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Greatest Happiness

Brian Barry, 19 January 1984

The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell. Vol. I: Cambridge Essays 1888-1899 
edited by Kenneth Blackwell, Andrew Brink, Nicholas Griffin, Richard Rempel and John Slater.
Allen and Unwin, 554 pp., £48, November 1983, 0 04 920067 4
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... Essays of Bertrand Russell in Russell, the journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives. The prophecy may come true, but even if I were to survive as long as Russell, I am unwilling to bet that I should be around to see it fulfilled. The prospectus appeared in Volume XII of Russell, the date of which was Winter 1973-4. Now, ten years later exactly, we have the ...

Hard Eggs and Radishes

Thomas Jones: Shelley at Sea, 21 July 2022

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Vol. VII 
edited by Nora Crook.
Johns Hopkins, 931 pp., £103.50, May 2021, 978 1 4214 3783 5
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... the sea was as real to him as the sound of a skylark singing on a summer evening.In the middle of May, Shelley wrote to Byron that, ‘after the first shock’, Clairmont had ‘sustained her loss with more fortitude than I had dared to hope’. Shelley, too, was in better spirits, having taken possession of a sailing boat built for him at Genoa. ‘It cost ...

Bereft and Beruffed

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s Last Plays, 6 June 2019

Shakespeare’s Lyric Stage: Myth, Music and Poetry in the Last Plays 
by Seth Lerer.
Chicago, 276 pp., £20.50, November 2018, 978 0 226 58254 2
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... while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by John Day, another playwright, in 1599. John Lyly, who gave up writing for 15 years to concentrate on his unsuccessful career in politics, made it to his early fifties, and John Marston lived to nearly ...

Shark-Shagger

Harry Mathews, 2 November 1995

‘Maldoror’ and the Complete Works of the Comte de Lautréamont 
translated by Alexis Lykiard.
Exact Change, 352 pp., £11.99, January 1995, 9781878972125
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... to by a name that appears only once in his work, that he never refers to in his letters, and that may have been no more than a temporary legal expedient. No doubt there is little point in defying a usage so entrenched; on the other hand, did Lautréamont write the Poésies, signed ‘Isidore Ducasse’?Besides ‘Lautréamont’, another name has provoked ...

Didn’t they notice?

David Runciman: Offshore, 14 April 2011

Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World 
by Nicholas Shaxson.
Bodley Head, 329 pp., £14.99, January 2011, 978 1 84792 110 9
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Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class 
by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson.
Simon and Schuster, 368 pp., £11.50, March 2011, 978 1 4165 8870 2
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... stuff of Shakespeare’, but that surely is letting everyone concerned off far too lightly. He may just be a smooth-talking thug, and many online observers have noted that he seems to model himself on the smooth-talking thug and would-be businessman Stringer Bell from The Wire. But the word that best captures Saif Gaddafi comes from Nicholas Shaxson’s ...

Inconvenient Truths

Hugh Miles: Who put the bomb on Pan Am 103?, 21 June 2007

... senior police officers and lawyers. Its job is to re-examine cases where a miscarriage of justice may have occurred: it handles cases after the appeal process has been exhausted, and if it finds evidence that a miscarriage of justice may have taken place it refers the case to the High Court to be heard again. Al-Megrahi ...

I only want to keep my hand in

Owen Bennett-Jones: Gerry Adams, 16 November 2017

Gerry Adams: An Unauthorised Life 
by Malachi O’Doherty.
Faber, 356 pp., £14.99, September 2017, 978 0 571 31595 6
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... He did this without always making his intentions clear. O’Doherty recounts the experience of Richard O’Rawe, a former IRA member, who, having served a prison sentence for armed robbery, decided his fighting days were over and took a job in the Sinn Féin press office. O’Rawe still believed that the political campaign was a way of winning broader ...

