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Female Bandits? What next!

Wendy Doniger: The incarnations of Robin Hood, 22 July 2004

Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography 
by Stephen Knight.
Cornell, 247 pp., £14.50, May 2003, 0 8014 3885 3
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... the sheriff and the abbeys who were regarded as corrupt by definition, by their social roles and powers – he now fought only against those who were evil by individual nature. Robin, too, became depoliticised and personalised, opposed only to noblemen who were personally treacherous to him. In Munday, Prince John is Robin’s enemy only because he is a ...

Collapse of the Sofa Cushions

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 24 March 1994

Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics 
by Isobel Armstrong.
Routledge, 545 pp., £35, October 1993, 0 415 03016 1
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The Woman Reader: 1837-1914 
by Kate Flint.
Oxford, 366 pp., £25, October 1993, 0 19 811719 1
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... The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich(1848), James Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night (1874) and Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts (1904-8). Though she has been considerably influenced by recent theorising, both linguistic and otherwise, Armstrong does not so much wish to deconstruct Victorian poetry as to show how it was already struggling with something like ...

Joke Book?

A.D. Nuttall, 23 November 1989

The Anatomy of Melancholy: Vol. I 
by Robert Burton, edited by Thomas Faulkner, Nicholas Kiessling and Rhonda Blair.
Oxford, 675 pp., £70, October 1989, 0 19 812448 1
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... sure, ‘melancholy’ is a much broader term than ‘depression’, connoting strong imaginative powers (with attendant pleasures) as well as anguish of spirit. But, when all this is conceded, it remains clear that the central reference of ‘melancholic’ is to states of profound depression. The real difficulty is one of style. Burton, as everyone ...

Clues

J.I.M. Stewart, 5 May 1983

A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie 
by Robert Barnard.
Collins, 203 pp., £7.95, April 1980, 0 00 216190 7
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The Agatha Christie Hour 
by Agatha Christie.
Collins, 190 pp., £6.50, September 1982, 0 00 231331 6
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The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes 
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Allen Lane, 1122 pp., £7.95, August 1981, 0 7139 1444 0
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The Quest for Sherlock Holmes 
by Owen Dudley Edwards.
Mainstream, 380 pp., £12.50, November 1982, 0 906391 15 6
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The Unknown Conan Doyle: Essays on Photography 
by John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green.
Secker, 128 pp., £8.50, November 1982, 0 436 13302 4
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The Unknown Conan Doyle: Uncollected Stories 
by John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green.
Secker, 456 pp., £8.95, November 1982, 0 436 13301 6
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The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie 
by Charles Osborne.
Collins, 256 pp., £9.95, September 1982, 0 00 216462 0
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... of ‘the narrow gauge of the wheels’. We are regularly and justly impressed by Holmes’s powers of observation and inference. But there is no contest between ourselves and the detective, just as there seems to be none recorded between Holmes’s prototype, Dr Joseph Bell, and his pupils in Edinburgh – or, indeed, between that ...

Pity the monsters

Richard Altick, 18 December 1980

The Elephant Man 
by Bernard Pomerance.
Faber, 71 pp., £2.25, June 1980, 0 571 11569 1
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The Elephant Man: the Book of the Film 
by Joy Kuhn.
Virgin, 90 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 9780907080091
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The Elephant Man 
by Christine Sparks.
Futura, 272 pp., £1.25, August 1980, 0 7088 1942 7
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The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences 
by Frederick Treves.
Star, 126 pp., £95, August 1980, 0 352 30747 1
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The Elephant Man and Other Freaks 
by Sian Richards.
Futura, 197 pp., £1.25, October 1980, 0 7088 1927 3
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The True History of the Elephant Man 
by Michael Howell and Peter Ford.
Allison and Busby, 190 pp., £6.95, March 1980, 0 85031 353 8
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... from one grimy location to another in greater London. Within four years, however, the police powers of the newly-formed London County Council were to make such shows illegal, thus ending, almost unnoticed, a form of popular urban entertainment that had flourished ever since Pepys’s and Evelyn’s time in taverns and rented rooms and at Bartholomew ...

I jolly well would have

Paul Foot, 20 August 1992

Claire clairmont and the Shelleys 
by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton.
Oxford, 281 pp., £20, April 1992, 0 19 818594 4
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Mab’s Daughters 
by Judith Chernaik.
Pan, 229 pp., £5.99, July 1992, 0 330 32379 2
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... one so calculated as yourself to raise our sex ... if you would but know your value and exert your powers you could give the men a most immense drubbing.’ The tone of letters like this flatly contradicts the conventional image of the two half-sisters petulantly and jealously bickering their way through their long relationship. Mary is a constant witness to ...

