Shakespeares

David Norbrook, 18 July 1985

Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism 
edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield.
Manchester, 244 pp., £19.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1752 1
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Alternative Shakespeares 
edited by John Drakakis.
Methuen, 252 pp., £10.50, July 1985, 0 416 36850 6
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Shakespeare and Others 
by S. Schoenbaum.
Scolar, 285 pp., £25, May 1985, 0 85967 691 9
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Illustrations of the English Stage 1580-1642 
by R.A. Foakes.
Scolar, 180 pp., £35, February 1985, 0 85967 684 6
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Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ 
by E.A.J. Honigmann.
Manchester, 172 pp., £17.50, April 1985, 0 7190 1743 2
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... be followed through by examining the dedications of Michael Drayton, Giles Fletcher the elder and Augustine Taylor. But common contacts do not necessarily prove the hypothesis: Fletcher knew of the Hoghton family without needing to go to Lancashire. The links between Shakespeare and John Cottom are not as clear as could be desired. More obdurately, however ...

Paraphrase me if you dare

Colin Burrow: Stanley Cavell’s Sadness, 9 June 2022

Here and There: Sites of Philosophy 
by Stanley Cavell, edited by Nancy Bauer, Alice Crary and Sandra Laugier.
Harvard, 326 pp., £23.95, May, 978 0 674 27048 0
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... philosophy peace’; his wonder that Wittgenstein begins the Investigations by quoting St Augustine’s description of how he learned to understand what words signified; and a passage in which Wittgenstein imagines being asked the question ‘How am I able to follow a rule?’ and responds: ‘Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached ...

What a Woman!

J.L. Nelson: Joan of Arc, 19 October 2000

Joan of Arc 
by Mary Gordon.
Weidenfeld, 168 pp., £12.99, April 2000, 0 297 64568 4
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Joan of Arc: A Military Leader 
by Kelly DeVries.
Sutton, 242 pp., £20, November 1999, 0 7509 1805 5
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The Interrogation of Joan of Arc 
by Karen Sullivan.
Minnesota, 208 pp., £30, November 1999, 0 8166 3267 7
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... truth, located within’ the suspect ‘but in opposition to him, to speak out in his stead’. Augustine in The City of God appreciated the cruel dilemma of the judge applying torture in this world of appearances ‘where the truth is not known’, yet he was clear that the judge must do his job, ‘for the claims of human society require it.’ Sullivan ...

Deeper Shallows

Stefan Collini: C.S. Lewis, 20 June 2013

C.S. Lewis: A Life 
by Alister McGrath.
Hodder, 431 pp., £20, April 2013, 978 1 4447 4552 8
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... the time of his centenary, Christianity Today announced that he had come to be ‘the Aquinas, the Augustine and the Aesop of contemporary evangelicalism’, a list suggestive of deep alphabetical reserves of praise to come. Recent polls of American Christians apparently reveal that Mere Christianity (a reworked selection of short talks he gave on the BBC ...

His Generation

Keith Gessen: A Sad Old Literary Man, 19 June 2008

Alfred Kazin: A Biography 
by Richard Cook.
Yale, 452 pp., £25, March 2008, 978 0 300 11505 5
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... with the uprooting of whole people that had washed up on the West Side, this specialist in St Augustine had turned her life into a voracious political inquiry. How did it happen? How had it all happened? How had this modern age happened? The boarder could be heard walking down the hall to the toilet. She rocked that dark flat with the flushing of the ...

Bound to be in the wrong

Jonathan Rée: Camus and Sartre, 20 January 2005

Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It 
by Ronald Aronson.
Chicago, 291 pp., £23, February 2005, 0 226 02796 1
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... a scholarship to a lycée in Algiers, and at the local university wrote a thesis on Plotinus and Augustine – both of them, for Camus, essentially philosophers of the southern Mediterranean. Meanwhile, he earned his living with an agitprop theatre company, and for two years was an active member of the Algerian branch of the French Communist Party. He was ...

The Politics of Translation

Marina Warner: Translate this!, 11 October 2018

This Little Art 
by Kate Briggs.
Fitzcarraldo, 365 pp., £12.99, September 2017, 978 1 910695 45 6
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Translation as Transhumance 
by Mireille Gansel, translated by Ros Schwartz.
Les Fugitives, 150 pp., £10, November 2017, 978 0 9930093 3 4
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Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto 
by Mark Polizzotti.
MIT, 168 pp., £17.99, May 2018, 978 0 262 03799 0
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The 100 Best Novels in Translation 
by Boyd Tonkin.
Galileo, 304 pp., £14.99, June 2018, 978 1 903385 67 8
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The Work of Literary Translation 
by Clive Scott.
Cambridge, 285 pp., £75, June 2018, 978 1 108 42682 4
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... view. The history of translation has developed along two branches, one growing from Augustine, who endorsed precise adherence to the original, the other from Jerome, who believed in adaptation and, to some extent, invention, in order to put the meaning across more effectively. Jerome’s way, as demonstrated by his Vulgate translation of the ...

Bats on the Ceiling

James Lasdun: The Gospel of St Karen, 24 September 2020

Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife 
by Ariel Sabar.
Random House, 401 pp., $29.95, August 2020, 978 0 385 54258 6
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... Congress of Coptic Studies was held in September 2012 at the headquarters of the Order of St Augustine in Rome. Among the speakers was Karen King, the first woman to hold the Hollis Professorship of Divinity, Harvard’s oldest endowed chair. King had made her name as an interpreter and champion of early Christian texts that asserted the spiritual ...

