Henry and Hamlet

Barbara Everett, 22 February 2024

... years’: the time between the public record of the birth and baptism of his twins in 1585, and Robert Greene’s published attack on him (which shows that Shakespeare was finding theatrical success) in 1592. E.A.J. Honigmann suggested that Shakespeare went north to join a household affiliated as he was to Roman Catholicism. This strikes me as too romantic ...

When Labour Was New

Malcolm Petrie: Labour’s First Government, 20 June 2024

The Men of 1924: Britain’s First Labour Government 
by Peter Clark.
Haus, 293 pp., £20, October 2023, 978 1 913368 81 4
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The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government 
by David Torrance.
Bloomsbury, 322 pp., £20, January, 978 1 3994 1143 1
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... expression of Britain’s shifting ‘governing traditions’. Both quote from the memoirs of John Robert Clynes, Labour leader between 1921 and 1922 and lord privy seal in 1924. Reflecting on meeting George V, Clynes could ‘not help marvelling at the strange turn of Fortune’s wheel’ that had brought him and his colleagues ‘to this pinnacle beside the ...

Restoring St. George’s

Peter Campbell: In Bloomsbury, 20 November 2003

... once the rather complicated stipulations attached to the grant have been met. A charity called Robert Wilson Challenge matches funds raised locally. The finances for the restoration are pretty nearly in place.What is St George’s future as a parish church? Its congregation has been growing, and the efforts of some regular parishioners drove forward the ...

I shoot, I shoot!

Daniel Lee: D-Day and After, 3 April 2025

Normandy: The Sailors’ Story 
by Nick Hewitt.
Yale, 433 pp., £12.99, March, 978 0 300 28109 5
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D-Day, the Oral History: The Turning Point of World War Two by the People Who Were There 
by Garrett M. Graff.
Monoray, 448 pp., £14.99, March, 978 1 80096 219 4
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... sexual offences by GIs in the UK, including 126 rapes, were documented, though the sociologist J. Robert Lilly has argued that only 5 per cent of rapes were reported: he estimates that between 1942 and 1945 US military personnel raped almost 2500 women in Britain, more than 3600 in France and more than 11,000 in Germany. Anti-Black racism meant that African ...

Identity Parade

Linda Colley, 25 February 1993

People and Places: Country House Donors and the National Trust 
by James Lees-Milne.
Murray, 232 pp., £19.99, October 1992, 0 7195 5145 5
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The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 
by Michael Dobson.
Oxford, 266 pp., £30, October 1992, 0 19 811233 5
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Myths of the English 
edited by Roy Porter.
Polity, 280 pp., £39.50, October 1992, 0 7456 0844 2
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Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States 
by Stephen Daniels.
Polity, 257 pp., £39.50, November 1992, 0 7456 0450 1
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... contributed to the undermining of Britishness. One reason for this, as the Party’s historian Robert Blake comments, is that Tories have always tended towards English nationalism, enjoying electoral paramountcy in the Southern counties, but possessed of far less secure roots in the North or in Wales or in Scotland. Predictably, therefore, the recent ...

Diary

Dani Garavelli: Cinema-going, 10 October 2024

... On its inside wall was a hand-painted scroll featuring the famous couplet from ‘To a Louse’ by Robert Burns: ‘O wad some power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us.’The documents Barr and Painter rescued from the Broadway are now in the Moving Image Archive in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall, once the home of the city’s annual carnival and ...

Prophet of the Past

Oliver Cussen: Blame it on Malthus, 26 September 2024

The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History 
by Deborah Valenze.
Yale, 254 pp., £45, July 2023, 978 0 300 24613 1
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... For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries ...

Painting is terribly difficult

Julian Barnes: Myths about Monet, 14 December 2023

Monet: The Restless Vision 
by Jackie Wullschläger.
Allen Lane, 545 pp., £35, October 2023, 978 0 241 18830 9
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... Early in​ 1971, Robert Hughes, recently appointed as Time magazine’s chief art critic, was ripping out his loft apartment at 143 Prince Street when he received an unexpected visitor. This was Henry Geldzahler, curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum. Hughes, probably the most macho and combative critic in his profession, was, by his own account, sweaty, foul-tempered, sore-footed and ‘grey with ingrained dirt ...

