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Don’t pick your nose

Hugh Pennington: Staphylococcus aureus, 15 December 2005

... policeman, was suffering from a spreading infection of his face that had started with a rose thorn scratch. He had lost an eye and the infection had spread to his lungs and his shoulder. On 12 February 1941 he was injected with penicillin made by Howard Florey and his team. Alexander’s condition improved dramatically. Treatment continued for five ...

In the Hornets’ Nest

Pamela Crossley: Empress Dowager Cixi, 17 April 2014

Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China 
by Jung Chang.
Cape, 436 pp., £20, September 2013, 978 0 224 08743 8
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... was chosen for the harem of the Xianfeng emperor of the Qing dynasty in 1852. In 1856 she rose steeply in rank after giving birth to the first (and as it happened only) male heir to the throne. When the emperor died in 1861, Cixi’s five-year-old son became the Tongzhi emperor. A regency of six male officials along with the late emperor’s ...

After Seven Hundred Years

Neal Ascherson: Ghosts of East Prussia, 24 May 2012

Forgotten Land: Journeys among the Ghosts of East Prussia 
by Max Egremont.
Picador, 356 pp., £9.99, April 2012, 978 0 330 45660 9
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... off in deep winter; when she finally dismounted, it was spring. ‘The birds were singing. Dust rose behind the seed drills as they worked over the dry fields. Everything was preparing for a new beginning. Could life really go on, as if nothing had happened?’ This book is, in large part, about people who at different times pretended that nothing had ...

He fights with flashing weapons

Katherine Rundell: Thomas Wyatt, 6 December 2012

Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest 
by Susan Brigden.
Faber, 714 pp., £30, September 2012, 978 0 571 23584 1
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Graven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy 
by Nicola Shulman.
Short Books, 378 pp., £20, April 2011, 978 1 906021 11 5
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... both tedious and dangerous. Sir Thomas Wyatt was born in 1503, high and close to the throne, and rose higher and closer. He was the eldest son of Sir Henry Wyatt, who had been a courtier and soldier, a privy counsellor and a bureaucrat of the old school. Henry had remained loyal to Henry Tudor throughout Richard III’s reign, despite starvation and ...

Out of the Ossuary

Michael Neill: Shakespeare and Emotion, 14 July 2016

The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare 
by Steven Mullaney.
Chicago, 231 pp., £24.50, July 2015, 978 0 226 11709 6
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... books of memory’ by a union that serves only to deface the ‘monuments of conquered France,/Undoing all as all had never been’. Talbot is presented not so much as an individual but as a ‘collective self’, the embodiment of ‘something like an imagined community’; in his absence, we are left with the ineffectual Henry who, flanked by a ...

Bus Lane Strategy

Tristram Hunt: London Governments, 31 October 2002

Governing London 
by Ben Pimlott and Nirmala Rao.
Oxford, 208 pp., £15.99, May 2002, 0 19 924492 8
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... Normans and the absolutism of the Stuarts, in the Victorian era the Saxon witenagemot mystically rose again in the form of city council chambers. Civic self-government became a symbol of British identity. ‘On the other side of the Channel, Paris is France, but no such rule applies with us,’ the Birmingham Daily Press ...

Baseball’s Loss

Geoffrey Hawthorn: The Unstoppable Hugo Chávez, 1 November 2007

Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope 
by Tariq Ali.
Verso, 244 pp., £14.99, November 2006, 9781844671021
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Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today 
by D.L. Raby.
Pluto, 280 pp., £18.99, July 2006, 0 7453 2436 3
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Venezuela: Hugo Chavez’s Revolution, Latin America Report No. 19 
by International Crisis Group.
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... radicals, like Bolívar, who was Constant’s contemporary and admired what had been happening in France, take this to mean the liberty of an inclusive nation, and give it a socialist cast. But until the late 20th century, the criollos’ refined sense of racial difference (made all the more acute by much cross-breeding) led them to keep active ...

In a Frozen Crouch

Colin Kidd: Democracy’s Ends, 13 September 2018

How Democracy Ends 
by David Runciman.
Profile, 249 pp., £14.99, May 2018, 978 1 78125 974 0
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Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth – And How to Fix It 
by Dambisa Moyo.
Little, Brown, 296 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 1 4087 1089 0
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How Democracies Die 
by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
Viking, 311 pp., £16.99, January 2018, 978 0 241 31798 3
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Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy 
by William Galston.
Yale, 158 pp., £25, June 2018, 978 0 300 22892 2
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... at the trial of John Scopes, the Tennessee teacher charged with teaching evolution in 1925). France, meanwhile, was torn apart by the Dreyfus Affair. Division on this scale is potentially fatal to democracy; trust, as Runciman reminds us, is its lifeblood. However, both democracies survived, with Dreyfus exonerated in 1906, and the Democrats able to ...

