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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... Meanwhile, plenty of other countries might also have been classed as ‘pandemoniums’, to use John Milton’s newly minted word. France endured regicide and rebellion and the Holy Roman Empire lost perhaps five million lives to the Thirty Years’ War. Nothing in England was comparable to the sack of Magdeburg in 1631. Jackson anticipates and deflects ...

Close Cozenage

David Wootton, 23 May 1996

Astrology and the 17th-Century Mind: William Lilly and the Language of the Stars 
by Ann Geneva.
Manchester, 298 pp., £40, June 1995, 0 7190 4154 6
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... he shaped the course of events. At the Restoration he had to counter the charge that the day the King was executed was chosen to conform to his prognostication. Through the key years of the Civil War he had forecast Parliamentary victory and royal defeat (he predicted victory at Naseby, the key battle of the war), and Royalists complained that his almanacs ...

No More D Minor

Peter Phillips: Tallis Survives, 29 July 2021

Tallis 
by Kerry McCarthy.
Oxford, 288 pp., £25.99, October 2020, 978 0 19 063521 3
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... 30 January 1540 the monks of Evesham Abbey were singing the Magnificat when messengers from the king interrupted them. ‘The monastery of Evesham was suppressed by King Henry VIII … at evensong time,’ John of Alcester recorded, ‘the convent being in the choir at this verse ...

Short Cuts

Mattathias Schwartz: John Bolton’s Unwitting Usefulness, 16 July 2020

... One​ of the enduring mysteries of the relationship between Donald Trump and John Bolton, his third national security adviser, is how the two men ever came to terms in the first place. Bolton, an unreconstructed Cold Warrior, once canvassed for the arch-conservative Barry Goldwater and interned in the Nixon White House ...

The Sacred Sofa

E.S. Turner, 11 December 1997

The House of Lords: From Saxon Wargods to a Modern Senate 
by John Wells.
Hodder, 298 pp., £20, October 1997, 0 340 64928 3
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... long afterwards the producer died suddenly and that was that. The scarlet Woolsack, described by John Wells as ‘a sofa sacred to the law’, plays a sit-on part throughout this book. Though periodically restuffed with Commonwealth wool, it retains all the ‘ritual magic’ of medieval days. During the Gordon Riots of 1780 it was the holy refuge on which ...

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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... when 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 ...

Insupportable

John Bayley, 19 February 1987

A Choice of Kipling’s Prose 
by Craig Raine.
Faber, 448 pp., £12.50, January 1987, 0 571 13735 0
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Kipling’s Kingdom: His Best Indian Stories 
by Charles Allen.
Joseph, 288 pp., £14.95, January 1987, 0 7181 2570 3
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... and greed is more disquietingly shown in an adventure story like ‘The Man who would be King’ than it is in Conrad’s anti-Imperialist fables, because Kipling is on the side of Empire, not safely against it. But at the end of ‘The Man who would be King’ an emblem of Empire, the crown of gold and turquoise ...

Short Cuts

Inigo Thomas: Cromwell’s Seal, 4 January 2018

... him as an apostle.) The 18th-century engraver George Vertue wrote a book about Thomas Simon; John Evelyn referred to him in Numismata, his discourse on medals, seals and coins. These objects, Evelyn wrote, ‘are the most lasting and vocal monuments of antiquity’. Proof, evidence and art are all involved, and in the 17th century proving who you said ...

Like Unruly Children in a Citizenship Class

John Barrell: A hero for Howard, 21 April 2005

The Laughter of Triumph: William Hone and the Fight for a Free Press 
by Ben Wilson.
Faber, 455 pp., £16.99, April 2005, 0 571 22470 9
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... demanding lower food prices and an end to the war with France. It was probably a stone, but the king and his government chose to believe it was a bullet, and used the occasion to introduce new legislation which, among other things, increased the penalty for seditious libel and put severe restrictions on the meetings of the popular societies for ...

