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Henson’s Choice

C.H. Sisson, 1 September 1983

Hensley Henson: A Study in the Friction between Church and State 
by Owen Chadwick.
Oxford, 337 pp., £18.50, May 1983, 0 19 826445 3
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... a single bishop at the top of his list of achievements?’ It is the voice of sober realism. Canon Charles Pattinson, who had been Henson’s chaplain, finally persuaded Chadwick to take on the at first rather repugnant task of spending so long with the Henson papers and writing the bishop’s life. Pattinson told him that ‘Henson’s ...

The Whole Bustle

Siobhan Kilfeather, 9 January 1992

The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing 
edited by Seamus Deane.
Field Day Publications/Faber, 4044 pp., £150, November 1991, 0 946755 20 5
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... predictable. In the first paragraph of the General Introduction Deane compares this anthology with Charles Read’s Cabinet of Irish Literature (1879): it would be interesting to learn why Field Day rejected writers such as Monk, Ryves, Tighe, Leadbetter, Hall, Mulholland, and over a dozen other women who appear in Read. I particularly missed some of the ...

It stamps its pretty feet

T.J. Clark: Goya’s Portraits, 19 November 2015

Goya: The Portraits 
National Gallery, until 10 January 2016Show More
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... made his living from: Théophile Gautier’s later guess at Goya’s feelings in his portrait of Charles IV and Family – ‘the baker on the corner and his wife after they’ve won the lottery’ – is unforgettable and wrong. Yet I stand by my first intuition. Of course as I spent more time at the show and became accustomed to Goya’s visual idiom ...

Doing Well out of War

Jonathan Steele: Chechnya, 21 October 2004

... but relations became strained last year when Moscow denounced its rapporteur, Britain’s Frank Judd, and refused to go on working with him. Judd’s successor, the Swiss Andreas Gross, was allowed into Chechnya in August in spite of criticising the lack of democracy in the elections Russia organised. Gross believes that the world has to work with the ...

Everyone’s Pal

John Sutherland: Louis de Bernières, 13 December 2001

Red Dog 
by Louis de Bernières.
Secker, 119 pp., £10, October 2001, 0 436 25617 7
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Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World 
by Louis de Bernières.
Vintage, 119 pp., £6.99, October 2001, 9780099428442
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... in his verse-play, Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World: it’s not much of a play, to be frank). The aimless years of his young manhood were now magically converted into high-grade literary capital. His first novel, The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts came out in 1990. It was well received, and two more novels followed, also set in ‘an ...

Thunder in the Mountains

J. Hoberman: Orson Welles, 6 September 2007

Orson Welles: Hello Americans 
by Simon Callow.
Vintage, 507 pp., £8.99, May 2007, 978 0 09 946261 3
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What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career 
by Joseph McBride.
Kentucky, 344 pp., $29.95, October 2006, 0 8131 2410 7
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... but Bertolt Brecht called it ‘the greatest thing I have seen in American theatre’. (He and Charles Laughton hoped in vain that Welles would direct their 1947 production of Galileo.) By the mid-1940s, Welles regarded Hollywood as a place where he made money by acting. But he also persuaded the independent producer Walter Wanger to buy the rights to ...

Most Handsome and Best

David Todd: ‘Enlightenment Biopolitics’, 5 June 2025

Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics and the Making of Citizens 
by William Max Nelson.
Chicago, 311 pp., £28, May 2024, 978 0 226 82558 8
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... on cross-breeding as a means of preventing degeneration inspired proto-eugenic schemes, including Charles-Augustin Vandermonde’s Essay on the Manner of Improving the Human Species (1756), and the first practical projects of racial engineering in French colonies. These revolved around the creation of a mixed Euro-African race, in charge of military ...

Thatcher’s Artists

Peter Wollen, 30 October 1997

Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection 
by Norman Rosenthal.
Thames and Hudson, 222 pp., £29.95, September 1997, 0 500 23752 2
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... without remembering that all the work in this particular show was purchased or commissioned by Charles Saatchi. No doubt he will be pleased to be compared with Isabella d’Este. If there is a serious theme running through these essays, it concerns the nature of the ‘modern’ and the ‘new’ as governing principles of 20th-century art. The underlying ...

