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Rambling

James Wood: Speaking our Minds, 1 June 2000

... is going to a new school. He has hitched a ride with two men, a wool trader named Kuzmichov, and a priest called Father Christopher. At the beginning of the journey, as they leave the boy’s home village, they pass the cemetery in which his father and grandmother are buried: From behind the wall cheerful white crosses and ...

Belgravia Cockney

Christopher Tayler: On being a le Carré bore, 25 January 2007

The Mission Song 
by John le Carré.
Hodder, 339 pp., £17.99, September 2006, 9780340921968
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... Salvo, the narrator of The Mission Song, is the 28-year-old son of a Congolese woman and an Irish priest. Brought up in Catholic orphanages in Kivu and – for complicated reasons – Sussex, he has degrees from SOAS and Edinburgh and an unfaithful English wife who works as a journalist. At the beginning of the story, he has a freelance role as a ‘top ...

Self-Effacers

John Lanchester, 24 May 1990

Chicago Loop 
by Paul Theroux.
Hamish Hamilton, 183 pp., £12.99, April 1990, 0 241 12949 4
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Lies of Silence 
by Brian Moore.
Bloomsbury, 194 pp., £12.99, April 1990, 0 7475 0610 8
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Amongst Women 
by John McGahern.
Faber, 184 pp., £12.99, May 1990, 0 571 14284 2
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The Condition of Ice 
by Christopher Burns.
Secker, 170 pp., £12.95, April 1990, 0 436 19989 0
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... not to tell the media about what has happened, and suddenly she and Dillon are in danger. A creepy priest comes to warn Dillon against giving evidence, but Dillon gives him a flea in his ear and leaves for England with Andrea. Fate, however, is not far behind ... Lies of Silence is a thriller – plot-centred, character-centred, not distractingly ...

Saucy to Princes

Gerald Hammond: The Bible, 25 July 2002

The Book: A History of the Bible 
by Christopher de Hamel.
Phaidon, 352 pp., £24.95, September 2001, 0 7148 3774 1
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The Wycliffe New Testament 1388 
edited by W.R. Cooper.
British Library, 528 pp., £20, May 2002, 0 7123 4728 3
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... was any different. There, in its portable transparent box, was the earliest relic of the Book. In Christopher de Hamel’s history, the Rylands fragment is reproduced life-size in the final chapter: life-size but not, to my faulty memory at least, very true to its actual appearance. In the reproduction the papyrus is a kind of drab olive; in the Rylands, with ...

The Bergoglio Smile

Colm Tóibín: The Francis Papacy, 21 January 2021

... in 1985.Of all those who gave evidence, one figure really stands out. Christian von Wernich was a priest and police chaplain. Later, in 2006, he would be charged with murder and kidnapping as part of the military repression, and in 2007 he would be sentenced to life imprisonment. But appearing before the court in 1985, he was a ...

Scribblers and Assassins

Charles Nicholl: The Crimes of Thomas Drury, 31 October 2002

... On 18 May 1593 a warrant was issued to ‘apprehend’ Christopher Marlowe, and on 20 May he was brought before the Privy Council for questioning. He was not detained, but was ordered to report to the Council daily until ‘licensed to the contrary’. This state of precarious liberty lasted only until 30 May, when he was fatally stabbed by a man named Ingram Frizer, though whether his sudden death was a matter of coincidence or conspiracy remains unresolved ...

Short is sweet

Christopher Ricks, 3 February 1983

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs 
edited by J.A. Simpson.
Oxford, 256 pp., £7.95, October 1982, 0 19 866131 2
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A World of Proverbs 
by Patricia Houghton.
Blandford, 152 pp., £5.95, September 1981, 0 7137 1114 0
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... is the double sense of ‘Once a ____, always a ____’ (knave, bishop, whore, thief, lady, patsy, priest ...). Sometimes this means that no X can ever change, for better or for worse; sometimes that when an X does change, nobody believes it. Both are good things to believe, and the proverb’s unduplicitous doubleness ministers to social vigilance, not to ...

