Des briques, des briques

Rosemary Hill: On British and Irish Architecture, 21 March 2024

Architecture in Britain and Ireland: 1530-1830 
by Steven Brindle.
Paul Mellon, 582 pp., £60, November 2023, 978 1 913107 40 6
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“... built in the mid-16th century, as the ne plus ultra of aspirational timber framing. The carpenter, Richard Dale, whose name appears with that of the owner, William Moreton, on one of the windows, gave the framing a raking design which creates on the exterior an elaborate dazzle effect. Starting out with an H-plan house, Dale and Moreton added every latest ...”

Flower or Fungus?

Barbara Graziosi: Bacchylides, 31 July 2008

Bacchylides: Politics, Performance, Poetic Tradition 
by David Fearn.
Oxford, 428 pp., £70, July 2007, 978 0 19 921550 8
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“... a quick look at the new find and declared: ‘No great poet has appeared.’ At Cambridge, Sir Richard Jebb thought that while Bacchylides was no eagle, he ought to be praised as a lively nightingale. ‘Students,’ he added, ‘would find his poetry helpful in facilitating their approach to Pindar.’ Bacchylides had been compared with Pindar from the ...”

We’ll keep humiliating you with American XXXXXX

Christian Lorentzen: ‘Guantánamo Diary’, 5 February 2015

Guantánamo Diary 
by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, edited by Larry Siems.
Canongate, 379 pp., £20, January 2015, 978 1 78211 284 6
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“... are a gang of reckless and clueless thugs enacting their 9/11 revenge fantasies on whatever brown-skinned men happen to be at hand. There have been 779 detainees at Guantánamo; of 517 men being held in 2005, 80 per cent had been handed over by Afghans and Pakistanis for $5000 bounties, resulting in not a few senseless detentions. Slahi recounts one of ...”

Main Man

Michael Hofmann, 7 July 1994

Walking Possession: Essays and Reviews 1968-1993 
by Ian Hamilton.
Bloomsbury, 302 pp., £20, May 1994, 0 7475 1712 6
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Gazza Italia 
by Ian Hamilton.
Granta, 188 pp., £5.99, May 1994, 0 14 014073 5
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“... are those who believe that Lewis’s future as a writer would have been in prose’; Richard Wilbur, ‘a poet of the “shallows” ’ who ‘has under-extended his considerable talent’; ‘What it all boils down to, or up to, is that Larkin the thrifty now has a Collected Poems of substantial bulk’; ‘the parsimonious connoisseur had ...”

Rose on the Run

Andrew O’Hagan: Beryl Bainbridge, 14 July 2011

The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress 
by Beryl Bainbridge.
Little, Brown, 197 pp., £16.99, May 2011, 978 0 316 72848 5
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“... tree, the other sprawled upon the ground, arms covering his face, bright hair bunched against the brown earth. Both were lazily humming, their scarlet jackets dangling from the branches above. Hearing the soft plodding of the horses’ hooves, the seated man opened his eyes and nodded respectfully; he had the rosy cheeks and snub nose of a country boy, and ...”

Bury that bastard

Nicole Flattery, 5 March 2020

Actress 
by Anne Enright.
Cape, 264 pp., £16.99, February, 978 1 78733 206 5
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“... lapse and a lot of Catholic guilt about it. Oh, the bloody bunch of flowers and the new coat in Richard Alan’s sale. Isn’t it worth it? I used to say. Isn’t it bloody worth it for a trip to Brown Thomas’s and a long weekend with the kids, all of us together in Ballybunion, walking the winter beach, a couple of ...”

Ach so, Herr Major

Nicholas Horsfall: Translating Horace, 23 June 2005

Horace: Odes and Epodes 
edited by Niall Rudd.
Harvard, 350 pp., £14.50, June 2004, 0 674 99609 7
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“... so for readers wanting a reliable guide to Euripides’ sense fifty years later, just as the thin brown Penguins by E.F. Watling were already dead and indigestible when I was told to read them at school. But Horace is a very special case. For a start, what he said and how he said it really matters, tremendously. David West quite rightly begins the ...”

