Whig History

Sheldon Rothblatt, 21 January 1982

A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past 
by J.W. Burrow.
Cambridge, 308 pp., £19.50, October 1981, 0 521 24079 4
Show More
Show More
... but even more so because its sensational image may encourage false, 20th-century expectations. But John Burrow will not mind. He writes to burst joy’s bubble upon the tongue. A Liberal Descent, like the works of 19th-century historical scholarship that it discusses, is written out of a tradition that respects personality (which is not at all the same thing ...

Squalor

Frank Kermode, 3 February 1983

Gissing: A Life in Books 
by John Halperin.
Oxford, 426 pp., £18.50, September 1982, 0 19 812677 8
Show More
George Gissing: Critical Essays 
edited by Jean-Pierre Michaux.
Vision/Barnes and Noble, 214 pp., £11.95, March 1981, 0 85478 404 7
Show More
Show More
... without it the oeuvre would be no more than the interesting record of a pained but minor artist. John Halperin, of course, takes a different view, claiming that a dozen of the novels are ‘first-rate’. In order to reach that total he has to include The Paying Guest – indeed, he thinks it a ‘masterpiece’. As it is a short book, about thirty thousand ...

That Ol’ Thumb

Mike Jay: Hitchhiking, 23 June 2022

Driving with Strangers: What Hitchhiking Tells Us about Humanity 
by Jonathan Purkis.
Manchester, 301 pp., £20, January, 978 1 5261 6004 1
Show More
Show More
... in numbers, and most people weren’t carrying much in the way of valuables. In the words of Jacob Holdt, who spent five years thumbing around the poorest parts of the southern US in the 1970s, there’s nothing safer than being on the road with no money. Risk and danger​ were always gendered, of course. I recall plenty of women waiting on the slip ...

The Bloody Sixth

Joshua Brown: The Real Gangs of New York, 23 January 2003

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld 
by Herbert Asbury.
Arrow, 366 pp., £6.99, January 2003, 0 09 943674 4
Show More
Gangs of New York 
directed by Martin Scorsese.
December 2002
Show More
Show More
... to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century ...

So much for genes

Adrian Woolfson: The Century of the Gene by Evelyn Fox Keller, 8 March 2001

The Century of the Gene 
by Evelyn Fox Keller.
Harvard, 186 pp., £15.95, October 2000, 0 674 00372 1
Show More
Show More
... time’. Have we then reached a point when we need to invent a new vocabulary? In 1961, François Jacob and Jacques Monod concluded that ‘the genome contains not only a series of blue-prints, but a co-ordinated programme of protein synthesis and the means of controlling its execution.’ Recent advances in our understanding of developmental processes ...

Diary

Celia Paul: Lucian Freud’s Sitters, 12 September 2024

... was replaced by a Bacon-inspired freedom.Freud’s first wife was Kitty Garman, the daughter of Jacob Epstein. In Girl with Roses (1947-48), Kitty is shown sitting on an elegant wicker chair with a curved dark frame. The wood looks newly polished, though its perfection is broken by a few tufts of wicker poking through where the armrest meets the seat. She ...

Honourable Chains

Alice Hunt: Catherine of Braganza, 9 July 2026

Queen Catherine’s Court: Power and Rebellion in Restoration England 
by Sophie Shorland.
Atlantic, 332 pp., £11.45, June 2025, 978 1 83895 641 7
Show More
Later Stuart Queens, 1660-1735: Religion, Political Culture and Patronage 
edited by Eilish Gregory and Michael C. Questier.
Macmillan, 368 pp., £119.99, January 2025, 978 3 031 38815 6
Show More
The Material World of a Restoration Queen Consort: The Privy Purse Accounts of Catherine of Braganza 
edited by Maria Hayward.
Boydell and Brewer, 540 pp., £59.99, November 2024, 978 1 910653 14 2
Show More
Show More
... IV’s cousin), fled and bonfires were lit to welcome Portugal’s rightful king. João became John IV, known as ‘the Restorer’. Catherine was elevated to Infanta.Portugal’s newfound independence was vulnerable and the Braganzas needed allies. England recognised John IV and the toddler Catherine was suggested as a ...

Falling in love with Lucian

Colm Tóibín: Lucian Freud’s Outer Being, 10 October 2019

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth, 1922-68 
by William Feaver.
Bloomsbury, 680 pp., £35, September 2019, 978 1 4088 5093 0
Show More
Show More
... to study if they didn’t want to. There were no marks or prizes, and no punishments were imposed. John Betjeman described it as ‘a co-educational school to which modern authors and intellectuals send their sons’. Freud had no interest in academic subjects. Instead, he was fascinated by horses, and remained fascinated all of his life. One of his school ...

