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This Guilty Land

Eric Foner: Every Possible Lincoln, 17 December 2020

Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times 
by David S. Reynolds.
Penguin, 1066 pp., £33.69, September, 978 1 59420 604 7
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The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the Struggle for American Freedom 
by H.W. Brands.
Doubleday, 445 pp., £24, October, 978 0 385 54400 9
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... Abraham Lincoln​ , memorialised as a child of the frontier, self-made man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician driven solely by ambition, the tyrant who ran roughshod over the Constitution, and the indecisive leader buffeted by events he could not control ...

Each of us is a snowball

Susannah Clapp: Squares are best, 22 October 2020

Square Haunting 
by Francesca Wade.
Faber, 422 pp., £20, January, 978 0 571 33065 2
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... maiden name. Lorna Garman nearly supplemented the many romances in the book: when her lover Laurie Lee went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, she sent him pound notes soaked in Chanel No. 5. Nancy Morris, who wore the cast-off suits of the Soho restaurateur Marcel Boulestin, would have brought a dash of something altogether different. ‘She is absolutely ...

Static Opulence

Leah Broad: Delius’s Worldliness, 19 January 2023

The Music of Frederick Delius: Style, Form and Ethos 
by Jeremy Dibble.
Boydell, 564 pp., £40, June 2021, 978 1 78327 577 9
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... the years, the story of his singularity was repeated so often that in 2014 his biographers Martin Lee-Browne and Paul Guinery could still claim that ‘Delius would spend his life composing music that bore no relationship to anything, good or bad, that had been written before.’Delius has been perceived this way in part because he wrote music that was not ...

Barely under Control

Jenny Turner: Who’s in charge?, 7 May 2015

... and what Clarke called his ‘golden nugget’, nasty WhatsApp chitchat about gays and women and Lee Rigby and postings of an image of a toilet roll imprinted with the Israeli flag. But even Clarke concluded that none of this amounted to ‘terrorism, radicalisation or violent extremism’. The Education Committee’s inquiry found another incident it deemed ...

Oh, you clever people!

Tom Crewe: The Unrelenting Bensons, 20 April 2017

A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain 
by Simon Goldhill.
Chicago, 337 pp., £24.50, October 2016, 978 0 226 39378 0
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... product of King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian character – Edward was to perpetuate in his own career. When he was still a ...

Rise and Fall of Radio Features

Marilyn Butler, 7 August 1980

Louis MacNeice in the BBC 
by Barbara Coulton.
Faber, 215 pp., £12.50, May 1980, 0 571 11537 3
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Best Radio Plays of 1979 
Eyre Methuen/BBC, 192 pp., £6.95, June 1980, 0 413 47130 6Show More
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... grievous blow when his first wife, Mary Ezra, ran away in 1935, leaving him at 28 with their child. Thereafter, even though he remarried during the war, he tended to appear more completely at home in a bar: he was the most compulsively gregarious of loners. Though he knew Auden by the mid-Thirties, and had known Spender since Oxford and Anthony Blunt ...

A Letter to Wystan Auden, from Iceland

Francis Spufford, 21 February 1991

... strange ground of most creation. You always thought that kindly diagnosis Begins by looking at the child’s neurosis, So I hope you’ll pay attention. I was born     In Cambridge; both my ma and pa were dons; But they moved where bricks were redder and the lawn     I first recall stretched down toward two swans     In Keele University, the origo ...

Possible Enemies

M.A. Screech, 16 June 1983

Collected Works of Erasmus. Vol. V: The Correspondence of Erasmus 
edited by Peter Bietenholz, translated by R.A.B Mynors.
Toronto, 462 pp., £68.25, December 1979, 0 8020 5429 3
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Collected Works of Erasmus. Vol. XXXI: Adages Ii 1 to Iv 100 
edited by R.A.B. Mynors, translated by Margaret Mann Phillips.
Toronto, 420 pp., £51.80, December 1982, 0 8020 2373 8
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Le Disciple de Pantagruel 
edited by Guy Demerson and Christiane Lauvergnat-Gagnière.
Nizet, 98 pp.
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... He disliked drinking with the college fellows, though, and was running into trouble with Edward Lee, who, despite his friendship with More, was becoming one of Erasmus’s harshest critics. In 1518 Erasmus left Louvain for Basle to see his revised New Testament through the press. Illnesses, quarrels, deaths, friendships ... life went on as usual. Names ...

