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Despairing Radicals

Blair Worden, 25 June 1992

Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet 
by Katherine Duncan-Jones.
Hamish Hamilton, 350 pp., £20, September 1991, 0 241 12650 9
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Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis 
by Jonathan Scott.
Cambridge, 406 pp., £40, October 1991, 0 521 35291 6
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Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage 
by Alan Craig Houston.
Princeton, 335 pp., £22.50, November 1991, 0 691 07860 2
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Milton’s ‘History of Britain’: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution 
by Nicholas von Maltzahn.
Oxford, 244 pp., £32.50, November 1991, 0 19 812897 5
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... those failed politicians, Philip and Algernon. The biographies by Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jonathan Scott are explicitly concerned to get behind the legends. Philip has been mythologised as the model Renaissance and Protestant courtier, whose courage and heroism led to a tragic early death at the battle of Zutphen in 1586. Algernon has been ...

Lawful Resistance

Blair Worden, 24 November 1988

Algernon Sidney and the English Republic 1623-1677 
by Jonathan Scott.
Cambridge, 258 pp., £27.50, August 1988, 0 521 35290 8
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Seeds of Liberty: 1688 and the Shaping of Modern Britain 
by John Miller.
Souvenir, 128 pp., £15.95, July 1988, 0 285 62839 9
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Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 
by W.A. Speck.
Oxford, 267 pp., £17.50, July 1988, 9780198227687
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War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough 
by D.W. Jones.
Blackwell, 351 pp., £35, September 1988, 0 631 16069 8
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Robert Harley: Speaker, Secretary of State and Premier Minister 
by Brian Hill.
Yale, 259 pp., £25, June 1988, 0 300 04284 1
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A Kingdom without a King: The Journal of the Provisional Government in the Revolution of 1688 
by Robert Beddard.
Phaidon, 192 pp., £14.95, November 1988, 9780714825007
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... one of its chief glories. When Algernon Sidney, the 17th-century republican who is the subject of Jonathan Scott’s biographical study, sought to incite insurrection against Charles II, and invoked the rights of ‘the nobility and people’, he made plain his assumption that the people would naturally do what the nobility told them. The assumption may ...

Reduced to Ashes and Rubbage

Jessie Childs: Civil War Traumas, 3 January 2019

Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars 
edited by David Appleby and Andrew Hopper.
Manchester, 247 pp., £80, July 2018, 978 1 5261 2480 7
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... Historians have fought so savagely over its causes and consequences that in 2000 the academic Jonathan Scott observed that ‘the battlefields of the 17th century … are becoming increasingly hard to see under the great piles of bleached bones left by historians murdered by their colleagues.’ It might help if we knew where the original bodies were ...

Birth of a Náison

John Kerrigan, 5 June 1997

The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621-41 
edited by J.F. Merritt.
Cambridge, 293 pp., £35, March 1996, 0 521 56041 1
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The British Problem, c. 1534-1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago 
edited by Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill.
Macmillan, 334 pp., £13.50, June 1996, 0 333 59246 8
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The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture 
edited by Malcolm Smuts.
Cambridge, 289 pp., £35, September 1996, 9780521554398
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Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the 19th Century 
by Joep Leerssen.
Cork, 454 pp., £17.95, November 1996, 1 85918 112 0
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... to reinstate the English Revolution as a branch of the Thirty Years War is sometimes extravagant, Jonathan Scott has a point when he argues that the true context of the Stuart crisis was not British but European, in the sense that Continental interference, climaxing in the Dutch invasion in 1688-9, clinched a process of state-formation which the civil ...

Alien Heat

Jonathan Gil Harris: ‘The Island Princess’, 17 March 2016

The Island Princess 
by John Fletcher, edited by Clare McManus.
Arden, 338 pp., £16.99, December 2012, 978 1 904271 53 6
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... of travelling to India was that one’s body would be transformed by these hot elements. Edmund Scott’s An Exact Discourse of the … East Indians (1606) is an early exercise in ethnography written for the then fledgling East India Company. But as well as describing ‘Java Major, with the manners and fashions of the people’, ...

Blighted Plain

Jonathan Meades: Wiltshire’s Multitudes, 6 January 2022

The Buildings of England: Wiltshire 
by Julian Orbach, Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 828 pp., £45, June 2021, 978 0 300 25120 3
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... of floods). He didn’t get away with it. Sixty years ago, Kenneth Haworth removed George Gilbert Scott’s reredos and transparent iron screen from the chancel. He did get away with it. Pevsner wrote that it was ‘a crime against the tenets of the Victorian Society but the need of the 13th-century cathedral was indeed greater than theirs’. Orbach ...

