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Megan Marshall: The Death of Edgar Allan Poe, 21 February 2008

Poe: A Life Cut Short 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Chatto, 170 pp., £15.99, February 2008, 978 0 7011 6988 6
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... artistic sensibility he comes closest to the German Romantics: perhaps most of all to the composer Robert Schumann, born just a year after Poe, whose fantasy pieces – inconclusive, fragmentary, whimsical and haunting – Poe probably never heard. A novelist of Ackroyd’s talents could have anticipated the risk involved in starting at the end of his ...

The Vision Thing

Eyal Press: Paul Krugman, 19 June 2008

The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming America from the Right 
by Paul Krugman.
Allen Lane, 296 pp., £20, March 2008, 978 1 84614 107 2
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... Prosperity Krugman dismissed Tyson and other Clinton advisors, including the labour secretary Robert Reich, as mere ‘policy entrepreneurs’, not real economists. His writing from this period betrays the prickly tone of one who has been spurned. But, when compared with Bush, Clinton didn’t seem so bad. The title of Krugman’s new book is a play on ...

Hellmouth

Michael André Bernstein: Norman Rush, 22 January 2004

Mortals 
by Norman Rush.
Cape, 715 pp., £18.99, July 2003, 0 224 03709 9
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... heartland of the global American imperium. Except for Jane and Paul Bowles in Morocco, only Robert Stone and Joan Didion suggest themselves, and neither of them is associated closely with any one setting. On the whole, American writers seem convinced that the vital features of their society are most clearly discernible at its centre, even though it is ...

Phrenic Crush

Hugh Pennington: The rise and rise of tuberculosis, 5 February 2004

The Return of the White Plague: Global Poverty and the ‘New’ Tuberculosis 
edited by Matthew Gandy and Alimuddin Zumla.
Verso, 330 pp., £25, October 2003, 1 85984 669 6
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... and medical measures, particularly those prompted by the discovery of the tubercle bacillus by Robert Koch in 1882? Were they all without merit? With pulmonary tuberculosis, there is no doubt that what doctors did to patients before the discovery and development of the main anti-tuberculosis drugs after World War Two – streptomycin, rifampicin and ...

Hooked Trout

Geoffrey Best: Appeasement please, 2 June 2005

Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War 
by Ian Kershaw.
Allen Lane, 488 pp., £20, October 2004, 0 7139 9717 6
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... the benefit of ten minutes’ chat with the Führer and was able to share his enthusiasm for the Robert Donat comedy The Ghost Goes West. It was all very genial, even if in a social sense not quite what the milord and his family were used to. Lady Mairi, who still lives in Mount Stewart, told Kershaw that Himmler had reminded her of a ‘shop-walker at ...

Blush, grandeur, blush

Norma Clarke: One of the first bluestockings, 16 December 2004

Hannah More: The First Victorian 
by Anne Stott.
Oxford, 384 pp., £20, September 2004, 0 19 927488 6
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... of villages near their cottage at Cowslip Green in Somerset, following the well-known examples of Robert Raikes in Gloucestershire and Sarah Trimmer in Brentford. Patty kept a journal of the years 1789-99, published as Mendip Annals in 1859 and clearly intended for general edification. According to Patty, God (‘Providence’) started it all by sending the ...

The Thought of Ruislip

E.S. Turner: The Metropolitan Line, 2 December 2004

Metro-Land: British Empire Exhibition Number 
by Oliver Green.
Southbank, 144 pp., £16.99, July 2004, 1 904915 00 0
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... heavy pressure to do so. Metroland’s chief thruster was the railway company’s general manager, Robert Hope Selbie. His task, in Jackson’s words, was to see those unspoiled arcadias ‘comfortably populated, preferably with a high percentage of first-class season ticket-holders and their families. And if in making that possible the scenery should become ...

Yellow Ribbons

Hal Foster: Kitsch in Bush’s America, 7 July 2005

... Max, Braveheart and Patriot all in one. It is this ‘moral value’ of redemptive violence that Robert Gober evoked in his recent installation at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. As usual with Gober, the exhibit was a broken allegory that both elicited and resisted interpretation. It opened with two stacked garbage cans in plaster covered by a sheet ...

