Surprise!

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth: Fragonard’s Abdications, 6 January 2022

Fragonard: Painting Out of Time 
by Satish Padiyar.
Reaktion, 284 pp., £35, September 2020, 978 1 78914 209 9
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... if these were commissioned or done for personal pleasure. Nor do we have any idea why Fragonard more or less gave up painting in his fifties, though the Revolution probably had something to do with it. Much of what we do know about him has been shaped by his reception in the 19th century. Having been utterly forgotten, he was rediscovered ...

What the Public Most Wants to See

Christopher Tayler: Rick Moody, 23 February 2006

The Diviners 
by Rick Moody.
Faber, 567 pp., £12.99, January 2006, 0 571 22946 8
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... Vidal once called the ‘Research and Development’ arm of American fiction – the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo. That might not sound hard if you think of R&D as a matter of surface effects: pop-cultural references, metafictional gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen ...

Not an Inkling

Jerry Coyne: There’s more to life than DNA, 27 April 2000

Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters 
by Matt Ridley.
Fourth Estate, 344 pp., £8.99, February 2000, 9781857028355
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... to deliver annoying homilies against big government and environmentalism. In the end, Genome is more soapbox than synopsis. Ridley structures the book eccentrically, with its 23 chapters numbered (and titled) to correspond to our chromosome pairs. From each chromosome, he picks a single gene to inspire an essay on a big question ...

Don’t try this at home

Gavin Francis: Adrenaline, 29 August 2013

Adrenaline 
by Brian Hoffman.
Harvard, 298 pp., £18.95, April 2013, 978 0 674 05088 4
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... the liver to pour out glucose as fuel for muscles, the airways to open in order to make breathing more effective, the heart to accelerate and the pupils to dilate. Its effect on the brain is to make us more attentive and alert. An overdose can be fatal. The cadaver’s adrenals curled around the upper poles of the kidneys ...

What is a pikestaff?

Colin Burrow: Metaphor, 23 April 2015

Metaphor 
by Denis Donoghue.
Harvard, 232 pp., £18.95, April 2014, 978 0 674 43066 2
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... or ‘buried’. It’s the only figure of speech which not only everyone uses but which more or less everyone can name, even if they can’t instantly rattle off the OED’s definition of it as ‘a figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it ...

Something about Mary

Diarmaid MacCulloch: The First Queen of England, 18 October 2007

Mary Tudor: The Tragical History of the First Queen of England 
by David Loades.
National Archives, 240 pp., £19.99, September 2006, 1 903365 98 8
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... once. When Mary was swept into her mother’s marriage crisis, the emperor was their chief friend. More than any other English monarch between Henry II and Charles II, Mary was preoccupied with a country beyond the sea, or rather a dynasty beyond the sea. She married Charles’s son Philip, and once she was married she was desperate to secure a Catholic future ...

Saints on Sundays, Devils All the Week After

Patrick Collinson: London Burnings, 19 September 2002

The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England 
by Peter Lake and Michael Questier.
Yale, 731 pp., £30, February 2002, 0 300 08884 1
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... his day and good riddance. Don’t be deceived by the slick subtitles, however. Peter Lake knows more than anyone else about the religious culture of the secondary and tertiary stages of the English Reformation. This is not only a book of dazzling brilliance and acute intelligence, it has many important things to say about the construction, deconstruction ...

Such Little Trousers

Lavinia Greenlaw: Pamela Hansford Johnson, 21 March 2019

This Bed Thy Centre 
by Pamela Hansford Johnson.
Hodder, 288 pp., £8.99, October 2018, 978 1 4736 7985 6
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An Impossible Marriage 
by Pamela Hansford Johnson.
Hodder, 352 pp., £8.99, October 2018, 978 1 4736 7980 1
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The Last Resort 
by Pamela Hansford Johnson.
Hodder, 352 pp., £8.99, October 2018, 978 1 4736 7994 8
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The Holiday Friend 
by Pamela Hansford Johnson.
Hodder, 272 pp., £8.99, October 2018, 978 1 4736 7987 0
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... a light but sure touch’, as if she were being praised for her pastry. Johnson’s writing is more industrial than domestic. From an early age, she kept the show on the road. Her absentee father, a colonial civil servant, dropped dead when she was 12, leaving Pamela and her mother penniless. She left school at 16, worked as a secretary, and wrote stories ...

