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Now for the Hills

Stephanie Burt: Les Murray, 16 March 2000

Collected Poems 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 476 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 1 85754 369 6
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Fredy Neptune 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 256 pp., £19.95, May 1999, 1 85754 433 1
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Conscious and Verbal 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 89 pp., £6.95, October 1999, 1 85754 453 6
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... now seem content to name, record, greet, praise and commemorate, making garrulity stand in for craft. To give another egregious example, in ‘Music to Me Is like Days’, the modern       world reverberates with Muzak and Prozac. As it doesn’t with poe-zac (I did meet a Miss Universe named Verstak). Some poems work better: an entertainingly ...

Good History

Christopher Hill, 5 March 1981

After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J.H. Hexter 
edited by Barbara Malament.
Manchester, 363 pp., £17.95, December 1980, 0 7190 0805 0
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Puritans and Adventurers 
by T.H. Breen.
Oxford, 270 pp., £10, October 1980, 0 19 502728 0
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On History 
by Fernand Braudel, translated by Sarah Matthews.
Weidenfeld, 226 pp., £10.95, January 1981, 0 297 77880 3
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Sociology and History 
by Peter Burke.
Allen and Unwin, 116 pp., £6.95, August 1980, 0 19 502728 0
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... and on the royal favourite Buckingham. There is only one article on a country other than England: Robert Harding’s ‘Aristocrats and Lawyers in French Provincial Government, 1559-1648’. William J. Bouwsma writes on ‘Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture’. His most interesting point is that the words ‘anxiety’ and ‘anxious’ entered ...

Let us breakfast in splendour

Charles Nicholl: Francis Barber, 16 July 2015

The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir 
by Michael Bundock.
Yale, 282 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 20710 1
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... and insinuated as much in various comments in his biography, referring to Francis’s ‘craft and selfishness’ and his ‘inattention to the interests of his Master’. His sneering treatment of Barber was widely condemned, not least by Boswell, who instanced it as an example of the ‘dark uncharitable cast’ of his competitor’s book. Boswell ...

Something for Theresa May to think about

John Barrell: The Bow Street Runners, 7 June 2012

The First English Detectives: The Bow Street Runners and the Policing of London, 1750-1840 
by J.M. Beattie.
Oxford, 272 pp., £65, February 2012, 978 0 19 969516 4
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... James Fox and other members of the parliamentary opposition attempting to haul to shore a landing craft crammed with an invasion force of the French Republic. In the sky is the head of Henry Dundas, the secretary of war and the allegorical embodiment of a loyalist wind, who blows towards Fox and friends the threatening names of five runners, among them ...

The Sucker, the Sucker!

Amia Srinivasan: What’s it like to be an octopus?, 7 September 2017

Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life 
by Peter Godfrey-Smith.
Collins, 255 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 0 00 822627 5
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The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness 
by Sy Montgomery.
Simon & Schuster, 272 pp., £8.99, April 2016, 978 1 4711 4675 6
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... observer than Aristotle, identified the octopus’s main characteristic as ‘mischief and craft’.) What does it feel like to be an octopus? Does it feel like anything at all? Or are octopuses, as Godfrey-Smith puts it, ‘just biochemical machines for which all is dark inside’? This form of question – ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ Thomas ...

Weird Things in the Sky

Edmund Gordon: Are we alone?, 26 December 2024

After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon 
by Greg Eghigian.
Oxford, 388 pp., £22.99, September 2024, 978 0 19 086987 8
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... their clothes unaccountably scuffed and torn, with odd fragments of memory: a large cigar-shaped craft with extended wings following their car down the highway; a glimpse of humanoid figures with shiny dark uniforms. Over the weeks that followed, Betty was tormented by dreams in which she and Barney were taken onboard the ship and subjected to a variety of ...

