Sinnermen

Niela Orr, 26 June 2025

... to open a juke joint, and buy a derelict mill from the town’s closeted KKK leader, Hogwood (David Maldonado). The twins enlist their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a sharecropper and precociously talented preacher’s boy who sings and plays the blues, and assemble a crew of old friends and lovers to do up the place, which they call Club Juke.Stack and ...

Scattered Alphabet

Ange Mlinko: On Susan Howe, 25 December 2025

Penitential Cries 
by Susan Howe.
Norton, 96 pp., £12.99, October 2025, 978 0 8112 3982 0
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... books are dedicated to husbands who left her widowed: Pierce-Arrow (1999), for the sculptor David von Schlegell, and That This (2010), for the philosopher Peter H. Hare. Nothing in Howe’s work exceeds the sheer beauty of the sequence ‘Rückenfigur’ – an art history term for a figure seen from the back – in Pierce-Arrow. It begins: ‘Iseult ...

When the Messiah Comes

Jacqueline Rose: When I met Netanyahu, 25 December 2025

... history – a moment reached on 20 July 2019, when he recorded 4876 days (exceeding the record of David Ben-Gurion). Netanyahu began the interview by boasting about the extent of American popular support for Israel. Citizens accosted him on trips across the US, hardly any of whom, he insisted with pleasure, were Jews. The subtext was that anyone in their ...

Like Hell

Thomas McKeown, 1 October 1981

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings 
translated by Eisei Ishikawa and David Swain.
Hutchinson, 706 pp., £20, August 1981, 0 09 145640 1
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... President Reagan’s attention span is known to be brief, and he is said to prefer his memoranda to be limited to a single page. It is therefore unlikely that he will read closely the 640-page report which describes experience of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nevertheless, it would be useful if he – and Mr Brezhnev – were to look through the photographs, which, for the convenience of those who will get no further, have been wisely placed before the text ...

The Big Store

Norman Hampson, 21 January 1982

The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store 1869-1920 
by Michael Miller.
Allen and Unwin, 266 pp., £12.50, September 1981, 0 04 330316 1
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Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the 19th Century 
by Bonnie Smith.
Princeton, 303 pp., £15, November 1981, 0 691 05330 8
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Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France 1789-1880 
by Maurice Agulhon, translated by Janet Lloyd.
Cambridge, 235 pp., £18.50, June 1981, 0 521 28224 1
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... more cheerfully plebeian than the austere embodiment of vertu that appealed to Robespierre or David. Marianne came into her own when it was necessary to find something to replace the portraits of the fallen Emperor, Napoleon III, which had adorned official places. Presidents of the Republic were no substitute. To enthrone them in effigy might give them ...

Barbarians

Stuart Airlie, 17 November 1983

Medieval Germany and its Neighbours 900-1250 
by K.J. Leyser.
Hambledon, 302 pp., £18, February 1983, 0 907628 08 7
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TheFrankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians 751-987 
by Rosamond McKitterick.
Longman, 414 pp., £9.95, June 1983, 0 582 49005 7
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Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies presented to J.M. Wallace-Hadrill 
edited by Patrick Wormald, Donald Bullough and Roger Collins.
Blackwell, 345 pp., £27.50, September 1983, 0 631 12661 9
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... rest on such evidence as we do possess. The contributors to this volume fulfil both requirements. David Ganz’s deciphering of bureaucratic shorthand in seventh-century Gaul enables him to cast light on the replacement of the Merovingian dynasty by the Carolingians, one of the major shifts in European political history. Patrick Wormald, in an ambitious and ...

Canons

Frank Kermode, 2 February 1984

Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism 
by James Barr.
Oxford, 181 pp., £13, June 1983, 0 19 826323 6
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Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth 
by Edmund Leach and D. Alan Aycock.
Cambridge, 170 pp., £15, September 1983, 0 521 25491 4
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... and it is the hanging together that matters, not whether there were real people called Moses and David, who may or may not have done this or that. Of course the patterns and fulfilments of the old interpreters were different from Leach’s; the resemblance lies only in that they are concealed, and require to be detected by elaborate methods of ...

Anglophobe Version

Denton Fox, 2 February 1984

The New Testament in Scots 
translated by William Laughton Lorimer.
Canongate, 476 pp., £17.50, October 1983, 0 900025 24 7
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Scotland and the Lowland Tongue 
edited by J. Derrick McClure.
Aberdeen University Press, 256 pp., £17, September 1983, 0 08 028482 5
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... The passages of invective follow handsomely the tradition of Scots flytings: They ar pang-fu o aa kin a wrang-daein, wickitness, greed, malice; invyfu, bluid-thristie, canglesome, sleekie, ill-hairtit, sae as they coudna be mair; clash-pyats, ill-speakers; hatesome tae God, bangsters, scorners, sprosers, drauchtie, camstairie wi their paurents; dull i ...

