Fathers Who Live Too Long

John Kerrigan: Shakespeare’s Property, 12 September 2013

Being and Having in Shakespeare 
by Katharine Eisaman Maus.
Oxford, 141 pp., £25, February 2013, 978 0 19 969800 4
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... in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius Caesar. To make Timon of Athens a play for today is to cut through a lot of differences between Jacobean and modern London. Again, this is defensible, given the extent to which the tragedy uses Lucian and Plutarch’s version of ancient Athens to ...

The Public Voice of Women

Mary Beard, 20 March 2014

... public life and speaking. In the course of the Roman civil wars that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar, Marcus Tullius Cicero – the most powerful public speaker and debater in the Roman world, ever – was lynched. The hit-squad that took him out triumphantly brought his head and hands to Rome, and pinned them up, for all to see, on the ...

Sabotage

Gavin Millar, 13 September 1990

Citizen Welles: A Biography of Orson Welles 
by Frank Brady.
Hodder, 655 pp., £18.95, January 1990, 0 340 51389 6
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If this was happiness: A Biography of Rita Hayworth 
by Barbara Leaming.
Weidenfeld, 312 pp., £14.95, September 1989, 0 297 79630 5
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Norma Shearer 
by Gavin Lambert.
Hodder, 381 pp., £17.95, August 1990, 0 340 52947 4
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Ava’s Men: The Private Life of Ava Gardner 
by Jane Ellen Wayne.
Robson, 268 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 86051 636 9
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Goldwyn: A Biography 
by Scott Berg.
Hamish Hamilton, 579 pp., £16.95, September 1989, 0 241 12832 3
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The Genius of the System: Hollywood Film-Making in the Studio Era 
by Thomas Schatz.
Simon and Schuster, 514 pp., £16.95, September 1989, 0 671 69708 0
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... enfant terrible in the theatre, with adaptations of Shakespeare, a negro Macbeth, a famous Mercury Julius Caesar and the banned The cradle will rock by Marc Blitzstein. The notorious radio production of The War of the Worlds and his epic compilation of Shakespeare’s History plays, Five Kings, convinced Hollywood that they wanted him as actor, or ...

Perfuming the Money Issue

James Wood: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’, 11 October 2012

Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece 
by Michael Gorra.
Norton, 385 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 0 87140 408 4
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... freedom. Henrietta finds it delightful, for instance, that the footling Bantling speaks of Julius Caesar as a ‘cheeky old boy’. James seeds Henrietta’s speech with tiny, revealing lapses – her habit of referring to the Ancien Régime as ‘the ancient régime’ nicely marks the gap between her and Bantling’s classical education. We know ...

Victory by Simile

Andrea Brady: Phillis Wheatley’s Evolution, 4 January 2024

The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys through American Slavery and Independence 
by David Waldstreicher.
Farrar, Straus, 480 pp., £24, March 2023, 978 0 8090 9824 8
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... fifteen, addressed to students at Harvard. Her audacity is striking: she cites Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, warns the students against sin and gives her own synopsis of their learning. The same ‘Powerfull hand’ of God that had ‘Brought me in Safety from the dark abode’ of Africa gave the students knowledge of ‘the ethereal Space/And ...

Genius in Its Pure State

Mark Ford, 22 May 1997

... dedications (to such as Mussolini – hailed in a copy of La Poussière de soleils as a ‘modern Julius Caesar’ – Proust, Colette, Robert Desnos, Pierre Loti ‘dont on ne doit prononcer le nom qu’à genoux’), self-promoting publicity handouts, details of his extravagant theatrical ventures, press clippings describing his roulotte, a luxury ...

Some girls want out

Hilary Mantel: Spectacular saintliness, 4 March 2004

The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint 
by Rudolph Bell and Cristina Mazzoni.
Chicago, 320 pp., £21, March 2003, 0 226 04196 4
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Saint Thérèse of Lisieux 
by Kathryn Harrison.
Weidenfeld, 160 pp., £14.99, November 2003, 0 297 84728 7
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The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty 
by Helen King.
Routledge, 196 pp., £50, September 2003, 0 415 22662 7
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A Wonderful Little Girl: The True Story of Sarah Jacob, the Welsh Fasting Girl 
by Siân Busby.
Short Books, 157 pp., £5.99, June 2004, 1 904095 70 4
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... away, and that suspicious sewing needle on the floor, the Passionists saw eloquent wounds. In Julius Caesar, Antony promises to ‘put a tongue in every wound of Caesar’. Father Germano undertook a similar duty for Gemma. Meanwhile, his advice to the people around her was to keep her busy – plenty of manual ...