We shall not be moved

John Bayley, 2 February 1984

Come aboard and sail away 
by John Fuller.
Salamander, 48 pp., £6, October 1983, 0 907540 37 6
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Children in Exile 
by James Fenton.
Salamander, 24 pp., £5, October 1983, 0 907540 39 2
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‘The Memory of War’ and ‘Children in Exile’: Poems 1968-1983 
by James Fenton.
Penguin, 110 pp., £1.95, October 1983, 0 14 006812 0
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Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland: An Anthology 
edited by Michael Schmidt.
Carcanet, 184 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 85635 469 4
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Nights in the Iron Hotel 
by Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 48 pp., £4, November 1983, 0 571 13116 6
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The Irish Lights 
by Charles Johnston and Kyril Fitzlyon.
Bodley Head, 77 pp., £4.50, September 1983, 0 370 30557 4
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Fifteen to Infinity 
by Ruth Fainlight.
Hutchinson, 62 pp., £5.95, September 1983, 0 09 152471 7
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Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature 
edited by George Dekker.
Carcanet, 153 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 9780856354663
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... thing, start doing poetry and prose that is nothing but ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’. This is what John Fuller’s new rhymes for children are: they announce their literariness and children can no doubt admire it, for in this context they know, like older readers on the poetry scene, what is proper to it. But Walter de la Mare’s line ‘Who said, “Peacock ...

The Fatness of Falstaff

Barbara Everett, 16 August 1990

... can get away with this debate as to who precisely, as between him and the future King of England, is whose dog, because the Henry IV plays give him peculiar authority. This is an authority that works not only inside the plays but outside them as well. One of the few early stories, rare but trustworthy, that come straight from Shakespeare’s ...

Is it still yesterday?

Hilary Mantel: Children of the Revolution, 17 April 2003

The Lost King of France 
by Deborah Cadbury.
Fourth Estate, 352 pp., £18.99, October 2002, 1 84115 588 8
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... the place des Victoires claimed: ‘Our women of Les Halles will go to Versailles to dethrone the King and tear his eyes out.’ A month later, when the King wanted to move palaces, he would not go through Paris, but had a path cut through the Bois de Boulogne, which was known afterwards as ‘the Riot Road’. It would be ...

Hoodoo Man

Francis Gooding: Dr John and ‘Gris-Gris’, 6 November 2025

Two-Headed Doctor: Listening for Ghosts in Dr John’s ‘Gris-Gris’ 
by David Toop.
Strange Attractor, 397 pp., £23, November 2024, 978 1 913689 60 5
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... he set out. What seemed false had become true.Qā’sElid had inadvertently become what Malcolm John Rebennack Jr, in his first work as Dr John, billed as the ‘last of the best’:They call me the gris-gris manGot many clients, come from miles around,Running down my prescriptionI got medicine to cure all y’alls ills,I ...

Rambo and Revelation

Malise Ruthven, 9 September 1993

Fire and Blood: The True Story of David Koresh and the Waco Siege 
by David Leppard.
Fourth Estate, 182 pp., £5.99, June 1993, 1 85702 166 5
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Preacher of Death: The Shocking Inside Story of David Koresh and the Waco Siege 
by Martin King and Marc Breault.
Signet, 375 pp., £4.99, May 1993, 0 451 18000 3
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... was the prime instigator of the legal moves that culminated in the ATF raid last February. Martin King, an Australian television reporter who interviewed Koresh before the siege, has in-corporated into his narrative parts of Breault’s original diary, as well as extensive interviews with him. The Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1978, in which the leader of ...

Joining them

Conrad Russell, 24 January 1985

Goodwin Wharton 
by J. Kent Clark.
Oxford, 408 pp., £15, November 1984, 0 19 212234 7
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Witchcraft and Religion 
by Christina Larner.
Blackwell, 184 pp., October 1984, 0 631 13447 6
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Lordship to Patronage: Scotland 1603-1745 
by Rosalind Mitchison.
Arnold, 198 pp., £5.95, November 1983, 0 7131 6313 5
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... making substantial contribution to the cost of paying for wars. The problem of the absentee king was another of the standard problems of union, and here what appeared to be an asset under James VI suddenly became a disaster under Charles I. Professor Mitchison perceptively suggests that James’s absence actually strengthened his position in ...