I wanted to rule the world

David A. Bell: Napoleon’s Global War, 3 December 2020

The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History 
by Alexander Mikaberidze.
Oxford, 936 pp., £25.99, April 2020, 978 0 19 995106 2
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... full French control over the colony. The French forces, commanded by Napoleon’s brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, had some initial success. They captured Louverture, and shipped him back to France, where he died in captivity in 1803. But an epidemic of yellow fever killed many of the Europeans (Leclerc died of it) and opened the way to a black victory. On 1 ...

Rescuing the bishops

Blair Worden, 21 April 1983

The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559-1625 
by Patrick Collinson.
Oxford, 297 pp., £17.50, January 1983, 0 19 822685 3
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Reactions to the English Civil War 1642-1649 
by John Morrill.
Macmillan, 257 pp., £14, November 1982, 0 333 27565 9
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The World of the Muggletonians 
by Christopher Hill, Barry Reay and William Lamont.
Temple Smith, 195 pp., £12.50, February 1983, 0 85117 226 1
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The Life of John Milton 
by A.N. Wilson.
Oxford, 278 pp., £9.95, January 1983, 0 19 211776 9
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Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Vol. 8: 1666-1682 
edited by Maurice Kelley.
Yale, 625 pp., £55, January 1983, 0 300 02561 0
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The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Works of Andrew Marvell 
by Warren Chernaik.
Cambridge, 249 pp., £19.50, February 1983, 9780521247733
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... burden of explanation, as William Lamont and Nicholas Tyacke have shifted it, onto the reign of Charles I and the regime of Archbishop Laud, ‘the greatest calamity ever visited upon the English Church’. Although that verdict is unlikely to go unchallenged, even those who question it should welcome Collinson’s determination to view the Jacobean Church ...

Presto!

James Buchan, 14 December 1995

The Life of Adam Smith 
by Ian Simpson Ross.
Oxford, 495 pp., £25, October 1995, 0 19 828821 2
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... about Cameron of Lochiel, whose decision, against his better judgment, to come out for Prince Charles Edward Stuart in 1745 won the clans for the Pretender and doomed the ancient culture of the Highlands to extinction. ‘That gentleman, whose rent never exceeded five hundred pounds a year, carried, in 1745, eight hundred of his own people into the ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: Men (and Women) of the Year, 14 December 1995

... habit of using familiar first names to describe celebrities they will never meet. ‘Are you with Charles or Di?’ Can’t say I know them well enough to be sure. Have you conceivably confused me with someone else? Someone who cares? I left Henry Kissinger’s name hanging around up there. It’s true that he seems to have slid down the charts but don’t be ...

Pure TNT

James Francken: Thom Jones, 18 February 1999

Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine 
by Thom Jones.
Faber, 312 pp., £9.99, February 1999, 9780571196562
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... to join up when he meets boot-camp disciplinarians ‘most of whom looked like close relatives of Charles “Sonny” Liston’. Jones – a former boxer and Vietnam veteran – appears to give Liston a better part in the off-beat title story of his new, third collection. A young amateur boxer hoping to go forward to the Chicago Golden Gloves competition ...

Dear Lad

Penelope Fitzgerald, 19 March 1981

The Simple Life: C.R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds 
by Fiona MacCarthy.
Lund Humphries, 204 pp., £7.95, January 1981, 0 85331 435 7
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Philip Mairet: Autobiographical and Other Papers 
edited by C.H. Sisson.
Carcanet, 266 pp., £7.95, February 1981, 0 85635 326 4
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... Charles Ashbee – C.R.A., as he asked to be called – must be counted as a successful man. He was an architect whose houses stood up, a designer whose work has always been appreciated, a homosexual who in his fifties became – almost absent-mindedly, it seems – the father of four daughters, and a dreamer who, by founding the Guild of Handicrafts, put his ideals into practice and then kept them going for twenty years ...

New York Review

Herschel Post, 17 December 1981

The Cost of Good Intentions: New York City and the Liberal Experiment 
by Charles Morris.
Norton, 256 pp., £8.95, March 1981, 0 393 01339 1
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... hailed in 1968 as the politician of the future, the man who had kept the city cool and who offered hope that the liberal experiment for the renaissance of the inner city could succeed. The ambitions certainly exceeded the achievements, but the achievements were tangible, and they are worth looking at. When the Commission for Racial Equality released copies of ...