Like a Top Hat

Jonathan Rée: Morality without the Metaphysics, 8 February 2024

Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography 
by Émile Perreau-Saussine, translated by Nathan J. Pinkoski.
Notre Dame, 197 pp., £36, September 2022, 978 0 268 20325 2
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... sense’. The notions it deals with – ‘courage’ and ‘compassion’, for example – may be abstract, but they are not inert: they can provoke acts of violence or heroic self-sacrifice. From a philosophical point of view, the practical power of moral concepts has always been a bit of a mystery. Plato attributed it to the intrinsic attraction of ...

What is this Bernard?

Christopher Hitchens, 10 January 1991

Good and Faithful Servant: The Unauthorised Biography of Bernard Ingham 
by Robert Harris.
Faber, 202 pp., £14.99, December 1990, 0 571 16108 1
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... in this way, Chamberlain was able to raise ‘news management’, in the words of the historian Richard Cockett, ‘almost to the level of an exact science’. Obviously, it’s a long march from making Lord Halifax look like an appeaser (which Harris might have pointed out he was already) to making Michael Heseltine look like a fool or a knave, which ...

Diary

Karl Miller: Football Tribes, 1 June 1989

... who were later to denounce it as obscene. Football is itself violent, of course – my friend Richard Wollheim once broke it to me that he was unable to look at a game, for this reason. But it has always distinguished between an allowable and an alien violence, and the rules it has for that purpose generally work. None of the really outstanding players ...

Wallflower

Anthony Quinn, 29 August 1991

Varying Degrees of Hopelessness 
by Lucy Ellmann.
Hamish Hamilton, 184 pp., £13.99, July 1991, 0 241 13153 7
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Slide 
by James Buchan.
Heinemann, 135 pp., £12.99, June 1991, 0 434 07499 3
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Alma Cogan 
by Gordon Burn.
Secker, 210 pp., £13.99, August 1991, 0 436 20009 0
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... behalf. Structured in short episodic chunks, Slide focuses on the mid-life melancholy of one Richard Verey, a 35-year-old Englishman. Oxford-educated, old-shoe patrician, Verey is trying to recover pieces of a life that seems to have passed him by, beginning as a student on vacation in Iran. In a village outside Isfahan he buys a set of antique Russian ...

A Welcome for Foreigners

Peter Burke, 7 November 1991

The Golden Age of Painting in Spain 
by Jonathan Brown.
Yale, 330 pp., £39.95, January 1991, 0 300 04760 6
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Spanish Paintings of the 15th through 19th Centuries 
by Jonathan Brown and Richard Mann.
National Gallery of Art, Washington/Cambridge, 165 pp., £50, April 1991, 0 521 40107 0
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... Even readers who find the sentimentality of Murillo’s images of street arabs difficult to accept may be convinced by Brown’s account of the merits of, say, the moving yet dignified Return of the Prodigal Son, originally painted for the Hospital of Charity of Seville and now to be seen in the National Gallery, Washington. Brown goes so far as to claim that ...

Cry Treedom

Jonathan Bate, 4 November 1993

Forests: The shadow of Civilisation 
by Robert Pogue Harrison.
Chicago, 288 pp., £19.95, May 1992, 0 226 31806 0
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... could be restored to integrity,’ says Harrison. Quite so, but Hitler and his green lieutenant Richard Walther Darre throve on that too. (Anna Bramwell’s work in this area is a conspicuous omission from the otherwise excellent bibliography, the length of which makes one pause to reflect on the number of trees which have been cut down in the cause of ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: On Peregrine Worsthorne, 4 November 1993

... hanging out with real white trash like P.K. Van der Byl, Smith’s kinkily sadistic deputy, and Richard Cecil, the brave but dim-bulbed scion of the Salisburys. We met in Meikles bar and had a very frank chat, in the course of which Worsthorne said that while he could easily look on, say, Asians, as equals, he found it very tough to extend the same ...
Noël Coward: A Biography 
by Philip Hoare.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 605 pp., £25, November 1995, 1 85619 265 2
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... Coward (1992) will have gathered what close friendship sometimes, though not always, meant. They may be more shocked to learn from Hoare (quoting Robin Maugham) that in youth Coward was a gifted and audacious shoplifter (‘a daredevil game many adolescents play’). Hoare tells us that in the spring of 1918 the precocious Coward, 18 years old, received a ...

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