Post-Modernism and the Law

Robert Post, 21 February 1991

Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks 
by Peter Goodrich.
Weidenfeld, 353 pp., £30, August 1990, 0 297 82024 9
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Post-Modern Law: Enlightenment, Revolution and the Death of Man 
edited by Anthony Carty.
Edinburgh, 166 pp., £25, August 1990, 0 7486 0156 2
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... and informative, although some of the history is shaky. For example, Goodrich attempts to connect Thomas More’s defence of ecclesiastical interpretative prerogative to Edward Coke’s similar claims for legal expertise, without apparently being aware that More’s own concept of law was essentially transparent. In ...

Good to Think With

Helen Pfeifer, 4 June 2020

Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought 1450-1750 
by Noel Malcolm.
Oxford, 512 pp., £25, May 2019, 978 0 19 883013 9
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... have identified a variety of sources for Campanella’s idiosyncratic vision, from Plato to Thomas More. What no one before Noel Malcolm noticed – although it would be unmistakable to any student of the early modern Middle East – is the extent to which the city of the sun was modelled on the Ottoman Empire.From the Renaissance to the ...

Saucy to Princes

Gerald Hammond: The Bible, 25 July 2002

The Book: A History of the Bible 
by Christopher de Hamel.
Phaidon, 352 pp., £24.95, September 2001, 0 7148 3774 1
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The Wycliffe New Testament 1388 
edited by W.R. Cooper.
British Library, 528 pp., £20, May 2002, 0 7123 4728 3
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... Protestants; Ruth and Jonah in Southern Swahili (spoken in the region of Zanzibar), translated by Edward Steere (1828-82), Zanzibar, 1868, and Saint Matthew by the same translator, London, 1869; Saint Matthew in Susu (spoken in French Guinea, West Africa), probably translated by J.H.A. Dupont (a West Indian of African descent, from Codrington ...

Magnificent Progress

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Tudor Marriage Markets, 5 December 2024

The Thistle and the Rose: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Tudor 
by Linda Porter.
Head of Zeus, 379 pp., £27.99, June 2024, 978 1 80110 578 1
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... a male heir through six successive brides produced only one legitimate son, and when young King Edward died in his teens, it left Edward’s half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, to succeed to the crown. Both had survived various indecisive marriage negotiations proposed by their father, and once liberated from much male ...

Our Founder

John Bayley: Papa Joyce, 19 February 1998

John Stanislaus Joyce: The Voluminous Life and Genius of James Joyce’s Father 
by John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello.
Fourth Estate, 493 pp., £20, October 1997, 1 85702 417 6
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... the saying was, more Irish than the Irish themselves’. The first-known of the name was Thomas Joyce, one of whose brothers was Archbishop of Armagh, a seat he resigned to another brother, Roland, who was confessor to Edward II of England – no doubt an interesting job to hold where gossip was concerned. And no ...

A Preference for Strenuous Ghosts

Michael Kammen: Theodore Roosevelt, 6 June 2002

Theodore Rex 
by Edmund Morris.
HarperCollins, 772 pp., £25, March 2002, 0 00 217708 0
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... And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us ...

Staging Death

Martin Puchner: Ibsen's Modernism, 8 February 2007

Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theatre, Philosophy 
by Toril Moi.
Oxford, 396 pp., £25, August 2006, 0 19 929587 5
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... created an eerie production of Ghosts with designs by Edvard Munch. The British director Edward Gordon Craig dreamed up stylised productions of several Ibsen plays. It was Ibsen’s ambivalence that made his plays so adaptable. He was an autodidact who remained wary of abstract debates and positions; he was divided and uncertain about most of the ...

Land of Pure Delight

Dinah Birch: Anglicising the Holy Land, 20 April 2006

The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism 
by Eitan Bar-Yosef.
Oxford, 319 pp., £50, October 2005, 0 19 926116 4
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... Bar-Yosef’s persuasively argued study is to suggest that the influential model developed in Edward Said’s Orientalism won’t quite do as an explanation of popular English perceptions of the Holy Land. Said was steadily committed to the Palestinian cause, but the school of postcolonial criticism which he fathered has not fully appreciated the cultural ...