Travelling Text

Marina Warner, 18 December 2008

The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights 
translated by Malcolm Lyons, with Ursula Lyons.
Penguin, 2715 pp., £125, November 2008, 978 0 14 091166 4
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‘The Arabian Nights’ in Historical Context: Between East and West 
edited by Saree Makdisi and Felicity Nussbaum.
Oxford, 337 pp., £55, November 2008, 978 0 19 955415 7
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... edition of this book. Nor, in some sense, can it even be attempted. The Lyons translation, as Robert Irwin explains in his introduction, returns to the Arabic version that Burton used, restores the interjected outbursts of song and bawdy that Galland skipped, and sternly avoids the free and easy habits of some of his successors. It clearly aims to ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: Reform’s Disaster Capitalism, 25 September 2025

... On the main stage Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who advises the US health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, said it was ‘highly likely’ that the Covid vaccine was ‘a significant factor in the cancers in the royal family’. During a live recording of a podcast for the Telegraph, Allison Pearson accused the police of having ‘tampered’ with ...

Supereffable

Tom Johnson: Mysteries of the Pearl Manuscript, 25 September 2025

Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight 
by Arthur Bahr.
Chicago, 257 pp., £36, March, 978 0 226 83535 8
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... Ashburnham held the many rare manuscripts that had been donated to the nation by the antiquarian Robert Cotton, as well as the treasures of the royal manuscript collections. The flames from a fireplace had caught on the wooden mantelpiece and spread to the wainscoting. Hapless librarians were throwing water on the blaze; the city fire engines were nowhere to ...

Every Mother’s Son

Jonathan Parry: Britain in Sudan, 24 July 2025

Chain of Fire: Campaigning in Egypt and the Sudan, 1882-98 
by Peter Hart.
Profile, 444 pp., £30, February, 978 1 80081 073 0
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... spears at the British. Individual British deaths were taken very seriously. After Lieutenant Robert Grenfell was hacked to death during the cavalry charge at Omdurman, his brother’s angry account of it spurred the men inspecting the wasted battlefield to ‘polish off the wounded and dangerous Dervishes with their bayonets in a very determined ...

She is the situation

Maureen N. McLane: ‘Big Kiss, Bye-Bye’, 4 December 2025

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye 
by Claire-Louise Bennett.
Fitzcarraldo, 158 pp., £12.99, October, 978 1 80427 193 3
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... complex strains, including the narrator’s revisiting of her adolescent sexual relationship with Robert Turner, her philosophy teacher and Stone’s colleague. Through Stone, she comes into discursive if not actual contact with Turner, whom she last saw several years earlier. Contact here is mediated: we are in the realm of missives as well as kisses; of ...

Damnable Rottenness

Lucy Wooding: More and More, 6 November 2025

Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England 
by Joanne Paul.
Michael Joseph, 604 pp., £30, May, 978 1 4059 5360 3
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... One is the principled, compassionate statesman who lays down his life for his convictions in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. The other, more or less diametrically opposed, is the zealot and vindictive persecutor of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, who takes savage delight in flogging heretics. The attempt to claim, for one agenda or another, this ...

Maurice Thomson’s War

Perry Anderson, 4 November 1993

Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders 1550-1653 
by Robert Brenner.
Cambridge, 734 pp., £40, March 1993, 0 521 37319 0
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The Nature of the English Revolution 
by John Morrill.
Longman, 466 pp., £32, June 1993, 0 582 08941 7
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... Merchants and Revolution, dedicated to Stone, comprehensively overturns that judgment. Its author, Robert Brenner, belongs to that rare group of historians who have given their name to a whole literature – the ‘Brenner Debate’ on the origins of agrarian capitalism in Europe recalling the ‘Pirenne Thesis’ of old. His new book, in which the name of ...