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Widowers on the Prowl

Tom Shippey: Britain after Rome, 17 March 2011

Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070 
by Robin Fleming.
Allen Lane, 458 pp., £25, August 2010, 978 0 7139 9064 5
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... there was extensively refortified in the post-Roman period, causing some believers in the King Arthur legend to imagine it as the original Camelot, but their imagination will not have stretched to the notion of the Knights of the Round Table grave-robbing for pots. It’s worth pointing out that there is no entry for ‘King ...

Wilsonia

Paul Foot, 2 March 1989

The Wilson Plot: The Intelligence Services and the Discrediting of a Prime Minister 
by David Leigh.
Heinemann, 271 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 0 434 41340 2
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A Price too High 
by Peter Rawlinson.
Weidenfeld, 284 pp., £16, March 1989, 0 297 79431 0
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... shape any of us imagined it, and having read this book, I am prepared to accept, like a reformed gold-digger on the Sierra Madre, that Wilsonia never existed: that there never was a simple, secret explanation for Wilson’s resignation. His own explanation was probably true – he had had enough. It is in answering the question why this sprightly 60-year-old ...

Down and Out in London

David Cannadine, 16 July 1981

Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block 1887-1920 
by Jerry White.
Routledge, 301 pp., £11.50, September 1980, 0 7100 0603 9
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East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding 
by Raphael Samuel.
Routledge, 355 pp., £11.50, April 1981, 0 7100 0725 6
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... East End tenement block, while Samuel’s puts between hard covers the ordered reminiscences of Arthur Harding, a man described to the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Police in 1907 as ‘a most slippery and dangerous criminal’. In their way, both books are irritating, inadequate, even incoherent: but they also give a vivid, horrifying, unforgettable ...

Putting on the Plum

Christopher Tayler: Richard Flanagan, 31 October 2002

Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish 
by Richard Flanagan.
Atlantic, 404 pp., £16.99, June 2002, 1 84354 021 5
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... a lie’: The lie that the blackfellas had died out. That the ex-convicts had left the island for gold rushes in other countries. That only pure free white settler stock remained. Like all great lies there was some truth in these assertions . . . But at the end of the day most blackfellas and convicts remained on the island, sick with syphilis and sadness and ...

The wind comes up out of nowhere

Charles Nicholl: The Disappearance of Arthur Cravan, 9 March 2006

... In the annals of French literature, Arthur Cravan is more often a colourful footnote than a sober paragraph. He is usually referred to as ‘the poet and boxer Arthur Cravan’, and this odd-seeming conjunction is often fleshed out with more disreputable terms such as ‘con man’ or ‘adventurer ...

A Very Good Job for a Swede

E.S. Turner, 4 September 1997

The Fu Manchu Omnibus: Vol. II 
by Sax Rohmer.
Allison and Busby, 630 pp., £9.99, June 1997, 0 7490 0222 0
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... In the late 19th century, America, not relishing the zeal with which the Chinese had joined in its gold rushes, passed a series of Chinese Exclusion Acts and there were yellow v. white riots in San Francisco. The ‘White Australia’ policy was inspired by Chinese incursions into Australian goldfields. In South Africa, after the Boer War, Lord Milner imported ...

Man-Bat and Raven

Mike Jay: Poe on the Moon, 1 July 2021

The Reason for the Darkness of the Night: Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science 
by John Tresch.
Farrar, Straus, 431 pp., £20, June, 978 0 374 24785 0
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... that ‘people want something larger and longer.’ His response was the book-length Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the purported manuscript of a shipwreck survivor carried on ocean currents to the South Pole, where he fetches up on an unknown island with a temperate climate and an ancient civilisation. Poe was inspired by the real-life ...

Jingoes

R.W. Johnson: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War, 6 May 2004

The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War 
by Ronald Hyam and Peter Henshaw.
Cambridge, 379 pp., £45, May 2003, 0 521 82453 2
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... between Britain and South Africa: to wit, that Britain fought the Boer War to get its hands on the gold and that economic considerations remained the motivating force in its difficult relationship with South Africa thereafter. Early on, they single out their adversaries as, pre-eminently, Shula Marks, Geoff Berridge and Jack Spence. ‘For some scholars, no ...

