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The perception of war changes, remarked the poet Robert Graves, when ‘your Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher, is as likely to be killed as a soldier in battle’. The perception of war changes, remarked the poet Robert Graves, when ‘your Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher, is as likely to be killed as a soldier in battle’.
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In the last few weeks, there has been much speculation that child benefit would be stopped when a child reaches 16. Today’s announcement suggests that this is not going to happen, although the Tories are refusing to rule it out. If there are to be changes to child benefit — and given the financial situation there need to be — then removing it from households with a higher rate taxpayer is a better move than stopping it at 16. Child benefit ending at 16 would send out a message that at 16 a child should start earning its way in the world. This would, for obvious reasons, have a negative impact on social mobility as it would likely lead to fewer children staying on at school post 16.
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Beware a mother scorned. George Osborne’s copping some stick on Mumsnet, social forum for the Latte-drinking classes, and with good reason. 'Hard-working families’, many of them far from rich, will feel abandoned by the party that ought to be theirs. IDS, Cameron and Osborne have taken a huge a political gamble, as James noted earlier, and they have also taken an enormous social risk. It is telling that the Centre for Social Justice, IDS’ think tank, are lukewarm about the proposal, describing it as ‘probably appropriate’ but calling for an alternative. Skipping through the comments on Mumsnet and you can see why.
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Well, it turns out that ‘Red Ed’ is really a social conservative. As both Pete and James say, his speech contained notable sallies into Cameroon territory – community and family. He didn’t follow Cameron’s trail to the metre, but fell into many of the same ditches. Two things struck me: 1). Ever the opportunist, Miliband sees that there is the kernel of a good idea at the root of the ‘Big Society’ and tried to exploit Cameron’s inability to present it. Miliband’s gave us the ‘Good Society’, a clear though sanctimonious slogan for community renewal. However, he, like Cameron, can’t define what he means by community. He talked about post offices, high streets and, of course, the local pub.
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Some of us are still startled that Wallace Stevens was 44 when he published Harmonium. So what to make of the fact that Roald Dahl was past the midpoint of his forties when he wrote his first children’s book in 1961, James and the Giant Peach? At the time, he was known as a dark little adult fabulist; macabre like Saki, twisty like O. Henry. A hint as to his view of children’s writing thereto is found in a letter anticipating the birth of his first child: ‘Parenthood is a great strain. I can see it all. Nursery books for Knopf. Once upon a time there was a dear little bunny . . .’ He did indeed end up writing nursery books for Knopf, but dear little bunnies were thin on the ground.
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Because Deborah Devonshire’s journalism has nearly always made me laugh, and because she seems like one of the jollier aunts in P. G. Wodehouse — an Aunt Dahlia, not an Aunt Agatha — I had expected her memoirs to provide chuckles on every page. Because Deborah Devonshire’s journalism has nearly always made me laugh, and because she seems like one of the jollier aunts in P. G. Wodehouse — an Aunt Dahlia, not an Aunt Agatha — I had expected her memoirs to provide chuckles on every page. In fact it is a sad book, taken all in all. Two of the more poignant passages, which will linger in my memory for a very long time, are about her dead babies, and about the alcoholism of her magnificent husband, the 11th Duke of Devonshire.
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Here is one of a new set of pictures of the Camerons posing with Florence Rose Endellion, who looks rather contented with life. It’s all very nice and there is no political capital in it. None at all. Honest.
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About 100 years ago two brothers settled in the same small English town and raised 12 children. Charles Greene was a scholar, destined for the Bar, who blundered into schoolmastering while eating his dinners at the Inner Temple and later became headmaster of Berkhamsted School. His younger brother, Edward (known as ‘Eppy’), declined to go to university and blundered into the coffee trade in Brazil. Having made a fortune, he returned to England and bought a large house in the same town. Shades of Greene is the story of those two families and of what happened to eight of the more interesting children. They included the novelist Graham Greene, whose life occupies the largest part of this account. Graham had three brothers.
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Conservatives have long been strong on family. They believe that families are the glue that sticks us together, and that traditional nuclear families therefore plays an important role in sticking the whole nation together. As a libertarian, I believe that people should live as they choose. Too many young people of my parents' and grandparents' generations were forced into marriages that were or became deeply unhappy – but divorce was thought scandalous. So people – particularly women, who rarely had independent means or income enough to escape – endured that misery. Many, too, were humiliated, or prosecuted, for conducting relationships that we would happily accept today.
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The birth of the Cameron’s baby daughter is, obviously, wonderful news for the Cameron family. All the political chatter around it is, frankly, irrelevant compared to the happiness that they must be feeling. But I do hope that David Cameron does take paternity leave. The Tories have talked a lot about making Britain the ‘most family friendly country in Europe’ and the PM taking paternity leave would be a good ‘nudge’ to employers and prospective fathers alike. One other timing issue worth noting is whether Cameron now goes to the UN summit in New York on the millennium development goals.
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In my many years as a judge for the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, I have been constantly surprised by the high proportion of books that deal with the subject of adoption. It is usually a melancholy story of young people who, as their 18th birthdays approach, become obsessed with the need to meet their natural parents, only eventually to find themselves being entertained by families with which they have nothing in common; of couples who suddenly discover that the children that they had come to regard as their own have now abruptly given precedence in their affections to total strangers; and of women who, having made the terrible sacrifice of surrendering a child, now only agree with extreme reluctance to have their past shame, guilt and anguish revived for them.