Report from the Interior

Michael Wood: On style indirect libre, 9 January 2014

The Antinomies of Realism 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 432 pp., £20, October 2013, 978 1 78168 133 6
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... Moreau, standing on the pont de la Concorde in Paris, very briefly contemplates suicide and even more swiftly decides against it. I’ve slightly modified the translation by Douglas Parmée. Des nues sombres couraient sur la face de la lune. Il la contempla, en rêvant à la grandeur des espaces, à la misère de la vie, au néant de tout. Le jour ...

Northern Irish Initiatives

Charles Townshend, 5 August 1982

... Mr Abbott, he roundly denied all involvement. Mr Powell himself has reverted to vaguer, more familiar allegations of conspiracy and submission to blackmail. The real significance of the affair, however, is that it illuminates the obsessive fear of Ulster Loyalists that the two governments are acting in collusion with each other. In the Loyalist ...

Making saints

Peter Burke, 18 October 1984

Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom 1000-1700 
by Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell.
Chicago, 314 pp., £21.25, February 1983, 0 226 89055 4
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The Norman Conquest and Beyond 
by Frank Barlow.
Hambledon, 318 pp., £22, June 1983, 0 907628 19 2
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Miracles and the Medieval Mind 
by Benedicta Ward.
Scolar, 321 pp., £17.50, November 1983, 0 85967 609 9
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The Great Debate on Miracles: From Joseph Glanvill to David Hume 
by R.M. Burns.
Associated University Presses, 305 pp., £17.50, July 1983, 0 8387 2378 0
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Saints and their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History 
edited by Stephen Wilson.
Cambridge, 435 pp., £35, December 1983, 0 521 24978 3
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... of society.’ Since Coulton’s time, this prosopographical approach to sanctity has become more and more popular. The American scholar John Mecklin studied the saint as a ‘culture type’ in 1941. In his book Altruistic Love (1951), the Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin refined Coulton’s analysis by ...

A Smile at My Own Temerity

John Barrell: William Hogarth, 16 February 2017

William Hogarth: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings 
by Elizabeth Einberg.
Yale, 432 pp., £95, November 2016, 978 0 300 22174 9
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... son of an earl. By issuing these and other series of his paintings as prints, Hogarth had gained more currency for his work than any other 18th or early 19th-century painter. There was no other whose name was commonly adjectivised: we don’t find ‘Reynoldsian’, for example, or ‘Turnerian’, in familiar use. But how far these prints were ...

Hickup over the Littany

Peter Phillips: What did it sound like?, 14 December 2023

The Pursuit of Musick: Musical Life in Original Writings and Art c.1200-1770 
by Andrew Parrott.
Taverner, 544 pp., £35, December 2022, 978 1 915229 54 0
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... ambassador to Henry VIII’s court and included in Andrew Parrott’s The Pursuit of Musick? ‘More divine than human; they were not singing but jubilating [giubilavano].’ The exact meaning of ‘giubilavano’ has been long debated, to no avail. Or what does this résumé of national styles, written in 1517, tell us? ‘The French sing; the Spaniards ...

Moments

Marilyn Butler, 2 September 1982

The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Vol. I: Medieval Literature Part One: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition, Vol. II: The Age of Shakespeare, Vol. III: From Donne to Marvell, Vol. IV: From Dryden to Johnson 
edited by Boris Ford.
Penguin, 647 pp., £2.95, March 1982, 0 14 022264 2
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Medieval Writers and their Work: Middle English Literature and its Background 
by J.A. Burrow.
Oxford, 148 pp., £9.95, May 1982, 0 19 289122 7
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Contemporary Writers Series: Saul Bellow, Joe Orton, John Fowles, Kurt Vonnegut, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Pynchon 
by Malcolm Bradbury, C.W.E. Bigsby, Peter Conradi, Jerome Klinkowitz and Blake Morrison.
Methuen, 110 pp., £1.95, May 1982, 0 416 31650 6
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... It is a current preoccupation on the Left, more fashionable now among many students of English than Post-Structuralism, that English Literature as an academic subject is a conspiracy of the Establishment. The message coming out of the polys is that the minds of students and (more disturbingly) of schoolchildren are being insidiously moulded by the classics they study at O and A Level ...

Goddesses and Girls

Nicholas Penny, 2 December 1982

... was needed and Praxiteles showed the goddess at her bath. This introduced something that was even more remarkable. For the goddess has reacted to us in a human way. We have surprised her, and she attempts instinctively to conceal from us her ‘private parts’ – thus, by the way, licensing the use of this euphemism (which is hardly appropriate for the ...