Very Pointed

Dinah Birch: Pugin, 20 September 2007

God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain 
by Rosemary Hill.
Allen Lane, 602 pp., August 2007, 978 0 7139 9499 5
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... reader, much affected by a series of iconoclastic texts she encountered early in life, including Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason and William Godwin’s Political Justice. She favoured the rights of women (perhaps as a result of reading Mary Wollstonecraft), and briefly attempted to found a Godwinian commonwealth with her brother. She had no time for ...

Hayward of the Dale

Mary Wellesley: Gurle Talk, 4 April 2024

Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words 
by Jenni Nuttall.
Virago, 292 pp., £10.99, May, 978 0 349 01531 6
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... live in a far more squeamish culture. The roots of this run deep. In 1870, the American doctor Edward Clarke argued that girls needed to be educated differently from boys during adolescence: ‘For the development and perfectation of the reproductive system … force must be allowed to flow thither in an ample stream, and not diverted to the brain by the ...

Cool Vertigo

Matthew Bevis: Auden Country, 2 March 2023

The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Poems, Vol. I: 1927-39 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 848 pp., £48, August 2022, 978 0 691 21929 5
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The Complete Works of W.H. Auden. Poems, Vol. II: 1940-73 
edited by Edward Mendelson.
Princeton, 1120 pp., £48, August 2022, 978 0 691 21930 1
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... Auden said in an interview a few months before he died. Thanks to the magnificent efforts of Edward Mendelson, it’s now all here: prose, plays, libretti and, finally, the poems, coming to just over 7500 pages all told. Sizing up these volumes, one might take courage from a line in ‘The Labyrinth’: ‘Assume this maze has got a plan.’ Many maps ...

Our Island Story

Stefan Collini: The New DNB, 20 January 2005

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 
edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison.
Oxford, sixty volumes, £7,500, September 2004, 9780198614111
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... to be made, given that relations remained so close for so long? Presumably, we have Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, ‘revolutionary politician and president of the United States’) but not Dwight Eisenhower because the former was born in what was still a British colony, though the latter spent more time in this country and arguably had a greater ...

Lords of the World

Thomas Jones: Keeping Up with the Caesars, 5 February 2026

The Lives of the Caesars 
by Suetonius, translated by Tom Holland.
Penguin, 448 pp., £10.99, March, 978 0 14 198038 6
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... pereo,’ traditionally rendered as ‘What an artist perishes with me,’ Holland, following Edward Champlin, translates as: ‘That I should die a mere artisan!’ As Nero speaks the phrase, he is digging his own grave, trying to build himself a tomb, a sorry mockery of the Domus Aurea, the enormous palace he had constructed on the ashes of the great ...

It has burned my heart

Anna Della Subin: Lives of Muhammad, 22 October 2015

The Lives of Muhammad 
by Kecia Ali.
Harvard, 342 pp., £22.95, October 2014, 978 0 674 05060 0
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... edition of the Quran in Latin, and wrote the preface when it appeared. But for Catholics like Thomas More, it was Luther who was Muhammad, in his iconoclasm and his lust, a priest who took a wife and bid Protestant clergymen to do the same. Or it was Calvin: a Catholic almanac depicted Satan with one claw on the turbaned prophet’s shoulder, the other ...

Adrenaline Junkie

Jonathan Parry: John Tyndall’s Ascent, 21 March 2019

The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer and Public Intellectual 
by Roland Jackson.
Oxford, 556 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 0 19 878895 9
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... order was therefore an individual and a societal imperative. Tyndall’s main inspiration was Thomas Carlyle, along with transcendental idealist philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Carlyle was Tyndall’s supporter at his wedding in 1876, Tyndall a pallbearer at Carlyle’s funeral in 1881.) To labour towards higher ...