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Winged Words

Tariq Ali: On Muhammad, 17 June 2021

Muhammad 
by Maxime Rodinson, translated by Anne Carter.
NYRB, 373 pp., £14.99, March 2021, 978 1 68137 492 5
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... from the eighth century onwards. A 19th-century example of this type of ‘scholarship’ was Sir William Muir’s The Life of Muhammad from Original Sources, first published in 1861, soon after the British brutally suppressed the Great Uprising of 1857 in India, particularly targeting the Muslims among its leaders. The nominal leader of the revolt, the last ...

Myths of the Artist’s Youth

Nicholas Penny, 7 November 1991

... taken as crucial. ‘That someone so near to French art should have pitted himself against these masters at the top of their form is a measure of Picasso’s confidence and daring ... within weeks of arriving in Paris the 19-year-old Spaniard had established his right to a place in the modern French tradition.’ It seems likely that Picasso had very ...

Urgency Is Not Enough

Peter Campbell, 6 April 1995

Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of Aids 
compiled by Ted Gott.
Thames and Hudson, 246 pp., £12.95, March 1995, 0 642 13030 2
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The End of Innocence: Britain in the Time of Aids 
by Simon Garfield.
Faber, 406 pp., £17.50, November 1994, 0 571 15353 4
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... best of Don’t Leave Me This Way – for example, the portrait photographs and captions in which William Yang records in pictures as plain as holiday snaps the sickness and death of a friend – is analogous to the personal accounts Garfield recorded for The End of Innocence. Such records (nearly always accompanied by words which explain who is HIV ...

To arms!

Patrick Parrinder, 20 March 1997

The Doll 
by Boleslaw Prus, translated by David Welsh.
Central European University, 683 pp., £9.99, September 1996, 1 85866 065 3
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... the 20th-century ‘post-colonial’ novel, in which the characters are mimic men and the puppet-masters are always elsewhere. One reason Izabela, Wokulski and the others are dolls is that they lack cultural authenticity and political freedom. Poland entered the 19th century divided between the three neighbouring empires of Russia, Prussia and Austria, with ...

Raiding Joyce

Denis Donoghue, 18 April 1985

James Joyce 
by Patrick Parrinder.
Cambridge, 262 pp., £20, November 1984, 9780521240147
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James Joyce and Sexuality 
by Richard Brown.
Cambridge, 216 pp., £19.50, March 1985, 0 521 24811 6
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Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation 
by Fritz Senn, edited by John Paul Riquelme.
Johns Hopkins, 225 pp., £22.20, December 1984, 0 8018 3135 0
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Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French 
edited by Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer.
Cambridge, 162 pp., £20, January 1985, 9780521266369
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... of meaning and reference. ‘At least one reader’ turns out, fifty pages later, to have been William Empson. Brown refers, with irrefutable accuracy, to ‘an American woman actress’, ‘Infidelity’ seems to have some occult meaning for him, because he alludes, in a passage about ‘The Dead’, to Gabriel’s ‘fascination with his wife’s ...

An Enemy Within

Paul Foot, 23 April 1987

Molehunt: The Full Story of the Soviet Mole in MI5 
by Nigel West.
Weidenfeld, 208 pp., £10.95, March 1987, 0 297 79150 8
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... His indignation had outlived the causes of it. He was still furious: the men who had been his masters in the Fifties, Sixties and even Seventies had been Communist traitors. He wanted to go on burgling and bugging Labour ministers, to continue with his dirty tricks and his invasion of private lives. But he found all this much more difficult. His ...

Blame it on the French

John Barrell, 8 October 1992

Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 
by Linda Colley.
Yale, 429 pp., £19.95, September 1992, 0 300 05737 7
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... desirability of strong, stable government by a virtuous, able and authentically British élite’. William Pitt was an especially important symbol of this new élite: his well-known private virtue (‘prettygirlibus indifferentissimus’) made him for many the model of what a public servant should be, even if for others he seemed entirely contemptuous of the ...

