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Dancing Senator

Pat Rogers, 7 November 1985

Memoirs of King George II: Vols I, II and III 
by Horace Walpole, edited by John Brooke.
Yale, 248 pp., £65, June 1985, 0 300 03197 1
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... Hill and its contents in the 1820s). This concerns the alleged sexual tastes of Archbishop Stone of Armagh and of Lord George Sackville, the future martyr of Minden, then chief secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Walpole admits it to be ‘mere matter of suspicion’, but does not hold back on the innuendo: The Irish are not farther removed ...

Tiff and Dither

Michael Wood, 2 January 1997

Diaries. Vol. I: 1939-60 
by Christopher Isherwood, edited by Katherine Bucknell.
Methuen, 1048 pp., £25, October 1996, 0 413 69680 4
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... he has written a novel called The Memorial; lives with his mother and a younger brother called Richard; works on a movie; has fashionable but uncontroversial left-wing ideas (he speaks himself of his ‘parlour socialism’); confesses to small acts of cowardice. But we know far more about the quality of his attention to the world than we know about ...

Fake it till you make it

Anthony Grafton: Indexing, 23 September 2021

Index, A History of the 
by Dennis Duncan.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, September, 978 0 241 37423 8
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... a new narrative about the ancient world, one built from the modest lives and careers recorded on stone.Indexes continued​ to suffer disrespect, however. Great scholars took pride in not having taken short cuts to learning. Scaliger himself described in revealing terms the way he had mastered the languages of antiquity: ‘Beginning with a mere smattering ...

Ghost Ions

Jonathan Coe: AA-Rated Memories, 18 August 2022

Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems 
edited by Julian Upton.
Headpress, 595 pp., £22.99, April, 978 1 909394 93 3
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The Magic Box: Viewing Britain through the Rectangular Window 
by Rob Young.
Faber, 500 pp., £12.99, August, 978 0 571 28460 3
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... another children’s series about a secret pagan society embedded within an isolated village; The Stone Tape (1972), a Nigel Kneale-scripted story about a building whose very fabric retains sinister memories; and Penda’s Fen (1974), a collaboration between David Rudkin and the director Alan Clarke in which a repressed Midlands schoolboy’s visions of ...

The Politics of Now

David Runciman: The Last World Cup, 21 June 2018

The Fall of the House of Fifa 
by David Conn.
Yellow Jersey, 336 pp., £9.99, June 2017, 978 0 224 10045 8
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... value. When England’s bid to host this summer’s tournament crashed and burned back in 2010, Richard Scudamore, executive chairman of the Premier League, responded by pointing out that for almost the whole world English football meant the Premier League, which would continue to thrive regardless. He was simultaneously saying the unsayable and stating the ...

Can a rabbit talk to a cat?

Julian Barnes: Lartigue takes a leap, 7 April 2022

Lartigue: The Boy and the Belle Époque 
by Louise Baring.
Thames and Hudson, 192 pp., £28, April 2020, 978 0 500 02130 9
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Jacques Henri Lartigue: The Invention of Happiness 
by Denis Curti, Marion Perceval and Charles-Antoine Revol.
Marsilio, 208 pp., £40, July 2020, 978 88 297 0527 6
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... the same year, more famously, his (female) cousin Bichonnade in mid-leap over a flight of stone steps. Decades later, and self-referentially, Lartigue persuaded Richard Avedon to launch himself upwards, camera in hand, with a curling whip of flash cable snaking about in the air.The world he took part in and ...

C is for Colonies

Anthony Pagden: A New History of Empire, 11 May 2006

Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750-1850 
by Maya Jasanoff.
Fourth Estate, 405 pp., £25, August 2005, 0 00 718009 8
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... he had. ‘Count on the memory of history,’ he told the unfortunate English negotiator William Richard Hamilton, ‘you too will have burned a library in Alexandria.’ In the end, the savants left with 55 cases of specimens and scientific papers. But the British got most of the artefacts, including the Rosetta ...

