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Diary

Mary-Kay Wilmers: Karl Miller Remembered, 9 October 2014

... In the middle of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, for example, we declined to publish an interview with King Hussein that had been obtained with great difficulty in favour of a diary from a reporter who lost his nerve and spent several days – or maybe it was just hours – cowering in his hotel bathroom. That was the sort of thing the high-ups didn’t ...

Stardom

Megan Vaughan: Explorers of the Nile, 8 March 2012

Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure 
by Tim Jeal.
Faber, 510 pp., £25, September 2011, 978 0 571 24975 6
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... Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over who exactly could claim to have solved the ‘mystery of the Nile’, a mystery that had first gripped Ptolemy. Ancient ...

M for Merlin

Helen Cooper: Chrétien de Troyes, 25 November 1999

Perceval: The Story of the Grail 
by Chrétien de Troyes, translated by Burton Raffel.
Yale, 307 pp., £22.50, March 1999, 0 300 07586 3
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... from the knight who is questioning him, as it indicates high status. He determines to go to King Arthur and get himself made a knight. Before he sets out, his mother gives him instructions on how to behave in the world, and tells him something of his own history how his father and brothers were killed in combat and she had withdrawn to the forest to ...

Diary

Clive James, 20 May 1982

... and pop-eyed, Saying the gains the SDP has made All clearly point to a retreating tide. Thus King Canute spake as his feet got wetter, But further up the beach his court knew better. But now a comic opera interlude Wins our attention from domestic cares. The generals in the Argentine, though rude And cruel and prone to giving themselves airs, Have in ...

After Hartlepool

James Butler, 3 June 2021

... an essay in the New Statesman. Blair’s retainers dutifully lauded the essay: David Miliband, the king over the water, described it as a masterclass in political argument. In fact, the piece is an embarrassment, a mixture of reheated Blairite cliché, regurgitated Silicon Valley TED talks, and analysis of the British cultural landscape as found in the comment ...

Pride and Graft

Christian Hesketh, 21 July 1983

Northampton: Patronage and Policy at the Court of James
by Linda Levy Peck.
Allen and Unwin, 277 pp., £18.50, December 1982, 0 04 942177 8
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... was not wasting any time. He supported Mary Queen of Scots and through her the claims of her son, James VI, to the English succession. This prompts one to ask what part, if any, religion played in Northampton’s political manoeuvres. Though he belonged to a Catholic group and was suspected of recusancy, he avoided serious trouble. Dr Peck’s view is that ...

Around Here

Alice Spawls: Drifting into the picture, 4 February 2016

... of coin shops and Korean grocers, ice cream parlours, language schools and camera shops. James Smith and Sons’ Umbrellas is the only one people remember. The area has never become obsolete, or not quite – there are shifts with changing tastes – but it has remained undefined: a little shabby, a little trashy, bordered by the genteel to the north ...

Eye Contact

Peter Campbell: Anthony van Dyck, 16 September 1999

Anthony van Dyck 1599-1641 
by Christopher Brown and Hans Vlieghe.
Royal Academy, 360 pp., £22.50, May 1999, 9780847821969
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Anthony van Dyck: A Life, 1599-1641 
by Robin Blake.
Constable, 435 pp., £25, August 1999, 9780094797208
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... liberally, since his house was frequented by the highest nobility, following the lead of the King, who used to visit him and took pleasure in watching him paint and spending time with him. In magnificence he rivalled Parrhasius, keeping servants, carriages, horses, musicians, singers and clowns, who entertained all the dignitaries, knights and ladies who ...

Where am I?

Greg Dening, 31 October 1996

Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas 
by Neil Rennie.
Oxford, 330 pp., £35, November 1995, 0 19 811975 5
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... of the South Seas was always theatrical: the sexual titivations of Tahiti, the triumphs of James Cook and then his death, the loss of Jean François de la Pérouse, the mutiny on the Bounty, the debates on the good and evil effects of missions. The ‘literature’ of this theatre is the preoccupation of Neil Rennie’s Far-Fetched Facts. It takes him ...

A Dreadful Drumming

Theo Tait: Ghosts, 6 June 2013

The Undiscovered Country: Journeys among the Dead 
by Carl Watkins.
Bodley Head, 318 pp., £20, January 2012, 978 1 84792 140 6
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A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof 
by Roger Clarke.
Particular, 360 pp., £20, November 2012, 978 1 84614 333 5
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... and the house was no longer troubled by spirits. As Clarke points out, this could be an M.R. James or Sheridan le Fanu story. One detail – the house was suspiciously cheap for its size – features in countless modern ghost stories of the Amityville type. There are, according to Clarke, eight main categories of ghostly phenomenon: traditional ghosts ...

Four in a Bed

Wendy Doniger, 8 February 1996

Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life 
by Marjorie Garber.
Hamish Hamilton, 608 pp., £25, January 1996, 9780241134481
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... of each sex’. But this papers over a crucial slippage between the serial experience of Tiresias (king for a day, queen for a day) and the simultaneous marriage (a.k.a. bigamy) of the person who has, and is, both a husband and a wife. This tension between serial and simultaneous bisexuality is crucial to the argument about monogamy and promiscuity that runs ...

At the British Library

Deborah Friedell: Elizabeth and Mary, 24 February 2022

... II of France declared her not only queen of Scots (as she had been since the death of her father, James V, when she was six days old), but queen of England and Ireland too. The show includes a sketch of Mary’s ‘false arms’ – French, Scottish and English arms displayed together on a single shield – that Throckmorton sent from France to Elizabeth’s ...

Shite

Karl Miller, 2 March 1989

A Disaffection 
by James Kelman.
Secker, 344 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 0 436 23284 7
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The Book of Sandy Stewart 
edited by Roger Leitch.
Scottish Academic Press, 168 pp., £15, December 1988, 0 7073 0560 8
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... said to have remarked, not long ago, that the people there didn’t seem to have much of a life. James Kelman’s stories make clear what life is like in Glasgow,* and what James Kelman’s life is like. They are not going to change the royal mind. This is the queen who was greeted, on a visit to a Scottish university, by ...

Falling for Desmoulins

P.N. Furbank, 20 August 1992

A Place of Greater Safety 
by Hilary Mantel.
Viking, 896 pp., £15.99, September 1992, 0 670 84545 0
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... When Sarah Orne Jewett sent her friend Henry James a copy of her latest work, a historical novel entitled The Tory Lover, he told her it would take a very long letter to ‘disembroil the tangle’ of how much he appreciated the gift of this ‘ingenious exercise’ of hers, and how little he was in sympathy with historical novels ...

‘Drown her in the Avon’

Colin Kidd: Catharine Macaulay’s Radicalism, 7 September 2023

Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings 
edited by Max Skjönsberg.
Cambridge, 312 pp., £24.99, March, 978 1 009 30744 4
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... Published in eight volumes between 1763 and 1783, her History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution was massive in scale and the dominant occupation of her adult life; a sequel, The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time, published in 1778, was written in a more relaxed conversational style as a series of ...

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