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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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Magnifico

David Bromwich: This was Orson Welles, 3 June 2004

Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life 
by Peter Conrad.
Faber, 384 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 571 20978 5
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... voodoo Macbeth in Harlem. Over the next few years, the Mercury Players would mount productions of Julius Caesar, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, The Cradle Will Rock, Danton’s Death and Native Son. Together with the Group Theater, they were the nerve power of the New York stage in the 1930s and early 1940s. There is a line more traceable than is sometimes ...

Mothers

Jacqueline Rose, 19 June 2014

The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women 
by Elisabeth Badinter, translated by Adriana Hunter.
Picador, 224 pp., £10.99, June 2013, 978 1 250 03209 6
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Are You My Mother? 
by Alison Bechdel.
Jonathan Cape, 304 pp., £16.99, May 2012, 978 0 224 09352 1
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A Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories 
by Rachel Bowlby.
Oxford, 256 pp., £20, June 2013, 978 0 19 960794 5
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Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome 
by Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell.
Texas, 274 pp., £16.99, April 2013, 978 0 292 75434 8
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Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in 20th-Century England 
by Pat Thane and Tanya Evans.
Oxford, 240 pp., £24.99, August 2013, 978 0 19 968198 3
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I Don’t Know Why She Bothers: Guilt-Free Motherhood for Thoroughly Modern Womanhood 
by Daisy Waugh.
Weidenfeld, 240 pp., £12.99, July 2013, 978 0 297 86876 7
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... deemed the most desirable of women, was the mother of four children, one, she claimed, by Julius Caesar and the three youngest by Mark Antony, something most representations of Cleopatra conspire not to remember or talk about (no one I have mentioned this to had the faintest idea she was a mother). In fact the silence began with Octavian in a bid ...

Past, Present and Future

A.J. Ayer, 21 January 1982

Collected Philosophical Papers. Vol. I: From Parmenides to Wittgenstein 
by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Blackwell, 141 pp., £10, September 1981, 0 631 12922 7
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Collected Philosophical Papers. Vol. II: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind 
by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Blackwell, 239 pp., £15, September 1981, 0 631 12932 4
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Collected Philosophical Papers. Vol. III: Ethics, Religion and Politics 
by G.E.M. Anscombe.
Blackwell, 160 pp., £12, September 1981, 0 631 12942 1
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... perceptions, say of printed letters, to terminate with a belief in some historical event, such as Julius Caesar’s murder. It is the present impression that stops the regress: the historical event is the first link of the chain. The argument should be that eye-witnesses of Caesar’s murder passed the information on ...

My Darlings

Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007

... irritating. She would quote Shakespeare in a loud voice and make you listen. Sometimes she was Julius Caesar, sometimes Cassio, sometimes Iago and often Othello. You had to stand there and wait until she was finished. The speeches were often long and accompanied by many gestures. She knew these plays because she had seen them acted by Anew McMaster ...

Travels with My Mom

Terry Castle: In Santa Fe, 16 August 2007

... just before she died and thought she looked a bit like Gertrude Stein: stocky, impassive, the same Julius Caesar haircut – only dreamier, blue-eyed, more aerated somehow. Her emotional remoteness seemed absolute.Yet Martin’s story has always enthralled me. Born in rural Saskatchewan in 1912, she moved to New York in the 1940s to study art at ...

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