Unbosoming

Peter Barham: Madness in the nineteenth century, 17 August 2006

Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient and the Family in England 1820-60 
by Akihito Suzuki.
California, 260 pp., £32.50, March 2006, 0 520 24580 6
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... as much as disempowering them, providing a space in which they could speak publicly. Thomas Telford Campbell, the son of the poet Thomas Campbell, impressed the jury with the ‘urbanity, coolness and composure’ of his performance in cross-examining witnesses, and persuaded them to reject the medical ...

Smoking big cigars

David Herd, 23 July 1992

Goodstone 
by Fred Voss.
Bloodaxe, 180 pp., £7.95, November 1991, 1 85224 198 5
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... him, these poets celebrated their own willingness to move among the ‘roughs’. However, as Edward Field’s anthology A Geography of Poets makes clear, Ginsberg’s influence within California is largely confined to San Francisco and the north. To the south, and in Los Angeles, the dominant figure is Charles Bukowski. Bukowski has spent the last 35 ...

Prize Poems

Donald Davie, 1 July 1982

Arvon Foundation Poetry Competion: 1980 Anthology 
by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.
Kilnhurst Publishing Company, 173 pp., £3, April 1982, 9780950807805
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Burn this 
by Tom Disch.
Hutchinson, 63 pp., £7.50, April 1982, 0 09 146960 0
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... distinguished poems here by Jill Bowers, Jack Barrack and (a practised hand, which shows) Charles Edward Eaton; from William Radice (a beautifully imagined variation on Virgil), and Mark Beeson (a similarly accomplished essay in the Dantesque); from Pauline Rainford, Monica Ditmas, Anne Stevenson (two) and John Whitworth; from Aidan Carl Mathews (another ...

History’s Revenges

Peter Clarke, 5 March 1981

The Illustrated Dictionary of British History 
edited by Arthur Marwick.
Thames and Hudson, 319 pp., £8.95, October 1980, 0 500 25072 3
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Who’s Who in Modern History, 1860-1980 
by Alan Palmer.
Weidenfeld, 332 pp., £8.50, October 1980, 0 297 77642 8
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... been allocated. The monarchs are presumably here by right and the leading statesmen by merit. Thus Edward VI is shunted off in six lines, with a cross-reference to the Reformation, whereas Thomas Cromwell gets 21 lines to himself plus a separate entry under Tudor Revolution in Government. This may indicate the administrative ...

Not Terminal

Stephen Sedley, 8 May 2025

... use texts in either language. In five years, we’ve picked our way through Ronsard, Tennyson, Edward Lear, Wendy Cope, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Yeats, Herbert, Donne, Larkin, Housman (who, I discover, admitted to his French translator that he had never spent much time in Shropshire), John Clare, A.A. Milne, Shelley, Blake, Eliot (Macavity, not Prufrock) and ...

Diary

A.J.P. Taylor: From Nuclear Bombs to Samuel Johnson, 18 November 1982

... laughably called the nuclear deterrent and 11 per cent are undecided – blessed followers of St Thomas. The man in the pew is said to support the nuclear deterrent. No figures are given for this assertion. The vocabulary used in discussing nuclear weapons is peculiarly misleading, almost as though the nuclear advocates are ashamed of what they are ...

Nothing Becomes Something

Thomas Laqueur: Pathography, 22 September 2016

When Breath Becomes Air 
by Paul Kalanithi.
Bodley Head, 228 pp., £12.99, February 2016, 978 1 84792 367 7
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... model came along in 1972 the tools used were Kaplan-Meier estimators, developed in 1958 after Edward Kaplan, working at Bell Labs on the problem of vacuum tube survival in transatlantic telephone cable repeaters, was put in touch with Paul Meier, who was working on cancer survival using a similar method.) The use of these techniques in medicine and in the ...

