Perfectly dressed

Peter Campbell, 7 November 1991

Moving Pictures 
by Anne Hollander.
Harvard, 512 pp., £15, April 1991, 0 674 58828 2
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... his gaze ... This was a Hollywood device during the great days of American self-flattery ... not a King but a whole nation was served the visible world on a platter, as if it were perfectly baked and glazed.’ The parallels Hollander draws make you see paintings and movies a little differently – and that little unglazes the eye to a remarkable degree. She ...

Eye-Catchers

Peter Campbell, 4 December 1986

Survey of London: Vol. XLII. Southern Kensington: Kensington to Earls Court 
Athlone, 502 pp., £55, May 1986, 0 485 48242 8Show More
Follies: A National Trust Guide 
by Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp.
Cape, 564 pp., £15, June 1986, 0 224 02105 2
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The Botanists 
by David Elliston Allen.
St Paul’s Bibliographies, 232 pp., £15, May 1986, 0 906795 36 2
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British Art since 1900 
by Frances Spalding.
Thames and Hudson, 252 pp., £10.50, April 1986, 0 500 23457 4
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Paintings from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760-1900 
by Richard Altick.
Ohio State, 527 pp., £55, March 1986, 0 8142 0380 9
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History of the British Pig 
by John Wiseman.
Duckworth, 118 pp., £12.95, May 1986, 9780715619872
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... was blown about like that,’ and had him remove unauthorial steps from his illustration to ‘King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid’. He was dealing with Pre-Raphaelites, whose notions of fidelity to text were flexible, but Altick describes this kind of confrontation as ‘a favourite form of journalistic pedantry’. Popular taste, which proved unkind to ...

Diary

Peter Pomerantsev: Berezovsky’s Last Days, 25 April 2013

... London telling the world he was using all the means at his disposal to unseat the man he had made king. With Berezovsky truth was always indivisible from fiction. ‘You would never know when he was bullshitting,’ a Duma deputy recently told me. ‘I remember in the 1990s he told us a Communist coup was in the offing and we needed to start building a ...

Humid Fidelity

Peter Bradshaw: The letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill, 16 September 1999

Speaking for Themselves: The Personal Letters of Winston and Clementine Churchill 
edited by Mary Soames.
Black Swan, 702 pp., £15, August 1999, 0 552 99750 1
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... which you see but can’t look at – When he came in everyone (women too) got up as if he were a King – You couldn’t help doing it. A few days later Clementine reports that she has received a signed photograph from Mussolini. It is inscribed:        A la Signora Winston Churchill                 Devotamente ...

What’s going on?

Peter Mair: The Netherlands, 14 December 2006

Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance 
by Ian Buruma.
Atlantic, 278 pp., £12.99, October 2006, 1 84354 319 2
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... and campaigned for election in 2002 in his chauffeur-driven Daimler, always accompanied by two King Charles spaniels. Van Gogh admired him – they admired each other for their shared outrageousness – and according to Buruma he scripted some of Fortuyn’s best lines. Buruma’s account of Fortuyn is one of the best available in English, but it is also ...

Incompetents

Stephen Bann, 16 June 1983

Worstward Ho 
by Samuel Beckett.
Calder, 48 pp., £5.50, April 1983, 0 7145 3979 1
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That Voice 
by Robert Pinget, translated by Barbara Wright.
Red Dust (New York), 114 pp., $10.95, May 1983, 0 87376 041 7
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King Solomon 
by Romain Gary, translated by Barbara Wright.
Harvill, 256 pp., £7.95, May 1983, 0 00 261416 2
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A Year in Hartlebury, or The Election 
by Benjamin Disraeli and Sarah Disraeli.
Murray, 222 pp., £8.50, May 1983, 0 7195 4020 8
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The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire 
by Doris Lessing.
Cape, 180 pp., £7.95, May 1983, 0 224 02130 3
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... nephews, and the one about the law court and its sentence, and the one about the dethroned king, and the one about the murderers everywhere, and the one about the garden with the nettles, and the one about the knife, and the one about the dead children, and the one about the grief, and the one about the rats, and the one about the innocents, and the ...

