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Insouciance

Gordon A. Craig, 17 July 1997

Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914-45 
by Thomas Nevin.
Constable, 280 pp., £20, January 1997, 0 09 474560 9
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... the Weimar period and his service under Hitler may have seen in Venator a defiant self-portrait. Thomas Nevin, in what might be an oblique reference to the passage, reminds them that there is a difference between literature and politics and that ‘the Autor, the anarch, is a Rousseauist construct, safeguard of an egoism that takes itself as the only ...

No Law at All

Stephen Sedley: The Governor Eyre Affair, 2 November 2006

A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law 
by R.W. Kostal.
Oxford, 529 pp., £79.95, December 2005, 0 19 826076 8
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... a focus was that Eyre had personally authorised the arrest in Kingston of a man named George Gordon, and what today would be called his extraordinary rendition to Morant Bay. Arriving there on a Saturday, Gordon was given an instant trial without access to counsel and hanged two days later – the military commander ...

England and Other Women

Edna Longley, 5 May 1988

Under Storm’s Wing 
by Helen Thomas and Myfanwy Thomas.
Carcanet, 318 pp., £14.95, February 1988, 0 85635 733 2
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... The structural ironies of Edward Thomas’s life still condition his reputation. Just as he made a late poetic start, so criticism has been slow to gather momentum. Even the recent spate of studies – by Michael Kirkham, Stan Smith, and the contributors to Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated ...

Success and James Maxton

Inigo Thomas, 3 January 2008

... Independent Labour Party MP, socialist, orator, Scotsman and the subject of a biography written by Gordon Brown twenty years ago – was not a successful leader, although some of his contemporaries in the 1920s thought he might become one. ‘Maxton was never a government minister,’ Brown wrote of his subject, ‘and his failure to achieve any high office ...

The Cow Bells of Kitale

Patrick Collinson: The Selwyn Affair, 5 June 2003

... looked for a position of some kind but without success. A deal was struck with his elder brother, Gordon, a leading Anglican theologian and Dean of Winchester, who took possession of the title deeds of the farm and offered them a loan. But the condition was that Helen was to take over. Her husband was to follow her instructions, even obey her orders.She seems ...

Antidote to Marx

Colin Kidd: Oh, I know Locke!, 4 January 2024

America’s Philosopher: John Locke in American Intellectual Life 
by Claire Rydell Arcenas.
Chicago, 265 pp., $25, October, 978 0 226 82933 3
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... rhetoric of patriots than those of the early 18th-century British journalists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon or the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. After 1776, in any case, Locke’s influence as a political philosopher declined sharply. By the 1780s Americans of the founding generation were much more likely to invoke the ideas of Montesquieu or William ...

Obstacles

Penelope Fitzgerald, 4 July 1996

Edward ThomasSelected Letters 
edited by R. George Thomas.
Oxford, 192 pp., £30, March 1996, 0 19 818562 6
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... It would be quite possible to read about Edward Thomas and wonder how it was that so many people made such allowances for him. A man who had a house built for himself and then refused to live in it, he tormented his wife and children with his restlessness – he calculated he was never happy for more than a quarter of an hour in the day ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Michael Crichton’s Revenge, 4 January 2007

... team, is on the side of the plaintiff. Crowley’s not the only paedophile in the story: Brad Gordon is a security guard at a Californian biotech firm, BioGen Research Inc. He’s terrible at his job, but gets to keep it because his uncle, Jack Watson, is the firm’s principal shareholder. Brad spends his free time watching 11-year-old girls play ...

Travelling in the Classic Style

Thomas Laqueur: Primo Levi, 5 September 2002

Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics 
by Robert Gordon.
Oxford, 316 pp., £45, October 2001, 0 19 815963 3
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Primo Levi 
by Ian Thomson.
Hutchinson, 624 pp., £25, March 2002, 0 09 178531 6
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The Double Bond: Primo Levi, a Biography 
by Carole Angier.
Viking, 898 pp., £25, April 2002, 0 670 88333 6
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... survive Auschwitz’, shaken, challenged to the core, ‘but intact’, is the subject of Robert Gordon’s superb book. Its thesis is that very early in his career Levi moved beyond the language of testimony to the ‘language of ethics’, a ‘flexible, sensitive, intelligent language’ that extends his work on the death camps into ‘a hypothetical ...

The Pocahontas Exception

Thomas Laqueur: America’s Ancestor Obsession, 30 March 2023

A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in US History 
by Francesca Morgan.
North Carolina, 301 pp., £27.95, October 2021, 978 1 4696 6478 1
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... reverse the cultural elision that existed in the long shadow of the Statute of Merton. The case of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is exemplary but not singular. DNA evidence – blood – played a central role (an instance of the political instrumentality of genealogical methods) but it followed on a claim about the foundational principles that determined ...

Mockney Rebels

Thomas Jones: Lindsay Anderson, 20 July 2000

Mainly about Lindsay Anderson 
by Gavin Lambert.
Faber, 302 pp., £18.99, May 2000, 0 571 17775 1
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... woman (Rachel Roberts) out of committing suicide, Travis reads her a poem by Adam Lindsay Gordon, Cheltenham College’s favourite alumnus, after whom Lindsay Gordon Anderson was named by his mother. One of the many anti-naturalistic devices of the movie is that several of the actors play different roles: Ralph ...

Balls in Aquaria

Thomas Crow: Joseph Rykwert, 23 October 2008

The Judicious Eye: Architecture against the Other Arts 
by Joseph Rykwert.
Reaktion, 496 pp., £29.95, June 2008, 978 1 86189 358 1
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... landscape’. Though he plainly has in mind works by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Rachel Whiteread, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeff Koons (who in fact used basketballs), Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, once again he doesn’t trouble us with names, as if that would be to indulge such artists further. These swipes are an odd fit in a book that means to illuminate ...

The Tongue Is a Fire

Ferdinand Mount: The Trouble with Free Speech, 22 May 2025

What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea 
by Fara Dabhoiwala.
Allen Lane, 472 pp., £30, March, 978 0 241 34747 8
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... in Latin, licentia. This sort of freedom has descended to us via the plea to the king from Thomas More when he was Speaker of the House of Commons that every MP should enjoy the liberty ‘freely … and boldly to declare his advice’ – a privilege that survives today in the liberty of MPs to utter words in the chamber which, if repeated ...

Dangerous Chimera

Colin Kidd: What is liberty?, 8 May 2025

Liberty as Independence: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Ideal 
by Quentin Skinner.
Cambridge, 320 pp., £35, January, 978 1 107 02773 2
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... series of articles published in the London Journal by the Whig writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, and which first appeared as a collection in 1724, took a similar line.By the 1740s, neo-Roman arguments were being used to underpin Britain’s claims to be a free state. However, several major novelists – Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson ...

At Tate Britain

Inigo Thomas: Frederick Swynnerton, 21 January 2016

... older than the Jatakas, older than the Mahabharata, older than history itself’. ‘General Gordon’s Last Stand’ by George Joy (1885) Frederick never knew a single career. He wrote about neolithic Manx history, he wrote on Indian themes for the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, but painting was dominant. He was taught ...

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