Outside in the Bar

Patrick McGuinness: Ten Years in Sheerness, 21 October 2021

The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness 
by Patrick Wright.
Repeater, 751 pp., £20, June, 978 1 913462 58 1
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... of Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em on Sheppey in 1975, the year after Johnson arrived. In the episode Frank Spencer takes his driving test for the tenth time, and hundreds of locals stood on the beach to watch Crawford, who was known for doing his own stunts, drive a blue Hillman Imp off Sheerness jetty. Crawford is Sheppey showbiz royalty: his mother, Doris ...

‘What is your nation if I may ask?’

Colm Tóibín: Jews in Ireland, 30 September 1999

Jews in 20th-century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust 
by Dermot Keogh.
Cork, 336 pp., £45, March 1998, 9781859181492
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... was never permitted to become a defining feature of Irish Catholic culture.’ Frank Duff, who founded the Legion of Mary and was perhaps the most influential Catholic layman of the time, ‘was an able defender of the Jewish community’, as were some of his colleagues. Anti-semitism in Ireland was kept on the fringes of the Catholic ...

The Forty Years’ Peace

Keith Kyle, 21 October 1993

The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations and Provocations 
by John Lewis Gaddis.
Oxford, 301 pp., £19.50, July 1992, 0 19 505201 3
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Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953-71 
by Douglas Brinkley.
Yale, 429 pp., £22, February 1993, 0 300 04773 8
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The Quest for Stability: Problems of West European Security 1918-1957 
edited by Rolf Ahmann, A.M. Birke and Michael Howard.
Oxford, 546 pp., £50, June 1993, 0 19 920503 5
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... much matters: deterrence deterred and deterred both ways. It worked, for example, against plans by Frank Wisner of the CIA to commit paramilitary groups trained in West Germany to aid the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and it made the Russians generally cautious outside their own sphere. President Glafkos Cleridis of Cyprus has revealed that after the first ...

The Card-Players

Paul Foot, 18 September 1986

Error of Judgment: The Truth about the Birmingham Bombings 
by Chris Mullin.
Chatto, 270 pp., £10.95, July 1986, 0 7011 2978 6
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... that they had been beaten up? And who was to say no to the Home Office forensic scientist, Dr Frank Skuse, who told the court he was ‘99 per cent certain’ that the three men whose hands turned positive in the Greiss test had been handling nitroglycerine? When the unanimous guilty verdict came, it was fully expected, and greeted with widespread ...

Big Head

John Sutherland, 23 April 1987

Thackeray’s Universe: Shifting Worlds of Imagination and Reality 
by Catherine Peters.
Faber, 292 pp., £12.95, January 1987, 0 571 14711 9
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... Collingwood (Collingwood being a hero of Trafalgar), Lancaster wrote a stream of nautical novels. Frank Barrett (1848-1926) was a successful potter when, in the early 1880s, his kiln collapsed, destroying two years’ work. He was persuaded in this crisis to become a novelist, and went on to write (very profitably) some fifty romances. William Alexander ...
Selected Poems 
by James Merrill.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £9.95, April 1996, 1 85754 228 2
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... from anyone’s received idea of a poet. He wasn’t poor: in fact, he was very rich, the son of Charles Merrill, founder of the biggest Wall Street brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch. He wasn’t tormented – at least he didn’t have mental breakdowns or attempt suicide. He drank a lot but not famously and he eventually joined AA without becoming sanctimonious ...

A Little Holiday

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Ben Hecht’s Cause, 23 September 2021

A Child of the Century 
by Ben Hecht.
Yale, 654 pp., £16, April 2020, 978 0 300 25179 1
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Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures 
by Adina Hoffman.
Yale, 245 pp., £10.99, April 2020, 978 0 300 25181 4
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... to write and produce rousing pageants: Fun to Be Free, written with his frequent Hollywood partner Charles MacArthur, drew large audiences to Madison Square Garden shortly before Pearl Harbor, and starred Jack Benny, Betty Grable, Eddie Cantor, Ethel Merman and Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, who tap-danced on Hitler’s coffin. Hecht also wrote propagandist ...

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