Out of the Lock-Up

Michael Wood: Wallace Stevens, 2 April 1998

Collected Poetry and Prose 
by Wallace Stevens, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson.
Library of America, 1032 pp., $35, October 1997, 1 883011 45 0
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... Hemingway in Key West; the most appropriate Stevens’s refusing to speak at a memorial for Dylan Thomas, whom he thought of as ‘an utterly improvident person’.Stevens, trained as a lawyer, worked for most of his life for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. He was born in 1879, of Dutch-German descent, in Reading, Pennsylvania; attended ...

Kill the tuna can

Christopher Tayler: George Saunders, 8 June 2006

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and In Persuasion Nation 
by George Saunders.
Bloomsbury, 358 pp., £10.99, June 2006, 0 7475 8221 1
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... he published his first short-story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. This was praised by Thomas Pynchon as well as Wolff, and since then Saunders has been about as successful as a scrupulous writer of offbeat stories can be. He has returned to the writing-school circuit as a teacher and collected numerous National Magazine and O. Henry Awards. Each ...

Never Seen a Violet

Dinah Birch: Victorian men and girls, 6 September 2001

Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman 
by Catherine Robson.
Princeton, 250 pp., £19.95, June 2001, 0 691 00422 6
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... both were clothed alike’. Only later, at the start of their formal education, did boys enter a more markedly masculine sphere – an experience finely dramatised in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The growing boy is removed from the inadequate female guidance of mother, sisters and nursery-maid, and socialised in the exclusively masculine institution of a public ...

Madame, vous fatiguez les singes

E.S. Turner: The Tower Menagerie, 24 July 2003

The Tower Menagerie: Being the Amazing True Story of the Royal Collection of Wild and Ferocious Beasts 
by Daniel Hahn.
Simon and Schuster, 260 pp., £15.99, March 2003, 0 7432 2081 1
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... bigger animal establishments. The Emperor Frederick had three private zoos, sometimes taking the more spectacular beasts on his travels; he also ran a training school for cheetahs. Even that, as Hahn tells us, was small stuff compared with the gigantic zoo with six hundred keepers maintained by Montezuma, the entire contents of which were eaten during a long ...

A Plumless Pudding

John Sutherland: The Great John Murray Archive Disaster, 18 March 2004

... took on the Macmillan and Longman business materials, which would have been unattractive to more obviously prestigious libraries, and by offering to take good care of them went on to acquire custody of archives from Chatto, Bodley Head, Secker, Cape, Allen and Unwin, Elkin Mathews, Heinemann Educational and Virago. It isn’t hard to see why the parent ...

What would Plato have done?

Christopher Krebs: Plutarch’s Lives, 29 June 2017

The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives 
by Plutarch, translated by Pamela Mensch.
Norton, 393 pp., £28, March 2017, 978 0 393 29282 4
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... grouped into biographies, on the one hand (almost fifty have come down to us)and, on the other, more than seventy miscellaneous essays, from ‘The Face in the Moon’ and ‘The Intelligence of Animals’ to ‘The Obsolescence of Oracles’, ‘Advice on Public Life’ and the ever helpful ‘On Praising Oneself Inoffensively’: ‘an uneven ...

Two Sharp Teeth

Philip Ball: Dracula Studies, 25 October 2018

Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote ‘Dracula’ 
by David J. Skal.
Norton, 672 pp., £15.99, October 2017, 978 1 63149 386 7
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The Cambridge Companion to ‘Dracula’ 
edited by Roger Luckhurst.
Cambridge, 219 pp., £17.99, November 2017, 978 1 316 60708 4
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The Vampire: A New History 
by Nick Groom.
Yale, 287 pp., £16.99, October 2018, 978 0 300 23223 3
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... It was the spectre of the age, aroused by Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871), which linked humans to more primitive forms of life. Darwin’s ideas were crudely recycled in the supposed hierarchy of races, with Northern European whites placed highest on the evolutionary tree, along with the belief that individuals could be ...

Making doorbells ring

David Trotter: Pushing Buttons, 22 November 2018

Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic and the Politics of Pushing 
by Rachel Plotnick.
MIT, 424 pp., £30, October 2018, 978 0 262 03823 2
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... machinery’ in operation from a distance served as a measure of ‘efficacy in office’. More recent presidents have had yet more vast machineries at their disposal. It’s no surprise, as Plotnick points out, that Donald Trump should so obviously relish the role of digital commander. In January this year, playing ...

