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Shriek before lift-off

Malcolm Gaskill: Could nuns fly?, 9 May 2024

They Flew: A History of the Impossible 
by Carlos Eire.
Yale, 492 pp., £30, November 2023, 978 0 300 25980 3
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Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa 
by Anthony Grafton.
Allen Lane, 289 pp., £30, January, 978 1 84614 363 2
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... misleading impression that it was easy to accuse someone of witchcraft on flimsy pretexts, which may have been true during severe panics but usually was not. Persistent doubt throughout the early modern period explains both the relative rarity of prosecutions – around 100,000 across an entire continent and three centuries is not that many – and the high ...

The Breakaway

Perry Anderson: Goodbye Europe, 21 January 2021

... over Maastricht without ever recovering politically, Major finally got ratification through in May 1993, a couple of days after the Danes were forced into holding a second referendum. At the Treasury, Kenneth Clarke presided over a return to growth, but it was of no electoral avail. The Conservatives were comprehensively thrashed in the elections of ...

The God Squad

Andrew O’Hagan: Bushland, 23 September 2004

... was giving an award to Republican Senator Amo Houghton for being a good egg. I spoke to Richard Kind, who plays the press secretary in the sitcom Spin City, and his chum Tim Blake Nelson, who was very funny in O Brother, where art thou? ‘It’s a fair trade issue,’ said Richard Kind. ‘Canada is constantly ...

The Power of Sunshine

Alexander Cockburn, 10 January 1991

City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles 
by Mike Davis.
Verso, 462 pp., £18.95, November 1990, 0 86091 303 1
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... Cold War and only elevated from this state by the crisis in the Gulf where their infernal devices may receive their first exposure to reality outside the engineering shed and the faked test. Los Angeles needs a historian, a political scientist, a sociologist, a pamphleteer, with the synoptic power to teach us how to see and seize it whole at the moment of its ...

The Kentish Hog

Adrian Desmond, 15 October 1987

The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Vol. II: 1837-1843 
edited by Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith.
Cambridge, 603 pp., £30, March 1987, 0 521 25588 0
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The Works of Charles Darwin 
edited by Paul Barrett and R.B. Freeman.
Pickering & Chatto, 10 pp., £470, March 1987, 1 85196 002 3
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The Darwinian Heritage 
edited by David Kohn.
Princeton, 1138 pp., £67.90, February 1986, 0 691 08356 8
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Western Science in the Arab World: The Impact of Darwinism, 1860-1930 
by Adel Ziadat.
Macmillan, 162 pp., £27.50, October 1986, 0 333 41856 5
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Theories of Human Evolution: A Century of Debate 1844-1944 
by Peter Bowler.
Blackwell, 318 pp., £25, February 1987, 0 631 15264 4
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Controversy in Victorian Geology: The Cambrian-Silurian Dispute 
by James Secord.
Princeton, 363 pp., £33.10, October 1986, 0 691 08417 3
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Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture 
by Robert Young.
Cambridge, 341 pp., £30, October 1985, 0 521 31742 8
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... was elected with Dickens), Babbage’s parties (to which he took his sister ‘that she may see the World’) and dinners with the literati, including Carlyle, who nauseated Darwin with his bombastic mysticism. There are darker moments too: Emma’s worry over his religious doubt, and Darwin, intermittently ill, fearing that he would do no more in ...

Effervescence

Alan Ryan, 9 November 1989

Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event 
by Steven Blakemore.
University Press of New England, 115 pp., £10, April 1989, 0 87451 452 5
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The Impact of the French Revolution on European Consciousness 
edited by H.T. Mason and William Doyle.
Sutton, 205 pp., £17.95, June 1989, 0 86299 483 7
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The French Revolution and the Enlightenment in England 1789-1832 
by Seamus Deane.
Harvard, 212 pp., £19.95, November 1988, 0 674 32240 1
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... and the merits of patriarchy as a ruling principle, to take a central example, the reader may well come away feeling decidedly sympathetic to Paine’s no-nonsense prose, matched to Paine’s no-nonsense demand that he should be shown the much-vaunted British constitution before being asked to refer it to the French, and preferring Mary ...

Time Longer than Rope

Greil Marcus, 16 November 1995

... is caught and let loose for the pleasure of chasing it down again. With every chorus Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel lift their voices and then abandon them, stranding their words right at the edge of a cliff, suspending the sound in dead silence until the next verse begins. It’s a stark, shuddering effect, the pleasure cut like a heater in a cheap hotel ...

Martinis with the Bellinis

Mary Beard, 31 July 1997

The Roy Strong Diaries 1967-87 
Weidenfeld, 461 pp., £20, May 1997, 0 297 81841 4Show More
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... every visitor as if they were a ten-year-old on a school project. On the other hand, while we may enjoy the theatricality of Strong’s remake and welcome the reminders about when and where the Battle of Newbury was, we inevitably regret the removal of large numbers of paintings to make way for all these trimmings and chafe at the intrusive packaging of ...

