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Lord of the Eggs

Liam Shaw: Great Auks!, 15 August 2024

The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction 
by Gísli Pálsson, translated by Anna Yates.
Princeton, 291 pp., £22, April, 978 0 691 23098 6
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... known stronghold.In 1858, two English ornithologists went to see the great auk for themselves. John Wolley and Alfred Newton travelled to the south-west peninsula of Iceland, hoping to visit Eldey and return with some specimens to add to their collections. Newton even dreamed of capturing a live auk for London Zoo. But their trip was a failure. Bad weather ...

At the Driehaus Museum

Rosemary Hill: Tulips, Fritillaries and Auriculas, 10 July 2025

... the impression McEwen made in his life. He was born into a Scottish gentry family, the son of Sir John McEwen, Conservative under-secretary of state for Scotland, and his wife, Brigid Lindley. Rory and his five brothers and one sister grew up in Berwickshire in the family’s Palladian mansion, Marchmont. Commenting later on his interest in Redouté, he wrote ...

The Fatness of Falstaff

Barbara Everett, 16 August 1990

... merely reverse them. Stress on the whole Tudor Myth, concern with the source materials Shakespeare took from contemporary historians, whether primarily ‘for’ the Prince or ‘for’ Falstaff, prejudges the actual form and substance of these plays.Scholarly criticism of the Henry IV plays is haunted by an interesting problem of structure. There is marked ...

We know it intimately

Christina Riggs: Rummaging for Mummies, 22 October 2020

A World beneath the Sands: Adventurers and Archaeologists in the Golden Age of Egyptology 
by Toby Wilkinson.
Picador, 510 pp., £25, October, 978 1 5098 5870 5
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... are used throughout the book) are both dated and revealing. Egyptian resistance took many forms, and the country wasn’t handed independence, but won it in the face of censorship, martial law, and the imprisonment and exile of many of its leaders.Most histories of Egyptology begin in earnest in July 1798, with the arrival at Alexandria of ...

Christopher Hitchens states a prosecution case

Christopher Hitchens, 25 October 1990

Crossman: The Pursuit of Power 
by Anthony Howard.
Cape, 361 pp., £15.95, October 1990, 0 224 02592 9
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... the body of Dick Double-Crossman, Classical don with political flair, Favoured of fortune he yet took a toss when Out with the hounds, he ran with the hare. This was widely quoted; and quoted because it came often to mind rather than, as Howard implies, because his name happened to lend itself to the joke. In spite of his declared friendship and admiration ...

Hanging Offence

David Sylvester, 21 October 1993

... feel I should leave, but I see from the correspondence that the insurmountable problem, because I took it to be symptomatic, was my inability to convince Rosenthal that you simply cannot do an exhibition called ‘American Art in the 20th Century’ without including at least one of Arshile Gorky’s portraits or double portraits of the Thirties (and, if ...

Why Do the Tories Always Have the Luck?

Peter Clarke, 23 February 1995

Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 
edited by Anthony Seldon and Stuart Ball.
Oxford, 842 pp., £20, October 1994, 0 19 820238 5
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... riven with ideological dispute and internecine factionalism faces electoral disadvantages. As John Barnes brings out in his urbane essay on ideology and factions, Conservative ideology has rested in part on a scepticism about the adequacy of ideology itself. In this sense, neither the fervent Tariff Reformers of the early part of the century, nor the ...

In the bright autumn of my senescence

Christopher Hitchens, 6 January 1994

In the Heat of the Struggle: Twenty-Five Years of ‘Socialist Worker’ 
by Paul Foot.
Bookmarks, 288 pp., £12.50, November 1993, 0 906224 94 2
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Why You Should Join the Socialists 
by Paul Foot.
Bookmarks, 70 pp., £1.90, November 1993, 0 906224 80 2
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... two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on the dishonest line of the Communist Party. No doubt there was a resolution to send a telegram to Downing Street. There was also, I dare say for the sake of ‘unity’, a pro-Chinese speaker (for some reason ...

Wild Bill

Stephen Greenblatt, 20 October 1994

Essays on Renaissance Literature. Vol. II 
by William Empson, edited by John Haffenden.
Cambridge, 292 pp., £35, May 1994, 0 521 44044 0
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... further back to the chapter on Milton and Bentley in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935). But they took an odd turn in his later years, a turn clearly signalled in a quirky essay on Elizabethan spirits published in the LRB in 1980 and included in the present volume. This essay was at least nominally a review of one of Frances Yates’s studies of the ...

Did Lloyd George mean war?

Michael Brock, 26 November 1987

David Lloyd George: A Political Life. The Architect of Change, 1863-1912 
by Bentley Brinkerhoff Gilbert.
Batsford, 546 pp., £25, April 1987, 0 7134 5558 6
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... All his skills were needed here: during some seventeen years of ministerial life Lloyd George took a hand in five books about himself, and much distortion resulted. After the war, for instance, Ll.G. hoped that his long struggle against Naval expenditure had been forgotten. He recorded that in July 1908 he had told the German Ambassador of his willingness ...

Famous Four

R.W. Johnson, 30 November 1995

SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party 
by Ivor Crewe and Anthony King.
Oxford, 611 pp., £25, November 1995, 0 19 828050 5
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... Sue Slipman, Polly Toynbee and Rosie Barnes among them – but even such a seasoned campaigner as John Cartwright. One reads their names and wonders how true believers in Elmer Gantry felt when the charisma wore off.Crewe and King talk of the Gang of Four in almost hushed tones as if they were giants still stalking the land. Yet the fact is that their ...

Conspiratorial Hapsburger

Michael Hofmann, 5 March 1987

Hotel Savoy 
by Joseph Roth, translated by John Hoare.
Chatto, 183 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 7011 2879 8
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... cradle of the Thirties, the Hotel Foyot in Paris, was demolished in 1937.) The cradle-robber also took his youth, for Roth looked and felt old practically all his life: ‘like a thousand-year-old man returning from Beyond,’ he once said. Last but not least, the cradle episode prefigures his relationships with women: in his life and in his books, their ...

A.E. Housman and Biography

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 22 November 1979

A.E. Housman 
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Routledge, 304 pp., £9.75
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... extensive knowledge. When he wants to tell us what a good scholar Housman was, he quotes the late John Carter’s comment on the testimonials supplied by various scholars when Housman was candidate for the Chair of Latin at University College, London. ‘Perhaps only those conversant with the trades-union of Academe,’ wrote Carter, ‘can appreciate to the ...

Return of the real

A.D. Nuttall, 23 April 1992

Uncritical Theory: Post-Modernism, Intellectuals and the Gulf War 
by Christopher Norris.
Lawrence and Wishart, 218 pp., £9.99, February 1992, 0 85315 752 9
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... Foucault, closely followed, as we shall see, by Presidents Reagan and Bush, Margaret Thatcher and John Major. The heroes are – well, Derrida, of course, but above all Noam Chomsky, here exalted especially because of his sturdily rationalist opposition to Foucault, in an exchange on Dutch Television in the early Seventies about the location of political ...

I’m not an actress

Michael Newton: Ava Gardner, 7 September 2006

Ava Gardner 
by Lee Server.
Bloomsbury, 551 pp., £20, April 2006, 0 7475 6547 3
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... A dead animal.’ She was the most beautiful girl at Rock Ridge High, and it was her looks that took her to Hollywood. She was famous as a beauty before she was famous as an actress. Her best films both celebrate her appearance and respond to it as a problem, almost a fate. They were always making icons of her: all those publicity stills and bathing-beauty ...

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