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A Shocking Story

Christopher Kelly: Julian the Apostate, 21 February 2019

The Last Pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate and the War against Christianity 
by H.C. Teitler.
Oxford, 271 pp., £22.99, April 2017, 978 0 19 062650 1
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... a widespread persecution of Christians actively or personally prosecuted by Julian. Certainly an unknown number of Christians died for their faith. Some were murdered by those who felt emboldened by the emperor’s lack of support for the Church. Some martyrs – like St Elophius – are probably later fictions. Some Christians were killed by other ...

A Pair of Yellow Gloves

Tim Parks: Stendhal’s ‘Italian Chronicles’, 19 October 2017

Italian Chronicles 
by Stendhal, translated by Raymond MacKenzie.
Minnesota, 344 pp., £20.99, May 2017, 978 1 5179 0011 3
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... Or again: ‘One might say that these Roman souls have enormous treasuries of energy, unknown to other women, which they spend on suffering.’ Certainly none of his characters is afflicted by boredom. Above all, there is an awareness of experience as a precarious collective creation to be savoured aesthetically, and a Nietzschean determination to ...

Shark-Shagger

Harry Mathews, 2 November 1995

‘Maldoror’ and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont 
translated by Alexis Lykiard.
Exact Change, 352 pp., £11.99, January 1995, 9781878972125
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... of affection ... The foamy wave their nuptial couch ... they rolled over and over towards the unknown depths of the briny abyss – and came together in a long, chaste, hideous coupling! ... At last I had found someone who resembled me! ... From now on I was no longer alone in life! ... She had the same ideas as I! ... I was facing my first love!‘A ...

Thee, Thou, Twixt

Mark Ford: Walter de la Mare, 24 March 2022

Reading Walter de la Mare 
edited by William Wootten.
Faber, 320 pp., £14.99, June 2021, 978 0 571 34713 1
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... best anthology I know of’. ‘I wish I were Mr Anon,’ de la Mare once remarked in a letter, ‘unknown, beloved, perennial, ubiquitous, in that very wide shady hat of his and dark dwelling eyes’. While the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear or Stevie Smith is always immediately identifiable, de la Mare’s rhymes often seem both to aim at and ...

Make ’em bleed

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘The War for Gloria’, 27 January 2022

The War for Gloria 
by Atticus Lish.
Knopf, 464 pp., $28, September 2021, 978 1 5247 3232 5
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... the course of coming events with brutal clarity: ‘No one knows exactly what causes ALS. An unknown chemical event triggers a chain reaction that destroys the motor system. The ALS patient will progressively lose function until she is almost completely paralysed. Death usually comes within three to five years, by way of respiratory failure.’Gloria and ...

I really mean like

Michael Wood: Auden’s Likes and Dislikes, 2 June 2011

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose Vol. IV, 1956-62 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 982 pp., £44.95, January 2011, 978 0 691 14755 0
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... and how Cavafy can be such an influence on him. ‘I can think of poems which, if Cavafy were unknown to me, I should have written quite differently or perhaps not written at all.’ All this without Greek. Auden doesn’t succeed in his explanation. He suggests it must be ‘a tone of voice, a personal speech’ that comes across, ‘a unique ...

Dreamland

Jonathan Lamb: 18th-century seafaring, 20 March 2003

Voyages of Delusion: The Search for the Northwest Passage in the Age of Reason 
by Glyn Williams.
HarperCollins, 467 pp., £8.99, March 2003, 0 00 653213 6
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Voyage to Desolation Island 
by Jean-Paul Kauffmann, translated by Patricia Clancy.
Harvill, 177 pp., £14.99, October 2001, 1 86046 926 4
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... Anglois’) instead of using his own words. Kerguelen, who had disobeyed orders by sailing into unknown seas with his mistress Louise Seguin (an erotic consolation suggested by Philibert Commerson, who had himself joined Bougainville’s round the world expedition with a young woman dressed as a man) and whose evasive treatment of his own discovery appears ...

