Busiest Thoroughfare of the Metropolis of the World

Ysenda Maxtone Graham: The Strand, 4 December 2025

The Strand: A Biography 
by Geoff Browell and Eileen Chanin.
Manchester, 272 pp., £25, February, 978 1 5261 7911 1
Show More
Show More
... therefore a ‘street of civic pride and pageantry’. The events of 13 October 1247, the Feast of Edward the Confessor, were ‘not untypical’, according to the authors, though it can’t have been an everyday experience to see the king dressed in sackcloth and carrying a reliquary of Christ’s blood, a gift from the patriarch of Jerusalem. Retracing his ...

Cosmic Ambition

Edward Said: J.S. Bach, 19 July 2001

Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician 
by Christoph Wolff.
Oxford, 599 pp., £25, March 2000, 9780198165347
Show More
Show More
... he was soon to be made Electoral Saxon and Polish Court compositeur while still employed at St Thomas’s School in Leipzig – Bach is described by Wolff as attempting to recapitulate the main outlines of his life in a genealogical sketch and family tree. In so doing he was opening a broad historical spectrum that induced him to look in two ...

Bordragings

John Kerrigan: Scotland’s Erasure, 10 October 2024

England’s Insular Imagining: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland 
by Lorna Hutson.
Cambridge, 323 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 1 009 25357 4
Show More
Show More
... unwelcome to Henry, and led, as he saw it, to a break in church history. During the reign of Edward I, ‘the bishops of Saint Andrews and Glasgow were not as they now be archbishops, but recognised the province of our archbishop of York, which extended over all that country.’ Is it any wonder that the Venetian historian Sabellicus ‘calleth Scotland ...

Robin’s Hoods

Patrick Wormald, 5 May 1983

Robin Hood 
by J.C. Holt.
Thames and Hudson, 208 pp., £8.95, May 1982, 0 500 25081 2
Show More
The Early History of Glastonbury: An Edition, Translation and Study of William of Malmesbury’s ‘De Antiquitate Glastonie Ecclesie’ 
by John Scott.
Boydell, 224 pp., £25, January 1982, 9780851151540
Show More
Megalithomania 
by John Michell.
Thames and Hudson, 168 pp., £8.50, March 1982, 9780500012611
Show More
Show More
... our comly kynge’ as the context of Robin’s pardon and entry into royal service, and since Edward II is known to have made such a tour in 1323, the pieces seemed to fit perfectly. But modern scholars are no longer convinced: for example, the name Robert Hood and its variants was not uncommon in the Wakefield area through the 13th and 14th ...

Lights On and Away We Go

Keith Thomas: Happy Thoughts, 20 May 2021

The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 
by Ritchie Robertson.
Allen Lane, 984 pp., £40, November 2020, 978 0 241 00482 1
Show More
Show More
... for the publication of two key works: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon praised Smith’s book as ‘the most profound and systematic treatise on the great objects of trade and revenue which had ever been published in any age or in any country’. It was a ...

Osler’s Razor

Peter Medawar, 17 February 1983

The Youngest Science 
by Lewis Thomas.
Viking, 256 pp., $14.75, February 1983, 9780670795338
Show More
Show More
... Lewis Thomas is a physician, a scientist, a medical administrator, and a man of letters whose previous books, The Lives of a Cell (1974) and The Medusa and the Snail (1979), and occasional writing for the New England Journal of Medicine have brought him a large following. The Youngest Science will meet his fans’ highest expectations ...

They would not go away

Conrad Russell, 30 March 1989

England’s Iconoclasts: Laws against Images 
by Margaret Aston.
Oxford, 548 pp., £48, July 1988, 0 19 822438 9
Show More
Show More
... people were adapting and tailoring the formulae before them. The shift towards iconoclasm under Edward is charted, and we are shown the increasing readiness of Protestants to answer yes to Archbishop Arundel’s old question: ‘were it a fair thing to come into a church and see therein none image?’ The conspicuous exception to this trend, as many readers ...

That Tendre Age

Tom Johnson: Tudor Children, 15 June 2023

Tudor Children 
by Nicholas Orme.
Yale, 265 pp., £20, February, 978 0 300 26796 9
Show More
Show More
... Essex, a funeral brass shows an infant in swaddling clothes. It was made to preserve the memory of Thomas Greville, who ‘died in his tender age’ in 1492.Nicholas Orme is perhaps best known for Medieval Children, a lavishly illustrated survey published in 2001, which helped to popularise medievalists’ critique of Ariès. Tudor Children reuses some of the ...

