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The Great NBA Disaster

John Sutherland, 19 October 1995

... maiden. Reviewing the experiment in the early 1890s, the publishing establishment, under Frederick Macmillan, determined that free trade in books had not worked and that something radical must be done. The time was propitious. The 1890s saw the formation of the Booksellers’ Association, the Publishers Association, the Society of Authors, and the first ...

Tea with Medea

Simon Skinner: Richard Cobb, 19 July 2012

My Dear Hugh: Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and Others 
Frances Lincoln, 240 pp., £20, October 2011, 978 0 7112 3240 2Show More
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... and Julian Maclaren-Ross, and wrote with sufficient extra-historical purchase to make it into Margaret Drabble’s Oxford Companion to English Literature (to his immoderate delight). His memoirs were a Book at Bedtime. He received the Légion d’honneur, was an FBA and a CBE. His birthday was in the Times. Cobb’s professional distinction was remarkable ...

Coalition Monsters

Colin Kidd, 6 March 2014

In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition Government 
by Matthew D’Ancona.
Penguin, 414 pp., £25, October 2013, 978 0 670 91993 2
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... that sits oddly with her later reputation, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, operated, like Wilson, on the sidelines of the Yes campaign. The result, in a notionally divided country, was a resounding 67 per cent majority in favour of continued EEC membership. Whitelaw confessed in his memoirs that he had rather enjoyed ...

Staying Alive in the Ruins

Richard J. Evans: Plato to Nato, 22 April 2021

Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after World War Two 
by Paul Betts.
Profile, 536 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 1 78816 109 1
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... century, and for some time afterwards, who hadn’t received a classical education. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher, a scientist, was a rare exception; far more typical is Boris Johnson, who likes to quote great chunks of Ancient Greek from memory.In his original and engrossing book, the Oxford historian Paul Betts, an American who experienced ‘Western ...

Achieving Disunity

Corey Robin, 25 October 2012

Age of Fracture 
by Daniel Rodgers.
Harvard, 360 pp., £14.95, September 2012, 978 0 674 06436 2
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... churches, families and firms. As Rodgers points out, even Hayek’s most influential student, Margaret Thatcher, when she stated that ‘there is no such thing as society,’ added a rider regarding the irreducibly social and institutional nature of humanity: ‘There are individual men and women and there are families.’ In this, she was merely echoing ...

When Labour Was New

Malcolm Petrie: Labour’s First Government, 20 June 2024

The Men of 1924: Britain’s First Labour Government 
by Peter Clark.
Haus, 293 pp., £20, October 2023, 978 1 913368 81 4
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The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government 
by David Torrance.
Bloomsbury, 322 pp., £20, January, 978 1 3994 1143 1
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... Adamson, the secretary of state for Scotland, telling the senior Scottish law officer, Hugh Macmillan, a Conservative, that he would be ‘surprised to find what a Tory’ Adamson was. Torrance also notes that, while some Labour figures tried to construct a more progressive justification for Britain’s imperial role, in practice, notably in Iraq and ...

Superman Falls to Earth

Ferdinand Mount: Boris Johnson’s First Year, 2 July 2020

... a sliver of that loss from council tax, which the Tory government also decided to cap.*Ever since Margaret Thatcher’s capping of the domestic rates in 1984 (something I had a small but culpable hand in at the Number Ten Policy Unit) and the abolition of the Metropolitan Counties and the Greater London Council in 1986, Tory governments have shown a flinty ...

Schrödinger’s Tumour

Jenny Diski: Schrödinger’s Tumour, 6 November 2014

... to sleep again, anyway, not dozing, no forty winks, but deeply, fast, vastly asleep. And as the Macmillan Nurse booklets (every patient’s and, it seems, every doctor’s source of information) explain, this fatigue is not alleviated by rest. You wake up just as exhausted as you were when you went to sleep. In an aside, they say that the fatigue can last ...

How bad can it get?

LRB Contributors: On Johnson’s Britain, 15 August 2019

... announced post-referendum by Nigel Lawson from his home in France: to ‘finish the job that Margaret Thatcher started’.Daisy HildyardFarmers,​ who were divided by the Brexit vote, are reliant on the EU for regulation, migrant labour and handouts. Financial support payments are currently distributed using a system which has become notorious for its ...

North and South

Raphael Samuel, 22 June 1995

Coming Back Brockens: A Year in a Mining Village 
by Mark Hudson.
Cape, 320 pp., £16.99, October 1994, 0 224 04170 3
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... win the miners an astonishing breadth of public support during the national strike of 1972. Harold Macmillan, who as MP for Stockton in the Thirties had referred indignantly to the ‘Passchendaele’ of the South-West Durham coalfield, gave moving expression to these feelings, in his last public speech, when intervening on behalf of the miners during the ...

Hayek and His Overcoat

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1 October 1998

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations 
by David Landes.
Little, Brown, 650 pp., £20, April 1998, 0 316 90867 3
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The Commanding Heights 
by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw.
Simon and Schuster, 457 pp., £18.99, February 1998, 0 684 82975 4
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... by fear, courage, conviction, inertia, envy, vanity and panic, too. There has also been, as Harold Macmillan remarked when asked to say what had guided his premiership, the force of ‘events, dear boy, events’. It would be an impressive historian who, at this short distance in time, succeeded in mastering the complexity of all this. Yergin and Stanislaw ...

What happened to the Labour Party?

W.G. Runciman: The difference between then and now, 22 June 2006

... at any rate appear to be, so many more of them than there were. Some may attribute the change to Margaret Thatcher, with her outspoken determination to roll back the encroaching state, her vehement belief in free, competitive markets, her implacable hostility to the trade unions, and her famous remark that ‘there is no such thing as society.’ But as ...

Where will we live?

James Meek: The Housing Disaster, 9 January 2014

... years is reaching the point of crisis. The party in power, whose late 20th-century figurehead, Margaret Thatcher, did so much to create the problem, is responding by separating off the economically least powerful and squeezing them into the smallest, meanest, most insecure possible living space. In effect, if not in explicit intention, it is a ...

Is the Soviet Union over?

John Lloyd, 27 September 1990

Moving the Mountain: Inside the Perestroika Revolution 
by Abel Aganbegyan, translated by Helen Szamuely.
Bantam, 248 pp., £14.95, October 1989, 0 593 01818 4
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Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform: The Soviet Reform Process 
by Anders Aslund.
Pinter, 219 pp., £35, May 1989, 0 86187 008 5
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... economy which not so long ago was envied or feared at least for some of its achievements. Harold Macmillan has a passage in his memoirs recalling the worries he expressed to President Kennedy over the imminent failure of the capitalist system, beaten not just by Yuri Gagarin in Soyuz One, but by the guarantee being offered to the Soviet people of a higher ...

Dazed and Confused

Paul Laity: Are the English human?, 28 November 2002

Patriots: National Identity in Britain 1940-2000 
by Richard Weight.
Macmillan, 866 pp., £25, May 2002, 0 333 73462 9
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Pariah: Misfortunes of the British Kingdom 
by Tom Nairn.
Verso, 176 pp., £13, September 2002, 1 85984 657 2
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Identity of England 
by Robert Colls.
Oxford, 422 pp., £25, October 2002, 0 19 924519 3
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Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, October 2002, 1 85619 716 6
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... Government discouraged and resisted black immigration (though it didn’t suggest, as Harold Macmillan had during the war, that black Britons should be issued with Union Jack badges). After 1945 most recruitment drives were directed at Europeans; ministers even briefly considered moving the Windrush passengers on to East Kenya, to work on the Groundnuts ...

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