What did they name the dog?

Wendy Doniger: Twins, 19 March 1998

Twins: Genes, Environment and the Mystery of Identity 
by Lawrence Wright.
Weidenfeld, 128 pp., £14.99, November 1997, 0 297 81976 3
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... applications, are even more seriously flawed than the data. One of the Minnesota researchers, David Lykken, wants to prevent low IQ mothers from having children (to ‘reduce the number of low IQ children’). This is, as the twin studied by Neubauer so nicely summed up that project, more ‘Nazi shit’. ‘A lot of social scientists are so scandalised ...

New Faces on the Block

Jenny Diski, 27 November 1997

Venus Envy 
by Elizabeth Haiken.
Johns Hopkins, 288 pp., £20.50, January 1998, 0 8018 5763 5
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The Royal Women of Amarna: Images of Beauty From Ancient Egypt 
by Dorothea Arnold.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 192 pp., $45, February 1997, 0 8109 6504 6
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... even married her Antony a good few times. The early stages of European portraiture began, the late David Piper suggested in his 1992 study, The English Face, with tomb-effigies in the 12th century. Neither beauty nor individuality were the point of these monuments in death to rank, wealth and piety. None of these portraits in stone looks like anyone I have ...

Good dinners pass away, so do tyrants and toothache

Terry Eagleton: Death, Desire and so forth, 16 April 1998

Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture 
by Jonathan Dollimore.
Allen Lane, 380 pp., £25, April 1998, 0 7139 9125 9
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... whirlwind trip around European thought, with seven and a half pages on Hegel, one and a bit on David Hume and so on. The Monty Python ‘Summarise Proust’ contest, in which competitors had thirty seconds to deliver a précis, springs irresistibly to mind. Like the motion of desire itself, the book drives remorselessly from one author to another, raiding ...

Strutting

Linda Colley, 21 September 1995

All the Sweets of Being: The Life of James Boswell 
by Roger Hutchinson.
Mainstream, 238 pp., £17.50, May 1995, 1 85158 702 0
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James Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’ 
edited by Marshall Waingrow.
Edinburgh, 518 pp., £75, March 1995, 0 7486 0471 5
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Johnson and Boswell: The Transit of Caledonia 
by Pat Rogers.
Oxford, 245 pp., £30, April 1995, 0 19 818259 7
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... and easy violence: taverns and clubs seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all ...
... into a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present Provost of Southwark, to the 1983-85 Crockford, the first to appear under the new dispensation. How it was that they failed to spot any danger signals when Dr Bennett’s manuscript came in remains, however, a mystery. For Dr ...

Patrons

Peter Burke, 15 October 1987

Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy 
edited by F.W. Kent and Patricia Simons.
Oxford/Humanities Research Centre, 331 pp., £35, June 1987, 0 19 821978 4
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Pienza: The Creation of a Renaissance City 
by Charles Mack.
Cornell, 250 pp., $43.95, June 1987, 9780801416996
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Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice: Bellini, Titian and the Franciscans 
by Rona Goffen.
Yale, 285 pp., £30, July 1986, 0 300 03455 5
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Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance 
by Margaret King.
Princeton, 524 pp., £42.90, April 1986, 0 691 05465 7
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The Venetian Patriciate: Reality versus Myth 
by Donald Queller.
Illinois, 386 pp., $29.95, September 1986, 0 252 01144 9
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Tradesman and Traders: The World of the Guilds in Venice and Europe, c.1250-c.1650 
by Richard MacKenney.
Croom Helm, 289 pp., £35, January 1987, 0 7099 1763 5
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Florence, Rome and the Origins of the Renaissance 
by George Holmes.
Oxford, 273 pp., £25, November 1986, 0 19 822576 8
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From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in 15th and 6th-Century Europe 
by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine.
Duckworth, 224 pp., £29.95, January 1987, 0 7156 2100 9
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Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France 
by J.H.M. Salmon.
Cambridge, 306 pp., £30, June 1987, 0 521 32769 5
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... in the Renaissance, edited by Guy Lytle and Stephen Orgel. Taking their cue from Lytle and Orgel, F.W. Kent and Patricia Simons have turned the proceedings of a conference held in Melbourne in 1983 into a valuable volume of essays on patronage in Renaissance Italy. What is particularly interesting about both collections is the fact that they discuss two kinds ...

Loot

Ian Buruma, 9 March 1995

The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War 
by Lynn Nicholas.
Macmillan, 498 pp., £20, September 1994, 0 333 62652 4
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... he wrote, ‘needed private carriers to help them struggle along under great loads.’ David Bergamini, Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy We almost collided with some SS officers who were carting up silver and other loot from the basement. One had a gold-framed picture under his arm. One was the commandant. His arms were loaded with silver knives and ...