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Linda Colley: Global History, 26 September 2013

The French Revolution in Global Perspective 
edited by Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt and William Max Nelson.
Cornell, 240 pp., £16.50, April 2013, 978 0 8014 7868 0
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... What is history for? What do we want it to do? In 1731, an obscure Kentish schoolmaster named Richard Spencer offered some answers. Properly to ascertain his position in geographical space, he reasoned, required not a single map, but access to a global atlas, one that would allow him to ‘see what London and the adjacent parts are in the kingdom; what the kingdom is in Europe, and what Europe is in the universe ...

Why didn’t he commit suicide?

Frank Kermode: Reviewing T.S. Eliot, 4 November 2004

T.S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews 
by Jewel Spears Brooker.
Cambridge, 644 pp., £80, May 2004, 0 521 38277 7
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... of Eliot’s reputation. Ploughing through these packed and not always fascinating columns may tell us as much about the craft, if that is the right word, of highbrow reviewing as it does about Eliot. On the English side one notices a steady reduction in pomposity, signalled by the disappearance of the reviewer’s plural first-person pronoun – a ...

The Nominated Boy

Robert Macfarlane: The Panchen Lama, 29 November 2001

The Search for the Panchen Lama 
by Isabel Hilton.
Penguin, 336 pp., £7.99, August 2001, 0 14 024670 3
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... godhead. Often, the searchers will carry props with them and carry out recognition tests: the boys may be shown a collection of artefacts, some of which belonged to the previous bodhisattva, and asked to pick from them. Candidates may also be marked out by physical signs, such as abnormally long earlobes – a Tibetan ...

Showboating

John Upton: George Carman, 9 May 2002

No Ordinary Man: A Life of George Carman 
by Dominic Carman.
Hodder, 331 pp., £18.99, January 2002, 0 340 82098 5
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... junior members of the Bar, ever sycophantic in their quest for advancement. Though the Telegraph may have been seeking to protect the innocence of its readers, there is nothing unusual in an ageing QC using his money and position to gain young admirers; nor about a gap between perceptions of the public and the private man. Yet, despite the excesses to which ...

Grit in the Oyster-Shell

Colin Burrow: Pepys, 14 November 2002

Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 499 pp., £20, October 2002, 0 670 88568 1
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... after the ejection of his patron (and former Lord High Admiral) James II. When Pepys died in May 1703, aged 70, the autopsy confirmed that he had lived hard: his lungs were full of black spots, his kidneys full of stones and his gut was discoloured and septic. And of course he wrote a diary, nine large volumes of it, which he began on 1 January 1660 and ...

A Smile at My Own Temerity

John Barrell: William Hogarth, 16 February 2017

William Hogarth: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings 
by Elizabeth Einberg.
Yale, 432 pp., £95, November 2016, 978 0 300 22174 9
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... girlfriend, a poor but pretty ballad-seller, is being violently interrupted by an older woman who may be his wife, and who, if we believe the account of the picture by Hogarth’s friend Jean André Rouquet, is also pregnant. The two women are rivals in politics as well as in love, the younger selling pro-Hanoverian papers, the older Jacobite ones. Apart from ...

What Columbus Didn’t Know

Peter Green: The history of cartography, 21 February 2002

The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, the Man who Discovered Britain 
by Barry Cunliffe.
Allen Lane, 182 pp., £12.99, October 2001, 0 7139 9509 2
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Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters 
edited by J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones.
Princeton, 232 pp., £17.95, January 2002, 0 691 09259 1
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Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World: Atlas and Map-By-Map Directory 
by Richard J.A. Talbert.
Princeton, three volumes, £300, September 2000, 9780691031699
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... a weight of psychological and religious investment to be abandoned with impunity. But, as Galileo may or may not have whispered after his 1632 recantation, things do in the end move: for Romans the (imaginary) Rhipaean Mountains retreat further and further as exploration forces back the boundaries of the unknown; the Earth ...

What will be left?

Tom Crewe: Labour’s Prospects, 18 May 2017

... we are all about to be nuked, and the next, we go back to arguing about Jeremy Corbyn. Theresa May’s surprise announcement of a snap election – surprising only because she’d spent the last nine months telling us it wasn’t going to happen – immediately wiped North Korea from the headlines, and returned the spotlight to another, more drawn-out ...

