On the Beaches

Richard White: In Indian Country, 21 March 2002

Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America 
by Daniel Richter.
Harvard, 317 pp., £17.95, January 2002, 0 674 00638 0
Show More
Show More
... for canonisation by the Catholic Church – not as a woman who forsook her native values for Christian values, but as one who found that she could, paradoxically, best fulfil the cultural values she inherited among a set of women who considered themselves Indian and Catholic. Even Metacom (or King Philip, as the New England colonists called him), who ...

King Cling

Julian Bell: Kings and Collectors, 5 April 2018

Charles I: King and Collector 
Royal Academy, London, until 15 April 2018Show More
Charles II: Art and Power 
Queen’s Gallery/London, until 13 May 2018Show More
Show More
... Nonetheless a driving clarity of exposition pushes them along, these models of pre-Reformation Christian consensus and academic agreement on what constituted ‘Roman’ style. As we now feel about the early 20th-century modernists, so Charles’s court must have felt about the High Renaissance: in awe of an optimism still resonant but now ...

It hurts, but it’s holy

Neal Ascherson: Consequences of Empire, 23 May 2024

Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe 
by Sathnam Sanghera.
Viking, 449 pp., £20, January, 978 0 241 60041 2
Show More
Show More
... shook him, and why should he have to be prepared for such a reception? (He notes that his friend William Dalrymple, whose books about the Raj and imperial history are just as scathing as Empireland, wrote in the Guardian that ‘he had not received a single piece of similar hate mail from a British person.’ But then, as Dalrymple himself pointed out, he is ...

Cool Tricking

David Thomson: Terrence Malick melts away, 22 May 2025

The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick 
by John Bleasdale.
Kentucky, 257 pp., £31.50, December 2024, 978 1 9859 0119 3
Show More
Show More
... inspired by the transcendent moment when the main character, Binx, observes someone who might be William Holden on the streets of New Orleans. Is he the real thing, or a ghost, a technological anticipation of holography, or just the manifestation of an awareness that such gods as Holden had become axiomatic, as much a model for American manhood as Johnny ...

Jerusalem

Penelope Fitzgerald, 3 December 1981

Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith 
edited by Jack Barbera and William McBrien.
Virago, 359 pp., £9.95, October 1981, 9780860682172
Show More
Show More
... Knox and all the propositions of the Catholic and Anglo-Catholic Churches. ‘Some Impediments to Christian Commitment’, which is a talk she gave at St Cuthbert’s, Philbeach Gardens just over two years before her death, is an account of her own spiritual history, a touching one, with her own particular sense of the sad and the ridiculous. It has never ...

Survivors

Jonathan Steinberg, 18 December 1986

Strangers in their own Land: Young Jews in Germany and Austria Today 
by Peter Sichrovsky and Thomas Keneally.
Tauris, 177 pp., £10.95, May 1986, 1 85043 033 0
Show More
Remnants: The Last Jews of Poland 
by Malgorzata Niezabitowska and Tomasz Tomaszewski, translated by William Brand and Hanna Dobosiewicz.
Friendly Press, 272 pp., £25, September 1986, 0 914919 05 9
Show More
The Jews in Poland 
edited by Chimen Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk and Antony Polonsky.
Blackwell, 264 pp., £29.50, September 1986, 0 631 14857 4
Show More
Show More
... of exploitation. The Church taught the peasants that the Jews had killed Christ and anyway needed Christian blood for their unleavened bread at Passover. When Poland literally disappeared after the Partitions, sliced up by Prussia, Russia and Austria, many Jews joined with the Poles in their struggle for nationhood, but they never gained full acceptance. To ...

Trevelogue

E.S. Turner, 25 June 1987

The Golden Oriole: Childhood, Family and Friends in India 
by Raleigh Trevelyan.
Secker, 536 pp., £16.95, May 1987, 0 436 53403 7
Show More
Show More
... beginning: ‘Ah, what avails the sceptred race ...’ She was a peer’s sister and, according to William Hickey, died from eating too much pineapple. Literary trails became spicily intertwined at Chhatarpur, whither E.M. Forster, Lowes Dickinson and R.C. Trevelyan, the poet (son of George Otto) had travelled in 1912, with the usual side-trip to Khajaraho to ...

In a narrow pass

Derek Hirst, 19 November 1992

A Spark in the Ashes: The Pamphlets of John Warr 
edited by Stephen Sedley and Lawrence Kaplan.
Verso, 116 pp., £9.95, October 1992, 0 86091 599 9
Show More
Show More
... underpinnings of what is here labelled Warr’s ‘ideology of liberation’. That Warr was a Christian thinker of considerable depth and sophistication is manifest; so, too, is the interdependence of his claims for political and legal liberty with his insistence on the transcendence of equity in religious life, on the triumph of the spirit over mere ...

