Elsinore’s Star Bullshitter

Michael Dobson, 13 September 2018

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness 
by Rhodri Lewis.
Princeton, 365 pp., £30, November 2017, 978 0 691 16684 1
Show More
Show More
... actors, including a recommendation that their star player should go to London and try to rival Richard Burbage’s performance as Hamlet) but other countries. There are records of a performance by ‘Englische Comoedien’ in Dresden as early as 1626, possibly of the practicably short first quarto text that lies behind the oldest surviving translated ...

Diary

Iain Sinclair: The Plutocrat Tour, 7 July 2022

... their crowning glory: a marina fit for Abramovich and his cohorts. Or, more modestly, for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on their pleasure craft, the Kalizma. Sadly, that vision was premature. The proposed harbour for the Have-Yachts would have to wait. And move upstream.My somewhat distressed 1993 map had a ...

Physicke from Another Body

Michael Neill: Cannibal Tinctures, 1 December 2011

Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture 
by Louise Noble.
Palgrave Macmillan, 241 pp., £52, March 2011, 978 0 230 11027 4
Show More
Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians 
by Richard Sugg.
Routledge, 374 pp., £24.99, June 2011, 978 0 415 67417 1
Show More
Show More
... is to the investigation of such demonic remedies that the groundbreaking work of Louise Noble and Richard Sugg is devoted. The belief that a wide range of maladies could be cured by the consumption of human remains – principally in the form of so-called ‘mummy’ – persisted in Europe for at least six centuries. Although the administration of such ...

A Rumbling of Things Unknown

Jacqueline Rose: Marilyn Monroe, 26 April 2012

... I am of course referring to her face, on which, unlike Dietrich, Garbo or indeed Elizabeth Taylor (whom she saw as a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. There is no flattening wash over this face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly couldn’t stand her, had to concede that every time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lights up ...

Two Pins and a Lollipop

Bee Wilson: Judy Garland’s Greatness, 25 December 2025

Judy Garland: The Voice of MGM 
by Scott Brogan.
Rowman & Littlefield, 404 pp., £50, August 2025, 978 1 4930 8654 2
Show More
Show More
... The recording comes from a film called Broadway Melody of 1938 in which Garland stars with Robert Taylor and Eleanor Powell. It was her first feature-length film for MGM. She had performed the song earlier that year at Gable’s on-set birthday celebrations: he was the studio’s biggest star. Garland made a surprise appearance at the party, posing as a ...

Lost in the Void

Jonathan Littell: In Ciudad Juárez, 7 June 2012

... was invented, here that Hollywood stars used to come, Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller or Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, for a quickie divorce followed by a huge party, or a discreet abortion. ‘Juárez’s bad reputation goes back thirty years,’ says Arnulfo Gómez, the owner of the Gato Félix, on the Avenida ...

Whose Justice?

Stephen Sedley, 23 September 1993

The Report of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice 
HMSO, 261 pp., £21.50, July 1993, 0 10 122632 2Show More
Show More
... else would listen to. At its worst the press can be a source of prejudice that, as the case of the Taylor sisters powerfully demonstrates, actually promotes miscarriages of justice. Between these poles its activity, both up-market and down-market, is often debatable. For example, in my view it now has a good deal to answer for in relation to the 1991 Criminal ...

Shakespeares

David Norbrook, 18 July 1985

Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism 
edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield.
Manchester, 244 pp., £19.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1752 1
Show More
Alternative Shakespeares 
edited by John Drakakis.
Methuen, 252 pp., £10.50, July 1985, 0 416 36850 6
Show More
Shakespeare and Others 
by S. Schoenbaum.
Scolar, 285 pp., £25, May 1985, 0 85967 691 9
Show More
Illustrations of the English Stage 1580-1642 
by R.A. Foakes.
Scolar, 180 pp., £35, February 1985, 0 85967 684 6
Show More
Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ 
by E.A.J. Honigmann.
Manchester, 172 pp., £17.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1743 2
Show More
Show More
... Shakespeare and his contemporaries which deserve this more permanent format; and in the essay on Richard II he does present a Shakespeare with a sharper political and historical consciousness than the more genial stereotype allows. Recent scholarship has in fact been questioning the traditional image of Shakespeare in a number of ways. In his Shakespeare’s ...