Big Bucks, Big Bangs

Chalmers Johnson: US intelligence and the bomb, 20 July 2006

Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea 
by Jeffrey Richelson.
Norton, 702 pp., £22.99, April 2006, 0 393 05383 0
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... originally designed to be 100 megatons but Khrushchev ordered the yield halved because of fears of unknown effects and the likely massive fallout. Had a 100-megaton bomb been tested, the US’s KC-135 aircraft monitoring Novaya Zemlya would not have made it back; as it was, it returned with a scorched fuselage. The nuclear arms race led to massive research ...

Restless Daniel

John Mullan: Defoe, 20 July 2006

The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography 
by John Richetti.
Blackwell, 406 pp., £50, December 2005, 0 631 19529 7
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A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe 
by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens.
Pickering & Chatto, 277 pp., £60, January 2006, 1 85196 810 5
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... Island of Great Britain was written even later than his novels, he would probably be entirely unknown to the general reader. He would, however, still be familiar to scholars interested in early 18th-century Britain, and its political and religious controversies. He was notorious long before he wrote those great and unprecedented works of fiction near the ...

Looking at the Ceiling

T.J. Clark: A Savonarolan Bonfire, 22 September 2005

The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art 
by Malcolm Bull.
Allen Lane, 465 pp., £30, April 2005, 9780713992007
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... to live in harmony with the lie: And here again I touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends … What meaning would our entire being have if not this, that in us the will to Truth has come to consciousness of itself as a problem? … It is from the will to Truth’s becoming conscious of itself that from now on – there is no doubt about ...

Cricket’s Superpowers

David Runciman: Beyond the Ashes, 22 September 2005

... a winning team. This must in part stem from a sense of his own limitations, and a fear of the unknown. Yet despite all this – the complacency of the Australian team, the inflexibility of their leadership, the poor form of so many of their best players, the injuries to McGrath – the miracle of this series is that it has been so close. The excitement ...

Ultimate Choice

Malcolm Bull: Thoughts of Genocide, 9 February 2006

The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing 
by Michael Mann.
Cambridge, 580 pp., £17.99, January 2005, 0 521 53854 8
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Genocide in the Age of the Nation State. Vol. I: The Meaning of Genocide 
by Mark Levene.
Tauris, 266 pp., £24.50, August 2005, 1 85043 752 1
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Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Vol. II: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide 
by Mark Levene.
Tauris, 463 pp., £29.50, August 2005, 1 84511 057 9
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... citizenship are also those of sovereignty. Empires may be limitless, claiming lost territories and unknown numbers of unidentifiable subjects, but democracies have to be more careful. Genocides, it may be noted, are frequently, but not invariably, attacks on second-class or non-citizens. The Jews were deprived of German citizenship by the Nuremberg laws of ...

Paper or Plastic?

John Sutherland: Richard Powers, 10 August 2000

Gain 
by Richard Powers.
Heinemann, 355 pp., £15.99, March 2000, 0 434 00862 1
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... I haven’t checked, but he is probably the youngest novelist ever to win a fellowship. Generally unknown in 1989, and temperamentally reticent, he has lately divulged something of his personal background in interviews and in the autobiographical novel Galatea 2.2 (written by the 35-year-old Richard Powers, it has a 35-year-old novelist narrator-hero called ...

The Old, Bad Civilisation

Arnold Rattenbury: Second World War poetry, 4 October 2001

Selected Poems 
by Randall Swingler, edited by Andy Croft.
Trent, 113 pp., £7.99, October 2000, 1 84233 014 4
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British Writing of the Second World War 
by Mark Rawlinson.
Oxford, 256 pp., £35, June 2000, 0 19 818456 5
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... of a Palaeolithic Cave’, which cover his agony at having survived soldier-comrades, known and unknown, and his emergence, subsequently, into the light of a history which continued nonetheless. (He began this last following a visit with Nancy Cunard to the Lascaux wall-paintings, themselves then newly come to light.) The two books in effect describe the ...

Hidden Consequences

John Mullan: Byron, 6 November 2003

Byron: Life and Legend 
by Fiona MacCarthy.
Faber, 674 pp., £9.99, November 2003, 0 571 17997 5
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... were animated by a new soul, alive to wholly novel sensations and activated by feelings till then unknown’. Lady Caroline Lamb was, as MacCarthy notes, merely ‘the fan to end all fans’. Samuel Rogers gave her a proof copy of the poem. ‘I read it, and that was enough.’ But what was it in the poem that produced such rapture and that so completely made ...

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