Diary

Andrew O’Hagan: Have You Seen David?, 11 March 1993

... got together, even when we were that young. We were competitive, deluded and full of our own small powers. And, of course, we spoke our own language. We even had our own way of walking – which wasn’t unlike that of the two boys on the video – dragging our feet, hands in our pockets, heads always lolling towards the shoulder. That culpable tilt gave the ...

A Subtle Form of Hypocrisy

John Bayley, 2 October 1997

Playing the Game: A Biography of Sir Henry Newbolt 
by Susan Chitty.
Quartet, 288 pp., £25, July 1997, 0 7043 7107 3
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... whatever the subject. Newbolt would have been gratified by this demonstration of his vatic powers, abruptly producing what Owen Barfield in Poetic Diction called ‘a felt change of consciousness’. My wife had not the faintest idea what the verses were about, what or where the Close was, or what incident of warfare was abruptly conjured up in the ...

Community

Raymond Williams, 24 January 1985

The Taliesin Tradition: A Quest for the Welsh Identity 
by Emyr Humphreys.
Black Raven, 245 pp., £10.95, April 1984, 0 85159 002 0
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Jones: A Novel 
by Emyr Humphreys.
Dent, 144 pp., £8.95, July 1984, 0 460 04660 8
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Wales! Wales? 
by Dai Smith.
Allen and Unwin, 173 pp., £9.95, March 1984, 0 04 942185 9
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The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country 
by Jan Morris.
Oxford, 442 pp., £12.50, November 1984, 0 19 215846 5
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... selves; at its strongest, however, a capacity for active and flexible survival, in which powers of a certain kind – hope, fidelity, eloquence – are repeatedly distilled from defeat. The test of the strongest sense would then be the welcoming admission of the latest shift: not as the abandonment of ‘Welshness’, in some singular and unitary ...

Whack-a-Mole

Rivka Galchen: Anti-Vax Sentiments, 27 January 2022

Stuck: How Vaccine Rumours Start – and Why They Don’t Go Away 
by Heidi Larson.
Oxford, 157 pp., £18.99, September 2020, 978 0 19 007724 2
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Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement 
by Jonathan Berman.
MIT, 277 pp., £25, September 2020, 978 0 262 53932 6
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... It wasn’t a huge leap to imagine that the Christian south might be collaborating with Western powers to limit population growth in the north. All attempts by the federal government to dispel the rumours through reports by technical committees failed. Eventually the boycott was ended after dialogue with political and religious leaders in the north; and ...

Banksability

Ian Sansom: Iain Banks, 5 December 2013

The Quarry 
by Iain Banks.
Little, Brown, 326 pp., £18.99, June 2013, 978 1 4087 0394 6
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... maybe a little reverb. For Banks, ideas were important and plots were paramount. His imaginative powers were extraordinary but no one would call him a prose stylist. Perhaps all the smart but simple teenage narrators were more than coincidence? Fifth, and frankly, there was little to distinguish between Banks the author and Banks the narrator, which meant ...

Don’t try this at home

Gavin Francis: Adrenaline, 29 August 2013

Adrenaline 
by Brian Hoffman.
Harvard, 298 pp., £18.95, April 2013, 978 0 674 05088 4
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... stimulation of which provoked effects similar to those seen after direct injection of adrenaline. Thomas Elliott, a Cambridge physiologist, claimed in 1904 that sympathetic nerves produced adrenaline in tiny quantities over such target tissues as lungs, heart muscle and the walls of arteries. Adrenaline, it seemed, worked both as a hormone carried by the ...

The Savage Life

Frank Kermode: The Adventures of William Empson, 19 May 2005

William Empson: Vol. I: Among the Mandarins 
by John Haffenden.
Oxford, 695 pp., £30, April 2005, 0 19 927659 5
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... country for the inevitable war. During this time he was again drinking too much, often with Dylan Thomas, and occasionally more grandly with Eliot and John Hayward. He claimed that in these Marchmont years he was enjoying himself very much, but he was not idling. He was quite heavily involved with Mass Observation, and so with Charles Madge and Kathleen ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: At NatCon London, 1 June 2023

... Kruger outlined his vision in the New Statesman. Britain, he asserted, is ruled by faceless ‘powers that be’ who are ‘not on the side of the British people, but instead serve the abstractions of “human rights”, “international law”, or other signals of middle-class virtue’. Kruger, an evangelical Christian, warned of ‘a new religion’ in ...

Euripides Unbound

Robert Cioffi, 26 September 2024

... of scholars. Alongside works such as Sophocles’ Trackers and the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, a sensation in the early years of the collection, Oxyrhynchus has yielded a student’s whiny letter to his father, legal petitions alleging everything from high crimes to petty acts of violence and endless accounts and receipts. Papyri have played a ...

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