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Out of Bounds

Ian Gilmour: Why Wordsworth sold a lot less than Byron, 20 January 2005

The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period 
by William St Clair.
Cambridge, 765 pp., £90, July 2004, 9780521810067
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... of which British poets should be honoured by inclusion in the book. Such behaviour, as William St Clair amply demonstrates in his magnificent, original and compelling study, was characteristic of the London publishers. His book stretches far wider than its title suggests. He has a mass of new and fascinating things to say about the centuries that ...

Horrid Mutilation! Read all about it!

Richard Davenport-Hines: Jack the Ripper and the London Press by Perry Curtis, 4 April 2002

Jack the Ripper and the London Press 
by Perry Curtis.
Yale, 354 pp., £25, February 2002, 0 300 08872 8
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... pleasure in every phase of their more ghastly homicides; from the moment a corpse was found the hunt for morbid thrills was intense. After seven members of the Marshall family were hacked to death at Denham in 1870, ‘pleasure vans’ brought hordes of day-trippers from London to see the gore, and to purloin souvenirs. The Victorians were not dainty in ...

A Preference for Torquemada

Michael Wood: G.K. Chesterton, 9 April 2009

Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Making of GKC 1874-1908 
by William Oddie.
Oxford, 401 pp., £25, November 2008, 978 0 19 955165 1
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The Man Who Was Thursday 
by G.K. Chesterton.
Atlantic, 187 pp., £7.99, December 2008, 978 1 84354 905 5
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... is stranger than fiction, he says in Heretics, ‘for we have made fiction to suit ourselves’. William Oddie’s book is a painstaking and intelligent study of the man who was not yet quite the Chesterton we have been looking at. This early life is a neglected area in Chesterton studies, Oddie tells us, and he found ‘existing biographies of little ...

Abishag’s Revenge

Steven Shapin: Who wants to live for ever?, 26 March 2009

Mortal Coil: A Short History of Living Longer 
by David Boyd Haycock.
Yale, 308 pp., £18.99, June 2008, 978 0 300 11778 3
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... and, therefore, from access to the Tree of Life. No more low-hanging fruit: from then on we had to hunt, farm and cook. The Earth itself was injured by original sin: it became less fertile and its produce less nourishing, taking a toll on human longevity. The patriarchs were not immortal, but they were built to last. Methuselah was out in the nervous 900s, and ...

At the House of Mr Frog

Malcolm Gaskill: Puritanism, 18 March 2021

The Puritans: A Transatlantic History 
by David D. Hall.
Princeton, 517 pp., £20, May 2021, 978 0 691 20337 9
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The Journey to the Mayflower: God’s Outlaws and the Invention of Freedom 
by Stephen Tomkins.
Hodder, 372 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 4736 4911 8
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... and courage dictated. It helped their enemies that some puritans were not only flaky but mad. William Hacket, a maltster, boasted of wrestling lions at the Tower of London, and supposedly once bit off a schoolmaster’s nose (and swallowed it). He progressed from mimicking radical preachers to providing exorcisms and false prophecy; finally, he claimed to ...

The Fall of the Shah

Malise Ruthven, 4 July 1985

Shah of Shahs 
by Ryszard Kapuściński, translated by William Brand.
Quartet, 152 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 7043 2473 3
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The Pride and the Fall: Iran 1974-1979 
by Anthony Parsons.
Cape, 160 pp., £8.95, April 1984, 0 224 02196 6
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Iran under the Ayatollahs 
by Dilip Hiro.
Routledge, 416 pp., £20, January 1985, 9780710099242
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Obbligato: Notes on a Foreign Service Career 
by William Sullivan.
Norton, 279 pp., £13.95, October 1984, 0 393 01809 1
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Envoy to the Middle World: Adventures in Diplomacy 
by George McGhee.
Harper and Row, 458 pp., £15.95, January 1984, 0 06 039025 5
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The Persians amongst the English 
by Denis Wright.
Tauris, 273 pp., £17.95, February 1985, 1 85043 002 0
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... the scandalous back-handers paid to members of the Shah’s family and entourage in the hunt for contracts. An unfortunate side-effect of Parsons’s self-denying ordinance was that it left the Embassy almost as isolated as the Shah himself when it came to domestic intelligence. The Embassy went wrong, Parsons admits, in its assumption that the Shah ...

