Marquess Untrussed

Malcolm Gaskill: The Siege of Basing House, 30 March 2023

The Siege of Loyalty House: A Civil War Story 
by Jessie Childs.
Vintage, 318 pp., £12.99, May, 978 1 78470 209 0
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... control of London were dashed at the Battle of Cheriton, after which the defeated commander headed north to Basing House, where he and what was left of his straggling army licked their wounds. On 21 May the victor, Waller, once again lined up Basing House in his sights but was ordered to Oxford instead. Still in the area, however, was Colonel Richard ...

Browbeating

Randall Kennedy: Congress v. Harvard, 25 January 2024

... of Pennsylvania. The tenor and aim of the hearing were established early on by its chairwoman, the North Carolina Republican representative Virginia Foxx, who told the witnesses that ‘each of you will have a chance to answer to and atone for the many specific instances of vitriolic, hate-filled antisemitism on your respective campuses that have denied ...

Why Twice?

Rosemary Hill: Fire at the Mack, 24 October 2024

The Mack: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art 
by Robyne Calvert.
Yale, 208 pp., £35, April, 978 0 300 23985 0
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... on an ongoing basis and the most recent ones [sic] … are available on our media centre.’ As Elizabeth Davidson, senior project manager for the post-2014 restoration, points out, once the first SOBC in 2021 found in favour of rebuilding it would have been possible to secure the structure internally and remove the scaffolding, which continues to cost a ...

All the flowers shall bow

Chris Given-Wilson: Wars of the Roses, 22 January 2026

The Wars of the Roses: A Medieval Civil War 
by John Watts.
Cambridge, 328 pp., £30, September 2025, 978 1 009 42216 1
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... IV), and not until the accession of Henry VII and his speedy marriage to Edward IV’s daughter, Elizabeth of York, thereby unifying their bloodlines, was the breach healed. For the Tudors, the dates of the Wars of the Roses were 1399 to 1486.For many years, the favourite academic approach to all this was through ‘bastard feudalism’, a term used to ...

My Girls: A Memoir

August Kleinzahler: Parents, lovers and a poetic punch-up, 19 August 2004

... The river makes its way through traprock and sandstone to the level plain of the city, continues north to Hawthorne, then doubles back on itself and begins its southerly flow to Newark Bay, about twenty-five miles through manufacturing and industrial towns and suburbs, places like Garfield, Lyndhurst, Kearny and Harrison, where it hooks east, then south ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Bennett’s Dissection, 1 January 2009

... customers at our butcher’s shop. Like Professor Needham, Mrs Kettle denounced the invasion of North Korea by the Americans and their use of germ warfare, not a view I’d then seen put forward. I was at the meeting not because of any left-wing views, but because the war was of some personal interest to me, as in 1952 I was due to be conscripted and likely ...

My Mad Captains

Frank Kermode, 14 December 1995

... of the island. This ungainly little craft had run into a gale even more severe than the usual North Atlantic winter blows and broke radio silence to say she was in trouble. Archer had a fondness for the skipper concerned – in fact, he probably valued these boom defence, ex-trawler skippers more highly than anybody around, and perhaps with reason. So he ...

What did they do in the war?

Angus Calder, 20 June 1985

Firing Line 
by Richard Holmes.
Cape, 436 pp., £12.95, March 1985, 0 224 02043 9
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The Right of the Line: The Royal Air Force in the European War 1939-1945 
by John Terraine.
Hodder, 841 pp., £14.95, March 1985, 0 340 26644 9
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The Bomber Command War Diaries: An Operational Reference Book 
by Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt.
Viking, 804 pp., £25, May 1985, 0 670 80137 2
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’45: The Final Drive from the Rhine to the Baltic 
by Charles Whiting.
Century, 192 pp., £7.95, March 1985, 0 7126 0812 5
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In the Ruins of the Reich 
by Douglas Botting.
Allen and Unwin, 248 pp., £9.95, May 1985, 9780049430365
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1945: The World We Fought For 
by Robert Kee.
Hamish Hamilton, 371 pp., £12.95, May 1985, 0 241 11531 0
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VE Day: Victory in Europe 1945 
by Robin Cross.
Sidgwick, 223 pp., £12.95, May 1985, 0 283 99220 4
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One Family’s War 
edited by Patrick Mayhew.
Hutchinson, 237 pp., £10.95, May 1985, 0 7126 0812 5
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Poems of the Second World War: The Oasis Selection 
edited by Victor Selwyn.
Dent, 386 pp., £12, May 1985, 0 460 10432 2
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My Life 
by Bert Hardy.
Gordon Fraser, 192 pp., £14.95, March 1985, 0 86092 083 6
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Victory in Europe: D Day to VE Day 
by Max Hastings and George Stevens.
Weidenfeld, 192 pp., £10.95, April 1985, 0 297 78650 4
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... up to 73,741, or nearly 60 per cent. The gross casualty rates among British infantry fighting in North-West Europe in 1944-45 could be even higher – in the 15th Division, 62.9 per cent of men, 72 per cent of officers – but ‘only’ 16.8 of the former and 28.7 per cent of the latter were killed. The death rate in bombers was exceptional. Charles ...

