On the Sixth Day

Charles Nicholl: Petrarch on the Move, 7 February 2019

Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer 
by Christopher Celenza.
Reaktion, 224 pp., £15.95, October 2017, 978 1 78023 838 8
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... hete, I dye.’ Watson’s version is sleeker, and closer to the original: ‘in summer freeze, in winter burn like fire.’ The English craze for Petrarch began to take hold in the 1530s, at the court of Henry VIII, where Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Thomas Wyatt were the ‘two chieftans’ of a ‘new company of courtly makers’. They had, the ...

Save My Beer

Tom Johnson: Industrious Revolution, 2 April 2026

The Experience of Work in Early Modern England 
by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb and Taylor Aucoin.
Cambridge, 362 pp., £105, October 2025, 978 1 316 51994 3
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... knew which were yours (theft was common), and paint them with tar to keep them warm through the winter and spring. In June they would be brought down from the pastures and washed in a river before being sent to the shearing men. If you couldn’t afford sheep of your own, you could go into the fields after the clip and gather the leftover scraps. Once the ...

Magnifico

David Bromwich: This was Orson Welles, 3 June 2004

Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life 
by Peter Conrad.
Faber, 384 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 571 20978 5
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... Welles sent detailed instructions for additional cuts, but they were ignored. An assistant editor, Robert Wise, was brought in to chop 30 more minutes out of the running time: half of the second half of the film. It was released on a double bill with Mexican Spitfire Sees a Ghost, and Welles was never again welcomed by the people in Hollywood with the money to ...

Loafing with the Sissies

Colm Tóibín: The Trials of Andy Warhol, 10 September 2020

Warhol: A Life as Art 
by Blake Gopnik.
Allen Lane, 931 pp., £35, March, 978 0 241 00338 1
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... him the first issue of the Black Mountain Review and introduced him to the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Cy Twombly and Ray Johnson.Opinion is divided about his appearance. ‘He thought of himself as ugly,’ a boyfriend from the early 1960s said. ‘But when you saw Andy naked, he looked ...

Mubarak’s Last Breath

Adam Shatz, 27 May 2010

... Beyoncé, whose concert at a Red Sea resort they were lobbying to prevent when I was in Cairo last winter. They have been encouraged in this by the state, which has expanded the role of the clerics on television and in education: as Sophie Pommier argues in Egypte, l’envers du décor (2008), it’s a mistake to see the NDP as a ‘secular party whose ...

A Man with My Trouble

Colm Tóibín: Henry James leaves home, 3 January 2008

The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-72: Volume I 
edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias.
Nebraska, 391 pp., £57, January 2007, 978 0 8032 2584 8
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The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855-72: Volume II 
edited by Pierre Walker and Greg Zacharias.
Nebraska, 524 pp., £60, January 2007, 978 0 8032 2607 4
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... to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years after James’s death, his family in the United States was concerned about his reputation, especially about what Edel ...

Crocodile’s Breath

James Meek: The Tale of the Tube, 5 May 2005

The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How It Changed the City For Ever 
by Christian Wolmar.
Atlantic, 351 pp., £17.99, November 2004, 1 84354 022 3
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... a thrill and a zest to life. It is an experience in having no traditions to live up to.’ One winter in the early 1990s I took an overnight train from Georgia to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. There were no planes: Armenia was at war with its neighbour Azerbaijan, and under blockade. Snow came through the ill-fitting windows of the sleeper as it ...

Which is worse?

Adam Tooze: Germany Divided, 18 July 2019

Die Getriebenen: Merkel und die Flüchtlingspolitik – Report aus dem Innern der Macht 
by Robin Alexander.
Siedler, 288 pp., €19.99, March 2017, 978 3 8275 0093 9
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Die SPD: Biographie einer Partei von Ferdinand Lassalle bis Andrea Nahles 
by Franz Walter.
Rowohlt, 416 pp., €16, June 2018, 978 3 499 63445 1
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Germany’s Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe 
by Oliver Nachtwey, translated by Loren Balhorn and David Fernbach.
Verso, 247 pp., £16.99, November 2018, 978 1 78663 634 8
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Die Schulz Story: Ein Jahr zwischen Höhenflug und Absturz 
by Markus Feldenkirchen.
DVA, 320 pp., €20, March 2018, 978 3 421 04821 9
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... in the minds of Schröder and his entourage, this programme of reforms became linked over the winter of 2002-3 with its opposition to war in Iraq. While Fischer, now foreign minister, sparred with Donald Rumsfeld, Schröder began work on a major statement of his government’s agenda. On the morning of 14 March 2003, he made a ninety-minute speech to the ...