Why name a ship after a defeated race?

Thomas Laqueur: New Lives of the ‘Titanic’, 24 January 2013

The Wreck of the ‘Titan’ 
by Morgan Robertson.
Hesperus, 85 pp., £8, March 2012, 978 1 84391 359 7
Show More
Shadow of the ‘Titanic’ 
by Andrew Wilson.
Simon and Schuster, 392 pp., £8.99, March 2012, 978 1 84739 882 6
Show More
‘Titanic’ 100th Anniversary Edition: A Night Remembered 
by Stephanie Barczewski.
Continuum, 350 pp., £15.99, December 2011, 978 1 4411 6169 7
Show More
The Story of the Unsinkable ‘Titanic’: Day by Day Facsimile Reports 
by Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton.
Transatlantic, 127 pp., £16.99, November 2011, 978 1 907176 83 8
Show More
‘Titanic’ Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew 
by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Harper, 404 pp., £9.99, September 2012, 978 0 00 732166 7
Show More
Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage 
by Hugh Brewster.
Robson, 338 pp., £20, March 2012, 978 1 84954 179 4
Show More
‘Titanic’ Calling 
edited by Michael Hughes and Katherine Bosworth.
Bodleian, 163 pp., £14.99, April 2012, 978 1 85124 377 8
Show More
Show More
... eggs and hothouse grapes and peaches. There were pink roses and white daisies on the table. John Jacob Astor, the richest man in America, and his young new wife, Madeleine, were on their honeymoon. The 46-year-old mining magnate Ben Guggenheim was having dinner in the rococo dining room with his latest mistress, Ninette, a 24-year-old cabaret ...

Seductress Extraordinaire

Terry Castle: The vampiric Mercedes de Acosta, 24 June 2004

‘That Furious Lesbian’: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta 
by Robert Schanke.
Southern Illinois, 210 pp., £16.95, June 2004, 0 8093 2579 9
Show More
Women in Turmoil: Six Plays 
by Mercedes de Acosta, edited by Robert Schanke.
Southern Illinois, 252 pp., £26.95, June 2003, 0 8093 2509 8
Show More
Show More
... Astor in attendance on opening night. It closed after a few snaggle-toothed performances. In Jacob Slovak (1923), the one de Acosta play to have some success (John Gielgud appeared in a short-lived London production), Mercedes again depicted doomed heterosexual love. The heroine is a New England village girl who has a ...

Baffled at a Bookcase

Alan Bennett, 28 July 2011

... to practise my newly acquired skill. My parents were both readers and Dad took the periodical John Bull, the books they generally favoured literature of escape, tales of ordinary folk like themselves who had thrown it all up for a life of mild adventure, a smallholding on the Wolds, say, or an island sanctuary, with both of them fans of the naturalist ...

Divinely Ordained

Jackson Lears: God loves America, 19 May 2011

A World on Fire: An Epic History of Two Nations Divided 
by Amanda Foreman.
Penguin, 988 pp., £12.99, June 2011, 978 0 14 104058 5
Show More
Show More
... against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business,’ Trollope said of the anti-slavery MP John Bright, a theatrical orator who couldn’t be bothered with political detail. Celebrating the Civil War as a triumph of freedom over slavery is equally easy. A few decades ago, US historians tried to complicate this heroic narrative. Guided at times by ...

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan, 6 March 2025

... childhood in West London, Merchant Taylors’ School, history and modern languages at St John’s College, Oxford, then an MBA at Insead. In 1997 he and Ian Wace launched the hedge fund Marshall Wace, with $50 million of seed capital raised from friends, family and George Soros. It now manages $69 billion in assets. Like many hedge fund ...

The crematorium is a zoo

Joshua Cohen: H.G. Adler, 3 March 2016

The Wall 
by H.G. Adler, translated by Peter Filkins.
Modern Library, 672 pp., £12.99, September 2015, 978 0 8129 8315 9
Show More
Show More
... camp. Bar-Or said he had, though of course there was also ‘the well-known book by Dr John Adler’: ‘This is the outstanding book about Theresienstadt, and it is called Theresienstadt.’ judge halevi: Was he there? state prosecutor bar-or: He himself was in Theresienstadt. I simply hesitate to burden the court with material. This is an ...

Choke Point

Patrick Cockburn: In Dover, 7 November 2019

... out every day, along with the hordes of cars and caravans and passengers on foot transported on P&O ferries to and from Calais. The Port of Dover is the UK’s closest point of connection to the continent beyond, just 21 miles away: £122 billion in imports and exports pass through here every year. Big container ships, heading north or south, stand out ...