At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Miami Vice’, 17 August 2006

Miami Vice 
directed by Michael Mann.
August 2006
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... is arresting in the above scene is a New York detective, Rico Tubbs, played by Philip Michael Thomas, and about to become Crockett’s partner. He’s after the same drug lord as Crockett is, so that in the previous encounter to set up a supposed deal, three out of the four players were undercover agents. Generally in this series there are so many agents ...

Peine forte et dure

Hazel V. Carby: Punishment by Pressing, 30 July 2020

... a load of nearly 800 lbs. In 1721, a judge at the Old Bailey sentenced two supposed highwaymen, Thomas Cross and William Spiggot, to be pressed for refusing to submit a plea. The prisoner, he instructed, ‘shall be laid upon the bare ground [and] upon his body shall be laid so much Iron and Stone as he can bear and more ...

Open House

Peter Campbell: Looking through other people’s windows, 6 October 2005

... of the architecture. In the case of the Wellcome building a sculpture was commissioned from the Thomas Heatherwick Studio and it bears an analogously close relationship to the style of the building. Both building and sculpture are technically accomplished, coolly anonymous and assured. The sculpture consists of almost 27,000 fine, closely spaced wires ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: ‘Watercolour’, 3 March 2011

... Tate Britain until 21 August), there are many examples of that freshness: two of the most famous, Thomas Girtin’s The White House at Chelsea and Turner’s Blue Rigi, hang side by side. There is also Bonington’s view of the Piazza dell’Erbe in Verona, which gives a sense of moving crowds and shifting light that makes Canaletto’s Venetian crowds and ...

Short Cuts

Chase Madar: Human Rights Window Dressing, 2 July 2015

... their own signed by dozens of legal scholars, including a great many progressive luminaries like Thomas Buergenthal, David Cole and Burt Neuborne. Other more right-wing figures vouching for Koh include William Taft, the State Department’s senior lawyer in 2003, who provided the Bush-Cheney administration with its legal ...

Short Cuts

Rosemary Hill: Shakespeare’s Faces, 7 January 2016

... John Aubrey’s passing remark in 1665 that Stonehenge might have been built by druids, through William Stukeley’s obsessively detailed and almost entirely invented account of the druidic religion it took another hundred and fifty years, but in the early 20th century druids appeared at Stonehenge and they have been there ever since. It is often pointed ...

At the Foundling Museum

Brian Dillon: Found, 11 August 2016

... The Foundling Hospital​ was established in Bloomsbury in 1739 by the philanthropist Thomas Coram, ‘for the education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children’. Strictly speaking, they weren’t foundlings: the parents, or more usually the mother, had to hand over their offspring and were instructed to ‘affix on each child some particular writing, or other distinguishing mark or token, so that the child may be known thereafter if necessary ...

Rat-Catchers, Dog-Butchers

Jessie Childs: England under Siege, 6 January 2022

Devil-Land: England under Siege, 1588-1688 
by Clare Jackson.
Allen Lane, 682 pp., £35, September 2021, 978 0 241 28581 7
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... Thomas​ Hobbes used to tell people that the Spanish Armada was the reason he had been born prematurely. ‘My mother gave birth to twins,’ he said, ‘myself and fear.’ He never shook off the sense of dread. More than half a century later, having fled England for France, he wrote Leviathan, predicated on the view that fear is the chief driver of man ...

Heavy Sledding

Chauncey Loomis, 21 December 1989

The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the Northwest Passage and the North Pole, 1818-1909 
by Pierre Berton.
Viking, 672 pp., £16.95, May 1989, 0 670 82491 7
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Overland to Starvation Cove: With the Inuit in Search of Franklin 1878-1880 
by Heinrich Klutschak and William Barr.
Toronto, 261 pp., £17.50, February 1988, 0 8020 5762 4
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Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition 
by Owen Beattie and John Geiger.
Bloomsbury, 180 pp., £12.95, November 1987, 0 7475 0101 7
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... the search for Franklin began, and 1859, when M’Clintock discovered some grisly remains on King William Island, almost thirty naval and overland expeditions joined the search. A writer has to juggle the names of explorers, famous in their day, but now known only to Arctic buffs, such as John and James Clark ...
Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered 
by William Pritchard.
Oxford, 186 pp., £14.95, March 1985, 0 19 503462 7
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... in style was striking. Set beside the early work of Pound and Eliot (or of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, for that matter), Frost’s ‘simple’ lyrics might have seemed to be some sort of throwback – as if they belonged far down the back slope of the great Modernist watershed. But those same unassuming poems earned Pound’s immediate ...

Public Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre, 18 February 1982

Explaining America: The ‘Federalist’ 
by Garry Wills.
Athlone, 286 pp., £14.50, August 1981, 0 485 30003 6
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James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition 
by David Hoeveler.
Princeton, 374 pp., £13.70, June 1981, 0 691 04670 0
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... When the Scottish radical lawyer, Thomas Muir, was tried before the infamous Lord Braxfield in 1793, he declared that if what he had advocated was treasonable, then Plato, Harrington and David Hume were equally guilty. To the present-day student of Hume, Muir’s inclusion of him in his catalogue of reformers must appear even odder than his appeal to Plato: for Hume is usually and rightly portrayed as a consistent defender of the 18th-century Hanoverian status quo ...

Diary

Tom Johnson: Strange Visitations, 15 August 2024

... manuscript’, was discovered in the archives of Hereford Cathedral in 1907. The next year Arthur Thomas Bannister became a canon there. His appointment had been somewhat controversial: a man ‘of singular simplicity and directness’, he was known for his liberal sympathies and a tendency to blurt out information about church assets. But he slowly rose ...

That Tendre Age

Tom Johnson: Tudor Children, 15 June 2023

Tudor Children 
by Nicholas Orme.
Yale, 265 pp., £20, February, 978 0 300 26796 9
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... Essex, a funeral brass shows an infant in swaddling clothes. It was made to preserve the memory of Thomas Greville, who ‘died in his tender age’ in 1492.Nicholas Orme is perhaps best known for Medieval Children, a lavishly illustrated survey published in 2001, which helped to popularise medievalists’ critique of Ariès. Tudor Children reuses some of the ...

Flash and Thunder

Michael Dobson: Marlowe’s Betrayals, 5 March 2026

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe 
by Stephen Greenblatt.
Bodley Head, 352 pp., £25, September 2025, 978 1 84792 713 2
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... sporadic treatments of his short life as the cautionary tale of a blasphemer justly punished. Thomas Dabbs made a good start in Reforming Marlowe (1991) by looking at the way the Victorians and the Decadents rediscovered Marlowe as an aesthete and a deviant (Havelock Ellis, for instance, identified Marlowe as a ‘psychosexual hermaphrodite’ in Sexual ...

Summons from a Witch

Emily Berry: Lynette Roberts holds firm, 21 May 2026

A Letter to the Dead: Collected Poems 
by Lynette Roberts, edited by Patrick McGuinness and Charles Mundye.
Carcanet, 364 pp., £20, November 2025, 978 1 80017 505 1
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... repeated fact about someone’s life is that a famous person was best man at their wedding. Dylan Thomas did the honours for Lynette Roberts and her groom in 1939, wearing a ‘smart brown suit’ he borrowed for the occasion. ‘I carried wild flowers and gave Dylan a bunchful of wild flowers for his lapel,’ Roberts recalled. ‘Vernon Watkins’s trousers ...