Cold Feet

Frank Kermode, 22 July 1993

Essays on Renaissance Literature. Vol. I: Donne and the New Philosophy 
by William Empson, edited by John Haffenden.
Cambridge, 296 pp., £35, March 1993, 0 521 44043 2
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William Empson: The Critical Achievement 
edited by Chistopher Norris and Nigel Mapp.
Cambridge, 319 pp., £35, March 1993, 0 521 35386 6
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... of the higher duty of saving one’s soul. It was possible for very learned men such as Augustine and Milton to condemn it; and it was sometimes stated in very repressive forms, as indeed it is in Paradise Regained. That Donne should have such an opinion even in a mild form was unacceptable to Empson because he would feel contempt for anybody who ...

We shall not be moved

John Bayley, 2 February 1984

Come aboard and sail away 
by John Fuller.
Salamander, 48 pp., £6, October 1983, 0 907540 37 6
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Children in Exile 
by James Fenton.
Salamander, 24 pp., £5, October 1983, 0 907540 39 2
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‘The Memory of War’ and ‘Children in Exile’: Poems 1968-1983 
by James Fenton.
Penguin, 110 pp., £1.95, October 1983, 0 14 006812 0
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Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland: An Anthology 
edited by Michael Schmidt.
Carcanet, 184 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 85635 469 4
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Nights in the Iron Hotel 
by Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 48 pp., £4, November 1983, 0 571 13116 6
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The Irish Lights 
by Charles Johnston and Kyril Fitzlyon.
Bodley Head, 77 pp., £4.50, September 1983, 0 370 30557 4
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Fifteen to Infinity 
by Ruth Fainlight.
Hutchinson, 62 pp., £5.95, September 1983, 0 09 152471 7
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Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature 
edited by George Dekker.
Carcanet, 153 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 9780856354663
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... Augustan, American, Polish, Russian, Irish. Indeed, one of the most illuminating essays, by Augustine Martin, professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College, Dublin, shows in detail how Davie has made use of Irish metrics and themes, weaving variations and reversals quite invisible to the uninstructed eye. The sentiments of Yeats or of Austin ...

A Singular Entity

Peter C. Perdue: Classical China, 20 May 2021

What Is China?: Territory, Ethnicity, Culture and History 
by Ge Zhaoguang, translated by Michael Gibbs Hill.
Harvard, 224 pp., £31.95, March 2019, 978 0 674 73714 3
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... state ideology’. If we think of Aristotle, the tutor to Alexander, rather than Socrates, say, or Augustine, we have an idea of the way the Confucians situated themselves. Scholars with practical advice to offer could change policy, if they were lucky enough not to be purged, but only at the cost of their intellectual independence. Those who stood on ...

Kings and Kinglets

Michael Kulikowski: Cassiodorus, 12 August 2021

The Selected Letters of Cassiodorus: A Sixth-Century Sourcebook 
translated and edited by M. Shane Bjornlie.
California, 328 pp., £25, September 2020, 978 0 520 29734 0
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... and a treatise, De anima. These are highly conventional: the Expositio borrows mainly from St Augustine; De anima, immensely popular in the Middle Ages, is a trot through twelve untaxing questions about the soul, their vaguely Neoplatonist answers long since assimilated into Christian thinking. Yet it is De anima the announces the theme of the rest of ...

Too Fast

Thomas Powers: Malcolm X, 25 August 2011

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention 
by Manning Marable.
Allen Lane, 592 pp., £30, April 2011, 978 0 7139 9895 5
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... Haley and Malcolm exaggerated the latter’s sordid life of sin and crime to highlight, as St Augustine did, the luminous transformation eventually worked by God, or Allah. ‘An investigation of the NYPD’s arrest record for Malcolm Little,’ Marable writes, ‘failed to turn up any criminal charges or arrests.’ Perhaps this only means that Malcolm ...

The Getaway Car

Glen Newey: Machiavelli, 21 January 2016

Machiavellian Democracy 
by John McCormick.
Cambridge, 252 pp., £21.99, March 2011, 978 0 521 53090 3
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Machiavelli in the Making 
by Claude Lefort, translated by Michael Smith.
Northwestern, 512 pp., £32.50, January 2012, 978 0 8101 2438 7
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Redeeming ‘The Prince’: The Meaning of Machiavelli’s Masterpiece 
by Maurizio Viroli.
Princeton, 189 pp., £18.95, October 2013, 978 0 691 16001 6
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... car? Many political thinkers have found themselves exiled by choice or force, including Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Lenin, Berlin, Arendt, Shklar and Machiavelli himself. Cicero was decapitated while trying to hot-foot it from Rome; according to Cassius Dio, his tongue was pulled out and jabbed with a hairpin ...

The Other Thomas

Charles Nicholl, 8 November 2012

... to the Edessene preacher and poet Bardaisan, who died in 222 AD. The book was known to St Augustine, who brusquely notes that it is ‘read by Manicheans’. It is a strange mix. High-flown gnostic poetry and propaganda are mingled with a mass of more picaresque material – miracles, magic, talking animals etc – written in an episodic, romance-like ...