Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: Reform’s Disaster Capitalism, 25 September 2025

... fringe event of the day, on ‘securing the borders’. I tagged along. On a makeshift stage, James Frayne, a Conservative strategist, was explaining to a full house that Reform’s stance on immigration aligns with public attitudes. In recent YouGov polling, 38 per cent of respondents rated Reform ‘best at handling asylum and ...

Things that are worth naming

Linda Colley, 21 November 1991

A Passion for Government: The Life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough 
by Frances Harris.
Oxford, 421 pp., £25, September 1991, 0 19 820224 5
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... intensity. In November 1688, when William of Orange landed in England to oust Anne’s father, King James II, the Marlboroughs seized their chance. Sarah helped the Princess to escape from Whitehall and brought her safely to William’s camp, while her husband deserted from the King’s Army and took as many ...

Diary

Ian Sansom: I was a teenage evangelist, 8 July 2004

... friends and, as much as possible for someone living in a small town, I tried to renounce what the King James Version calls the friendship of the world (James 4.4). I tried to be polite to my parents. I studied the Bible and read devotional books, inspirational books, books by a woman who’d saved Jews from the ...

Ça va un peu

Adam Shatz: Congo, 23 October 2014

Congo: The Epic History of a People 
by David Van Reybrouck.
Fourth Estate, 656 pp., £25, March 2014, 978 0 00 756290 9
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... Howard French to Jason Stearns, to say nothing of Adam Hochschild’s study of the Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost, and Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated. David Van Reybrouck’s enormous history is the latest addition to this literature. Van Reybrouck is a Dutch-speaking Belgian journalist whose father was ...

Behind the Waterfall

Lorna Scott Fox, 16 November 1995

The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado 
by Charles Nicholl.
Cape, 396 pp., £18.99, May 1995, 0 224 03333 6
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... back to Venezuela in the late 1590s, but never again set foot there himself. In 1618 he persuaded King James to let him out of the Tower, where he’d spent 13 years concocting his Guinea Balsam and writing the History of the World under a suspended death sentence. He was allowed a final attempt to find El Dorado, on the outcome of which hung pardon or ...

Data Guy

Andrew Berry: Almost like a Whale by Steve Jones, 3 February 2000

Almost like a Whale: ‘The Origin of Species’ Updated 
by Steve Jones.
Doubleday, 402 pp., £20, September 1999, 0 385 40985 0
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... polemic. Just as missionaries prefer modern or idiomatic translations of the Bible over the King James version when trying to convert the heathen, Jones may have hoped that evolutionists would find his update a more effective evangelical tool than Darwin. His book, however, will be read only by the converted; it is not going to sell well in the ...

Irishtown

D.A.N. Jones, 1 November 1984

Ironweed 
by William Kennedy.
Viking, 227 pp., £7.95, September 1984, 0 670 40176 5
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In Custody 
by Anita Desai.
Heinemann, 204 pp., £9.95, October 1984, 9780434186358
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Flaubert’s Parrot 
by Julian Barnes.
Cape, 190 pp., £8.50, October 1984, 0 241 11374 1
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... snobbish about its Dutch origins and its tulip festival, and named after our least successful king, James II, when he was Duke of York and Albany. One year, when I told friends in Manhattan that I was going to Albany to hear the hippy, marijuana-influenced poems of a Londoner who was living with another poet, half-Negro ...

Witchcraft and the Inquisition

Robin Briggs, 18 June 1981

Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late 16th and Early 17th Centuries 
by D.P. Walker.
Scolar, 116 pp., £9.95, March 1981, 9780859676205
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The Witches’ Advocate 
by Gustav Henningsen.
Nevada, 607 pp., $24, November 1980, 0 87417 056 7
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... of a less prestigious medical team hastily assembled by the Capucin exorcists, neither the King’s physicians nor he himself seem to have felt the slightest doubt that Marthe was a fraud being used for political ends. Professor Walker’s discussion of the surrounding circumstances only strengthens this withering diagnosis. He is particularly ...

Hail, Muse!

Seamus Perry: Byron v. Shelley, 6 February 2003

The Making of the Poets: Byron and Shelley in Their Time 
by Ian Gilmour.
Chatto, 410 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 7011 7110 3
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Byron and Romanticism 
by Jerome McGann.
Cambridge, 321 pp., £47.50, August 2002, 0 521 80958 4
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... more than his father’s because of its connections with royalty (she was remotely descended from King James I of Scotland); at school, he boasted so much about the (alleged) venerability of his title that he was facetiously nicknamed ‘the Old English Baron’. Occasionally the pretension turned more prickly: invited to join a formal procession, he ...

