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Princes and Poets

Niall Rudd, 4 August 1983

The Augustan Idea in English Literature 
by Howard Erskine-Hill.
Arnold, 379 pp., £33.50, May 1983, 0 7131 6373 9
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Catullus 
by G.P. Goold.
Duckworth, 266 pp., £24, January 1983, 0 7156 1435 5
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Three Classical Poets: Sappho, Catullus and Juvenal 
by Richard Jenkyns.
Duckworth, 242 pp., £24, May 1982, 0 7156 1636 6
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... Particularly notable are the comparison of Donne’s fourth Satire (based on Horace 1.9) with Pope’s ‘The Impertinent’, the interpretation of Jonson’s The Poetaster, the comparison of Huish’s Horatian Ode with that of Marvell, and the discussion of Pope’s poem ‘To Mr Addison’. This combination of ...

Allergic to Depths

Terry Eagleton: Gothic, 18 March 1999

Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin 
by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Fourth Estate, 438 pp., £20, December 1998, 1 85702 498 2
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... fascinating pages). This is clear enough from Davenport-Hines’s inclusion among his Goths of Alexander Pope, the Earl of Shaftesbury and the architect William Kent. The dominant culture of 18th-century England was not averse to a spot of wild irregularity, not least when it came to gardening. Or indeed to the heroic couplet, which combines symmetry ...

Leave me my illusions

Nicholas Penny: Antiquarianism, 29 July 2021

Time’s Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism 
by Rosemary Hill.
Allen Lane, 390 pp., £25, June, 978 1 84614 312 0
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... after Marriage, a farce written by John Gay, with the assistance of John Arbuthnot and the young Alexander Pope, which was performed at Drury Lane in 1717. The leading character, Dr Fossile, has just married a much younger woman (‘the best of my curiosities’) and is unaware that two would-be seducers have moved into his domestic ...

The Sword is Our Pope

Alexander Murray: Religion in Europe, 15 October 1998

The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity, 371-1386 AD 
by Richard Fletcher.
HarperCollins, 562 pp., £25, September 1997, 0 00 255203 5
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... in Livonia. The Knights ‘yearned for battle like a hungry falcon’, intoned ‘the sword is our Pope’ and thought nothing of massacring the entire population of any town imprudent enough to cavil at the Gospel message. Kóscól, Polish for ‘church’, comes from the word for ‘castle’. Those are the extremities. Points between them are almost ...

I have no books to consult

Stephen Sedley: Lord Mansfield, 22 January 2015

Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason 
by Norman Poser.
McGill-Queen’s, 532 pp., £24.99, September 2013, 978 0 7735 4183 2
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... as cabinet member, counsellor and confidant; he knew everyone from Boswell to Blackstone and Pope to Pitt; and at Kenwood in Hampstead he constructed a mansion, designed by Robert Adam, and a park which remain a high point of British design. Norman Poser is not Mansfield’s first biographer, but he is arguably the best so far. The first, John ...

Saint Q

Alan Brien, 12 September 1991

Well, I forget the rest 
by Quentin Crewe.
Hutchinson, 278 pp., £17.99, September 1991, 0 09 174835 6
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... you may even be glad of a wheelchair yourself.’ Until then, I had gloried in what the crippled Alexander Pope bitterly, and brilliantly, categorised as ‘all the arrogance of superfluous health’. For the next thirty years, there was not a day when I could not get up and do a day’s work. But Quentin made me grateful for every one of them, never ...

Poetry to Thrill an Oyster

Gregory Woods: Fitz-Greene Halleck, 16 November 2000

The American Byron: Homosexuality and the Fall of Fitz-Greene Halleck 
by John W.M. Hallock.
Wisconsin, 226 pp., £14.95, April 2000, 0 299 16804 2
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... borrow music from the Muse of Gray’), his Grayness keeps veering off uneasily into the tones of Alexander Pope (‘And I – a victim to love’s cruel dart,/Went – to the Opera – with a broken heart!’) – in this case, the satirical invasion saves the poem from drowning in its own reserves of treacle. As soon as the lad wakes up we are shown ...