Its Rolling Furious Eyes

James Vincent: Automata, 22 February 2024

Miracles and Machines: A 16th-Century Automaton and Its Legend 
by Elizabeth King and W. David Todd.
Getty, 245 pp., £39.99, August 2023, 978 1 60606 839 7
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... trapped in copper tubes. Or the oracular brazen heads supposedly created by Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon. These heads were forged from bronze or brass and activated with the help of arcane knowledge of spirits or celestial conjunctions. Once operational, they were able to predict the future and answer any question. But stories ...

The wind comes up out of nowhere

Charles Nicholl: The Disappearance of Arthur Cravan, 9 March 2006

... and scandal, Maintenant was entirely written and published by Cravan: the other contributors (Robert Miradique, W. Cooper, E. Lajeunesse, Marie Lowitska etc) are all pseudonyms. Even the advertisements bear his skewed imprint: the restaurant Chez Jourdain entices customers with the words, ‘Where can you see Van Dongen’ – the Flemish painter Kees van ...

‘We ain’t found shit’

Scott Ritter, 2 July 2015

... lectures about various Iraqi weapons programmes, about the result of past inspections, about the craft and tools of inspection, the rights and duties of inspectors in Iraq and about the history, culture and religions of Iraq’. An Unmovic inspector, he said, should be ‘driving and dynamic – but not angry and aggressive’; ‘ingenious – but not ...

The Stuntman

David Runciman: Richard Branson, 20 March 2014

Branson: Behind the Mask 
by Tom Bower.
Faber, 368 pp., £20, February 2014, 978 0 571 29710 8
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... of utter ruin. Branson’s line on Bower is that he got lucky a while back exposing the monstrous Robert Maxwell and is now trying the same trick on other prominent figures in the hope that lightning will strike twice. But Bower doesn’t portray Branson as another Maxwell. He never suggests he is a crook and he is almost admiring of the skill with which he ...

Spaces between the Stars

David Bromwich: Kubrick Does It Himself, 26 September 2024

Kubrick: An Odyssey 
by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams.
Faber, 649 pp., £25, January, 978 0 571 37036 8
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... to failure and the posthumous honour of indie renown. The largest exception to the rule, as Robert Kolker and Nathan Abrams show in Kubrick: An Odyssey, owed his escape to a coalescence of luck and preternatural self-confidence.Kubrick is a comprehensive Life. It yields, in orderly procession, almost every fact a scholar or a fan might want; and a fair ...

Social Arrangements

John Bayley, 30 December 1982

The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry 
edited by Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion.
Penguin, 208 pp., £1.95, October 1982, 0 14 042283 8
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The Rattle Bag 
edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.
Faber, 498 pp., £10, October 1982, 0 571 11966 2
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... consonants’ into order ‘with sadistic ease’. This subtle poem implies with kindness and craft what so many writers from working-class backgrounds labour on about: the continuing need for a communal background from which the writer has been isolated by individual intelligence, the need for                      blank printer’s ...

Hand and Foot

John Kerrigan: Seamus Heaney, 27 May 1999

Opened Ground: Poems 1966-96 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 478 pp., £20, September 1998, 0 571 19492 3
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The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study 
by Neil Corcoran.
Faber, 276 pp., £9.99, September 1998, 0 571 17747 6
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Seamus Heaney 
by Helen Vendler.
HarperCollins, 188 pp., £15.99, November 1998, 0 00 255856 4
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... of Opened Ground; his subsequent use of it shows how closely fractious politics and the demands of craft can run together in his work to produce a form of words which sounds final in its simplicity but has had the capacity to take on new meanings as his writing has developed. In the years since North the idea of ‘opening up’ has become a leitmotif in ...

The Monster Plot

Thomas Powers: James Angleton, Spymaster, 10 May 2018

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton 
by Jefferson Morley.
Scribe, 336 pp., £20, December 2017, 978 1 911344 73 5
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... in London during the war, and Michael Holzman’s James Jesus Angleton: The CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence (2008). But Angleton laid out on the page is nothing like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for example, who took over as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division in the ...

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