Loose Woven

Peter Howarth: Edward Thomas’s contingencies, 4 August 2005

Collected Poems 
by Edward Thomas, edited by R. George Thomas.
Faber, 264 pp., £12.99, October 2004, 0 571 22260 9
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... write any poems until the autumn of 1914. Thinking over their genesis afterwards, his friend Robert Frost commented that ‘the decision he made in going into the army helped him make the other decision in form.’ This is both a simple material explanation and perhaps also a piece of soul-searching. Frost knew that the more Thomas believed he could ...

A Fue Respectable Friends

John Lloyd: British brass bands, 5 April 2001

The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History 
by Trevor Herbert.
Oxford, 381 pp., £48, June 2000, 0 19 816698 2
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... bands. One of the earliest was the Cyfarthfa band, in the iron-smelting centre of Merthyr Tydfil. Robert Crawshay, the owner of the Cyfarthfa works, in effect created a private orchestra. He employed a family of musicians from Bradford, members of London theatre orchestras and strolling players; and, like some Renaissance prince or 17th-century cardinal, gave ...

Haleking

John Bossy: Simon Forman, 22 February 2001

The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman 
by Barbara Howard Traister.
Chicago, 260 pp., £19, February 2001, 0 226 81140 9
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Dr Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician 
by Judith Cook.
Chatto, 228 pp., £18.99, January 2001, 0 7011 6899 4
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... society beauty Frances Howard, who wanted to divorce her husband and marry James I’s favourite Robert Carr, and apparently procured the death by poison of Carr’s friend Sir Thomas Overbury, who was against the marriage. Howard had consulted Forman about the fulfilment of her passion, and her confidante Mrs Anne Turner, who was supposed to have got hold ...

Pillors of Fier

Frank Kermode: Anthony Burgess, 11 July 2002

Nothing like the Sun: reissue 
by Anthony Burgess.
Allison and Busby, 234 pp., £7.99, January 2002, 0 7490 0512 2
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... are of course novels about Jesus – in fact, Burgess wrote one of them, Man of Nazareth – and Robert Graves did Milton as well as Jesus and Claudius. Doubtless there are many more such biographical novels, forgotten or unread by me. They don’t seem very popular, though there was Lloyd Douglas’s bestselling The Robe, which amazed the experienced Edmund ...

More Reconciliation than Truth

David Blackbourn: Germany’s Postwar Amnesties, 31 October 2002

Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration 
by Norbert Frei, translated by Joel Golb.
Columbia, 479 pp., £24.50, September 2002, 0 231 11882 1
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... of insisting that their honour remained untainted. His book can be read in conjunction with Robert Moeller’s War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, which explores these themes with imagination.* The myth of the Wehrmacht’s ‘clean hands’ took hold in these years, and – witness the heated debates over the ...

In Icy Baltic Waters

David Blackbourn: Gunter Grass, 27 June 2002

Im Krebsgang: Eine Novelle 
by Günter Grass.
Steidl, 216 pp., €18, February 2002, 3 88243 800 2
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... by his widow with the customary bottle of champagne and went into service as a pleasure cruiser in Robert Ley’s Strength through Joy organisation, which provided ‘classless’ holidays for (some) members of the Volksgemeinschaft, subsidised by money seized from the trade unions. In the remaining years of peace it cruised the Mediterranean and the Norwegian ...

Delightful to be Robbed

E.S. Turner: Stand and deliver, 9 May 2002

Outlaws and Highwaymen: The Cult of the Robber in England from the Middle Ages to the 19th century 
by Gillian Spraggs.
Pimlico, 372 pp., £12.50, November 2001, 0 7126 6479 3
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... robbers and even on their stout bearing on the gallows. In late Elizabethan years the Jesuit Robert Parsons conjectured that there was more highway robbery in England than probably anywhere in the world. The miscreants ‘were sometimes of no base Condition, or Quality . . . but rather Gentlemen, or wealthy Men’s Sons, moved thereunto not so much of ...

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