My Faults, My Follies

Helen Deutsch: Laetitia Pilkington, ‘Foot-ball of Fortune’, 17 July 2008

Queen of the Wits: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington 
by Norma Clarke.
Faber, 364 pp., £20, February 2008, 978 0 571 22428 9
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... Ladies Heads, &c. &c”’. In stories like these Pilkington is playing a serious game, not unlike Pope’s in his feminisation of epic in the beautifully violent world of The Rape of the Lock: she is reversing the gender of the ‘scandalous memoir’ by exposing the male secrets to which her own oppression gave her access. The role Pilkington fought against ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Nephews and Daughters, 23 January 2003

... not officially (it’s worth remembering that Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia were the children of Pope Alexander VI). By way of an example: Arthur Balfour was made Chief Secretary of Ireland when his mother’s brother, the Marquess of Salisbury, or ‘Robert’ to his friends, was Prime Minister – hence ‘Bob’s your uncle.’ Here’s a ...

Who is a Jew?

Alexander Bevilacqua: Converso Identities, 10 July 2025

Strangers Within: The Rise and Fall of the New Christian Trading Elite 
by Francisco Bethencourt.
Princeton, 602 pp., £38, May 2024, 978 0 691 20991 3
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... of Christianity as creed, not lineage, that had held for more than a millennium. The king and the pope both opposed the restrictions, yet they were widely adopted across Spain and then Portugal, especially after a later, Spanish pope, Alexander VI, approved blood purity statutes in ...

Nymph of the Grot

Nicholas Penny, 13 April 2000

The Culture of the High Renaissance 
by Ingrid Rowland.
Cambridge, 384 pp., £40, February 1999, 0 521 58145 1
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Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 
by Francesco Colonna, translated by Joscelyn Godwin.
Thames and Hudson, 476 pp., £42, November 1999, 0 500 01942 8
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After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the 16th Century 
by Marcia Hall.
Cambridge, 349 pp., £45, March 1999, 0 521 48245 3
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... Papal banker Agostino Chigi also colours this book. Chigi is another hero of hers. So, too, is Pope Julius II. Rowland is expert at placing the subjects she studies in relation to each other. A jocular study of the ruins of Rome by ‘Prospettico Melanese depictore’ (‘the Perspectivist’ – or, as she whimsically has it, ‘Mr ...

For his Nose was as sharpe as a Pen, and a Table of greene fields

Michael Dobson: The Yellow Shakespeare, 10 May 2007

William Shakespeare, Complete Works: The RSC Shakespeare 
edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.
Macmillan, 2486 pp., £30, April 2007, 978 0 230 00350 7
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... and its reprints (1632, 1663-64, 1685), followed by the editions of Nicholas Rowe (1709), Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1733), Sir Thomas Hanmer (1744) and William Warburton (1747) – and each had been able to offer what a modern commissioning editor would call a Unique Selling Point. The First Folio had supplied 18 plays which had ...

Not Many Dead

Linda Colley, 10 September 1992

Riot, Risings and Revolution: Governance and Violence in 18th-Century England 
by Ian Gilmour.
Hutchinson, 504 pp., £25, May 1992, 0 09 175330 9
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... 1714 for debasing government and oppressing the masses. Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke and Alexander Pope argued this at the time, and Benjamin Disraeli made the same point when he stigmatised the Venetian oligarchy. Yet labelling the Whigs as the bad guys in this fashion, and indeed discussing 18th-century England in terms of internal violence in ...

Refuse to be useful

Andrea Brady: Lisa Robertson Drifts, 4 August 2022

The Baudelaire Fractal 
by Lisa Robertson.
Coach House, 205 pp., £12.99, March 2020, 978 1 55245 390 2
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Anemones: A Simone Weil Project 
by Lisa Robertson.
If I Can’t Dance, 120 pp., £19, December 2021, 978 94 92139 19 1
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Boat 
by Lisa Robertson.
Coach House, 175 pp., £12.99, September, 978 1 55245 440 4
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... an affinity for Enlightenment rhetoric and a modern feminist irony: like Edith Sitwell reading Alexander Pope. But her early books also owe a debt to Virgil. He wrote his Eclogues and Georgics before attempting his epic; Robertson began her cursus with XEclogue (1993), a book of pastoral featuring the ‘roaring boys’, Lady Mary Wortley ...

Grub Street Snob

Terry Eagleton: ‘Fanny Hill’, 13 September 2012

Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland 
by Hal Gladfelder.
Johns Hopkins, 311 pp., £28.50, July 2012, 978 1 4214 0490 5
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... with a number of the age’s luminaries, from the Duchess of Marlborough to Richard Steele and Alexander Pope. At the age of 18, Cleland arrived in Bombay in the service of the East India Company, where his skill at writing and talent for languages smoothed his progress from foot soldier to attorney, and from there to secretary of the Bombay ...

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