Character References

Robert Taubman, 15 May 1980

The Echo Chamber 
by Gabriel Josipovici.
Harvester, 154 pp., £6.50, March 1980, 0 85527 807 2
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Birthstone 
by D.M. Thomas.
Gollancz, 160 pp., £6.50, March 1980, 0 575 02762 2
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Kingdom Come 
by Melvyn Bragg.
Secker, 352 pp., £6.50, March 1980, 0 436 06714 5
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A Gentle Occupation 
by Dirk Bogarde.
Chatto, 360 pp., £5.95, March 1980, 0 7011 2505 5
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Innocent Blood 
by P.D. James.
Faber, 276 pp., £5.95, March 1980, 0 571 11566 7
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... modern, the talk of the natives weirdly Biblical and that of strong men quaintly Victorian: ‘King and country, death and glory, all the rest of it, knew that. Knew that I might cop it one day, or get a bullet in the backside, lose a leg, couple of fingers, that sort of thing ... Ordinary wounds. You know. Didn’t expect the others. The ones you speak ...

Short Cuts

Matt Foot: Failures at the CCRC, 23 January 2025

... and Error, whose investigations had helped overturn numerous cases, and the forensic psychiatrist James MacKeith, who provided expert evidence for the defence for the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six. Miscarriages would no doubt still occur, but now at least there was a proper mechanism to identify and reverse them.In July 2023 another man made a speech ...

More about Marilyn

Michael Church, 20 February 1986

Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe 
by Anthony Summers.
Gollancz, 414 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 575 03641 9
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Norma Jeane: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe 
by Fred Lawrence Guiles.
Granada, 377 pp., £12.95, June 1985, 0 246 12307 9
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Poor Little Rich Girl: The Life and Legend of Barbara Hutton 
by C. David Heymann.
Hutchinson, 390 pp., £12.95, March 1985, 0 09 146010 7
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Deams that money can buy: The Tragic Life of Libby Holman 
by Jon Bradshaw.
Cape, 431 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 224 02846 4
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All Those Tomorrows 
by Mai Zetterling.
Cape, 230 pp., £9.95, November 1985, 0 224 01841 8
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Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady 
by Florence King.
Joseph, 278 pp., £8.95, August 1985, 0 7181 2611 4
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... serving as fancy dress; a razor slipping and a GI getting castrated at a drunken homosexual orgy; James Dean being roped in for a one-night stand; Zsa Zsa Gabor getting her famous black eye from Hutton-fancier Rubirosa (after whose magnificent appendage smart restaurants named their giant pepper mills). Curiously blind to her family firm’s ...

Moll’s Footwear

Terry Eagleton: Defoe, 3 November 2011

Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth 
by Katherine Frank.
Bodley Head, 338 pp., £20, June 2011, 978 0 224 07309 7
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Moll: The Life and Times of Moll Flanders 
by Siân Rees.
Chatto, 224 pp., £18.99, July 2011, 978 0 7011 8507 7
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... and, as a convinced Dissenter, took part in the Duke of Monmouth’s abortive rebellion against James II. In search of sunken treasure, he flirted with a diving bell project in Cornwall. He established a civet cat business in his home on Newington Green, collecting and selling the animals’ perineal secretions for the manufacture of perfume. It is not ...

Short Cuts

Stephen Sedley: The Supreme Court’s Judgment, 2 March 2017

... be done by the rule of government.’ It took the rest of the 17th century – a civil war, the king’s execution, the implosion of the republic, the restoration of the monarchy and the coup d’état we know as the Glorious Revolution – to establish that government enjoyed no such extra-legal power.In 1685 the Duke of York, who had been brought up in ...

Dining with Ivan the Terrible

Malcolm Gaskill: Seeking London’s Fortune, 8 February 2018

London’s Triumph: Merchant Adventurers and the Tudor City 
by Stephen Alford.
Allen Lane, 316 pp., £20, April 2017, 978 0 241 00358 9
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... forced loan on the Merchant Adventurers Company. By its terms, his fellow merchants would make the king solvent using the profits from their business in Antwerp. They complained, but in the end, they were according to Gresham ‘the great gainers’ from the arrangement. It was a masterstroke of financial wizardry. Gresham had the right credentials for this ...