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Witchcraft and the Inquisition

Robin Briggs, 18 June 1981

Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late 16th and Early 17th Centuries 
by D.P. Walker.
Scolar, 116 pp., £9.95, March 1981, 9780859676205
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The Witches’ Advocate 
by Gustav Henningsen.
Nevada, 607 pp., $24, November 1980, 0 87417 056 7
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... of their elements must have existed in Basque folklore, yet it appears that they were previously unknown in at least one of the affected communities. Certainly they were spread by a variety of means, including news from the French side of the border, the auto-da-fé held by the Inquisition at Logroño, and the preaching of local priests and monks. The French ...

Elder of Zion

Malcolm Deas, 3 September 1981

Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number 
by Jacobo Timerman, translated by Toby Talbot.
Weidenfeld, 164 pp., £7.95, July 1981, 0 297 77995 8
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... needed the presence of such fear – about one’s personal security, the economic crisis, the unknown – that it would provide them with the margin of time and planning, and the needed passivity, to develop what they regarded as the only solution to leftist terrorism: extermination. This is not far-fetched. While ‘the situation’ evolved towards ...

Prisoners

Graham Hough, 8 May 1986

To the Kwai and Back: War Drawings 1939-1945 
by Ronald Searle.
Collins/Imperial War Museum, 192 pp., £15, March 1986, 0 00 217436 7
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A World Apart 
by Gustav Herling, translated by Joseph Marek.
Heinemann, 262 pp., £9.95, April 1986, 0 434 35710 3
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... working parties and as camp administrators faced demands on their courage and adroitness largely unknown to other ranks. They had either to drive and cajole their own men into docile submission to enemy orders or to find a whole camp subjected to savage punishment if they hung back. In that long holiday from moral responsibility that imprisonment generally ...

Images of Displeasure

Nicholas Spice, 22 May 1986

If not now, when? 
by Primo Levi, translated by William Weaver.
Joseph, 331 pp., £10.95, April 1986, 0 7181 2668 8
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The Afternoon Sun 
by David Pryce-Jones.
Weidenfeld, 214 pp., £8.95, March 1986, 0 297 78822 1
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August in July 
by Carlo Gebler.
Hamish Hamilton, 188 pp., £9.95, March 1986, 0 241 11787 9
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... nowhere to go to and nowhere to return to, the past wiped out by horror, the future a terrifying unknown. While the Simon family in Heimat go peacefully about their lives, Isidor, one of Primo Levi’s partisans, is watching the SS, ‘boys themselves, only a little older than he, clubbing his father, mother and sister to death’, and apparently ‘having ...

A Journey through Ruins

Patrick Wright, 18 September 1986

The Infant and the Pearl 
by Douglas Oliver.
Ferry Press, 28 pp., £2, December 1985
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... proposed in the claimed spirit of the welfare state:       that our soul and ourselves are unknown yet unconsciously known in the union between people. I find The Infant and the Pearl most interesting where it is also most openly problematic: namely, in its engagement with tradition and received symbolism. Oliver’s poem is pointedly ambivalent in ...

Forget the Klingons

James Hamilton-Paterson: Is there anybody out there?, 6 March 2003

Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life 
by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart.
Ebury, 369 pp., £17.99, September 2002, 0 09 187927 2
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XTL: Extraterrestrial Life and How to Find It 
by Simon Goodwin and John Gribbin.
Weidenfeld, 191 pp., £12.99, August 2002, 1 84188 193 7
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... by science fiction writers, and Cohen and Stewart provide their own short SF story about how an unknown creature might perceive a Nasa probe sent in the near future to Europa, a satellite of Jupiter. (There are great hopes that life might be found in the ocean that is believed to lie beneath its frozen surface.) They also dot their text with plot summaries ...

Pens and Heads

Blair Worden: Printing and reading, 24 August 2000

The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making 
by Adrian Johns.
Chicago, 707 pp., £14.50, May 2000, 0 226 40122 7
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Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England 
by Kevin Sharpe.
Yale, 358 pp., £25, April 2000, 0 300 08152 9
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... in his Novum Organum, ‘the force, effect, and consequence’ of three inventions which were unknown to the ancients, ‘namely, printing, gunpowder and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world.’ Since Bacon’s time almost everyone has agreed that the social and cultural impact of printing must have been ...