Diary

Mary Hawthorne: Remembering Joseph Mitchell, 1 August 1996

... them. The waterfront becomes a place of longing, and Mitchell writes of it as hauntingly as John Lee Hooker sang of it. In 1938 Mitchell was hired by Harold Ross as a staff writer for the New Yorker, though his first contribution to the magazine had been published in 1933. He took up with writers like Philip Hamburger, S.J. Perelman and James Thurber, but ...

He is cubic!

Tom Stammers: Wagnerism, 4 August 2022

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music 
by Alex Ross.
Fourth Estate, 769 pp., £14.99, September 2021, 978 0 00 842294 3
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... Carter’s ‘private opera house of the individual sensibility’. In an essay from 1911, Vernon Lee described the knack of seeing past the individual production: imprisoned in her seat, the spectator could allow her mind to ‘divagate from the music only to the stage; not the literal stage of indifferently painted lath and pasteboard, with its ...

The Italianness of it all

Tessa Hadley: Iris Origo, 24 May 2018

Images and Shadows: Part of a Life 
by Iris Origo.
Pushkin, 384 pp., £12.99, February 2017, 978 1 78227 266 3
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War in Val d’Orcia 
by Iris Origo.
Pushkin, 320 pp., £9.99, February 2017, 978 1 78227 265 6
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A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary 1939-40 
by Iris Origo.
Pushkin, 200 pp., £14.99, October 2017, 978 1 78227 355 4
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A Study in Solitude: The Life of Leopardi 
by Iris Origo.
Pushkin, 416 pp., £12.99, June 2017, 978 1 78227 268 7
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The Last Attachment 
by Iris Origo.
Pushkin, 576 pp., £12.99, June 2017, 978 1 78227 267 0
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... them) and some with less. Bernard Berenson, Janet Ross (Leaves from Our Tuscan Kitchen) and Vernon Lee were their near neighbours and friends. In Florence there were English banks and English doctors, English shops where you could buy tea and mackintoshes. This art-loving, literary Anglo-American community in Italy had complex relationships with actual ...

Why did we start farming?

Steven Mithen: Hunter-Gatherers Were Right, 30 November 2017

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States 
by James C. Scott.
Yale, 336 pp., £20, September 2017, 978 0 300 18291 0
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... symposium in Chicago in 1966, Marshall Sahlins drew on research from the likes of Richard B. Lee among the !Kung of the Kalahari to argue that hunter-gatherers enjoyed the ‘original affluent society’. Even in the most marginal environments, he said, hunter-gatherers weren’t engaged in a constant struggle for survival, but had a leisurely ...

Shapeshifter

Ian Penman: Elvis looks for meaning, 25 September 2014

Elvis Has Left the Building: The Day the King Died 
by Dylan Jones.
Duckworth, 307 pp., £16.99, July 2014, 978 0 7156 4856 8
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Elvis Presley: A Southern Life 
by Joel Williamson.
Oxford, 384 pp., £25, November 2014, 978 0 19 986317 4
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... might have saved Jesse if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the surprise appearance of a second child. But the Presleys were satisfied with his work and Dr Hunt received his standard $15 payment from the county.) In many communities the arrival of twins was regarded as a queasy, unreadable omen. What to make of this mixed benison of one dead and one ...

The Angry Men

Jean McNicol: Harriet Harman, 14 December 2017

A Woman’s Work 
by Harriet Harman.
Allen Lane, 405 pp., £20, February 2017, 978 0 241 27494 1
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The Women Who Shaped Politics 
by Sophy Ridge.
Coronet, 295 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 4736 3876 1
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... list, but although many of the Labour women MPs who preceded her had fought for equal pay, for child benefit to be paid to the mother, for pension rights for women and so on, they were often reluctant to be ‘cast in the feminist role’, as Barbara Castle put it. Class had always been the primary determinant of Labour Party policy: you improved the ...

Advantage Pyongyang

Richard Lloyd Parry, 9 May 2013

The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and Future 
by Victor Cha.
Bodley Head, 527 pp., £14.99, August 2012, 978 1 84792 236 6
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... Keung put it, ‘It’s an invasion of the stomach.’ The conservative South Korean government of Lee Myung Bak formally abandoned the Sunshine Policy in 2010. Two years earlier, it had dropped its other central element, a jointly run holiday resort in the Diamond Mountains, after a North Korean soldier shot dead a middle-aged South Korean tourist who had ...

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