As God Intended

Rosemary Hill: Capability Brown, 5 January 2012

The Omnipotent Magician: Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown 1716-83 
by Jane Brown.
Chatto, 384 pp., £20, March 2011, 978 0 7011 8212 0Show More
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“... style, published The Nobleman, Gentleman and Gardener’s Recreation and when Brown was three, Alexander Pope, who believed that ‘all gardening is landscape painting,’ began work on the house and grounds at Twickenham which he continued to alter and write about for the rest of his life. Gardening of this sort was not only painting, it was also from the ...”

Let’s call it failure

John Lanchester: The Shit We’re In, 3 January 2013

“... government of the day. The OBR was set up to correct that tendency. To run it, Osborne brought in Robert Chote, who had been head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a highly respected think tank which analyses government tax and spending plans and reports on them in a spirit of Cassandra-meets-Scrooge. In June 2010, the OBR predicted that the UK economy ...”

In the Shady Wood

Michael Neill: Staging the Forest, 22 March 2018

The Shakespearean Forest 
by Anne Barton.
Cambridge, 185 pp., £75, August 2017, 978 0 521 57344 3Show More
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“... a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield (c.1590), Antony Munday’s two-part Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1598) and Jonson’s unfinished Sad Shepherd – remember or re-enact the paradigmatic story of Robin Hood. In George Peele’s Edward I, the Welsh bandit Prince Lluellen and his followers give their cause a veneer of mischievous ...”

Four Funerals and a Wedding

Andrew O’Hagan: If something happens to me…, 5 May 2005

“... must explain her hazardous use of words. She’d met Sandy, her husband, when he drove one of the Alexander buses about the town of Elgin. She happened to be the clippy on the same bus, and she would often tell me about the beauty of those single-decker vehicles (‘the Bluebird’) and the handsomeness of Sandy behind the wheel. Now she was furious all the ...”

Frisking the Bishops

Ferdinand Mount: Poor Henry, 21 September 2023

Henry III: Reform, Rebellion, Civil War, Settlement 1258-72 
by David Carpenter.
Yale, 711 pp., £30, May, 978 0 300 24805 0Show More
Henry III: The Rise to Power and Personal Rule 1207-58 
by David Carpenter.
Yale, 763 pp., £30, October 2021, 978 0 300 25919 3Show More
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“... Louis IX under the Treaty of Paris, peace with Llywelyn in Wales, with another brother-in-law, Alexander II in Scotland. The only man with whom he never came to a lasting understanding was Montfort (yet another brother-in-law).In short, nothing could be less like the conventional idea of a pugnacious Plantagenet than the fair nine-year-old child who came ...”

A Tentative Idea for a Lamp

Tim Radford: Thomas Edison, 18 March 1999

Edison: A Life of Invention 
by Paul Israel.
Wiley, 552 pp., £19.50, November 1998, 0 471 52942 7Show More
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“... for which society cannot find a use. In 1829, an Oxford-trained barrister called Sir William Robert Grove found a new way of making electricity: he trickled oxygen and hydrogen gases over a pair of electrodes and produced three things. One was heat. The second was water. The third was electricity. There were no moving parts to the instrument, and no ...”

The Man in the Clearing

Iain Sinclair: Meeting Gary Snyder, 24 May 2012

“... cash poor and land rich,’ he said. ‘And who needs more second-growth pine and manzanita?’ Alexander Pope, in his upstream exile at Twickenham, laid out garden and grotto as a conceit, an extension of his work into the world, and a powerful attractor for patrons and lesser talents. To fund the Sierra reinhabitation, as Snyder saw it, he took on reading ...”

Into the Eisenshpritz

Elif Batuman: Superheroes, 10 April 2008

Life, in Pictures: Autobiographical Stories 
by Will Eisner.
Norton, 493 pp., £18.99, November 2007, 978 0 393 06107 9Show More
Epileptic 
by David B..
Cape, 368 pp., £12.99, March 2006, 0 224 07920 4Show More
Shortcomings 
by Adrian Tomine.
Faber, 108 pp., £12.99, September 2007, 978 0 571 23329 8Show More
Misery Loves Comedy 
by Ivan Brunetti.
Fantagraphics, 172 pp., £15.99, April 2007, 978 1 56097 792 6Show More
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“... 1960s, the comic-book landscape was being altered by the ‘underground comix’ movement, led by Robert Crumb. Among Crumb’s most popular creations are the suave adventurer Fritz the Cat (whose conquests include a female ostrich and his own sister) and Mr Natural, a fountainhead of exasperatingly vague advice, outfitted in a Tolstoyan beard and ...”

Last Night Fever

David Cannadine: The Proms, 6 September 2007

“... what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman and the young Henry Wood inaugurated an eight-week season of Promenade Concerts in 1895, they were not doing anything very novel. Such ‘promenades’ had been a permanent yet ephemeral part of London cultural life for the best part of sixty ...”

The Person in the Phone Booth

David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010

“... years from private into public hands and back again. The telephone was invented in March 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell. Queen Victoria witnessed a demonstration of the new device on 14 January 1878. On 7 April 1882, the Aberdeen Weekly Journal reported that the establishment of a rudimentary telephone system in London had ‘justified the most sanguine ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... he threatens to destroy more Scottish jobs than Margaret Thatcher, to ruin more pension plans than Robert Maxwell. Colin Kidd In​ an ideal world a fully independent Scotland might be a better place than the quasi-independent state it is now, but why is almost impossible to see given the evasions and silences of the ‘Yes’ campaign. The SNP’s argument is ...”

Tricked Out as a Virgin

Bee Wilson: Respectable Enough, 4 November 2021

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A True Story of Sex, Crime and the Meaning of Justice 
by Julia Laite.
Profile, 410 pp., £16.99, April, 978 1 78816 442 9Show More
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“... expressed pity for the poor women on the street, but many viewed them with misogynist contempt. Robert Fabian, a former London superintendent, wrote in his memoirs that ‘the whore is a bad apple … there is a big brown bruise on her soul, of self-indulgence and selfishness.’ But traffickers and pimps were also vile: ‘the lowest form of animal life on ...”

Robespierre’s Chamber Pot

Julian Barnes: Loathed by Huysmans, 2 April 2020

Modern Art 
by J.K. Huysmans, translated by Brendan King.
Dedalus, 313 pp., £10.99, February 2019, 978 1 910213 99 5Show More
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“... because he is the least known of the writer-critics, and his French is often not straightforward. Robert Baldick, biographer of Huysmans (1955) and translator of his most famous novel, À Rebours, described his style as ‘one of the strangest literary idioms in existence’. Léon Bloy, a fellow writer and fellow Catholic, described it as ‘continually ...”

Light through the Fog

Colin Burrow: The End of the Epithet, 26 April 2018

The Odyssey 
translated by Peter Green.
California, 538 pp., £24, April 2018, 978 0 520 29363 2Show More
The Odyssey 
translated by Emily Wilson.
Norton, 592 pp., £30, December 2017, 978 0 393 08905 9Show More
The Odyssey 
translated by Anthony Verity.
Oxford, 384 pp., £7.99, February 2018, 978 0 19 873647 9Show More
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“... against so many.This simile was much reviled by neoclassical critics. In his translation of 1726 Alexander Pope couldn’t bring himself to mention the sausage, and produced instead one of his prissiest euphemisms: ‘As one who long with pale-ey’d famine pin’d,/The sav’ry cates on glowing embers cast.’ Odysseus has returned to Ithaca and is still ...”
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