Little Bastard

Patrick Collinson: Learning to be Queen, 6 July 2000

Elizabeth: Apprenticeship 
by David Starkey.
Chatto, 339 pp., £20, April 2000, 0 7011 6939 7
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Elizabeth I: Collected Works 
edited by Leah Marcus and Janel Mueller.
Chicago, 436 pp., £25, September 2000, 0 226 50464 6
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... Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull. In sending her royal brother Edward VI her youthful likeness, soon to be hidden for ever behind the iconic mask of royalty, she apologised for her appearance, ‘the face ... I might well blush to offer’, but not for her mind, of which she would never be ashamed. It was a mind which as yet ...

Boudoir Politics

Bee Wilson: Lola Montez, 7 June 2007

Lola Montez: Her Life and Conquests 
by James Morton.
Portrait, 390 pp., £20, January 2007, 978 0 7499 5115 3
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... Morton (a journalist friend of Thackeray), Augustus Noel Follin (a businessman from Cincinnati), Edward Payson Willis (a literary black sheep) and, most scandalously of all, King Ludwig of Bavaria, whose long entanglement with Lola brought disgrace, in the opinion of many, on the city of Munich. ‘What a hold this miserable witch has obtained over this ...

A Regular Grey

Jonathan Parry, 3 December 2020

Statesman of Europe: a Life of Sir Edward Grey 
by T.G. Otte.
Allen Lane, 858 pp., £35, November, 978 0 241 41336 4
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... misfortune. To lose two, at different times, is surely remarkable. Such was the distinction of Sir Edward Grey, who served as foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916. A lion got his brother George, who was hunting in British East Africa in 1911: excited for the kill, he galloped too near his prey, missed and was mauled. Charles, having lost an arm and won an MC in ...

Save My Beer

Tom Johnson: Industrious Revolution, 2 April 2026

The Experience of Work in Early Modern England 
by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb and Taylor Aucoin.
Cambridge, 362 pp., £105, October 2025, 978 1 316 51994 3
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... with a quick job done in the tailor’s workshop. Joan Cowling sent ‘shag and stuff … to one Edward Manley a tailor in Tiverton to make into a coat for her child in 1660’. It wasn’t much to look at, perhaps, but at least the child was warm. If Smith brought the woollen coat into the history of economic thought, it was Marx who made it famous. As the ...

Johnson’s Business

Keith Walker, 7 August 1980

A Dictionary of the English Language 
by Samuel Johnson.
Times, 2558 pp., £45, June 1980, 0 7230 0228 2
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Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years 
by James Clifford.
Heinemann, 372 pp., £10, February 1980, 0 434 13805 3
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... Waller, ‘to improve the English tongue’. Nothing much came of this. In 1658, Milton’s nephew Edward Philips had published a New World of English Words which reached its seventh edition by 1720. Swift busied himself with the state of the language in his ‘Proposals for Correcting the English Tongue’ (1712) and elsewhere, hoping that ‘some method ...

An ’ell of an ’eadache

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: The General Strike, 13 August 2026

The Future in Our Past: The General Strike, 1926-2026 
by Callum Cant and Matthew Lee.
Verso, 154 pp., £11.99, April, 978 1 83674 261 6
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The Edge of Revolution: The General Strike that Shook Britain 
by David Torrance.
Bloomsbury, 320 pp., £20, March, 978 1 3994 2359 5
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Nine Days in May: The General Strike of 1926 
by Jonathan Schneer.
Oxford, 416 pp., £25, March, 978 0 19 289453 3
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Britain’s Revolutionary Summer: The General Strike of 1926 
by Edd Mustill.
Oneworld, 324 pp., £16.99, April, 978 1 83643 068 1
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... their support. Memories of the two Fridays would profoundly shape the response to this call.Jimmy Thomas, the general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), saw a general strike as a dangerous ‘whirlpool’. Many workers would lose wages, rack up debts and be unable to pay their rent; unions would deplete their funds; failure could lead to the ...

X marks the self

Thomas Jones, 16 November 2017

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World 
by Greg Milner.
Granta, 336 pp., £9.99, June 2017, 978 1 84708 709 6
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... track of them using a combination of dead reckoning and star positions. In 1948, the psychologist Edward Tolman published an article called ‘Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men’. Watching rats finding their way through a maze, Tolman rejected the strict behaviourist idea that each individual wrong turn was a separate negative stimulus to which the rat ...