A Man It Would Be Unwise to Cross

Stephen Alford: Thomas Cromwell, 8 November 2018

Thomas Cromwell: A Life 
by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Allen Lane, 752 pp., £30, September 2018, 978 1 84614 429 5
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... favour with the king. Of Cromwell’s arrest in early June we have a second-hand account by the French ambassador. Informed by the captain of the king’s guard that he was a prisoner, he ‘ripped his cap from his head and threw it to the ground in contempt, saying to the Duke of Norfolk and others of the Privy Council assembled there that this was the ...

Agents of Their Own Abuse

Jacqueline Rose: The Treatment of Migrant Women, 10 October 2019

... country of origin is ‘refoulement’ (to push back or repulse) which also happens to be the French word for the psychoanalytic concept of repression. As if somewhere it is being acknowledged that returning a migrant to the country from which they fled is not only inhumane (and most likely illegal under international law), but also straitjackets their ...

Diary

John Lanchester: Among the Balls, 20 July 2006

... from home? When national stereotypes are contradicted, nobody knows what to say. If he were French or from a Latin country the papers would be full of stuff about his being detached, laid-back, shruggy. As it is, they reach for the received-opinion file – which doesn’t have anything in it about the not at all rare phenomenon of the New Age German ...

Humph, He, Ha

Julian Barnes: Degas’s Achievement, 4 January 2018

Degas: A Passion for Perfection 
Fitzwilliam Museum/Cambridge, until 14 January 2018Show More
Degas Danse Dessin: Hommage à Degas avec Paul Valéry 
Musée d’Orsay/Paris, until 25 February 2018Show More
Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell 
National Gallery, London, until 7 May 2018Show More
Degas and His Model 
by Alice Michel, translated by Jeff Nagy.
David Zwirner, 88 pp., £8.95, June 2017, 978 1 941701 55 3
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... The great​ French diarist Jules Renard (1864-1910) had small interest in non-literary art forms. When Ravel approached him wanting to set five of his Histoires naturelles, Renard couldn’t see the point; he didn’t forbid it, but declined to go to the premiere. He sat through Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and found it a ‘sombre bore’, its plot ‘puerile ...

A Degenerate Assemblage

Anthony Grafton: Bibliomania, 13 April 2023

Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America 
by Denise Gigante.
Yale, 378 pp., £25, January 2023, 978 0 300 24848 7
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... You could buy new books in English at the elegant Scribner shop on Fifth Avenue, new books in French at the Librairie de France or Rizzoli, and old books in German at Mary S. Rosenberg’s austere, packed shop on Broadway, where neither I nor another obsessive friend could afford $100 for a first edition of Winckelmann’s history of ancient art. You ...

Reservations of the Marvellous

T.J. Clark, 22 June 2000

The Arcades Project 
by Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland.
Harvard, 1073 pp., £24.95, December 1999, 9780674043268
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... in the early 20th century, and adopted much the same way of life. He was in love with modern French literature, and out of love with his native academy. He wanted to drift and burrow in a city that seemed ‘more like home’ to him than Berlin – the phrase crops up in a letter from 1913 – but at the same time deeply strange, deeply alien. Mostly he ...

Conspire Slowly, Act Quickly

David Runciman: Thatcher Undone, 2 January 2020

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorised Biography Vol. III: Herself Alone 
by Charles Moore.
Allen Lane, 1072 pp., £35, October 2019, 978 0 241 32474 5
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... quickened the pace of European integration, including plans for a single currency. The French in particular saw the need to ensure that a bigger and more powerful Germany was embedded in European institutions so that it would be subject to the influence of others, above all the French themselves. François ...

O brambles, chain me too

Tom Paulin: Life and Vowels of Andrew Marvell, 25 November 1999

World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell 
by Nicholas Murray.
Little, Brown, 294 pp., £20, September 1999, 0 316 64863 9
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Marvell and Liberty 
edited by Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis.
Macmillan, 365 pp., £47.50, July 1999, 0 333 72585 9
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Andrew Marvell 
edited by Thomas Healy.
Longman, 212 pp., £12.99, September 1998, 0 582 21910 8
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... has slipped to the edges of cultural memory. The first comprehensive biography was written in French by Pierre Legouis and published in an edition of 500 copies in 1928. It appeared in English, abridged and lacking its rich footnotes, in 1965. Despite the enormous amount of critical commentary on the poems, a lot of it tedious and exasperating, no major ...

A Peacock Called Mirabell

August Kleinzahler: James Merrill, 31 March 2016

James Merrill: Life and Art 
by Langdon Hammer.
Knopf, 913 pp., £27, April 2015, 978 0 375 41333 9
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... Tucson. In 1933, when Merrill was seven, his parents hired as his governess a woman named Lilla Howard whom Jimmy came to love. She seemed to have exotic European origins and, though not French, was to be addressed as ‘Mademoiselle’. Merrill called her Zelly. She ‘gave him his first book of foreign postage ...

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: Stevenson in Edinburgh, 4 January 2024

... the learned, though he wished to know the world and for the world to know him (he spoke excellent French but knew no grammar. The tutor liked him and let him away with it). He enjoyed drinking but had zero interest in sports, unless snowball fights may be counted (golf to him was as profitless as study). He spent his time writing poems, but at conversation he ...

Magnifico

David Bromwich: This was Orson Welles, 3 June 2004

Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life 
by Peter Conrad.
Faber, 384 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 571 20978 5
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... that got him the offer to come to Hollywood and make a picture for RKO. The Martian script was by Howard Koch, who would later work on Casablanca and The Letter, but everyone always knew that Welles’s contribution was central. He had advised Koch to employ the present tense and let the story unfold as a piece of live radio: it would leak out, a string of ...

Whigissimo

Stefan Collini: Herbert Butterfield, 21 July 2005

Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter 
by C.T. McIntire.
Yale, 499 pp., £30, August 2005, 0 300 09807 3
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... published in 1939, he had written: ‘Liberty comes to the world from English traditions, not from French theories.’ And in a series of lectures delivered in Toronto in 1952, he declared that the story of liberty was ‘the basic theme of English history’. Second, we discover that although Butterfield wrote a great deal in the later stages of his ...

Mr Toad’s Wild Ride

Jessica Olin: Leaving Graceland, 5 December 2024

From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir 
by Lisa Marie Presley with Riley Keough.
Macmillan, 281 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 1 0350 5104 5
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... in a house across the pasture. Lisa Marie adored her Southern family; the fried chicken, grits and French fries that the Graceland chefs would make at any hour of the day; the stormy weather that seemed to reflect her father’s changing moods. In this telling, Elvis is gregarious, nocturnal, prone to volcanic rages and tender gestures. Lisa Marie is a tiny ...

Wild about Misia

Clive James, 4 September 1980

Misia 
by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale.
Macmillan, 337 pp., £10, June 1980, 0 333 28165 9
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... nothing parodic about the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter except her name. Emanating from the French branch of the Rothschild family, she was a jazz fan whose New York apartment served as un fastueux logement de dépannage for Charlie Parker, If he had met her earlier he might have lasted longer. With the possible exception of Clodia, none of the women I ...

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
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Going to Church in Medieval England 
by Nicholas Orme.
Yale, 483 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 300 25650 5
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... cult object of Christ’s blood. Among religious traditionalists, Norfolk had plans to remodel the Howard mausoleum church at Thetford, having already obtained the king’s consent to make this Cluniac priory into a college. Remarkably, Norfolk proposed to model the new Thetford College’s statutes on those that had recently been written for Stoke College in ...