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Bristling with Barricades

Christopher Clark: Paris, 1848, 3 November 2022

Writers and Revolution: Intellectuals and the French Revolution of 1848 
by Jonathan Beecher.
Cambridge, 474 pp., £29.99, April 2021, 978 1 108 84253 2
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... to read. There is a willingness to collaborate, for the moment at least, despite the boundaries of class and occupation. But the facial expressions are too varied and the members of the crowd too embroiled in local transactions to suggest a collective emotion. The image gives us no reason to think that when the sun rises on a new day, these people will still ...

Who were they?

Sanjay Subrahmanyam: ‘Thuggee’, 3 December 2009

Stranglers and Bandits: A Historical Anthology of ‘Thuggee’ 
edited by Kim Wagner.
Oxford, 318 pp., £22.99, January 2009, 978 0 19 569815 2
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... Masters (1914-83), who had served in the British army in India before and during the Second World War. Masters’s family had had a relationship with India stretching back five generations; I have been told by elderly Indian army officers who served with him in the Gurkhas that he cut a dashing figure, full of exciting tales about his participation in Orde ...

Maisie’s Sisters

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Sargent’s Daughters, 5 August 2010

Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting 
by Erica Hirshler.
MFA, 262 pp., £23.95, October 2009, 978 0 87846 742 6
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... outskirts of Boston would later give its name, Bellmont, to an entire suburb. Like others of their class and time, including their friends Henry James and Edith Wharton, the Boits travelled back and forth across the Atlantic and took up residence in France and Italy at various periods, as well as in Boston and Newport. Sometime in the late 1870s, Ned Boit, as ...

Toxic Lozenges

Jenny Diski: Arsenic, 8 July 2010

The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain Was Poisoned at Home, Work and Play 
by James Whorton.
Oxford, 412 pp., £16.99, January 2010, 978 0 19 957470 4
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... though doubtless their shadows were twinned – should be a little man of the professional class – a dentist or a solicitor, say – living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs, and preferably in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbours to hear suspicious sounds through the wall. He should be either chairman of the ...

Will we notice when the Tories have won?

Ross McKibbin: Election Blues, 24 September 2009

... tells us, he remains committed. But given what the deterrent means to the country’s political class – the international standing they imagine it gives them – it is unlikely that a Cameron government would do away with it, whatever the expense.If value for money is the concern, Cameron could easily take an axe to the whole Home Office apparatus, whose ...

Adjusting the Mechanism

Colin Burrow: Robert Graves, 11 October 2018

Robert Graves: From a Great War Poet to ‘Goodbye to All That’, 1895-1929 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 461 pp., £25, August 2018, 978 1 4729 2914 3
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The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose 
by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge.
Seven Stories, 613 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 1 60980 733 7
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... and Dick were now the only two things that really mattered.’ He then survived the First World War, in which, as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, he had been so badly wounded in the Battle of the Somme that his commanding officer wrote a letter of condolence to his parents and his death was announced in the Times (the paper was decent enough to ...

Weathering the storm

Robert Blake, 18 October 1984

Lord Liverpool: The Life and Political Career of Robert Banks Jenkinson, Second Earl of Liverpool 1770-1828 
by Norman Gash.
Weidenfeld, 265 pp., £16.95, August 1984, 0 297 78453 6
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... panache, style, oratory and wit, but no one who was a mediocrity could have governed Britain in war and peace through 15 of the most difficult and turbulent years in the country’s history, nor is there any reason to regard the bishops whom he created as notably second-rate. There is, however, another reason for his dim reputation. As Professor Gash points ...

Malise Ruthven discusses the Beirut massacre

Malise Ruthven, 4 November 1982

... of 1955, in which 39 Egyptians died, a direct cause of the escalation which led to the 1956 Suez War. Sharret’s diaries also give details of Israeli plans to take over Gaza and the West Bank in the early 1950s, and to establish a Maronite puppet-state in Lebanon at least fifteen years before the Palestinians became a political factor in that country. In ...

Out of the Pound Loney

Ronan Bennett: The demonising of Gerry Adams, 5 March 1998

Man of War, Man of Peace? The Unauthorised Biography of Gerry Adams 
by David Sharrock and Mark Devenport.
Macmillan, 488 pp., £16.99, November 1997, 0 333 69883 5
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... the authors hint that he even set a rival up for assassination. Sources quoted in Man of War, Man of Peace? describe Adams as ‘akin to a Nazi’, a racketeering criminal thug’, ‘a fundamentalist’. No misdemeanour is overlooked: he was an indifferent student, enjoys the occasional lie-in with his wife and may have dyed his beard. If Sharrock ...

Three Weeks Wide

Rosemary Hill: A Psychohistory of France, 7 July 2022

France: An Adventure History 
by Graham Robb.
Picador, 527 pp., £25, March, 978 1 5290 0762 6
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... pick their way with caution. There had indeed been a disaster, Robb concludes: the Hundred Years War. This is a point scored against the baggage-train approach to history, according to which the war is long over. Estienne’s Guide itself makes no reference to it, but historical sources rarely make explicit reference to ...

Lamentable Thumbs

Blake Morrison: The Marvellous Barbellion, 21 June 2018

The Journal of a Disappointed Man 
by W.N.P. Barbellion.
Penguin, 394 pp., £9.99, November 2017, 978 0 241 29769 8
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... to the Journal when it was first published, Barbellion was a product of ‘that most unfortunate class, the poor educated, who live lives of worry in straitened circumstances’. Instead of going to university, he earned his keep on a local paper, where his father worked. Later, he came to regret not making more of journalism, but at the time he’d rather ...

Leave them weeping

Colin Grant: Frederick Douglass, 1 August 2019

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom 
by David Blight.
Simon and Schuster, 892 pp., £30, November 2018, 978 1 4165 9031 6
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... is the full justification of it to reason.’In the years immediately preceding the Civil War, Douglass continued to advocate a violent response to the Fugitive Slave Act and to slavery itself, skewering pacifist abolitionists and their futile ambition to ‘frown slave holders down’. Blight argues persuasively that Douglass’s manicheanism was ...

No More Scissors and Paste

Mary Beard: R.G. Collingwood, 25 March 2010

History Man: The Life of R.G. Collingwood 
by Fred Inglis.
Princeton, 385 pp., £23.95, 0 691 13014 0
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... student crew to Greece. He agreed; they left in June and Collingwood came back only shortly before war was declared. In 1940, his account of the journey, The First Mate’s Log, appeared from OUP. This frenetic activity was not typical of Collingwood’s life up to that point. True, he was always an insomniac workaholic, but he had lived undemonstratively, and ...

Termagant

Ian Gilmour: The Cliveden Set, 19 October 2000

The Cliveden Set: Portrait of an Exclusive Fraternity 
by Norman Rose.
Cape, 277 pp., £20, August 2000, 0 224 06093 7
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... College, Oxford, whom Lord Milner summoned or took with him to rebuild South Africa after the Boer War. With their mission completed by the foundation of the Union of South Africa, they returned to England but maintained some cohesion by starting a quarterly review, The Round Table, dedicated to turning the British Empire into an organic union; and they ...

Royal Classic Knitwear

Margaret Anne Doody: Iris and Laura, 5 October 2000

The Blind Assassin 
by Margaret Atwood.
Bloomsbury, 521 pp., £16.99, September 2000, 0 7475 4937 0
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... of her sister Laura, of whose death we learn in the very first sentence: ‘Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.’ It is part of the business of the novel to discover why Laura died. Iris and Laura grew up the daughters of a conscientious manufacturer who had inherited the estate, wealth and power of a successful ...

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