Postcards from the Past

Chris Power: Georgi Gospodinov’s Impossible Books, 5 June 2025

The Physics of Sorrow 
by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel.
Weidenfeld, 277 pp., £9.99, February 2024, 978 1 3996 2313 1
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The Story Smuggler: A Very Brief Memoir 
by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Kristina Kovacheva and Dan Gunn.
Weidenfeld, 70 pp., £14.99, February 2024, 978 1 3996 2311 7
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... forth, discussing events of the late 1920s as if they are contemporary – the question of whether France will accept the exiled Trotsky, the demonstration of a shortwave radio in Berlin – until Gospodinov tires of the game and breaks off the correspondence. Several years pass before Gaustine writes again, in a letter dated August 1939, making despairing ...

Responses to the War in Gaza

LRB Contributors, 29 January 2009

... on Gaza will be seen as the action of a colonial power that is running out of ideas; not unlike France in the final stage of the Algerian war.Gabriel Piterberg teaches history at UCLA. The Returns of Zionism was published last year. Jacqueline Rose The only abiding law for Israel in this onslaught seems to be the ethics ...

Kipling and Modernism

Craig Raine, 6 August 1992

... Book of Horace Paraphrased’. One might list more obviously poetic lines of Pope like ‘Die of a Rose in aromatic Pain’, but better are lines that merely, yet perfectly enact the unremittingly alert language we call poetry: the exact comedy of bowls ‘obliquely waddling to the mark in view’; the just comparison of learned commentary to the silkworm and ...

Old Europe

Jeremy Harding: Britain in Bosnia, 20 February 2003

Indictment at The Hague: The Milosevic Regime and the Crimes of the Balkan Wars 
by Norman Cigar and Paul Williams.
New York, 339 pp., $24.95, July 2002, 0 8147 1626 1
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Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia 
by Brendan Simms.
Penguin, 464 pp., £8.99, July 2002, 0 14 028983 6
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Under Orders: War Crimes in Kosovo 
by Fred Abrahams.
Human Rights Watch, 593 pp., £18, October 2001, 1 56432 264 5
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Milosevic: A Biography 
by Adam LeBor.
Bloomsbury, 386 pp., £20, October 2002, 0 7475 6090 0
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... is not Nato’s enemy, but Nato’s alibi; if Russia had not existed, then Britain and France would have had to invent it as an excuse for their cowardice and indecision.’ But Tory diplomacy on Bosnia had precedents: Hurd and Rifkind seem to have imagined themselves as realpolitiker descendants of the consummate Disraeli faced by a posse of minor ...

Flour Fixated

Bee Wilson, 24 September 2020

Amber Waves: The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat 
by Catherine Zabinski.
Chicago, 246 pp., £18, August 2020, 978 0 226 55371 9
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... from rice and 281 calories from sugar and other sweeteners. In some countries, such as Turkey and France, per capita wheat consumption is a great deal higher and in others, such as Cameroon (where maize is the staple food) or the Philippines (rice), much lower. But it’s striking that wheat consumption has been increasing fast since the 1960s, even in ...

Wordsworth’s Crisis

E.P. Thompson, 8 December 1988

Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years 
by Nicholas Roe.
Oxford, 306 pp., £27.50, March 1988, 0 19 812868 1
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... Borderers’ and also in the Prelude and Excursion. The crisis is associated less with ‘France’ than with ‘false philosophy’ in its bearing upon both public life and personal relations. One is tempted to speculate whether – just as the matter of Annette Vallon was covered up for a hundred years – there might not also be some political ...

Ravishing

Colm Tóibín: Sex Lives of the Castrati, 8 October 2015

The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds 
by Martha Feldman.
California, 454 pp., £40, March 2015, 978 0 520 27949 0
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Portrait of a Castrato: Politics, Patronage and Music in the Life of Atto Melani 
by Roger Freitas.
Cambridge, 452 pp., £22.99, May 2014, 978 1 107 69610 5
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... see more hideous old men; but what contributed more than aught else to give to the spectre that rose before us the aspect of an artificial creation was the red and white paint with which he glistened.’ The man also wore a light wig, ‘with innumerable curls which indicated extraordinary pretensions to elegance’. He wore gold earrings and ‘a ...

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