Kingdoms of Paper

Natalie Zemon Davis: Identity and Faking It, 18 October 2007

Who Are You? Identification, Deception and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe 
by Valentin Groebner, translated by Mark Kyburz and John Peck.
Zone, 349 pp., £18.95, April 2007, 978 1 890951 72 6
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... They weren’t especially important in the very case that Groebner cites to support his claim: David Reuveni, calling himself the brother of King Joseph of Habor, the ruler of some of the Lost Tribes of Israel, came to Rome as his brother’s messenger in 1524 and promised an army of Jewish warriors to join with Christians in a final battle against the ...

Not Biographable

Patrick Collinson: The Faithful Thomas Cromwell, 29 November 2007

Thomas Cromwell: The Rise and Fall of Henry VIII’s Most Notorious Minister 
by Robert Hutchinson.
Weidenfeld, 360 pp., £20, February 2007, 978 0 297 84642 0
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... his account of English constitutional history. But in telling the story of the English monarchy, David Starkey found no occasion even to mention Cromwell’s name.* Now, with the publication of Robert Hutchinson’s biography of Cromwell, it is as if Beria has come back to haunt us, requiring a further revision of the Encyclopedia. And the analogy is not so ...

Can’t you take a joke?

Jonathan Coe, 2 November 2023

Different Times: A History of British Comedy 
by David Stubbs.
Faber, 399 pp., £20, July, 978 0 571 35346 0
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... sense of humour’: a phenomenon everyone considers to be distinctive but no one can define. As David Stubbs writes in Different Times, his impressive survey of British comedy on stage, radio, film and television, ‘it’s not so much a case of Britain producing comedy as comedy producing Britain.’ The book provides a good opportunity to look at our ...

Eaten Alive by a Vicious Cat

Tim Parks: On Hisham Matar, 25 April 2024

My Friends 
by Hisham Matar.
Viking, 458 pp., £18.99, January, 978 0 241 40948 0
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... of man from that other one I might have been had I remained in Libya; and the hours after seeing David with the Head of Goliath in the Galleria Borghese, searching for shade and finding a place to rest under a pine on a green beside the Sant’Andrea al Quirinale – all seemed to fold together and collapse like a concertina of days made of the same ...

Into the Underworld

Iain Sinclair: The Hackney Underworld, 22 January 2015

... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... Molineux) long since lost in the mists. The issue also contains a consideration of the sociologist David Riesman, since no intellectual journal back then was complete without a Riesman snorkel dive; a piece by Paul de Man (remember him?) which begins on the stirring note, ‘Ever since the war, American criticism has remained relatively stagnant’; and an ...

During Her Majesty’s Pleasure

Ronan Bennett, 20 February 1997

... did not long survive her son’s birth, and soon afterwards Ms Woolvine met and married David McCluskie, a plasterer and bricklayer. Terry took McCluskie’s name, though this was never regularised. The family moved to London after the strike at Cammell-Laird, when David McCluskie was finding work hard to come ...

Short Cuts

Daniel Soar: Underground Bunkers, 6 November 2008

... to the underground government facility newly photographed in large-format full colour by David Moore. The Last Things (Dewi Lewis, £25) opens with an anonymous quote – ‘Ministry of Defence official, London 2007’ – that reads: ‘I don’t understand how you’ve got this far.’ What follows is a series of shots of unpeopled hallways and ...

Short Cuts

Chris Mullin: Michael Foot, 25 March 2010

... Of all the many tributes to Michael Foot it was David Cameron who hit the nail on the head. He was, Cameron said, ‘almost the last link to a more heroic age in politics’. In appearance, and demeanour, Foot resembled an Old Testament prophet. An impression which, in later life, his shock of white hair, the passion of his delivery and the magnificence of his rhetoric served only to enhance ...

Short Cuts

Daniel Soar: Spies, 22 July 2010

... TV channel Russia Today solicited the views of Annie Machon – ex-MI5 agent, ex-partner of David Shayler and current 9/11-truther – and she came up with a conspiracy theory of her very own: ‘Hardline factions within the American administration,’ she surmised, ‘egged on the FBI to try and get them to come up with this result because of the need ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: ‘Watercolour’, 3 March 2011

... painted in France in 1918, has the gawkiness of something noticed, not composed, while in David Cox’s Tour d’Horloge, Rouen it is not so much the architecture of the clock tower as the patch of bright light seen through the arch at its base that is the subject. This kind of observation, centring on light, weather and landscape, became a ...

At the RA

Jeremy Harding: Richard Diebenkorn, 7 May 2015

... Diebenkorn remembered helping him hang a show of his work in 1947. But like Elmer Bischoff and David Park, with whom he made the turn to figurative painting a few years later, Diebenkorn was asking questions that abstract expressionism couldn’t always answer, even though, as the early works in the show at the Royal Academy (until 7 June) suggest, he was ...

Short Cuts

Chase Madar: Human Rights Window Dressing, 2 July 2015

... dozens of legal scholars, including a great many progressive luminaries like Thomas Buergenthal, David Cole and Burt Neuborne. Other more right-wing figures vouching for Koh include William Taft, the State Department’s senior lawyer in 2003, who provided the Bush-Cheney administration with its legal rationale for invading Iraq, and John Yoo, the ...

Short Cuts

Rosemary Hill: Shakespeare’s Faces, 7 January 2016

... in Poets’ Corner is an image of a national bard. Roubiliac’s version was commissioned by David Garrick, who posed for it himself and while this was certainly vain of him, it was not as vain as it would be today. At a time when the play, rather than the biography, was the thing, Garrick was not unjustified in seeing himself as the embodiment of ...

Short Cuts

Tom Crewe: Ed Balls, 22 September 2016

... the cabinet in 2008 at the head of the department for energy and climate change. Peter Mandelson, David Miliband, James Purnell and Andy Burnham were other New Labour luminaries who swapped being special advisers for being parliamentarians, all of them, like Balls, dropped into carefully selected safe seats (Balls reveals that he put pressure on his ...