-Johansen.
Oxford, 359 pp., £115, January 2019, 978 0 19 882343 8
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The Collected Works of Walter Pater, Vol. IV: Gaston de Latour 
edited by Gerald Monsman.
Oxford, 399 pp., £115, January 2019, 978 0 19 881616 4
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Walter Pater: Selected Essays 
edited by Alex Wong.
Carcanet, 445 pp., £18.99, September 2018, 978 1 78410 626 3
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... whole. The ten-volume Library Edition, first published in 1910 by Pater’s original publisher, Macmillan, had no critical apparatus. Oxford, where Pater spent virtually his entire career, might have been expected to fill the scholarly gap, but an attempt to bring out a critical edition foundered some time in the 1990s. Rumour attributes the failure to ...

Is this successful management?

R.W. Johnson, 20 April 1989

One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher 
by Hugo Young.
Macmillan, 570 pp., £16.95, April 1989, 0 333 34439 1
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... much. They’re so vulgar.’ The story illustrates the major problem of writing a biography about Margaret Thatcher: personally, she is neither nice nor interesting. She has immense energy, remarkable tenacity and stamina, and a good brain. But she has a shallow mind, little imagination and an immense, bullying ego. As she goes ramping on and on and on ...

Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat

David Runciman: Thatcher’s Rise, 6 June 2013

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography. Vol. I: Not for Turning 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 859 pp., £30, April 2013, 978 0 7139 9282 3
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... from the first volume of Charles Moore’s exhaustive and exhausting authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, which takes the story up to the Falklands War in 1982. The person on display here is not more intelligent than her rivals, or more principled. She chops and changes as much as they do. But she is a lot more relentless: if anything, she keeps ...

Doctor Feelgood

R.W. Johnson, 3 March 1988

Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home 
by Garry Wills.
Heinemann, 488 pp., £14.95, February 1988, 0 434 86623 7
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... than herself who was seeking consolation from a failed marriage to another blonde, also called Margaret. Lo, the grocer’s daughter became a millionairess. What Mrs Thatcher preaches is that we should all go out and make money by hard work: what she actually did herself was to marry money, give up paid work, hire others to work for her, and dedicate ...

Memories of Tagore

E.P. Thompson, 22 May 1986

... poems, entitled Gitanjali, with a prefatory essay by W.B. Yeats, had met with instant acclaim, and Macmillan were hurrying out successor volumes, including The Gardener. Scholars and critics continue to argue how far these ‘translations’ established his reputation or led to misrecognitions. Mary Lago’s Imperfect Encounter (1972) is one gate-of-entry into ...

Celestial Blue

Matthew Coady, 5 July 1984

Sources Close to the Prime Minister: Inside the Hidden World of the News Manipulators 
by Michael Cockerell and David Walker.
Macmillan, 255 pp., £9.95, June 1984, 0 333 34842 7
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... the astute politician can put the services of a well-nigh defenceless television service. Harold Macmillan, with his jaunty actor’s instinct, first perceived the possibilities. In turn, Mr Wilson portrayed the homely Northern pipeman preoccupied by larger concerns and James Callaghan faced the cameras with avuncular aplomb, but it is Mrs Thatcher who has ...

The Stamp of One Defect

David Edgar: Jeremy Thorpe, 30 July 2015

Jeremy Thorpe 
by Michael Bloch.
Little, Brown, 606 pp., £25, December 2014, 978 0 316 85685 0
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Closet Queens: Some 20th-Century British Politicians 
by Michael Bloch.
Little, Brown, 320 pp., £25, May 2015, 978 1 4087 0412 7
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... overfond of aristocratic titles and the ceremonial and sartorial trappings that went with them (Margaret Thatcher once berated him for his trademark Homburg). His most famous bon mot was that, in sacking a third of his cabinet on the Night of the Long Knives, Harold Macmillan demonstrated the truth that ‘greater love ...

Hooting

Edward Pearce, 22 October 1992

Beaverbrook 
by Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie.
Hutchinson, 589 pp., £20, October 1992, 0 09 173549 1
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... Journalists who worked for Beaverbrook speak of him with a combination of awe and affection. James Macmillan and John Ellison, who were so much of the Daily Express for so long, describe this slow, mocking North American voice coming over the phone with approbation or a grumble and always creating a frisson. Both have said to me, ‘You would have liked ...

God’s Endurance

Peter Clarke, 30 November 1995

Gladstone 
by Roy Jenkins.
Macmillan, 698 pp., £20, October 1995, 0 333 60216 1
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... similar figure who died in somewhat similar circumstances in 1952, would have frustrated Harold Macmillan in 1957’. What of Gladstone as Palmerston’s Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1860s? ‘It is reminiscent of the position in the Federal Republic of Germany a hundred years later when Ludwig Erhard’s economic management provided the essential ...

Diary

R.W. Johnson: Major Wins the Losership, 3 August 1995

... Office, hiring and firing the party chairman at will. When a major cabinet crisis erupted under Macmillan, with the Chancellor of the Exchequer resigning in flat disagreement over economic policy, what was chiefly remembered – and admired – was Macmillan’s patrician dismissal of it as ‘a little local ...

Even Uglier

Terry Eagleton: Music Hall, 20 December 2012

My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall 
by John Major.
Harper, 363 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 0 00 745013 8
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... sing his songs with what this book enigmatically describes as ‘teddy bear gestures’. Harold Macmillan could do a superb impersonation of the languid patrician he actually was, while Harold Wilson could imitate his true identity as a bluff, plain-speaking Yorkshireman to perfection. David Cameron once worked for a public relations agency and looks as ...

Two Men in a Boat

Ian Aitken, 15 August 1991

John Major: The Making of the Prime Minister 
by Bruce Anderson.
Fourth Estate, 324 pp., £16.99, June 1991, 9781872180540
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‘My Style of Government’: The Thatcher Years 
by Nicholas Ridley.
Hutchinson, 275 pp., £16.99, July 1991, 0 09 175051 2
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... His hero reached his conclusion all by himself, he insists. On the other hand, he didn’t tell Margaret about his conversion. If he had, says Anderson, ‘she would have lost all faith in his judgment of foreign affairs, and in her own favourable assessment of his merits.’ But when Mr Major returned to the Treasury as Chancellor, this time stepping over ...

Christopher Hitchens states a prosecution case

Christopher Hitchens, 25 October 1990

Crossman: The Pursuit of Power 
by Anthony Howard.
Cape, 361 pp., £15.95, October 1990, 0 224 02592 9
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... American resources and broader American minds, and getting himself posted to the Eisenhower-Macmillan joint command in North Africa. He also developed, according to Howard, a marked preference for the active-service officer over ‘the trained diplomats or elected politicians with whom he had been accustomed to deal in London’. After the war, though ...

Did my father do it?

C.H. Sisson, 20 October 1983

Elizabeth R.: A Biography 
by Elizabeth Longford.
Weidenfeld, 389 pp., £10.95, September 1983, 0 297 78285 1
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Aristocrats 
by Robert Lacey.
Hutchinson/BBC, 249 pp., £9.95, October 1983, 0 09 154290 1
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The Cult of the Prince Consort 
by Elizabeth Darby and Nicola Smith.
Yale, 120 pp., £10, October 1983, 0 300 03015 0
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... the way of business or horse-racing should distress nobody. She has no need to be impressed by ‘Margaret Drabble and other highbrows’ at informal Buckingham Palace luncheons. The monarch’s business is with practice and not with theory. It is we who have to get our ideas straight. The notion of a ‘royal biography’ is itself part of the kit of ...

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