1086, 1886, 1986 and all that

John Dodgson, 22 May 1986

Domesday: 900 Years of England’s Norman Heritage 
edited by Kate Allen.
Millbank in association with the National Domesday Committee, 192 pp., £3, March 1986, 0 946171 49 1
Show More
The Normans and the Norman Conquest 
by R. Allen Brown.
Boydell, 259 pp., £19.50, January 1985, 0 85115 427 1
Show More
The Domesday Book: England’s Heritage, Then and Now 
edited by Thomas Hinde.
Hutchinson, 351 pp., £14.95, October 1985, 0 09 161830 4
Show More
Domesday Heritage 
edited by Elizabeth Hallam.
Arrow, 95 pp., £3.95, February 1986, 0 09 945800 4
Show More
Domesday Book through Nine Centuries 
by Elizabeth Hallam.
Thames and Hudson, 224 pp., £12.50, March 1986, 0 500 25097 9
Show More
Domesday Book: A Reassessment 
edited by Peter Sawyer.
Arnold, 182 pp., £25, October 1985, 0 7131 6440 9
Show More
Show More
... usurped the authority and eventually the kingdom of the unpretentious and unimpressive half-Norman Edward the Confessor – a world whose social structure and legal forms and local customs were clearly recollected or remembered by the deponents who testified to the DB commissioners. Yet it would be, still, as well to weigh Allen Brown’s reasonable apology ...

Glaucus and Ione

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 17 April 1980

The Last Days of Pompeii 
by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton.
Sidgwick, 522 pp., £6.95, December 1979, 0 283 98587 9
Show More
Show More
... with them. Late in 1833, Gell guided round the sites the rich, well-born novelist and politician Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, with his termagant of an Irish wife. The spoiled child of a doting mother, Bulwer – he added his mother’s maiden name of Lytton to his own – had had a desultory education, part of it at Cambridge, had experienced a romantic ...

At the British Library

Deborah Friedell: Elizabeth and Mary, 24 February 2022

... which agreed that the Queen of Scots, still a baby, would eventually marry Henry VIII’s son, Edward. Had Edward lived, and the union between England and Scotland held, she would have become queen of England, Elizabeth’s ‘sister’. Instead, Scotland turned to France, and Mary was betrothed to the dauphin. Her ...

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
Show More
Show More
... of offal brought by the barge-load for his beasts’ consumption. His master of the bears was Edward Alleyn, more reputably known as the founder of Dulwich College. The King took a personal interest in the breeding of lions and ‘even designed a nipple for a bottle that one fading cub might suckle from’. Sometimes the lions had to be encouraged with ...

A Monk’s-Eye View

Diarmaid MacCulloch, 10 March 2022

The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History 
by James G. Clark.
Yale, 649 pp., £25, October 2021, 978 0 300 11572 7
Show More
Going to Church in Medieval England 
by Nicholas Orme.
Yale, 483 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 300 25650 5
Show More
Show More
... were assured of a pension from the bureaucracy set up by Henry VIII and his details man and fixer, Thomas Cromwell. Abbot Hawford’s career was not over; he died seventeen years later as dean of Worcester Cathedral, also lately a Benedictine monastery. While abbot of Evesham, Hawford had been a loyal henchman of Cromwell’s, but as dean at ...

Thoughts on Late Style

Edward Said, 5 August 2004

... symbol to Adorno was the figure of the ageing, deaf and isolated composer that it turns up in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus – Adorno gave Mann a great deal of help with the novel – in the form of a lecture on Beethoven’s final period given by Adrian Leverkühn’s composition teacher, Wendell Kretschmar: Beethoven’s art had overgrown ...

At the Smithsonian

August Kleinzahler: Richard Estes, 22 January 2015

... of the visual complexity, speed and energy of the city streets. Estes is often associated with Edward Hopper, and the influence is evident in some of his earliest work, but by the mid-1960s, it was waning. In Estes’s Horn and Hardart Automat (1967) day-lit multiple reflecting surfaces bring an apartment block, traffic and signage pouring through the ...