In Her Green Necklace

Elisabeth R. O’Connell: Mummy Portraits, 23 October 2025

The Mysterious Fayum Portraits: Faces from Ancient Egypt 
by Euphrosyne Doxiadis.
Thames and Hudson, 248 pp., £40, October 2024, 978 0 500 02794 3
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... greater archaeological context: in the 1990s at Marina el-Alamein on the Mediterranean coast and, more recently, at er-Rubayat (ancient Philadelphia).Petrie’s finds from Hawara and Albert Gayet’s from Antinoöpolis both caused a sensation when they were exhibited, but the mummy portraits were not examined in great detail. For most of the following ...

Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Sonnet

Barbara Everett: The Sonnets, 8 May 2008

... sonnet forms in English, and this is one of them, the Shakespearean. The other, the Petrarchan, is more coherent aesthetically, having only two rhymes in the octave (the first eight lines) and two more in the sestet (the last six), but it is much harder to write in English than in Italian, because English has fewer ...

Through the Trapdoor

Steven Shapin: Roger Penrose’s Puzzles, 26 June 2025

The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius 
by Patchen Barss.
Atlantic, 337 pp., £25, November 2024, 978 1 83895 932 6
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... brother, Jonathan, was a grandmaster and ten times British chess champion. But there was much more to Roger’s puzzling than this. People who know little else about what he did may be familiar with the Penrose triangle, which shares space with Escher’s prints on the walls of student bedrooms around the world, or with Penrose tiling – tessellated ...

Not You

Mary Beard, 23 January 1997

Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship 
edited by J.P. Hallett and T. van Nortwick.
Routledge, 196 pp., £42.50, November 1996, 0 415 14284 9
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... For more than two thousand years, classical culture – as a set of institutions and as a way of life – has been lamenting its own imminent extinction. By inventing the idea of ‘barbarity’ to be the antitype of their own ‘civilised’ values, the ancient Greeks prompted the fear that those barbarians (real or, for the most part, imaginary) would sooner or later triumph ...

Diary

Colin Robinson: Publishing’s Demise, 26 February 2009

... sort of way: I was the most recently hired editor at the imprint, one of its more highly paid staff members, and my list, though filled with erudite, well-written books, was not the most profitable. If anyone was for the chop, it was likely to be me. And the possibility of staff cuts seemed far from remote. The share price of the ...

Browning Versions

Barbara Everett, 4 August 1983

Robert Browning: A Life within Life 
by Donald Thomas.
Weidenfeld, 334 pp., £12.95, August 1982, 0 297 78092 1
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The Elusive Self in the Poetry of Robert Browning 
by Constance Hassett.
Ohio, 186 pp., £17, December 1982, 0 8214 0629 9
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The Complete Works of Robert Browning. Vol. V 
edited by Roma King.
Ohio, 395 pp., £29.75, July 1981, 9780821402207
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The Poetical Works of Robert Browning: Vol. I 
edited by Ian Jack and Margaret Smith.
Oxford, 543 pp., £45, April 1983, 0 19 811893 7
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Robert Browning: The Poems 
edited by John Pettigrew and Thomas Collins.
Yale/Penguin, 1191 pp., £26, January 1982, 0 300 02675 7
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Robert Browning: ‘The Ring and the Book’ 
edited by Richard Altick.
Yale/Penguin, 707 pp., £21, May 1981, 0 300 02677 3
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... is happening in Browning studies, one marked by the accession of new editions – do little more than try to base an ethical conclusion on what they take to be the psychology of what they take to be the Duke’s ‘character’; and though such probings are often acute and sensible, they hardly advance understanding of the poem beyond the critical ...

Types of Ambiguity

Conrad Russell, 22 January 1987

War, Taxation and Rebellion in Early Tudor England: Henry VIII, Wolsey and the Amicable Grant of 1525 
by G.W. Bernard.
Harvester, 164 pp., £25, August 1986, 0 7108 1126 8
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Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform 1500-1550 
by Alistair Fox and John Guy.
Blackwell, 242 pp., £22.50, July 1986, 0 631 14614 8
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The Union of England and Scotland 1603-1608 
by Bruce Galloway.
John Donald, 208 pp., £20, May 1986, 0 85976 143 6
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Stuart England 
edited by Blair Worden.
Phaidon, 272 pp., £25, October 1986, 0 7148 2391 0
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... 17th century, a sort of Tillyardian monster with which our examiners are still wrestling. In more recent times, revisionism in the 17th century has created the opportunity to build a new coherence, but it cannot be said that this opportunity has yet been fully taken. These four books perhaps suggest that the time is coming when a synthesis will at last ...