I saw them in my visage

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare and Race, 6 February 2025

White People in Shakespeare: Essays in Race, Culture and the Elite 
edited by Arthur Little.
Bloomsbury, 320 pp., £21.99, January 2023, 978 1 350 28566 8
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Shakespeare’s White Others 
by David Sterling Brown.
Cambridge, 214 pp., £30, August 2023, 978 1 009 38416 2
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The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare while Talking about Race 
by Farah Karim-Cooper.
Oneworld, 328 pp., £11.99, April 2024, 978 0 86154 809 5
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“... ornamentally in service to academic publication and career trajectories’. David Sterling Brown’s essay on Shakespeare’s near obsession with white women’s white hands doesn’t bring in his own lived experience, but his monograph Shakespeare’s White Others – in which Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra and Othello are used as case ...”

Use your theodolite

Rosemary Hill: Stone Circles, 26 December 2024

Stone Circles: A Field Guide 
by Colin Richards and Vicki Cummings.
Yale, 494 pp., £30, September 2024, 978 0 300 23598 2
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“... during Burl’s excavation and the stone bank was rebuilt. Visitors are now directed to it by a brown ‘heritage’ sign and, Stone Circles tells us, there is a convenient car park with picnic table.Strichen’s story is not atypical. The appreciation and understanding of stone circles hasn’t been a linear process. For every advance there have been ...”

Dress Rehearsals

Misha Glenny, 17 July 1997

Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nation hood in Greek Macedonia, 1870-1990 
by Anastasia Karakasidou.
Chicago, 264 pp., $38, June 1997, 0 226 42493 6
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“... in Macedonia’, an unpublished doctoral thesis by a young British anthropologist, Keith Brown, which examines the Ilinden Uprising. Brown’s work goes a long way towards tracing the evolution of (Slav) Macedonian national mythology in much the same way that Karakasidou reveals the broad outlines of late 19th and ...”

Welly-Whanging

Thomas Jones: Alan Hollinghurst, 6 May 2004

The Line of Beauty 
by Alan Hollinghurst.
Picador, 501 pp., £16.99, April 2004, 9780330483209
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“... with one of the waiters, a boy called Tristão (after wandering off through ‘a side door into a brown passageway’, he found himself in a pantry; they agreed to meet by the main stairs at three o’clock). Toby and Wani Ouradi, an astonishingly beautiful boy whose father owns a vast supermarket empire, sneak ostentatiously and shockingly into Toby’s ...”

And That Rug!

Michael Dobson: Images of Shakespeare, 6 November 2003

Shakespeare’s Face: The Story behind the Newly Discovered Portrait 
by Stephanie Nolen.
Piatkus, 365 pp., £18.99, March 2003, 0 7499 2391 1
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Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions 
by Stephen Orgel.
Palgrave, 172 pp., £25, August 2003, 1 4039 1177 0
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Shakespeare in Art 
by Jane Martineau et al.
Merrell, 256 pp., £29.95, September 2003, 1 85894 229 2
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In Search of Shakespeare 
by Michael Wood.
BBC, 352 pp., £20, May 2003, 9780563534778
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“... late Elizabethan doublet with an unusual semi-transparent lace collar. He has fashionably shortish brown hair, a fairly high forehead, bags under his eyes as if he hasn’t been sleeping well lately, and a lightweight, almost fluffy beard and moustache. The top right-hand corner of the painting gives a date – 1603, perfectly consonant with the clothes, the ...”

Globaloney

Jackson Lears: Brzezinski’s Cold War, 5 March 2026

Zbig: The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America’s Cold War Prophet 
by Edward Luce.
Bloomsbury, 545 pp., £30, May 2025, 978 1 5266 3784 0
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“... CIA. The Senate had convened an inquiry into CIA misconduct, and even the fanatical cold warrior Richard Nixon had promoted détente with the Soviet Union and opened a diplomatic door to China. One could be pardoned for hoping that a reorientation of policy was underway.But almost as soon as the last helicopter left the roof of the American Embassy in ...”

The God Squad

Andrew O’Hagan: Bushland, 23 September 2004

“... Maybe he just forgot how good he was in Total Recall. New York was buzzy with parties, as Tina Brown might say. In fact she did say it, about something or other, on her new weekly television show Topic [A], with Tina Brown, which created its own buzz by having Hendrik Hertzberg and Armstrong Williams slug it out about ...”

Balloons and Counter-Balloons

Susan Eilenberg: ‘The Age of Wonder’, 7 January 2010

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science 
by Richard Holmes.
HarperPress, 380 pp., £9.99, September 2009, 978 0 00 714953 7
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“... questions that they askd was, when it would thunder. Joseph Banks, The ‘Endeavour’ Journal Richard Holmes describes The Age of Wonder as a ‘relay race of scientific stories’ about the explosion of exploration and scientific achievement in England between two celebrated voyages, Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the world in the ...”