Nothing to Do with Me

Gaby Wood: Henri Cartier-Bresson, 5 June 2014

Henri Cartier-Bresson 
Pompidou Centre, until 8 June 2015Show More
‘Voir est un tout’: Entretiens et conversations 1951-98 
by Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Centre Pompidou, 176 pp., €19.90, January 2014, 978 2 84426 639 2
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Henri Cartier-Bresson: Here and Now 
edited by Clément Chéroux.
Thames and Hudson, 400 pp., £45, March 2014, 978 0 500 54430 3
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... Art in New York put on a solo exhibition of his work, and he founded Magnum with three others: Robert Capa, David Seymour (known as ‘Chim’) and George Rodger. When he saw his friend’s show in New York, Capa advised Cartier-Bresson to be cautious. ‘You will be labelled the little surrealist photographer,’ he wrote: ‘you will be lost, and will ...

Jigsaw Mummies

Tom Shippey: Pagan Britain, 6 November 2014

Pagan Britain 
by Ronald Hutton.
Yale, 480 pp., £25, November 2013, 978 0 300 19771 6
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The King in the North: The Life and Times of Oswald of Northumbria 
by Max Adams.
Head of Zeus, 450 pp., £25, August 2013, 978 1 78185 418 1
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... statuettes with exaggerated breasts and hips, seemed to support the notion. D.H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and Rudyard Kipling all picked up the idea, so that by the early 20th century, Mircea Eliade commented: ‘A “search for the Mother” had become a major component of the “unconscious nostalgias of the Western intellectual”.’ The only such ...

Shaving-Pot in Waiting

Rosemary Hill: Victoria’s Albert, 23 February 2012

Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death That Changed the Monarchy 
by Helen Rappaport.
Hutchinson, 336 pp., £20, November 2011, 978 0 09 193154 4
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Albert 
by Jules Stewart.
I.B. Tauris, 276 pp., £19.99, October 2011, 978 1 84885 977 7
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... own way and saw no reason not to have it in matters of state as well as at home. All in all the young queen had more in common with her unpopular and self-indulgent uncles George IV and William IV than the fresh-faced appearance and the famous promise to ‘be good’ suggested. Courtiers and Victoria herself recorded tearful scenes and door slamming on her ...

Don’t wear yum-yum yellow

Theo Tait: Shark Attack!, 2 August 2012

Demon Fish: Travels through the Hidden World of Sharks 
by Juliet Eilperin.
Duckworth, 295 pp., £18.99, January 2012, 978 0 7156 4291 7
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... attitudes, are fairly hysterical. The professional shark-hater and shark-killer Captain William E. Young remarked in his 1934 memoir Shark! Shark! that the very word summons up a powerful mental image of a cold-blooded rover of the deep, its huge mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth, swimming ceaselessly night and day in search of anything that might fall into ...

Ruck in the Carpet

Glen Newey: Political Morality, 9 July 2009

Philosophy and Real Politics 
by Raymond Geuss.
Princeton, 116 pp., £11.95, October 2008, 978 0 691 13788 9
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... theory. The new book’s jacket image, a striking black and white photo by John Sadovy, shows a young man almost literally biting the dust. Only after turning the book over to look at the back does one notice his presumed killer, reloading his rifle. This example already poses questions beyond the ken of liberal orthodoxy. The dead man, a member of the ...

The Immortal Coil

Richard Barnett: Faraday’s Letters, 21 March 2013

The Correspondence of Michael Faraday Vol. VI, 1860-67 
by Frank James.
IET, 919 pp., £85, December 2011, 978 0 86341 957 7
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... at Owen’s College in Manchester, ‘what kinds of habits &c I had to overcome when I was young & thinking of speaking to others.’ But he took pains to learn, and to fashion a suitable character for his performances. Dignified, unostentatious, unforced, he became the handsome, masculine face of Victorian public science, a gentleman who could command ...

Like a Mosquito

Mattathias Schwartz: Drones, 4 July 2013

Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield 
by Jeremy Scahill.
Serpent’s Tail, 642 pp., £15.99, May 2013, 978 1 84668 850 8
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... A senior official told Scahill that Obama was ‘surprised and upset and wanted an explanation’. Robert Gibbs, a senior advisor to Obama, suggested that the boy wouldn’t have been killed if he’d had a ‘more responsible father’. A wrongful death suit against US officials for the death of both al-Awlakis and a third US citizen is pending. Scahill ...