Every three years

Blake Morrison, 3 March 1988

Fifty Poems 
by Ian Hamilton.
Faber, 51 pp., £4.95, January 1988, 0 571 14920 0
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A Various Art 
edited by Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville.
Carcanet, 377 pp., £12.95, December 1987, 0 85635 698 0
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Between Leaps: Poems 1972-1985 
by Brad Leithauser.
Oxford, 81 pp., £5.95, September 1987, 0 19 282089 3
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Eldorado 
by William Scammell.
Peterloo, 71 pp., £4.50, October 1987, 0 905291 88 3
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Disbelief 
by John Ash.
Carcanet, 127 pp., £6.95, September 1987, 0 85635 695 6
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The Automatic Oracle 
by Peter Porter.
Oxford, 72 pp., £4.95, November 1987, 0 19 282088 5
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Voice-over 
by Norman MacCaig.
Chatto, 64 pp., £5.95, February 1988, 0 7011 3313 9
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... and work as separate units. At worst, they read like a cross between R.D. Laing’s case-notes and Richard Aldington’s Imagism. At best, they have a force and integrity which none of the other poets associated with the Review, and few poets since, have come close to matching. The problem, as Hamilton concedes in his preface, is that these 50 poems encompass ...

Performing Art

Rosalind Krauss: The Sanctification of Rebecca Horn, 12 November 1998

Rebecca Horn: The Glance of Infinity 
edited by Carl Haenlein.
Scalo, 400 pp., £47.50, January 1997, 3 931141 66 7
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... Monk, Joan Jonas), weaving the naked body through a world of charged theatrical props (Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson) and exploring sado-masochism reminiscent of Surrealism (Gina Pane, Valie Export). Given the ephemerality of ‘performance’ as a medium, it was natural that these artists would either turn to a recording medium like video or ...

California Noir

Michael Rogin: Destroying Los Angeles, 19 August 1999

Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster 
by Mike Davis.
Picador, 484 pp., £18.99, June 1999, 9780330372190
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... and pictorial detail that allows Davis to claim (I borrow the formulation from a famous remark of Richard Wright about horror) not that he has invented magic realism, but that Southern Californian magic realism has invented him. But sometimes, it now seems, the image that lodges with such conviction in Davis’s mind and in this book has undergone creative ...

Eric the Nerd

Ian Hamilton: The Utterly Complete Orwell, 29 October 1998

The Complete Works of George Orwell 
edited by Peter Davidson.
Secker, £750, July 1998, 0 436 20377 4
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... and very unreliable; Ian Mikardo: I don’t know much about him, but have sometimes wondered; Richard Crossman: ??Political climber. Zionist (appears sincere about this). Too dishonest to be outright FT. Nearly all of this, however, has been known about for years and made use of in biographies of Orwell. So, too, have the Notes on which he based his Home ...

Going on the air

Philip French, 2 May 1985

Orwell: The War Broadcasts 
edited by W.J. West.
Duckworth/BBC, 304 pp., £12.95, March 1985, 0 7156 1916 0
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... and John Morris (both of whom wrote elegant memoirs of Orwell at the BBC); he employed Nye Bevan, Richard Acland, J.B.S. Haldane, T.S. Eliot, Quintin Hogg, Bernard Shaw; he led a BBC party, that included Guy Burgess, to a special de-briefing by Stafford Cripps on his abortive mission to India. Working for the BBC gave Orwell the experience, however ...

You can have it for a penny

Malcolm Gaskill: ‘Agent Sonya’, 6 January 2022

Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy 
by Ben Macintyre.
Viking, 377 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 0 241 40850 6
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... a Soviet spy, and with her support, Kuczynski was recruited by Moscow and received a visit from Richard Sorge, a charismatic German described by Macintyre as ‘a strange mixture of bibliophile and brawler, pedantic scholar and hard-nosed functionary … a dissolute warrior-priest’.* The Hamburger home became a rendezvous, and domesticity a ...

Ghost Ions

Jonathan Coe: AA-Rated Memories, 18 August 2022

Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems 
edited by Julian Upton.
Headpress, 595 pp., £22.99, April, 978 1 909394 93 3
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The Magic Box: Viewing Britain through the Rectangular Window 
by Rob Young.
Faber, 500 pp., £12.99, August, 978 0 571 28460 3
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... tribute to the BFI’s Flipside series in particular for resurrecting and restoring films such as Richard Lester’s The Bed Sitting Room (1969) and Don Levy’s Herostratus (1967).Oliver also mentions the work done by the Talking Pictures TV channel, with the caveat that ‘poor prints, interrupted by adverts for cruises and incontinence pads, is a less than ...

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