Pillors of Fier

Frank Kermode: Anthony Burgess, 11 July 2002

Nothing like the Sun: reissue 
byAnthony Burgess.
Allison and Busby, 234 pp., £7.99, January 2002, 0 7490 0512 2
Show More
Show More
... whole of this paragraph is very unsound.’ Here is an example of candour rarely matched by Shakespeare’s biographers. Any biography of Shakespeare has to mix conjecture with established fact since there must be a measure of continuity in the narrative that the known facts cannot themselves provide. It is not ...

An Urbane Scholar in a Wilderness of Tigers

Robert Irwin: Albert Hourani, 25 January 2001

A Vision of the Middle East: An Intellectual Biography of Albert Hourani 
byAbdulaziz Al-Sudairi.
Tauris, 221 pp., £12.99, January 2000, 9781860645815
Show More
Show More
... of those who now teach and write about the modern Middle East in this country were taught by Albert Hourani. He encouraged the historians he supervised to take an interest in developments in anthropology and sociology. More than anyone else, he was responsible for challenging the notion that the Ottoman period was a dark age of political and cultural ...

Slipper Protocol

Peter Campbell: The seclusion of women, 10 May 2001

Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature 
byRuth Bernard Yeazell.
Yale, 314 pp., £22.50, October 2000, 0 300 08389 0
Show More
Show More
... Ruth Bernard Yeazell’s subject. To find out how Western concerns and speculations were projected by the distorting lens of (often wishful) ignorance, she has trawled a substantial range of material – from the sparse documentary accounts of travellers to any number of imaginative genres, both literary and visual. Just what significance she expected this ...

Diary

Christopher Turner: Summerhill School and the real Orgasmatron, 3 June 2004

... I first visited Summerhill, the ‘free’ school in Suffolk founded in 1921 by A.S. Neill, when I was an anthropology student. I asked whether I could stay for a while as a participant-observer, and was offered a large tepee as a place to sleep. I liked the idea of living in it: a wigwam seemed a suitable home for a backyard anthropologist ...

Even Purer than Before

Rosemary Hill: Angelica Kauffman, 15 December 2005

Miss Angel: The Art and World of Angelica Kauffman 
byAngelica Goodden.
Pimlico, 389 pp., £17.99, September 2005, 1 84413 758 9
Show More
Show More
... She too is fair, her pink and white complexion carefully shaded from the afternoon sun. Painted by Angelica Kauffman in Naples and Rome in 1785 and 1786, this is a picture of refined innocence: a picture, but not in the truest sense a portrait. Elizabeth Foster was a beauty, but a notorious one. She had come to Italy to conceal an inconvenient pregnancy and ...

Badmouthing City

William Fitzgerald: Catullus, 23 February 2006

The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition 
translated byPeter Green.
California, 339 pp., £15.95, September 2005, 0 520 24264 5
Show More
Show More
... a small library. But for all his deprecation of the ‘booklet’, Catullus ends his dedication by praying that it may ‘outlast at least one generation’. Two thousand years later we are opening yet another translation to see how Catullus’ uniquely elusive and enticing voice survives. The news is good. This is a translation that sounds like ...

Exact Walking

Christopher Hill, 19 June 1980

Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 
byR.T. Kendall.
Oxford, 252 pp., £12.50, February 1980, 0 19 826716 9
Show More
Show More
... later King James I, all agreed on the essentials of theology. This orthodoxy was challenged by Laudians in the 1630s, by sectaries in the Forties and Fifties. By the end of the century, Calvinism was no longer the intellectual force it had been. It was not stressed ...

In Search of People’s History

Eric Hobsbawm, 19 March 1981

People’s History and Socialist Theory 
edited byRaphael Samuel.
Routledge, 417 pp., £10.95, January 1981, 0 7100 0765 5
Show More
British Labour History 
byE.H. Hunt.
Weidenfeld, 428 pp., £18.50, January 1981, 0 297 77785 8
Show More
Show More
... When the Roman emperor Vitellius was deserted in his last moments by everyone except his cook, the aristocratic historian Tacitus could not bring himself to mention the actual occupation of so undignified a member of society. As Peter Burke points out in a friendly but sceptical contribution to People’s History and Socialist Theory, under such circumstances ‘people’s history’ was a contradiction in terms ...