Don’t Move

Jeremy Noel-Tod: Fictional re-creations of Vermeer, 9 August 2001

Girl with a Pearl Earring 
by Tracy Chevalier.
HarperCollins, 248 pp., £5.99, July 2000, 0 00 651320 4
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Girl in Hyacinth Blue 
by Susan Vreeland.
Review, 242 pp., £6.99, May 2001, 9780747266594
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A View of Delft: Vermeer Then and Now 
by Anthony Bailey.
Chatto, 288 pp., £16.99, April 2001, 0 7011 6913 3
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Vermeer's Camera 
by Philip Steadman.
Oxford, 207 pp., £17.99, February 2001, 0 19 215967 4
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... his modest oeuvre – 35 canvases, not counting a couple of debatably attributed pieces – was unknown to the international public until Théophile Thoré, a French critic, began to collect and promote it in the mid-1860s. It offered a new version of the homely Dutch art invoked by mid-19th-century novelists such as George Eliot, who made her famous ...

J. xx Drancy. 13/8/42

Michael Wood: Patrick Modiano, 30 November 2000

The Search Warrant 
by Patrick Modiano, translated by Joanna Kilmartin.
Harvill, 137 pp., £7.99, September 2000, 1 86046 612 5
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... was arrested in Rome, detained in the Fossoli camp, and deported in 1944 towards his death in an unknown time and place. Jansen tells the narrator the ‘truth that we intuit but hide from ourselves because we don’t care or because we are afraid: a brother, a double is dead instead of us in an unknown time and place, and ...

An Even Deeper Bunker

Tom Vanderbilt: Secrets and spies, 7 March 2002

Body of Secrets: How America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World 
by James Bamford.
Century, 721 pp., £20, May 2001, 0 7126 7598 1
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Total Surveillance: Investigating the Big Brother World of E-Spies, Eavesdroppers and CCTV 
by John Parker.
Piatkus, 330 pp., £10.99, September 2001, 0 7499 2226 5
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... one NSA official said, ‘to show how good we are at it.’ To counter a threat that is ominously unknown by vesting more powers in an Agency that is itself largely unknown is politically expedient, but as the NSA’s glacially slow declassification of its files shows, a monopoly on security only breeds further ...

Venus in Blue Jeans

Charles Nicholl: The Mona Lisa, 4 April 2002

Mona Lisa: The History of the World’s Most Famous Painting 
by Donald Sassoon.
HarperCollins, 350 pp., £16.99, September 2001, 0 00 710614 9
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... different face, more than ten years later. How it would have looked when he painted it is another unknown: her currently crepuscular aspect is the result of several centuries of protective varnish, tinged yellowish by oxidisation. As early as 1625, a viewer complained of the picture being ‘so damaged by a certain varnish that one cannot make it out very ...

At the Opium Factory

David Simpson: Amitav Ghosh, 22 October 2009

Sea of Poppies 
by Amitav Ghosh.
Murray, 544 pp., £7.99, April 2009, 978 0 7195 6897 8
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... in the Middle Ages is depicted here as the site of a ‘global’ culture whose history is largely unknown in the popular imagination of the West, though it can be tracked in the vocabularies of world languages, for example in words like sugar and adobe. In Ghosh’s other books the modern history of global politics is seen from the periphery, and from below ...

Bare Bones

Steven Shapin: Rhinoceros v. Megatherium, 8 March 2018

The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium: An Essay in Natural History 
by Juan Pimentel, translated by Peter Mason.
Harvard, 356 pp., £21.95, January 2017, 978 0 674 73712 9
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... might have something to do with his imaginings, which ‘bodied forth the forms of things unknown’, giving them a shape, a name and a durable engraved image. Now imagine an animal called the Megatherium. Unless you’re a biologist of the right sort, that’s going to be harder. In all likelihood, you’ll never have seen, or even heard of, such ...

77 Barton Street

Dave Haslam: Joy Division, 3 January 2008

Juvenes: The Joy Division Photographs of Kevin Cummins 
To Hell with Publishing, 189 pp., £200, December 2007Show More
Joy Division: Piece by Piece 
by Paul Morley.
Plexus, 384 pp., £14.99, December 2007, 978 0 85965 404 3
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Control 
directed by Anton Corbijn.
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... music down, and created its iciness and Gothic grandeur. On Joy Division’s debut album, Unknown Pleasures, you can hear the space in the music, dragging the listener in. Joy Division didn’t last long. They made two studio albums, played 120 gigs and came to an abrupt end on Sunday, 18 May 1980, when Ian Curtis killed himself. He’d been up all ...

Call me comrade

Miriam Dobson: Cold War Pen-Pals, 17 April 2025

Dear Unknown Friend: The Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women 
by Alexis Peri.
Harvard, 290 pp., £29.95, October 2024, 978 0 674 98758 6
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... facilitated by organisations critical of the Soviet regime, have an unexpected antecedent. In Dear Unknown Friend, Alexis Peri takes us back to the 1940s and 1950s to uncover an earlier history of letter-writing across the Cold War division. The epistolary friendships she traces were not illicit, but arranged and encouraged by Soviet state institutions, and ...

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