Throw your testicles

Tom Shippey: Medieval Bestiaries, 19 December 2019

Book of Beasts: The Bestiary in the Medieval World 
edited by Elizabeth Morrison, with Larisa Grollemond.
Getty, 354 pp., £45, June 2019, 978 1 60606 590 7
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... and many other flora and fauna common in those days.’ Some of these creatures are unknown even to Book of Beasts, though the cinnomolgus, or cinnamon bird, is featured.As Morrison points out, even those of us ignorant of bestiaries use phrases that originate with them. ‘Crocodile tears’ comes from the cunning cocodrill; ‘licking ...

At the British Library

James Romm: Alexander the Great, 5 January 2023

... the water from reaching his lips, condemning him to an early death.These voyages into the unknown promote the idea of Alexander, pupil of Aristotle, as a seeker of knowledge. A strange text first found embedded in the Alexander Romance, and later in stand-alone Latin and Old English versions, purports to be a letter from Alexander to Aristotle ...

At the William Morris Gallery

Rosemary Hill: On Mingei, 18 July 2024

... the Japan Folk Crafts Museum. Spanning two centuries, it juxtaposed traditional craft work by unknown makers with pieces by the founders of Mingei – the potters Soetsu Yanagi and Shoji Hamada – and others, with relatively slight commentary. This almost purely aesthetic approach has given way to a more critical evaluation of Mingei’s own complicated ...

Captain Corelli’s Machine-Gun

John Foot: Italian Counterfactuals, 23 May 2024

The Bad German and the Good Italian: Removing the Guilt of the Second World War 
by Filippo Focardi, translated by Paul Barnaby.
Manchester, 336 pp., £85, August 2023, 978 1 5261 5713 3
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... lesson’. In Domeniko there is now a monument to the massacre, but it is almost completely unknown in Italy.Filippo Focardi’s study, published in Italian in 2013 and now translated into English by Paul Barnaby, unpacks these silences and assumptions. Crucial to his analysis are the linked, binary stereotypes of the ‘good Italian’ and the ‘bad ...

Fistful of Dirt

Jordan Kisner: Alia Trabucco Zerán’s ‘Clean’, 17 April 2025

Clean 
by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes.
Fourth Estate, 261 pp., £9.99, April, 978 0 00 860797 5
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... for some reason, we carry on reading.’ The book begins with a sense of brutal inevitability. An unknown voice speaks flatly in a silent room: ‘The end of this story – are you sure you want to know? – is this: the girl dies.’ A beat passes. ‘Hello? No reaction at all?’ What follows is a circuitous jailhouse confession from a domestic worker who ...

An Enemy to Its Friends

James Meek, 6 March 2025

... the terms for an initial ceasefire that Putin is offering the Americans in private is unknown, we have a pretty good idea what he wants, which is not so much peace as its evil twin, victory. The degree to which the US pushes back or endorses Putin’s demands could be the first test of how far Trump speaks for America. There are still ...

The Right Hand of the Father

Thomas Lynch, 4 January 1996

... the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort. But burying infants we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fence-rows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that ...

Boarder or Day Boy?

Bernard Porter: Secrecy in Britain, 15 July 1999

The Culture of Secrecy in Britain 1832-1998 
by David Vincent.
Oxford, 364 pp., £25, January 1999, 0 19 820307 1
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... In much the same way, the first three Official Secrets Acts may have been directed more at unknown future subversives than at the foreign spies who provided their excuse. It cannot be a mere accident that these successive entrenchments of the principle that governments could choose their own targets for surveillance roughly coincided with the moments ...

Blumsday

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, 3 November 1983

Léon Blum 
by Jean Lacouture, translated by George Holoch.
Holmes & Meier, 571 pp., $39.50, October 1982, 0 8419 0775 7
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... has been very well translated by George Holoch. The book’s frequent references to French names unknown across the Channel could put English readers off: but curiosity may prevail with a British public which finds itself abruptly transported into the unfamiliar territory of French political life under the Third and Fourth Republics. The book was written ...

Funny Mummy

E.S. Turner, 2 December 1982

The Penguin Stephen Leacock 
by Robertson Davies.
Penguin, 527 pp., £2.95, October 1981, 0 14 005890 7
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Jerome K. Jerome: A Critical Biography 
by Joseph Connolly.
Orbis, 208 pp., £7.95, August 1982, 0 85613 349 3
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Three Men in a Boat 
by Jerome K. Jerome, annotated and introduced by Christopher Matthew and Benny Green.
Joseph, 192 pp., £12.50, August 1982, 0 907516 08 4
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The Lost Stories of W.S. Gilbert 
edited by Peter Haining.
Robson, 255 pp., £7.95, September 1982, 0 86051 200 2
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... if a shade nervously, he discourses about what scientists are doing to the atom; while he writes, unknown to him, the first atom bomb is being prepared for delivery. Leacock enjoyed being Canada’s leading ‘character’. At the same time, he was a good university administrator and a good educator. A contemporary description of him says: ‘He has a fine ...

Fetch the Chopping Knife

Charles Nicholl: Murder on Bankside, 4 November 2021

... story set in Italy). The title page attributes this quarto to one Robert Yarington, otherwise unknown as an author. He was probably only the copyist – a Robert Yarington is recorded as a member of the Scriveners’ Company in 1603, and had a brother, John, who was also a scrivener (i.e. professional scribe) – though his role may well have extended to ...

A Small, Sharp Stone

Ange Mlinko: Lydia Davis’s Lists, 2 December 2021

Essays One 
by Lydia Davis.
Hamish Hamilton, 512 pp., £20, November 2019, 978 0 241 37147 3
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Essays Two 
by Lydia Davis.
Hamish Hamilton, 571 pp., £20, December, 978 0 241 55465 4
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... life. I couldn’t hop onto a transatlantic flight, but I could at least make expeditions into an unknown language, and it would alter my brain just the same: ‘This confrontation with the densely printed text in the unknown language turned out to be oddly exhilarating. It was like diving, or jumping, into the deep, cold ...

Massive Egg

Hal Foster: Skies over Magritte, 7 July 2022

Magritte: A Life 
by Alex Danchev with Sarah Whitfield.
Profile, 420 pp., £30, November 2021, 978 1 78125 077 8
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... word can never do justice to the object; it is foreign to it, as if indifferent. But the unknown name may also hurl us into a world of ideas and images … where we encounter things wondrous and strange and come back full of them.’ In November 1927, Magritte went a step further with his ‘metamorphosis’ paintings, which show ‘an object ...

Creamy Polished Globes

Blake Morrison: A.E. Coppard’s Stories, 7 July 2022

The Hurly Burly and Other Stories 
by A.E. Coppard, edited by Russell Banks.
Ecco, 320 pp., £16.99, March 2021, 978 0 06 305416 5
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... of the Month Club in the US. For a non-American non-novelist to be a Book of the Month choice was unknown. But as Russell Banks points out in the preface to The Hurly Burly, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg had led a campaign on Coppard’s behalf. In the 1970s, he had another revival in the UK after a couple of his stories were ...

Secrets

Adam Phillips, 6 October 1994

The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi. Vol I: 1908-14 
edited by Eva Brabant, Ernst Falzeder and Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch, translated by Peter Hoffer.
Harvard, 584 pp., £27.50, March 1994, 0 674 17418 6
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... expertise. But if the unconscious is what cannot be anticipated, can there then be experts of the unknown? ‘The weather,’ as Freud puts it here, ‘of course never comes from the quarter one has been carefully observing.’ If you locate psychoanalysis somewhere between literature and science it can begin to look like a legitimate and intelligible social ...