Quarrelling

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 29 October 1987

Tears before Bedtime 
by Barbara Skelton.
Hamish Hamilton, 205 pp., £12.95, September 1987, 0 241 12326 7
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In the Pink 
by Caroline Blackwood.
Bloomsbury, 164 pp., £11.95, October 1987, 0 7475 0050 9
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... marriage to go, people were telling each other that they had already separated. Her former lover, Peter Quennell, eager for bad news, invited her to lunch at the Etoile and asked about her sex life. But that day she didn’t feel like doing Connolly down, so Quennell soon got bored and asked for the bill. While Cyril dined out on their quarrels, his ...

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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... with the message that Italy had no need of an emperor and that he, Odoacer, would rule as king on Zeno’s behalf. Zeno had troubles of his own and was in no position to argue even if he wanted to. Constantinople’s shrugging benediction began more than a decade of peace and stability such as hadn’t been seen for a generation in the lands Odoacer ...

You are a milksop

Ferdinand Mount, 7 May 2020

Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate 
by Paul Lay.
Head of Zeus, 352 pp., £30, January 2020, 978 1 78185 256 9
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... sir, are a drunkard, and some of you are whoremasters’ (he’s looking at Henry Marten and Sir Peter Wentworth). Then he points to the Speaker up in his chair: ‘Fetch him down.’ When the Speaker doesn’t budge, he shouts, ‘Put him out,’ and a couple of members, rather unwillingly, drag him down, and he is marched out without the mace through a ...

Rough Trade

Steven Shapin: Robert Hooke, 6 March 2003

The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Strange and Inventive Life of Robert Hooke 1635-1703 
by Stephen Inwood.
Macmillan, 497 pp., £18.99, September 2002, 0 333 78286 0
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... world. Recognising that he could have IP with world-changing possibilities, Hooke went to see the King and asked him for a patent – that’s how you could secure your rights to IP in Restoration England, though it was more customary to work through Crown officials. Hooke gave the King an early version of his watch and ...

The Great Dissembler

James Wood: Thomas More’s Bad Character, 16 April 1998

The Life of Thomas More 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Chatto, 435 pp., £20, March 1998, 1 85619 711 5
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... a Catholic martyr because he died opposing Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the King’s robbery from the Pope of the leadership of the English Church. But he is also seen as a lawyer-layman caught in the mesh of presumptuous ecclesiology, an English Cicero of the pre-Reformation who nobly gave his head to forces beyond his control. Most ...

Love with Time Let in

Barbara Everett: ‘The Winter’s Tale’, 8 January 2004

... as detached narrative, in Court prose) but to the revival of Hermione and her coming-home to the King’s embrace.Myth-making or myth-finding has its own seasonal designs on the play. It leans, that is to say, too heavily on time as a circumstance outside the self. Early in Cymbeline, Posthumus, exiled in Rome, is asked what he will do to help himself, and ...

Blame it on the boogie

Andrew O’Hagan: In Pursuit of Michael Jackson, 6 July 2006

On Michael Jackson 
by Margo Jefferson.
Pantheon, 146 pp., $20, January 2006, 0 375 42326 5
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... record already has a title, ‘He Who Makes the Sky Grey’, but no release date is in sight. The king’s son has high hopes for the recording. He recently called a press conference in order to claim that the project ‘intends to bridge the gap between East and West’. Meanwhile, Jackson is in the habit of smiling widely beside his new friend. Things are ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2013, 9 January 2014

... discovery of the body of Richard III, though there would be some mild satisfaction in finding the king exactly where the sources said he was. McFarlane wouldn’t have thought the body particularly informative as compared with the real stuff of history, some of the ex-duke of York’s receiver’s accounts, say, or records of Yorkist estate management.The TV ...

Here you will find only ashes

Geoffrey Hosking: The Kremlin, 3 July 2014

Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia’s History 
by Catherine Merridale.
Penguin, 528 pp., £10.99, May 2014, 978 0 14 103235 1
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... warlords. At the height of the 17th-century Time of Troubles, the Kremlin was occupied by a Polish king and supported by a predominantly Polish army. (Imagine an Irish king installed in the Tower of London by an Irish-French army, supported by English Catholics and given diplomatic backing by the Vatican; English national ...