Spaced

Michael Neve, 3 September 1981

The Opium-Eater: A Life of Thomas de Quincey 
by Grevel Lindop.
Dent, 433 pp., £12, July 1981, 0 460 04358 7
Show More
Show More
... opium routinely, to sedate themselves and their children. For the more exotic figure of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, addiction started while he was at the great university standing on the edge of the sad East Anglian plain. The Trojan horse in Coleridge’s case was his teeth, which ached relentlessly. A certain sympathy must extend to him, since dentistry was ...

A Misreading of the Law

Conor Gearty: Why didn’t Campbell sue?, 19 February 2004

Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly CMG 
by Lord Hutton.
Stationery Office, 740 pp., £70, January 2004, 0 10 292715 4
Show More
Show More
... malevolent recluses. Things began to change with the arrival of a new lord chief justice, Lord Taylor of Gosforth, and the appointment to the bench of intelligent and progressive voices like those of Harry Woolf, Thomas Bingham and Stephen Sedley. By the mid-1990s, the senior judiciary were conducting a spirited campaign of defiance against successive Tory ...

Higher Ordinariness

Jonathan Meades: Poor Surrey, 23 May 2024

Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39 
by Gavin Stamp.
Profile, 568 pp., £40, March, 978 1 80081 739 5
Show More
The Buildings of England: Surrey 
by Charles O’Brien, Ian Nairn and Bridget Cherry.
Yale, 854 pp., £60, November 2022, 978 0 300 23478 7
Show More
Show More
... slimeRise and deride this sepulchre of crime.When war is claimed as a mother of invention (A.J.P. Taylor, Paul Virilio), that invention is hardly intended to signify the memorials that constitute a quintessential building type of the 1920s, albeit not much of one. Although medals were fashioned of different metals according to the status of the award, men ...
... written for medical journals in a subsequent attempt to figure out her condition. In 1978, Richard Altick put together the pieces of her story in The Shows of London. Until very recently (as far as I could tell), Altick was the only person outside the medical profession who had written about her this century. Now Jan Bondeson, whose paper on her ...

Another Country

Adam Shatz: Visions of America, 5 February 2026

... of lynchers’, turned to it for inspiration, drawing on the work of Black writers such as Richard Wright and Chester Himes. America is a ‘battlefield’, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging with itself, in which the stakes are beyond measure.’Since Beauvoir made this observation in 1947, at ...

No Theatricks

Ferdinand Mount: Burke, 21 August 2014

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: from the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence 
by David Bromwich.
Harvard, 500 pp., £25, May 2014, 978 0 674 72970 4
Show More
Moral Imagination: Essays 
by David Bromwich.
Princeton, 350 pp., £19.95, March 2014, 978 0 691 16141 9
Show More
Show More
... in seducing language, the illusions of love and the abominable trade of war’. Abraham’s son Richard became Burke’s best friend (Burke wrote sixty letters to him over five years), and the Quaker and Huguenot connections, both in Dublin and in Co. Cork (where Burke’s mother originally came from), are not to be underestimated. As for his Catholic ...

On the Salieri Express

John Sutherland, 24 September 1992

Doctor Criminale 
by Malcolm Bradbury.
Secker, 343 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 436 20115 1
Show More
The Promise of Light 
by Paul Watkins.
Faber, 217 pp., £14.99, September 1992, 0 571 16715 2
Show More
The Absolution Game 
by Paul Sayer.
Constable, 204 pp., £13.99, June 1992, 0 09 471460 6
Show More
The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman 
by Louis de Bernières.
Secker, 388 pp., £14.99, August 1992, 0 436 20114 3
Show More
Written on the Body 
by Jeanette Winterson.
Cape, 190 pp., £13.99, September 1992, 0 224 03587 8
Show More
Show More
... satire into his fiction. Some of the attributions, such as the folkloric ‘Howard Kirk is Laurie Taylor,’ are discredited: Bradbury himself wittily derides this once ubiquitously offered key to The History Man in his collection of squibs, Unsent Letters. But other identifications are not as easily laughed off. Anyone who has read Eating people is wrong and ...