Public Works

David Norbrook, 5 June 1986

The Faber Book of Political Verse 
edited by Tom Paulin.
Faber, 481 pp., £17.50, May 1986, 0 571 13947 7
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... faith in the canon and turning to different forms of cultural studies. But their disillusion may be premature. English poetry has not been as one-sidedly conservative as is frequently supposed, and needs defending against many of its defenders – whether overt reactionaries or ‘liberal humanists’ who display an extraordinary complacency about the ...

Old Scores

Colin McGinn, 30 August 1990

The Meaning of Life, and Other Essays 
by A.J. Ayer.
Weidenfeld, 212 pp., £17, June 1990, 0 297 82041 9
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... He had flu and had lost his voice, but he didn’t let that put him off. He arranged to have Richard Wollheim read his paper out for him. As the paper was mellifluously read, in cadences quite unlike Freddie’s own clipped and headlong mode of speech (‘prshn’ for ‘proposition’), he nodded his vigorous assent to the arguments that were being ...

Making things happen

R.W. Johnson, 6 September 1984

The Missing Dimension: Governments and Intelligence Communities in the 20th Century 
edited by Christopher Andrew and David Dilks.
Macmillan, 300 pp., £16.95, July 1984, 0 333 36864 9
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... secrecy is that any government which reveals how its predecessors spied upon their own populace may also face some embarrassing queries as to what comparable actions it is getting up to itself today. It is, at first sight, odd that we know a great deal more about the more necessarily secret world of military and foreign intelligence. The reasons for this ...

Are women nicer than men?

Michael Wood, 21 February 1985

The Dark Hole Days 
by Una Woods.
Blackstaff, 127 pp., £3.50, December 1984, 0 85640 316 4
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Superior Women 
by Alice Adams.
Heinemann, 374 pp., £8.95, January 1985, 0 434 00631 9
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The Collected Stories 
by Frank Tuohy.
Macmillan, 410 pp., £12.95, December 1984, 0 333 38534 9
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The Apple in the Dark 
by Clarice Lispector, translated by Gregory Rabassa.
Virago, 361 pp., £10.95, January 1985, 0 86068 605 1
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Family Ties 
by Clarice Lispector and Giovanni Pontiero.
Carcanet, 140 pp., £8.95, January 1985, 0 85636 569 6
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... invention, elements of an intended meaning, and they come trailing all kinds of associations which may not have much to do with their material locations out there in the world. The ‘brilliant’, the ‘deep blue’ New England air and the irremediable Californian innocence that crop up so frequently in Superior Women really belong to literature or mythology ...

Cruelty to Animals

Brigid Brophy, 21 May 1981

Reckoning with the Beast 
by James Turner.
Johns Hopkins, 190 pp., £7.50, February 1981, 0 8018 2399 4
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The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes 
by S. Zuckerman.
Routledge, 511 pp., £17.50, March 1981, 0 7100 0691 8
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... is mushy at best, resting, not on respect, but on a caprice that might be withdrawn, and which may even imply the fascist notion that the lives of animals are somehow forfeit to humans but can be redeemed by an act of clemency or leniency on the part of the boss species. His very terminology does violence to the pro-animal arguments of such Victorians as ...

Textual Intercourse

Claude Rawson, 6 February 1986

The Name of Action: Critical Essays 
by John Fraser.
Cambridge, 260 pp., £25, December 1984, 0 521 25876 6
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... it ‘easier for the dominators and predators who prosper in a Hobbesian or Sadean world’, one may agree that all these things are as bad as he says, while questioning whether they’re any worse than the intellectual atmosphere revealed by his own bludgeoning style and the vulgar facility of his mental transitions. I wonder, too, whether the connection ...

Adele goes West

Mark Lambert, 17 September 1987

Anywhere but here 
by Mona Simpson.
Bloomsbury, 406 pp., £11.95, June 1987, 0 7475 0017 7
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Herself in Love 
by Marianne Wiggins.
Collins, 184 pp., £9.95, May 1987, 0 00 223147 6
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Journey of the Wolf 
by Douglas Day.
Bodley Head, 235 pp., £10.95, April 1987, 0 370 31064 0
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Spanking the maid 
by Robert Coover.
Heinemann, 102 pp., £8.95, February 1987, 0 434 14289 1
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A Night at the Movies, or, You must remember this 
by Robert Coover.
Heinemann, 187 pp., £12.95, August 1987, 0 434 14390 1
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... Anywhere but here lies in its presentation of Adele, the heroine’s mother. Every American woman may have her own story, but all children who read can use the myth of a mother both vital and wrong. As with her use of the movement to the West, one feels that Mona Simpson’s drawing of Adele, her giving her lines like ‘I’m part of all that went before and ...

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