Lyrics and Ironies

Christopher Ricks, 4 December 1986

The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony 
by D.J. Enright.
Oxford, 178 pp., £12.95, October 1986, 0 19 212253 3
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Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric 
by Donald Davie.
Cambridge, 76 pp., £15, September 1986, 0 521 32264 2
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... of an ill omen immediately occurs to us,’ Miss Furst remarks, ‘though not to the unimaginative Charles.’ It isn’t hard for the reader to be cleverer than Charles. But what would we think of a suitor who turned back because his horse stumbled at the threshold of his loved one’s home? Or rather, following the ...

Talking to the Radiator

Andrew Saint, 2 October 1997

Corbusier’s Formative Years 
by H. Allen Brooks.
Chicago, 506 pp., £51.95, June 1997, 0 226 07579 6
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... time to climb the road,’ he admonishes readers eager to tick off the Villa Fallet, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s first house, on the out-skirts of the community. ‘Walk, don’t drive, and if you have a generous hour this route will gradually lead you back into town; in the meantime you will learn more about Jeanneret than you would in twice ...

Back to the Border

Niamh Gallagher: Ulsterism, 17 June 2021

The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925 
by Charles Townshend.
Allen Lane, 368 pp., £20, April, 978 0 241 30086 2
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... was replaced by the Irish Free State, but Northern Ireland is with us still.In The Partition, Charles Townshend aims to explain how Ulster came to be conceived of as an entity requiring special treatment, even if people couldn’t agree on what, if anything, should be done about it, or on what exactly Ulster was. Townshend’s main focus is on British ...

Poet at the Automat

Eliot Weinberger: Charles Reznikoff, 22 January 2015

... Charles Reznikoff​ may be the most elusive poet in American poetry and his book-length Testimony the most elusive long poem of modernism. He is remembered as a kind of New York saint, an urban Emily Dickinson: the unknown poet, walking the city streets, writing intense, seemingly matter-of-fact lyrics about things he saw and heard ...

What most I love I bite

Matthew Bevis: Stevie Smith, 28 July 2016

The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith 
edited by Will May.
Faber, 806 pp., £35, October 2015, 978 0 571 31130 9
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... of time’, beyond the necessities of human life, their humilities and importunities, without hope, without hope of return, without the aggravating possibility of some knight-errantry, how delicious, when one is in the mood, the contemplation of such a fate. This is characteristic of Smith’s hard-edged ...

Relations will stop at nothing

Philip Horne, 5 March 1987

The Whole Family: A Novel by 12 Authors 
by Henry James and William Dean Howells, edited by Elizabeth Jordan, introduced by Alfred Bendixen.
Ungar (USA), 392 pp., $9.95, June 1986, 0 8044 6036 1
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‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship 
by Michael Anesko.
Oxford, 272 pp., £21.50, January 1987, 0 19 504034 1
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... which Howells and Elizabeth Jordan remarkably granted their contributors no doubt speaks for their hope of an unforced unanimity, with variety assured by the assortment of styles and of points of view rendered: those of the Old-Maid Aunt, Grandmother, Daughter-in-Law, School-Girl, Son-in-Law, Married Son, Married Daughter, Mother and School-Boy, and finally of ...

Jackson breaks the ice

Andrew Forge, 4 April 1991

Jackson Pollock: An American Saga 
by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith.
Barrie and Jenkins, 934 pp., £19.95, March 1990, 0 7126 3866 0
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Abstract Expressionism 
by David Anfam.
Thames and Hudson, 216 pp., £5.95, August 1990, 0 500 20243 5
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Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston 
by Musa Mayer.
Thames and Hudson, 256 pp., £8.95, February 1991, 0 500 27633 1
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... pulled out, finding work in surveying camps and road construction, faithful with his cheques home. Charles, the eldest of the five brothers, had shown an aptitude for drawing. Encouraged by Stella, he left to study painting in Los Angeles. From Los Angeles he would send home copies of the Dial which would have been Jackson’s very first intimation of modern ...
George Macaulay Trevelyan: A Memoir 
by Mary Moorman.
Hamish Hamilton, 253 pp., £9.95, April 1980, 0 241 10358 4
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Public and Private 
by Humphrey Trevelyan.
Hamish Hamilton, 208 pp., £8.95, February 1980, 0 241 10357 6
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... and has retrieved letters, chiefly early and chiefly to his brother, the Labour Minister, Sir Charles Trevelyan, which show the forces that inspired G.M. Trevelyan’s history. Her study makes her father accessible as a human being for the first time, relieves him from the imputation of being too much of a paragon to be interesting, and shows him, without ...