Dye the Steak Blue

Lidija Haas: Shirley Jackson, 19 August 2010

Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories 
edited by Joyce Carol Oates.
Library of America, 827 pp., $35, May 2010, 978 1 59853 072 8
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... story was ‘about the Jews’; and to others she said it wasn’t fiction at all, but ‘simply North Bennington’, the Vermont town in which she lived, and the people there, ‘the way they slaughter one another’. The lottery works in two stages. First, a family is chosen: the head of each household picks a slip of paper from a box. Then each member of ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Did in 2015, 7 January 2016

... and a respect for tradition I filch a couple of branches from the base of a balsam poplar on the north side of Regent’s Park. The buds are hardly open and thus are briefly heavily scented. Now in a glass on the sitting-room mantelpiece they bring a flavour to the room as they have done every spring for the last forty years.Easter Saturday, 4 ...

What does she think she looks like?

Rosemary Hill: The Dress in Your Head, 5 April 2018

... all about attracting men, though men often think it is. There is, for example, the iron rule that north of Derby no woman can wear tights on a night out. Why? How did Liz Hurley launch an entire career by wearing a dress much less extreme than many that Versace has shown on the catwalks of Milan? What happens when it goes wrong? Did Diana overdo it on ...

Benign Promiscuity

Clair Wills: Molly Keane’s Bad Behaviour, 18 March 2021

Good Behaviour 
by Molly Keane.
NYRB, 291 pp., £12, May, 978 1 68137 529 8
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... having a go at ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, or even Molly Bloom, on her concert tours in the North of Ireland in Ulysses. They are songs of love and loss, and many of them were written while Walter and Agnes Skrine were ranching in Alberta, having moved to Canada after their marriage in 1895. The Skrines were true imperialists: Canada was as much their ...

Salt Spray

Ferdinand Mount: When Britannia Ruled the Waves, 5 December 2024

The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain 1815-1945 
by N.A.M. Rodger.
Allen Lane, 934 pp., £40, October 2024, 978 0 7139 9412 4
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... year later, which cost the lives of around ten thousand men for nothing, but which a furious Queen Elizabeth ensured was hushed up.What is incontestable is that over the years the British navy really did achieve the mastery of the seas of which it had so long boasted. With new financial resilience, it began to grasp the techniques that made it possible to keep ...

Trapped with an Incubus

Clair Wills: Shirley Hazzard, 21 September 2023

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life 
by Brigitta Olubas.
Virago, 564 pp., £12.99, June, 978 0 349 01286 5
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... woman … In the characterisation of women, the male novelists of those years wrote as though Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothea Brooke, Becky Sharp and Emma Bovary had never been created.She describes Phuong, Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress in Greene’s The Quiet American – a novel that invokes Cyril Connolly’s dictum in Enemies of Promise about the pram in ...

O brambles, chain me too

Tom Paulin: Life and Vowels of Andrew Marvell, 25 November 1999

World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell 
by Nicholas Murray.
Little, Brown, 294 pp., £20, September 1999, 0 316 64863 9
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Marvell and Liberty 
edited by Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis.
Macmillan, 365 pp., £47.50, July 1999, 0 333 72585 9
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Andrew Marvell 
edited by Thomas Healy.
Longman, 212 pp., £12.99, September 1998, 0 582 21910 8
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... to Milton, as well as in these intriguing paragraphs which open Chapter 58, ‘Brit’: Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and ...