The Global Id

John Lanchester: Is Google a good thing?, 26 January 2006

The Google Story 
by David Vise.
Macmillan, 326 pp., £14.99, November 2005, 1 4050 5371 2
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The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture 
by John Battelle.
Nicholas Brealey, 311 pp., £16.99, September 2005, 1 85788 361 6
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... the last year they gave this info, the five most increased searches were for Spider-Man, Shakira, Winter Olympics, World Cup and Avril Lavigne; the five most decreased searches were for Nostradamus, Napster, Anthrax, World Trade Center and Osama bin Laden. Thus did we recover from the trauma of 9/11. Technologically, Google is an amazing thing. As for whether ...

Doris and Me

Jenny Diski, 8 January 2015

... my presence, as indeed it and they will in my next and final absence. It was a famously cold winter. I’d come from a snowbound Hove, where I’d spent hours sitting and brooding, wrapped up but shivering on the frozen pebbled beach staring out at an icy sea, writing poetry about seagulls and loneliness (no longer extant, thank heavens, though that’s ...

He Roared

Hilary Mantel: Danton, 6 August 2009

Danton: The Gentle Giant of Terror 
by David Lawday.
Cape, 294 pp., £20, July 2009, 978 0 224 07989 1
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... Duhauttoir; Françoise herself lent Danton some of the purchase price. A 1964 biographer, Robert Christophe, speculated that Françoise may have had a child by Danton, and that he paid an inflated price to settle his obligations. He certainly drew on the dowry for his upcoming marriage to Gabrielle Charpentier, whose father was a tax official and the ...

Disaffiliate, Reaffiliate, Kill Again

Jeremy Harding: Régis Debray, 7 February 2008

Praised Be Our Lords: The Autobiography 
by Régis Debray, translated by John Howe.
Verso, 328 pp., £19.99, April 2007, 978 1 84467 140 3
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... In Praised Be Our Lords, he quotes a letter he wrote from jail in 1969 to Philippe de Saint-Robert, a Gaullist of the left and the author of Le Jeu de la France, which he had just been reading. The letter was signed off by ‘an ordinary young Frenchman who, because he loves his country and its people, went to Bolivia. Everyone plays … in his own ...

Summer with Empson

Jonathan Raban: Learning to Read, 5 November 2009

... and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter, because the cold and Narcissistic charm suggested by choirboys suits well with Shakespeare’s feeling for the object of the Sonnets, and for various sociological and historical reasons (the Protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of ...

Slammed by Hurricanes

Jenny Turner: Elsa Morante, 20 April 2017

The World Saved by Kids: And Other Epics 
by Elsa Morante, translated by Cristina Viti.
Seagull, 319 pp., £19.50, January 2017, 978 0 85742 379 5
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... with an unusually low cover price subsidised by her own royalties. She picked a picture by Robert Capa for the cover, a young man lying dead on a heap of rubble, and composed a line of text to run underneath it: ‘A scandal that has lasted ten thousand years’. Within a year of publication, the book had sold 800,000 copies and was being discussed all ...

Faint Sounds of Shovelling

John Kerrigan: The History of Tragedy, 20 December 2018

Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy 
by Yopie Prins.
Princeton, 297 pp., £24, April 2017, 978 0 691 14189 3
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Greek Tragic Women on Shakespearean Stages 
by Tanya Pollard.
Oxford, 331 pp., £60, September 2017, 978 0 19 879311 3
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Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy 
by Richard Halpern.
Chicago, 313 pp., £34, April 2017, 978 0 226 43365 3
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Samson Agonistes: A Redramatisation after Milton 
by John Kinsella.
Arc, 109 pp., £10.99, October 2018, 978 1 911469 55 1
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... had shrunk to the darkened upstairs room in 50 Wimpole Street from which she would elope with Robert Browning. Her letters to him allude to the ‘blind hopes’ for the future that Prometheus speaks of in Aeschylus. She hoped to escape her isolation, not just to marry, but to realise her creative potential. She did not want to be crushed by a falling ...