Getting the Undulation

Benjamin Lytal: Willa Cather’s Letters, 20 February 2014

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather 
edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout.
Knopf, 715 pp., £24, April 2013, 978 0 307 95930 0
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... have known but one really dull Bohemian, and I have known a great many clever ones. You know Richard Wagner said that whenever he got dull he went to Prague. “There I renew my youth,” he wrote, “in that magical and volcanic soil of Bohemia.”’ She dramatised the South-West breakthrough in her 1915 novel, Song of the Lark, a book that shed light ...

Visible Woman

James Shapiro: Sticking up for Shakespeare, 4 October 2007

Shakespeare’s Wife 
by Germaine Greer.
Bloomsbury, 406 pp., £20, September 2007, 978 0 7475 9019 4
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... to believe that she was eight years older than Shakespeare is that a brass plate, set in the stone over her grave, records that Ann ‘departed this life on the sixth day of August 1623 being of the age of 67 years’. If it turns out that the engraver was misinformed about her age or that his hand slipped and changed a 1 into a 7, the racy story of an ...

Function v. Rhetoric

Peter Campbell: Engineers and Architects, 10 April 2008

Architect and Engineer 
by Andrew Saint.
Yale, 541 pp., £45, March 2008, 978 0 300 12443 9
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... Maillart or Frei Otto. For them, construction – the business of embodying a design in brick, stone, steel – takes on its proper importance. In the heroic age of English engineering, engineer-contractors like the Stephensons dominate. Professional institutions have encouraged their members to keep the commercial side of building at a ...

Imparadised

Colin Burrow: Cultivation and desire in Renaissance gardens, 19 February 2004

Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens 
by Rebecca Bushnell.
Cornell, 198 pp., £18.95, August 2003, 0 8014 4143 9
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... at least a fantasy of self-transformation. An accountant who spends his weekends laying York stone in the garden of his ruined manor in Somerset is imagining himself moving in two social directions at once: he enjoys pretending to be a manual worker; and he likes the idea that after his labour his estate will seem a bit more like that of a ...

Why didn’t he commit suicide?

Frank Kermode: Reviewing T.S. Eliot, 4 November 2004

T.S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews 
by Jewel Spears Brooker.
Cambridge, 644 pp., £80, May 2004, 0 521 38277 7
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... to deal with a plague of poems modelled on that work, so that the mere occurrence of the words ‘stone’, ‘dust’ or ‘dry’ condemned them to the waste basket. Even among knowing readers the standing of Eliot as a poet was diminishing; the early novelty was gone. Ash Wednesday was too religious for many of them. Discussions of Eliot’s prose still ...

The Nominated Boy

Robert Macfarlane: The Panchen Lama, 29 November 2001

The Search for the Panchen Lama 
by Isabel Hilton.
Penguin, 336 pp., £7.99, August 2001, 0 14 024670 3
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... by rumours that the Chinese were planning to kidnap the Dalai Lama, provided the perfect excuse. Stone-throwing and shouting in the streets of Lhasa quickly metastasised into a serious insurgency. Mao was delighted; ‘the Tibetan problems are very likely to be resolved by force,’ he advised the military command in Lhasa: ‘this kind of force is ...

Grit in the Oyster-Shell

Colin Burrow: Pepys, 14 November 2002

Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 499 pp., £20, October 2002, 0 670 88568 1
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... shares her subject’s fascination with detail. Her description of the operation to remove the ‘stone’ in his urinary tract which had plagued him throughout his early years is so vivid that it brings tears to the eye. She has walked over his habitual walks, and describes the area around Hinchingbrooke and Huntingdon in which he spent much of his youth ...

On the Hilltop

Nicholas Penny: How the Getty spends its money, 4 January 2007

Guide to the Getty Villa 
by Kenneth Lapatin et al.
Getty, 131 pp., £8.50, June 2006, 0 89236 828 4
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History of the Art of Antiquity 
by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave.
Getty, 431 pp., £45, March 2006, 0 89236 668 0
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The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing 
by T.J. Clark.
Yale, 260 pp., £20, August 2006, 0 300 11726 4
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... pay and to return $250,000 to the Trust. It was a spectacularly extravagant decision to commission Richard Meier in 1984 to build a new Getty Center – including the chief museum, the Research Institute and the Conservation Center – as a cluster of buildings on a hilltop in Brentwood accessible only (for ordinary visitors and most staff) by a steep ...

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