The Ballad of Andy and Rebekah

Martin Hickman: The Phone Hackers, 17 July 2014

... of the News of the World, then edited by Coulson, intercepted the voicemail messages of Princes William and Harry. Goodman was arrested, and the police found 15 confidential palace phone books at his house in Putney. They also found five thousand names mentioned in 11,000 pages of handwritten notes at the home and in the office of Glenn Mulcaire, the ...

If We Say Yes

Amia Srinivasan: Campus Speech, 23 May 2024

... Enzo Rossi, protesting against the suspension of Jodi Dean, a professor of politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, from her academic duties. In a blog post, Dean – a communist and anti-Zionist – had remarked of the early scenes from 7 October:Who could not feel energised seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the ...

Look over your shoulder

Christopher Hitchens, 25 May 1995

... and some of the early populist movements. A man can’t brew his own booze no more, can’t hunt when he wants, can’t build an outhouse on his own land without filling forms into next week, can’t educate his children with the Good Book in one hand and a strap in the other. A man needs a permit to get married, to set a trap for a wild animal, to own ...

Wonderland

Edward Timms, 17 March 1988

The Temple 
by Stephen Spender.
Faber, 210 pp., £10.95, February 1988, 0 571 14785 2
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... Only Place for Sex.’ After Paul’s arrival in Germany, this is confirmed by his second mentor William Bradshaw (Isherwood): ‘Everybody in Berlin is equal ... It all comes down to sex.’ Sexuality, in this view, is an egalitarian force. ‘Nakedness is the democracy of the new Germany,’ Paul reflects after he has been taken to the open-air swimming ...

Plain English

Denis Donoghue, 20 December 1984

Nineteen Eighty-Four: Facsimile Edition 
by George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison.
Secker, 291 pp., £25, July 1984, 9780436350221
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Nineteen Eighty-Four 
by George Orwell, edited by Bernard Crick.
Oxford, 460 pp., £17.50, March 1984, 0 19 818521 9
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Inside the Myth. Orwell: Views from the Left 
edited by Christopher Norris.
Lawrence and Wishart, 287 pp., £12.50, November 1984, 0 85315 599 2
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The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell 
by George Woodcock.
Fourth Estate, 287 pp., £5.95, November 1984, 0 947795 05 7
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Orwell’s London 
by John Thompson.
Fourth Estate, 119 pp., £9.95, November 1984, 0 947795 00 6
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... wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it ...’ Orwell is content to believe that the relation between language, cognition and utterance is as straightforward as this passage says it is. The fact that ‘the meaning’ does not choose ‘the ...

How bad are we?

Bernard Porter: Genocide in Tasmania, 31 July 2014

The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania 
by Tom Lawson.
Tauris, 263 pp., £25, January 2014, 978 1 78076 626 3
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... were none – only mixed-race Tasmanians and those deported to the Australian mainland survived. (William Lanne, the ‘last man’ of Tom Lawson’s title, died in 1869; two Tasmanian women survived him briefly.) There is also disagreement about the way they met their end, or rather about the relative roles played by settler violence, intertribal ...

Things Left Unsaid

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Achebe on Biafra, 11 October 2012

There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra 
by Chinua Achebe.
Allen Lane, 333 pp., £20, September 2012, 978 1 84614 576 6
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... ambition of the Biafran leader Ojukwu. It is now known that the British high commissioner, David Hunt, wrote a memo to London describing Ojukwu as an overambitious man who had engineered the secession and manipulated his people into supporting him. Many others have repeated this view. Achebe vigorously disputes it: ‘I believe that following the pogroms, or ...

Venus in Blue Jeans

Charles Nicholl: The Mona Lisa, 4 April 2002

Mona Lisa: The History of the World’s Most Famous Painting 
by Donald Sassoon.
HarperCollins, 350 pp., £16.99, September 2001, 0 00 710614 9
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... and out again, carrying the Mona Lisa stuffed under his workman’s smock. A police hunt ensued, but despite his criminal record, and despite having left a large thumb-print on the frame, Peruggia’s name never came up. Among those suspected of involvement were Picasso and Apollinaire; the latter was imprisoned briefly, and wrote a poem about ...

Diary

Tom Johnson: Strange Visitations, 15 August 2024

... and Lleucu Kedy – all probably Welsh – but also with the more English-sounding Margaret Hunt. Another woman in the village, accused of fornication, was named as ‘Gwladus, otherwise Alison’. But this cross-cultural flux was under threat. A few years after the visitation, a legal dispute involving the Welsh nobleman Owain Glyn Dŵr got out of ...

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