Bull

Bernard Wasserstein, 23 September 1993

Imperial Warrior: The Life and Times of Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby 1861-1936 
by Lawrence James.
Weidenfeld, 279 pp., £20, January 1993, 0 297 81152 5
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... Dublin Fusiliers, Lawrence’s Arab army, Jewish battalions (mainly Russian Jews recruited in North America), a French detachment and a few companies of Carabinieri, Bersaglieri and Cacciatori organised into a Distaccamento Italiano di Palestina (according to the official record, the Italians performed ‘important guard duties’). Much of the hard work ...

Greatest Genius

Frances Harris, 23 July 1992

Charles James Fox 
by L.G Mitchell.
Oxford, 338 pp., £25, June 1992, 0 19 820104 4
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... taken the Commons by storm with his dazzling debating skills, and at 24 he was a Treasury lord in North’s ministry. It went to his head. ‘In an excess of vanity and presumption,’ Horace Walpole remarked, he acted as the leader of a party, ‘his arrogance, loquacity and intempernace raising him the enemies of a minister before he had acquired the power ...

Unwarranted

John Barrell: John Wilkes Betrayed, 6 July 2006

John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty 
by Arthur Cash.
Yale, 482 pp., £19.95, February 2006, 0 300 10871 0
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... a speech from the throne commending the terms of the peace. In issue no. 45 of his periodical the North Briton, Wilkes attacked the effrontery of the prime minister, George Grenville, in obliging the king to speak in praise of a shameful treaty, though in fact the sentiments in the speech were well known to be those of George III himself. Where the speech ...

Spurning at the High

Edward Pearce: A poet of Chartism, 6 November 2003

Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics 1819-69 
by Miles Taylor.
Oxford, 290 pp., £45, January 2003, 0 19 820729 8
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... A busy time in the courts brought a modest prosperity, a house in the suburbs and a partner, Elizabeth Darbyshire, whom he later married. Politics never lost its appeal, however. Radical movements were split over the degree of accommodation that should be reached with the progressive end of the mainstream. Jones favoured reconciliation with the John ...

No Innovations in My Time

Ferdinand Mount: George III, 16 December 2021

George III: The Life and Reign of Britain’s Most Misunderstood Monarch 
by Andrew Roberts.
Allen Lane, 763 pp., £35, October, 978 0 241 41333 3
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... of England’s most disastrous kings’). Roberts tells us with his trademark thump that now Elizabeth II has allowed more than 200,000 pages of the Georgian Archives at Windsor to be published – 85 per cent of them for the first time – ‘it is at last possible to show that every single word quoted above about George III is completely ...

Weimar in Partibus

Norman Stone, 1 July 1982

Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World 
by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl.
Yale, 563 pp., £12.95, May 1982, 0 300 02660 9
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Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy 
by Bhikhu Parekh.
Macmillan, 198 pp., £20, October 1981, 0 333 30474 8
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... 1975, by Mary McCarthy, as The Life of the Mind. The question that crops up, unstated, throughout Elizabeth Young – Bruehl’s lengthy and thorough biography, and in Bhikhu Parekh’s Hannah Arendt Made Simple, is this: how much of the Sixties survives to the Eighties? She comes across, certainly, as a good egg. She looks out of the back cover of Dr ...

Coiling in Anarchy

Rosemary Hill: Top of the Lighthouse, 16 February 2023

Where Light in Darkness Lies: The Story of the Lighthouse 
by Veronica della Dora.
Reaktion, 280 pp., £25, March 2022, 978 1 78914 549 6
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... the scene. Land-based lighthouses offer more graphic potential and seemingly generate less unease. North Foreland, which featured in the advertising campaign ‘You Can Be Sure of Shell’ in the 1930s, was shown close up, from the landward side, in Elwin Hawthorne’s design, but it has some of the brooding, uninviting quality that pervades the nearly ...

