Condy’s Fluid

P.N. Furbank, 25 October 1990

A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture 
by Samuel Hynes.
Bodley Head, 514 pp., £20, October 1990, 0 370 30451 9
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Killing in Verse and Prose, and Other Essays 
by Paul Fussell.
Bellew, 294 pp., £9.95, October 1990, 0 947792 55 4
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... they were following, in some measure and according to their capacity, the brilliant example of Robert Graves, whose coming to maturity as a poet was a matter of saying a decisive ‘goodbye’ not only to the war but to all ghosts and rubbish (including cast-off language) that threatened the living. It was in 1930 that T.S. Eliot wrote in Criterion, with ...

Votes for Women, Chastity for Men

Brian Harrison, 21 January 1988

Troublesome People: Enemies of War, 1916-1986 
by Caroline Moorehead.
Hamish Hamilton, 344 pp., £14.95, April 1987, 0 241 12105 1
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Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 
by Susan Kingsley Kent.
Princeton, 295 pp., £22, June 1987, 0 691 05497 5
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Women, Marriage and Politics, 1860-1914 
by Pat Jalland.
Oxford, 366 pp., £19.50, November 1986, 0 19 822668 3
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An Edwardian Mixed Doubles: The Bosanquets versus the Webbs. A Study in British Social Policy, 1890-1929 
by A.M. McBriar.
Oxford, 407 pp., £35, July 1987, 0 19 820111 7
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... callous and even (through its agents) brutal. Take Moorehead’s approach to A.J.P Taylor’s breathtakingly naive rhetorical question at a CND meeting in 1958: ‘ “Is there anyone here who would do this to another human being?” Silence. “Then why are we making the damned thing?” Thunderous applause.’ Whatever happened at the ...

Manchester’s Moment

Boyd Hilton, 20 August 1998

Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 
by Anthony Howe.
Oxford, 336 pp., £45, December 1997, 9780198201465
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The Origins of War Prevention: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1730-1854 
by Martin Ceadel.
Oxford, 587 pp., £55, December 1996, 0 19 822674 8
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... with (and even now to require) active state intervention, social reform and higher taxes. Robert Morier even sought to reconcile Free Trade with Empire (an Empire bound together by ties of sentiment and affection rather than by material economic interests). Thus reinvigorated, it had no difficulty in seeing off the fair trade and bimetallist ...

New-Model History

Valerie Pearl, 7 February 1980

The City and the Court 1603-1643 
by Robert Ashton.
Cambridge, 247 pp., £10.50, September 1980, 0 521 22419 5
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... of silver greatly benefited the East India Company. The silver trade through Dover was also, as Mr Taylor and Mr Kepler have shown, of vital importance for the reexport business: this brought a new height of prosperity to the Levant traders and others in the 1630s. The Goa treaty with Portugal in 1635 primarily benefited the East India Company. Not only did it ...

Perfect Companions

C.K. Stead, 8 June 1995

Christina Stead: A Biography 
by Hazel Rowley.
Secker, 646 pp., £12.99, January 1995, 0 436 20298 0
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... was a great success. Stead was to have from that time on powerful literary support: Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Theodore Roethke, Lillian Hellman, Peter Taylor, Elizabeth Hardwick in America; Patrick White in Australia. Books previously declined were now published. There were reprints. There was an ...

Adrenaline Junkie

Jonathan Parry: John Tyndall’s Ascent, 21 March 2019

The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer and Public Intellectual 
by Roland Jackson.
Oxford, 556 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 0 19 878895 9
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... Tyndall’s fellow Queenwood teachers, Edward Frankland, had been invited to work with the chemist Robert Bunsen in Marburg, and in 1848 Tyndall decided to join him in Germany and study for a PhD, using his savings from railway surveying. In Marburg, he rose at 5 a.m., sitting in the cold in a dressing gown lined with cat fur, and worked on ...