Three feet on the ground

Marilyn Butler, 7 July 1983

William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision 
by Jonathan Wordsworth.
Oxford, 496 pp., £25, February 1983, 0 19 812097 4
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William Wordsworth: The Poetry of Grandeur and of Tenderness 
by David Pirie.
Methuen, 301 pp., £14.95, March 1982, 0 416 31300 0
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Benjamin the Waggoner 
by William Wordsworth, edited by Paul Betz.
Cornell/Harvester, 356 pp., £40, September 1981, 0 85527 513 8
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... One evening, declares Jonathan Wordsworth as he begins his new critical book, a poet happened to be walking along a road, when the peasant who was with him pointed out a striking sight:         ’Twas a horse, that stood Alone upon a little breast of ground With a clear silver moonlight sky behind. With one leg from the ground the creature stood, Insensible and still; breath, motion gone, Hairs, colour, all but shape and substance gone, Mane, ears, and tail, as lifeless as the trunk That had no stir of breath ...

How bad can it get?

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

... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell ...

Jade Goody Goes to Heaven

Laurence Scott: OK! and the uncanny, 26 March 2009

... beginning, middle and end – and as such it could be judged in advance as an aesthetic totality. Jonathan Strauss, in Subjects of Terror, argues that during the French Revolution, the guillotine was always late for a death that had already happened; the period between condemnation and the fall of the blade was a twilight of the walking dead. Jade’s final ...

My Wife

Jonathan Coe, 21 December 1989

Soho Square II 
edited by Ian Hamilton.
Bloomsbury, 287 pp., £12.95, November 1989, 0 7475 0506 3
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... couplets evoke Ogden Nash rather than Pope, and he could learn a thing or two about humour from Scott Bradfield, who at any rate (on the basis of his story ‘Sweet ladies, good night, good night’) knows how to manufacture a few Woody Allenish wisecracks. ‘I was audited by scientologists and believe it was the most profound, unforgettable experience of ...

Let’s go to Croydon

Jonathan Meades, 13 April 2023

Iconicon: A Journey around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain 
by John Grindrod.
Faber, 478 pp., £10.99, March, 978 0 571 34814 5
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... a new location, topic or domain is added to the theoretical competence of architecture.’Denise Scott Brown, overlooked co-author of the ham-fisted National Gallery extension (with her much praised husband, Robert Venturi), wrote that ‘architects lost their social concern: the architect as macho evolutionary was succeeded as the architect as dernier cri ...

Per Ardua

Paul Foot, 8 February 1996

In the Public Interest 
by Gerald James.
Little, Brown, 339 pp., £18.99, December 1995, 0 316 87719 0
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... weapons in the Ministry of Defence and was now a director of James’s own company, BMARC, as was Jonathan Aitken who had close links to the Saudi Royal Family, and Stefanus Adolphus Kock, a leading British intelligence agent and Midland Bank consultant whose business was arms sales. At the time none of this worried James very much. ‘You got the ...

Peripheries

Charles Rzepka, 21 March 1991

The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the 19th Century 
by Susan Manning.
Cambridge, 270 pp., £32.50, May 1990, 0 521 37237 2
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... examples, Manning traces the provincialising of Calvinist attitudes in the writings of David Hume, Jonathan Edwards, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Far from a mechanical application of rigid doctrinal categories, Manning’s thoughtful critique shows how contradictory attitudes can arise out of, and in reaction to, a common ...

Destroy the Miracle!

Lorna Scott Fox: Manuel Rivas, 19 May 2011

Books Burn Badly 
by Manuel Rivas, translated by Jonathan Dunne.
Vintage, 592 pp., £8.99, February 2011, 978 0 09 952033 7
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... Manuel Rivas writes in Galician, the least known of Spain’s official languages. Franco’s repression of the four regional languages ended up doing a great deal to stimulate their revival, and Rivas chooses to write in Galician even if not all his characters would have spoken it, even if it means his work’s literary life will be led mostly in translation ...

Carry up your Coffee boldly

Thomas Keymer: Jonathan Swift, 17 April 2014

Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World 
by Leo Damrosch.
Yale, 573 pp., £25, November 2013, 978 0 300 16499 2
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Parodies, Hoaxes, Mock Treatises: ‘Polite Conversation’, ‘Directions to Servants’ and Other Works 
by Jonathan Swift, edited by Valerie Rumbold.
Cambridge, 821 pp., £85, July 2013, 978 0 521 84326 3
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Journal to Stella: Letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, 1710-13 
by Jonathan Swift, edited by Abigail Williams.
Cambridge, 800 pp., £85, December 2013, 978 0 521 84166 5
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... wars on pointless subjects; straight-faced manuals of advice on behaving badly. For Walter Scott, his shrewdest 19th-century reader, Swift ‘possessed the faculty of transfusing his own soul into the body of anyone whom he selected’. His lifelong preference was to write under assumed identities – Isaac Bickerstaff or Lemuel Gulliver; the bumptious ...

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