Mud, Mud, Mud

Nathaniel Rich: New Orleans, 22 November 2012

The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans 
by Lawrence Powell.
Harvard, 422 pp., £22.95, March 2012, 978 0 674 05987 0
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... acknowledges, part of it collapsed into the river in the early 1800s. There was arable land to its north and east, so settlers could have moved away from the river and ‘the diseased swamps that would make New Orleans the great necropolis of North America’. And yet, as Powell concedes, this cramped geography would force ...

On Cortney Lamar Charleston

Stephanie Burt, 21 October 2021

... means. White girls look at meconstantly. DMX never seems to be screaming.The underground heads north on my playlistswhile an old poster peels away from the wall.I’m beside myself almost always: A-side, B-side.FUBU (a clothing line) means ‘For Us, By Us’. It summons up a culture of Black solidarity that Charleston associates with Chicago’s South ...

Chiantishire

Michael Hofmann: Shirley Hazzard, 6 May 2021

Collected Stories 
by Shirley Hazzard.
Virago, 356 pp., £16.99, November 2020, 978 0 349 01295 7
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... of Sydney Harbour Bridge. She went on to live on three other continents: Asia, Europe and North America. As is sometimes the way with writers whose biographies are yet to be written (Brigitta Olubas is on the case), information about Hazzard’s life is often tinged with exoticism. She was a teenage spy in Hong Kong after the Second World War; in the ...

Unwritten Novels

Doris Lessing, 11 January 1990

... their talents; ‘The Psychopathology of the Sofa’ is the subtitle. A Butterfly Under a Stone by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She and her sisters, unknown to her father, brothers and later, her husband, befriended a poor girl dying of tuberculosis in ‘The Rookeries’, which were, after all, not a mile from their house. This fine and compassionate novel was ...

Diary

Susannah Clapp: On Angela Carter, 12 March 1992

... goose-pimpling pause: ‘I’ve always thought that Gudrun was, well, the vasectomy queen of the North.’ Angela shot straight. She saw clearly and she spoke up, and this is what, more than anything else, I admired about her. When Wise Children was published last June, she was widely and rightly praised for its ingenuities: for dramatically depicting the ...

Obstacles

Penelope Fitzgerald, 4 July 1996

Edward Thomas: Selected Letters 
edited by R. George Thomas.
Oxford, 192 pp., £30, March 1996, 0 19 818562 6
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... air and open road (‘going one knows not where’) literature of all kinds: in the summer of 1907 Elizabeth von Arnim took a large party, including E.M. Forster, through Sussex by caravan, while the Neo-Pagans were camping out in the New Forest. Even so, with the rent of his cottage ‘a quarterly worry’, Edward Thomas had to make ends meet with the ...

Tunnel Vision

Jenny Diski: Princess Diana, 2 August 2007

The Diana Chronicles 
by Tina Brown.
Century, 481 pp., £18.99, June 2007, 978 1 84605 286 6
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Diana 
by Sarah Bradford.
Penguin, 443 pp., £7.99, July 2007, 978 0 14 027671 8
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... low Diana had sunk that night in Paris as she left the Ritz: In August most upscale Parisians head north to Deauville for the polo and the racing or to the cool woods of their country estates in the Loire or Bordeaux … Paris’s most prestigious hotel at that time of the year is crawling with camera-toting tourists and rubber-neckers. At the end of the ...

Keys to the World

Tom Stevenson: Sea Power, 8 September 2022

The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans 
by David Bosco.
Oxford, 320 pp., £22.99, April, 978 0 19 026564 9
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Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order In World War Two 
by Paul Kennedy.
Yale, 521 pp., £25, May, 978 0 300 21917 3
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... tend to take emphatic pride in their nation’s carriers: the Royal Navy refers to HMS Queen Elizabeth, launched in 2014, as ‘4.5 acres of floating sovereign power’. The US has eleven full-size fleet carriers, more than the rest of the world combined. It wasn’t always so. Japan had ten carriers by 1940 and Japanese admirals pioneered the carrier ...