George Eliot, Joyce and Cambridge

Michael Mason, 2 April 1981

... peaceably intent on exploring and teaching European culture and English grammar while bayed about by his attackers. To read the Joyce book is to be quickly disabused of at least this impression of what is going on at Cambridge. It is a tremendously aggressive piece of writing. Its aggression is directed both at current ...

Can we speak Greek?

Alexander Bevilacqua: Martin Crusius’s Project, 3 April 2025

The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius 
byRichard Calis.
Harvard, 301 pp., £33.95, February, 978 0 674 29273 4
Show More
Show More
... Tübingen’s professor of Greek, Martin Kraus, known to posterity as Martin Crusius, could, by his own admission, ‘rightly be said to be drunk with love for Greek affairs’. To him each new arrival presented an opportunity to learn about the Greeks and their ...

American Unreason

Emily Witt: Garth Greenwell’s ‘Small Rain’, 26 December 2024

Small Rain 
byGarth Greenwell.
Picador, 306 pp., £18.99, September 2024, 978 1 5098 7469 9
Show More
Show More
... bring resolution. Instead, the hospital is a place of bureaucracy and confusion, where you might be kept alive but left in debt, the course of treatment is decided by unseen administrators, and a few acts of negligence can kill you. Small Rain begins with pain. It’s the summer of 2020, in Iowa City, and one Saturday the ...

Dutch Treat

Amber Medland: Miranda July’s Make-Believe, 6 March 2025

All Fours 
byMiranda July.
Canongate, 336 pp., £20, May 2024, 978 1 83885 344 0
Show More
Show More
... parting gift: strategies for pleasuring women. (‘He said he didn’t know if they’d be of use to me, seeing as how I was a woman myself, but it was all he had in the way of a dowry.’) In ‘Majesty’, a woman fantasises about fucking Prince William. (‘Gradually I realised he had lifted up the back of my skirt and was nuzzling his face ...

Gender Wonder

Katie Ebner-Landy: Early Modern Women’s Writing, 2 April 2026

Sex and Style: Literary Criticism and Gender in Early Modern England 
byElizabeth Scott-Baumann.
Princeton, 216 pp., £84, September 2025, 978 0 691 27201 6
Show More
Show More
... that tense and gender.If​ you think you know what the 17th-century poet Anne Southwell means by referring to Minerva’s owl, you are probably wrong. Southwell is alluding to Ovid’s story of a jealous crow, who worries that the owl has usurped his position as Minerva’s favourite. The owl is Nyctimene, a princess who was raped ...

From Papa in Heaven

Russell Davies, 3 September 1981

Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961 
edited byCarlos Baker.
Granada, 948 pp., £15, April 1981, 0 246 11576 9
Show More
Show More
... West? Rancho El Paradiso?) Dear Pos: How the hell are you? A stupid damned question as you will be rolling along pretty much as always, my reliable friend. You will be surprised to get a letter from me but not half as surprised as Papa is to be writing a letter. I have not written a ...

The Bible as Fiction

George Caird, 4 November 1982

The Story of the Stories: The Chosen People and its God 
byDan Jacobson.
Secker, 211 pp., £8.95, September 1982, 0 436 22048 2
Show More
The Art of Biblical Narrative 
byRobert Alter.
Allen and Unwin, 195 pp., £10, May 1982, 0 04 801022 7
Show More
The Great Code: The Bible and Literature 
byNorthrop Frye.
Routledge, 261 pp., £9.95, June 1982, 0 7100 9038 2
Show More
Show More
... lost nothing of its perennial fascination. All three grapple with the conundrum forcefully posed by Frye: ‘Why does this huge, sprawling, tactless book sit there inscrutably in the middle of our cultural heritage like the “great Boyg” or sphinx in Peer Gynt, frustrating all our efforts to walk around it?’ All three agree that it is fiction, but when ...