The Fire This Time

John Sutherland, 28 May 1992

... climax. Unlike other American cities, LA has a police chief who is independent of his political masters. He has the equivalent of academic tenure and cannot be dismissed (without extraordinary cause) by his boss, the Mayor. This is to prevent the Police being used for political ends. Chief Daryl F. Gates rose through the ranks to the highest position in the ...

Talking to the Radiator

Andrew Saint, 2 October 1997

Corbusier’s Formative Years 
by H. Allen Brooks.
Chicago, 506 pp., £51.95, June 1997, 0 226 07579 6
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... The weight of analysis which critics bring to bear on immature works of the architectural masters is often anomalous, and nowhere more so than with the first fumblings of Jeanneret. Among the handful of houses he completed in La Chaux-de-Fonds, only the last, the rebarbative Villa Schwob of 1916, is out of the common run (and even this contains ...

Where have all the horses gone?

Eric Banks: Horse Power, 5 July 2018

The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey through Human History 
by Susanna Forrest.
Atlantic, 418 pp., £9.99, October 2017, 978 0 85789 900 2
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Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship 
by Ulrich Raulff, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp.
Penguin, 448 pp., £9.99, February 2018, 978 0 14 198317 2
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... straw sun hats for horses, strappers who specialised in vigorous grooming, ostlers at inns, riding masters, horsebreakers and common or garden grooms. In the same way that the horse left its mark on the titles of the aristocracy of Europe, the Ritters, Cabelleros and Chevaliers, so it marked the surnames of the ordinary man: the ...

Making a Mouth in a Contemptuous Manner

John Gallagher: Civility Held Sway, 4 July 2019

In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilisation in Early Modern England 
by Keith Thomas.
Yale, 457 pp., £25, June 2018, 978 0 300 23577 7
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... through language, but codes of behaviour were also written on the body. One reason dancing masters were so in demand in the 17th and 18th centuries was that they promised to teach deportment – the proper carriage of the body even after the music stopped. Some lapses from bodily decorum were permitted. Tears, for instance, might be acceptable – even ...

The Bloody Sixth

Joshua Brown: The Real Gangs of New York, 23 January 2003

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld 
by Herbert Asbury.
Arrow, 366 pp., £6.99, January 2003, 0 09 943674 4
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Gangs of New York 
directed by Martin Scorsese.
December 2002
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... few historical figures introduced to bolster the movie’s plot – the future Tammany Hall boss William M. Tweed, Archbishop John Hughes and the showman P.T. Barnum – are either transported backwards in time or engage in alliances with gangs that defy the actual marginality of these gangs within the class and power structure of the mid-century city. As ...

Cool Brains

Nicholas Guyatt: Demythologising the antebellum South, 2 June 2005

Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South 
by Michael O’Brien.
North Carolina, 1354 pp., £64.95, March 2004, 0 8078 2800 9
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... in the feeling that belongs to it’. Some Southerners wandered further from the beaten path. William Brown Hodgson of Georgia entered the State Department in 1824 and, without the benefit of a university education, became the most prodigious linguist of his time. He played an important role in persuading American diplomats of the need to master other ...

I just get my pistol and shoot him right down

Eric Foner: Slave-Dealing, 22 March 2018

The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History 
by Anne C. Bailey.
Cambridge, 197 pp., £19.99, November 2017, 978 1 316 64348 8
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... in cash, with the remainder in interest-bearing instalments. The highest sum paid was $1750 for William, a carpenter – an immense amount at a time when the average working-class white person earned around $300 per year. George, Sue and their two young sons together went for $2480. The sale was managed by Joseph Bryan, a prominent slave dealer whose ...

The Unfortunate Posset

Alice Hunt: Your Majesty’s Dog, 26 December 2024

The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham 
by Lucy Hughes-Hallett.
Fourth Estate, 630 pp., £30, October 2024, 978 0 00 812655 1
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... influential crypto-Catholic strand of Protestantism best represented by another of his creatures: William Laud, the future archbishop of Canterbury. It is an episode about which The Scapegoat is curiously silent, but it cemented MPs’ suspicions of Buckingham as the cause of all ills: casualties in war, the dishonour of defeat, ‘no money’, the ...

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