Itemised

Fredric Jameson, 8 November 2018

My Struggle: Book 6. The End 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken and Don Bartlett.
Harvill Secker, 1153 pp., £25, August 2018, 978 1 84655 829 0
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... can put their utterances through quality control first.’‘I remember crying when I read about Julius Caesar. His death. I always did whenever I read biographies. Because of course they all die. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford. Benjamin Franklin. Marie Curie. Florence Nightingale. Winston Churchill. Louis Armstrong. Theodore Roosevelt.’‘You read ...

I just let him have his beer

Christopher Tayler: John Williams Made it Work, 19 December 2019

The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, ‘Stoner’ and the Writing Life 
by Charles Shields.
Texas, 305 pp., £23.99, October 2018, 978 1 4773 1736 5
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Nothing but the Night 
by John Williams.
NYRB, 144 pp., $14.95, February 2019, 978 1 68137 307 2
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... how many cars there would be in a Missouri college town in 1917, or what rhetorical strategies Julius Caesar might employ in a letter to his niece.Nothing but the Night (1948), Williams’s slim first novel, now reprinted, isn’t like that. Williams never showed any interest in resurrecting it, and it isn’t hard to see the reason. Originally ...

Bonkers about Boys

James Davidson: Alexander the Great, 1 November 2001

Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction 
edited by A.B. Bosworth and E.J. Baynham.
Oxford, 370 pp., £35, September 2000, 0 19 815287 6
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... of Alexander was now finally at an end. Suddenly, everyone was writing like Xenophon again, or Julius Caesar. Consequently, apart from the citations by literary critics and a remarkable late inscription erected by the ruler of Commagene at Nemrut Dagh in Turkey, which makes even Hegesias seem pedestrian, next to nothing of this singular literary ...

Versailles with Panthers

James Davidson: A tribute to the Persians, 10 July 2003

From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire 
by Pierre Briant, translated by Peter Daniels.
Eisenbrauns, 1196 pp., $79.50, January 2002, 1 57506 031 0
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Ancient Persia from 550 BC to 650 AD: reissue 
by Josef Wiesehöfer, translated by Azizeh Azodi.
Tauris, 332 pp., £35, April 2001, 1 85043 999 0
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... bowing and feasting, which leads from god-given Cyrus to our own anointed Queen, with Alexander, Julius Caesar and Byzantium acting as intermediaries. It could indeed be argued that the Persians laid the foundations for the Babylon of minorities and bickering diasporas – Greeks, Phoenicians, Syrians, Arabs, Jews – that somehow persisted in the ...

Ich dien

Michael Neill: Shakespeare and the Servants, 22 October 2009

Shakespeare, Love and Service 
by David Schalkwyk.
Cambridge, 317 pp., £50, June 2008, 978 0 521 88639 0
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... the actor-servant is never entirely free from the suspicion that is allowed to surface in Octavius Caesar’s sceptical reaction: ‘O noble weakness!’ Cleopatra’s mastery of ‘excellent dissembling’ may have reduced Pompey, Julius Caesar and Antony in turn to the condition of ‘soldier-servant’, but it is the ...

From Progress to Catastrophe

Perry Anderson: The Historical Novel, 28 July 2011

... Mann, Döblin, Broch, Brecht – in which Fascism was allegorised into the past, as the rise of Julius Caesar, mobs howling for Augustus, or the killers of the Catholic League, in a deliberately modernising spirit completely at variance with the classical conception of the historical novel. If this was an enclave with few consequences, two works of the ...

Our Island Story

Stefan Collini: The New DNB, 20 January 2005

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 
edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison.
Oxford, sixty volumes, £7,500, September 2004, 9780198614111
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... a Greek who wrote the first known account of ‘Britain’, and he is followed by Julius Caesar (100-44 BC, ‘politician, author and military commander’), one of the first to have thought it was time Britain joined the larger European community. While it is easy to see the merits of taking a fairly relaxed and inclusive view on the ...

Cradle Scissors

Nick Richardson: Away with the Fairies, 10 September 2026

Briggs’s Dictionary of Fairies: Banshees, Boggarts and Other Folklore Creatures 
by Katharine Briggs and Fee Greening.
Monoray, 219 pp., £18.99, September 2025, 978 1 80096 350 4
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Fairies: A History 
by Francis Young.
Polity, 340 pp., £25, March, 978 1 5095 6677 8
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... in the romance Huon of Bordeaux, where he is portrayed as an immortal hunchbacked dwarf, a son of Julius Caesar, who rules over an enchanted forest kingdom in the Middle East.Those summoning fairies may have believed themselves to be less at risk from retribution by the church than if they summoned angels or demons. But as the Reformation got underway ...