Lady with the Iron Nose

Tom Shippey: Pagan Survival, 3 November 2022

Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe, an Investigation 
by Ronald Hutton.
Yale, 245 pp., £18.99, May, 978 0 300 26101 1
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... His new book may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian ...

Builder of Ruins

Mary Beard: Arthur Evans, 30 November 2000

Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth 
by J.A. MacGillivray.
Cape, 313 pp., £20, August 2000, 0 224 04352 8
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... disappointment, not so much at the excavation site itself (‘where,’ he writes archly, ‘Sir Arthur Evans … is rebuilding the palace’) but at its collection of prize paintings and sculpture, which had been removed to the museum in Heraklion. In the sculpture, he ‘saw nothing to suggest any genuine aesthetic feeling at all’. The frescoes were much ...

How do we know her?

Hilary Mantel: The Secrets of Margaret Pole, 2 February 2017

Margaret Pole: The Countess in the Tower 
by Susan Higginbotham.
Amberley, 214 pp., £16.99, August 2016, 978 1 4456 3594 1
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... Margaret came to court under the new regime, and in September 1486 she attended the christening of Arthur, the first Tudor prince. There are only glimpses of her in these years: ‘my lady Margaret of Clarence’. When she reached her teens, a marriage was arranged with Richard Pole, a modest landowner with solid Tudor connections, who had been rewarded for ...

Womanism

Dinah Birch, 21 December 1989

The Temple of my Familiar 
by Alice Walker.
Women’s Press, 405 pp., £12.95, September 1989, 0 7043 5041 6
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The Fog Line 
by Carol Birch.
Bloomsbury, 248 pp., £13.95, September 1989, 0 7475 0453 9
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Home Life Four 
by Alice Thomas Ellis.
Duckworth, 169 pp., £9.95, November 1989, 0 7156 2297 8
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The Fly in the Ointment 
by Alice Thomas Ellis.
Duckworth, 132 pp., £10.95, October 1989, 9780715622964
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Words of Love 
by Philip Norman.
Hamish Hamilton, 218 pp., £11.95, October 1989, 0 241 12586 3
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... story in Words of Love avoids both sourness and self-pity. ‘Spring Sonata’ records the life of Arthur Hallett, a 96-year-old violinist living alone on the coast of Suffolk. In this story Philip Norman enlarges upon the idea of music as a redemptive force in a soiled world. Hallett is non-political, unworldly, curiously disengaged from life. His wife ...

When Demigods Walked the Earth

T.P. Wiseman: Roman Myth, Roman History, 18 October 2007

Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History 
by Denis Feeney.
California, 372 pp., £18.95, June 2007, 978 0 520 25119 9
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... Troy and the composition of the Homeric epics, or between the supposed post-Roman context of King Arthur and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. In each of these three cases, serious scholars still try to make the legend fit the archaeology and turn it into history. See, for instance, Joachim Latacz’s Troia und Homer ...

At the British Library

Katherine Rundell: Harry Potter, 14 December 2017

... An ignoble plot-engine, you could say, though one that has been deployed by narratives from King Arthur to Star Wars. Freud called it the ‘family romance’. Stylistically, the books sprawl; Rowling’s prose is laden with adverbs and adjectives, and on any one page characters might speak ‘sharply’, ‘curiously’, ‘impatiently’ and ...

Can you spot the source?

Wendy Doniger, 17 February 2000

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban 
by J.K. Rowling.
Bloomsbury, 317 pp., £10.99, July 1999, 0 7475 4215 5
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... is poor in the Muggle world (his glasses are mended with tape), though he has secret deposits of gold in the magic world, is taunted by the rich, snobbish, cowardly, cruel Malfoy, who is backed by his powerful, manipulative father and talks a lot of proto-Nazi drivel about pure blood. But the true epoch of Hogwarts is medieval: it teaches things like ...

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