The Academy of Lagado

Edward Said: The US Administration’s misguided war, 17 April 2003

... has everyone been of the charge of anti-semitism that the stranglehold of the neo-conservative cum Christian Right cum Pentagon civilian hawks on American policy is now a reality which forces the entire country into an attitude of undifferentiated bellicosity. The idea that Iraq’s population would have welcomed American forces entering the country after a ...

Weavers and Profs

Katherine Harloe, 1 April 2021

A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland 1689 to 1939 
by Edith Hall and Henry Stead.
Routledge, 670 pp., £29.99, March 2020, 978 0 367 43236 2
Show More
Show More
... Early issues of Plebs included a series of articles on Greek and Roman economic development by William Craik, a railway worker from South Wales who had enrolled at Ruskin.Mansbridge, Craik, De Leon, the Plebs League, the WEA and Ruskin College find no place in Stray’s account. Their absence demonstrates the need for Hall and Stead’s book, which takes ...

Midwinter

J.B. Trapp, 17 November 1983

Thomas More: History and Providence 
by Alistair Fox.
Blackwell, 271 pp., £19.50, September 1982, 0 631 13094 2
Show More
The Statesman and the Fanatic: Thomas Wolsey and Thomas More 
by Jasper Ridley.
Constable, 338 pp., £12.50, October 1982, 9780094634701
Show More
English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition 
by John King.
Princeton, 539 pp., £30.70, December 1982, 0 691 06502 0
Show More
Seven-Headed Luther: Essays in Commemoration of a Quincentenary, 1483-1983 
edited by Peter Newman Brooks.
Oxford, 325 pp., £22.50, July 1983, 0 19 826648 0
Show More
The Complete Works of St Thomas More. Vol. VI: A Dialogue concerning Heresies. Part 1: The Text, Part 2: Introduction, Commentary, Appendices, Glossary, Index 
edited by T.M.C. Lawler, Germain Marc’hadour and Richard Marius.
Yale, 435 pp., £76, November 1981, 0 300 02211 5
Show More
Show More
... of his friend and bishop, Cuthbert Tunstal, he turned to refute the English disciples of Luther, William Tyndale chief among them. In this interest More produced nearly a million words in half a dozen years, for half of which he was Lord Chancellor. By the end of 1533, when he gave over writing of this kind, the effort had helped to bring him close to ...

What I heard about Iraq in 2005

Eliot Weinberger: Iraq, 5 January 2006

... that there were 3200 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, 700 more than its capacity. I heard Major General William Brandenburg, who oversees US military detention operations in Iraq, say: ‘We’ve got a normal capacity and a surge capacity. We’re operating at surge capacity.’ A year before, I had heard the President promise ‘to demolish the Abu Ghraib ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2010, 16 December 2010

... limed oak. It was this house where Eric Korn heard someone reading out the plaque as being to ‘William Butler Yeast’. ‘Presumably,’ Eric wanted to say, ‘him responsible for the Easter Rising.’ 17 February. Stopped by a man outside the post office in Regents Park Road who fishes in his wallet and shows me a note I sent nearly 50 years ago to ...

Alphabeted

Barbara Everett: Coleridge the Modernist, 7 August 2003

Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection 
edited by Seamus Perry.
Oxford, 264 pp., £17.99, June 2002, 0 19 871201 4
Show More
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. XVI: Poetical Works I: Poems (Reading Text) 
edited by J.C.C. Mays.
Princeton, 1608 pp., £135, November 2001, 0 691 00483 8
Show More
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. XVI: Poetical Works II: Poems (Variorum Text) 
edited by J.C.C. Mays.
Princeton, 1528 pp., £135, November 2001, 0 691 00484 6
Show More
The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Vol. XVI: Poetical Works III: Plays 
edited by J.C.C. Mays.
Princeton, 1620 pp., £135, November 2001, 0 691 09883 2
Show More
Show More
... a very strange poet. The usual account of this strangeness, until fairly recently, was to say as William Empson did in the introduction to the selection of Coleridge’s poems he edited with David Pirie: ‘Coleridge wrote only a few very good poems.’ Debate has turned essentially on the question of which those poems were. Defending the edition he was by ...

A feather! A very feather upon the face!

Amit Chaudhuri: India before Kipling, 6 January 2000

The Unforgiving Minute 
by Harry Ricketts.
Chatto, 434 pp., £25, January 1999, 0 7011 3744 4
Show More
Show More
... post-feudal Indian middle class and members of the British scholarly and administrative classes. William Jones, whose researches at the Fort William College in Calcutta were largely responsible for inaugurating Orientalist scholarship and the reconstruction of Indian history, wore native clothes made of muslin in the heat ...