These people are intolerable

Richard J. Evans: Hitler and Franco, 5 November 2015

Hitler’s Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War 
by Pierpaolo Barbieri.
Harvard, 349 pp., £22.95, April 2015, 978 0 674 72885 1
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... in order to prevent the further spread of communism in that theatre and, secondly, to test my young Luftwaffe at this opportunity in this or that technical respect.’ German armed forces personnel trained around 56,000 Nationalist troops, and at any one time there were around 10,000 Germans engaged in the war in some capacity on the ground; the total ...

Petulance is not a tragic flaw

Rosemary Hill: Edward and Mrs Simpson, 30 July 2015

Princes at War: The British Royal Family’s Private Battle in the Second World War 
by Deborah Cadbury.
Bloomsbury, 407 pp., £25, April 2015, 978 1 4088 4524 0
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... Communicated monthly, sit and stare At the new suburb stretched beyond the run-way Where a young man lands hatless from the air. The dashing new king’s arrival in London by aeroplane was widely reported and seen as a refreshing sign of modernity: here was a prince who was both a man of the people – of the desperate poverty he saw in Wales he said ...

Forever on the Wrong Side

R.W. Johnson: Jean Suret-Canale, 27 September 2012

Suret-Canale: de la Résistance a l’anticolonialisme 
by Pascal Bianchini.
L’Esprit Frappeur, 253 pp., €14, March 2011, 978 2 84405 244 5
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... of other names in Montpellier and Périgueux. He was in a three-person cell that included a Jew, Robert Kirschen. In 1942, the Gestapo pounced on a Resistance network at the Maison de Chimie, and Kirschen’s younger brother André was among those arrested. André, at 15 the youngest of them, was the only one not shot, but in ‘compensation’, both his ...

It was satire

Mary Beard: Caligula, 26 April 2012

Caligula: A Biography 
by Aloys Winterling, translated by Deborah Lucas Scheider, Glenn Most and Paul Psoinos.
California, 229 pp., £24.95, October 2011, 978 0 520 24895 3
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... and Penthouse, with a script by Gore Vidal. It starred Malcolm McDowell as a convincingly bonkers young emperor, backed up by a group of A-list actors, including Gielgud and Helen Mirren, who were said to have been unaware of the soft porn enterprise in which they were involved. (Did they think that Guccione was bankrolling serious historical drama?) Much ...

Do put down that revolver

Rosemary Hill, 14 July 2016

The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House between the Wars 
by Adrian Tinniswood.
Cape, 406 pp., £25, June 2016, 978 0 224 09945 5
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... interval between the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on ...

Orchestrated Panic

Yitzhak Laor: The Never-Ending War, 1 November 2007

1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East 
by Tom Segev, translated by Jessica Cohen.
Little, Brown, 673 pp., £25, May 2007, 978 0 316 72478 4
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... did Helms introduce him to senior figures in the CIA, but he set up a meeting between Amit and Robert McNamara, then the defense secretary: McNamara found Amit’s arguments persuasive, and he conveyed them to Johnson the same evening. The president understood that Israel was going to act; he set up a special task force to handle the situation, headed by ...

‘Where’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’

Michael Dobson: 17th-century literary culture, 11 September 2008

Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707 
by John Kerrigan.
Oxford, 599 pp., March 2008, 978 0 19 818384 6
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... tradition alike (with more than a hundred pages of endnotes citing work by the likes of Tom Nairn, Robert Crawford and Brian Doyle), this is an examination of the writing produced across these islands during the crucial century between the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in 1603 and the passage of the legislation that at last legally ...

Batsy

Thomas Karshan: John Updike, 31 March 2005

Villages 
by John Updike.
Hamish Hamilton, 321 pp., £17.99, February 2005, 9780241143087
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... where, on a bed like theirs, two single beds yoked together to make a king-size, a man – rather young, to judge from the smoothness of his blond body, with its plump buttocks – lies upon his wife’s body as if attempting resuscitation or (not at all the same thing) concealment. When, under silent direction from the accompanying, officiating ...