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The Norwegian, Per Petterson, was not well known until his 2003 novel, Out Stealing Horses, became a surprise international bestseller. It deserved the many prizes it garnered: it is a wonderful book, unsettling and minutely observed. Readers may recall that the closing scene of that novel has the young narrator walking with his mother: ‘We went on like that, arm in arm like a real couple . . . it was like dancing.’ An earlier book, To Siberia, is an imagined account of Petterson’s mother’s young life as a girl in wartime, moving from Danish Jutland to Norway. By contrast, I Curse the River of Time is about the end of a mother’s life. Discovering that she has cancer, the woman returns from Norway to a summer house in Denmark to reflect on her ebbing life.
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Charlotte Moore’s family have lived at Hancox on the Sussex Weald for well over a century. Charlotte Moore’s family have lived at Hancox on the Sussex Weald for well over a century. Hancox is a large, rambling house, and the Moores are a family who throw nothing away. Charlotte Moore still cooks on a 1934 Aga. Every drawer and every cupboard bulges with letters, diaries, receipts, even cheque book stubs. Moore has pieced together this chaotic archive to construct the history of her family. It is a complex but riveting story. Hancox was bought in the 1891 by a 23-year old spinster named Milicent Ludlow. Both her parents had died, leaving her with independent means.
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Knole is a country house the size of a small village in the Kent countryside. For the past 400 years it has been inhabited by 13 generations of a single family, the Sackvilles. The present Lord Sackville, Robert Sackville-West who lives with his family there, has written a scholarly book on Knole’s effect on the family and vice versa. It was Thomas Sackville who in the 1590s transformed a late medieval manor house into the Renaissance mansion that has become today’s tourist attraction. Like the Cecils, who were his colleagues in government, he made little distinction between enriching the crown and his own family, just as today’s MPs fiddled expenses to feather their own nests.
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Some years ago, Edmund de Waal inherited a remarkable collection of 264 netsuke from his great-uncle Iggie, whom he had got to know 20 years previously while studying pottery and Japanese in Tokyo. Each week the young de Waal visited his urbane, elderly relative and his friend, Jiro. He heard ancient family stories and was introduced to the hare and all the other miniature carvings in ivory or wood, each one ‘a small, tough explosion of exactitude’. When eventually he inherited the netsuke, he felt he had also been ‘handed a responsibility — to them and to the people who have owned them.
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Here are two novels about that most harrowing and haunting of subjects — children who go missing. Here are two novels about that most harrowing and haunting of subjects — children who go missing. Rachel Billington’s Missing Boy is Dan, a 13-year- old runaway. Dan’s disappearance marks the beginning of a nightmare for his parents, Eve and Max, plus aunt Martha. Has Dan run away or has he been kidnapped? Will he be found? The if, where and how are the questions that torment them. As Ronnie, the police liaison officer puts it, though families vary, when there’s a missing child the suffering is always the same, a pattern of ‘disbelief, anger, terror, despair, endurance.
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If only E. M. Forster hadn’t beaten him to it by exactly a century, Jonathan Coe could have coined the enigmatic phrase ‘only connect’ in this novel. If only E. M. Forster hadn’t beaten him to it by exactly a century, Jonathan Coe could have coined the enigmatic phrase ‘only connect’ in this novel. Maxwell Sim cannot connect at all. A depressed salesman approaching 50, he is adrift from his father, who moved to Australia 20 years ago, from his wife, an aspiring writer who left him to live in the Lake District, and from his daughter, who hardly speaks to him. He has 70 Facebook ‘friends’, but they are of course not real friends.
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The emperor Augustus was the original god/father. Julius Caesar was often referred to as ‘the divine Julius’, but his nephew (and adopted son) was the first Roman to have temples dedicated to him in his lifetime. If uncle Julius had died a natural death, or in some brave battle, the Roman upper class would never have suffered the decimation (and then some) which Caesar’s ‘son’ and heir visited upon it under the rubric of vengeful piety. His last and greatest enemies had had nothing to do with Caesar’s death. Mark Antony had been Julius’s number two and was actually Octavian’s brother-in-law; Cleopatra had been his uncle’s most passionate love.
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One’s past life is, usually, comfortably past. One’s past life is, usually, comfortably past. Susan Morrow’s first husband, Edward, is so firmly in her past that his second wife even sends her Christmas cards, signed ‘love’. Apart from that once-a-year token, she hasn’t heard from Edward in two decades. Their early marriage had been brief, and at cross-purposes: she had wanted a conventional bourgeois life, while he wanted to write — worse, he wanted to be a writer. Now, out of her past, comes a novel from Edward, with a note saying ‘Damn! but this book is good.’ But it’s still missing something, he fears, and he asks his long-ex-wife to read it, and tell him what.
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In 1931, a 23-year-old Englishman called Henry ‘Gino’ Watkins returned from an expedition to the white depths of the Greenlandic ice cap. In 1931, a 23-year-old Englishman called Henry ‘Gino’ Watkins returned from an expedition to the white depths of the Greenlandic ice cap. He was hailed as a precocious talent, even as a worthy successor to Fridtjof Nansen, who had recently died. When Watkins died the following year, during another expedition to Greenland, King George remarked on the tragedy of his death, and Stanley Baldwin wrote that ‘If he had lived he might have ranked . . . among the greatest of polar explorers’. Yet Watkins had only just begun to establish himself, and his reputation swiftly faded.