Don’t wear yum-yum yellow

Theo Tait: Shark Attack!, 2 August 2012

Demon Fish: Travels through the Hidden World of Sharks 
by Juliet Eilperin.
Duckworth, 295 pp., £18.99, January 2012, 978 0 7156 4291 7
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... the Jersey attacks, and Quint, the Ahab-style shark hunter played with scenery-chewing vigour by Robert Shaw in the film, is a veteran of the Indianapolis disaster. Benchley, Eilperin says, did more to instil ‘intense fear and hatred of sharks than anyone else in the 20th century’. By bringing an age-old nightmare to life, he ‘gave it a credibility, a ...

Flirting is nice

Mary-Kay Wilmers: ‘Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace’, 11 October 2012

Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady 
by Kate Summerscale.
Bloomsbury, 303 pp., £16.99, April 2012, 978 1 4088 1241 9
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... types’, Summerscale calls them. Several were free-thinkers, proto-Darwinians – the publisher Robert Chambers, for example, secret author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and George Combe himself – though, like Darwin, they hesitated to spell it out. The Drysdales too saw the universe in largely materialist terms, finding it hard to ...

Apocalypse Two

R.W. Johnson: Rwanda’s genocide, 21 June 2001

A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide 
by Linda Melvern.
Zed, 272 pp., £16.95, September 2000, 9781856498319
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... and Brazzaville). It will doubtless be the same in 2002 – which is why Chirac receives Robert Mugabe in such splendour at the Elysée, conscious that Zimbabwe’s 14,000 troops in the Congo make him a key player in such marchandise. Not that France has a monopoly on playing Machiavelli in Africa: Herman Cohen, Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of ...

Shady Acquisitions

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Corporate Imperialism, 21 September 2023

Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism 
by Philip J. Stern.
Harvard, 408 pp., £30.95, May, 978 0 674 98812 5
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... and sciences’, created a corporate sponsor for knowledge-gathering. One of its founding members, Robert Boyle, a Hudson’s Bay Company shareholder as well as an Irish plantation owner and an EIC director, wrote questionnaires to guide the RSL’s factors, who eagerly supplied the society and other metropolitan institutions with travelogues, dictionaries of ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: Reform’s Disaster Capitalism, 25 September 2025

... On the main stage Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who advises the US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, said it was ‘highly likely’ that the Covid vaccine was ‘a significant factor in the cancers in the royal family’. During a live recording of a podcast for the Telegraph, Allison Pearson accused the police of having ‘tampered’ with ...

Buy birthday present, go to morgue

Colm Tóibín: Diane Arbus, 2 March 2017

Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer 
by Arthur Lubow.
Cape, 734 pp., £35, October 2016, 978 0 224 09770 3
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Silent Dialogues: Diane Arbus and Howard Nemerov 
by Alexander Nemerov.
Fraenkel Gallery, 106 pp., $30, March 2015, 978 1 881337 41 6
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... was fired from MGM, late in 1931, Scott Fitzgerald was having lunch with the screenwriter Dwight Taylor in the company canteen when something, or even two things, more disturbing than his own drunken dreams appeared and sat at his table. The apparition was a pair of Siamese twins. ‘One of them picked up the menu,’ ...

Homer Inc

Edward Luttwak, 23 February 2012

The Iliad by Homer 
translated by Stephen Mitchell.
Weidenfeld, 463 pp., £25, October 2011, 978 0 297 85973 4
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... expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell ...

The Cult of Celebrity

Jacqueline Rose, 20 August 1998

... so much more brazen, upfront way it puts this on display. One of my favourite moments was Barbara Taylor Bradford renewing her marriage vows in the total privacy of a completely deserted tropical island on which no tourists step; with only black luggage carriers in attendance , as well as the whole photographic and editorial team of Hello!. (She said this day ...

The Party in Government

Conor Gearty, 9 March 1995

... was no suggestion that Mr McGregor was involved in the decision. Other former ministers such as Robert Jackson, Tim Yeo and Robert Key have obtained jobs since leaving the government. Earlier this year, the current Conservative Party Deputy Chairman and MP, Dame Angela Rumbold, was forced vigorously to defend her £12,000 ...