Who whom?

Christopher Ricks, 6 June 1985

The English Language Today 
edited by Sidney Greenbaum.
Pergamon, 345 pp., £12.50, December 1984, 0 08 031078 8
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The English Language 
by Robert Burchfield.
Oxford, 194 pp., £9.50, January 1985, 9780192191731
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A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language 
by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik.
Longman, 1779 pp., £39.50, May 1985, 0 582 51734 6
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Words 
by John Silverlight.
Macmillan, 107 pp., £17.50, May 1985, 9780333380109
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Faux Amis and Key Words: A Dictionary-Guide to French Language, Culture and Society through Lookalikes and Confusables 
by Philip Thody, Howard Evans and Gwilym Rees.
Athlone, 224 pp., £16, February 1985, 0 485 11243 4
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Puns 
by Walter Redfern.
Blackwell, 234 pp., £14.95, October 1984, 0 631 13793 9
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Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism 
edited by D.J. Enright.
Oxford, 222 pp., £9.95, April 1985, 0 19 212236 3
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... polite revenge of the clerisy upon the democratic egalitarianism to which it pays lip service. New priest does well to accuse old presbyter of authoritarianism.Averting their ears from any possibility of hearing a tu quoque, the radicals insist that it is their enemies who constitute a priesthood: ‘the death-of-language writers are self-ordained ...

A Shocking Story

Christopher Kelly: Julian the Apostate, 21 February 2019

The Last Pagan Emperor: Julian the Apostate and the War against Christianity 
by H.C. Teitler.
Oxford, 271 pp., £22.99, April 2017, 978 0 19 062650 1
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... I inquired what the city intended to sacrifice in celebration of the annual feast of the god, the priest said: ‘As things stand the city has made no preparations … but I have brought with me from my own house a goose.’ Whatever the ritual preferences of Julian’s fellow believers (perhaps they chose to pray or burn incense or pour ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Where was I in 1987?, 10 December 1987

... are looking along Arlington Road when it comes stealing through the market itself. It is led by a priest in a cape and an undertaker bearing a heavy rolled umbrella that he holds in front of him like a staff of office or a ceremonial cross. The procession is so silent and unexpected that it scarcely disturbs people doing their normal shopping, the queue at ...

Royalties

John Sutherland, 14 June 1990

CounterBlasts No 10. The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favourite Fetish 
by Christopher Hitchens.
Chatto, 42 pp., £2.99, January 1990, 0 7011 3555 7
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The Prince 
by Celia Brayfield.
Chatto, 576 pp., £12.95, March 1990, 0 7011 3357 0
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The Maker’s Mark 
by Roy Hattersley.
Macmillan, 558 pp., £13.95, June 1990, 9780333470329
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A Time to Dance 
by Melvyn Bragg.
Hodder, 220 pp., £12.95, June 1990, 0 340 52911 3
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... Krin and Spitting Image. Their jests have served to make the institution stronger than ever. Christopher Hitchens – although he can poke fun with the best of them – offers an unjestingly rational argument for abolishing the English monarchy. He begins with a perplexed description of the country’s convulsion on learning as the lead item on the ten ...

Lost in Beauty

Michael Newton: Montgomery Clift, 7 October 2010

The Passion of Montgomery Clift 
by Amy Lawrence.
California, 333 pp., £16.95, May 2010, 978 0 520 26047 4
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... appears to suggest a reason why Clift’s character, Michael Logan, should become a Roman Catholic priest. The war had made these characters, giving them confidence, troubling them with memories. So it was perhaps that the 1950s were the decade of neurosis. For all their resistance to the ‘torn T-shirt brigade’, even older stars such as John Wayne and ...

Through Trychay’s Eyes

Patrick Collinson: Reformation and rebellion, 25 April 2002

The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village 
by Eamon Duffy.
Yale, 232 pp., £16.95, August 2001, 0 300 09185 0
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... found that even in London, it was a minority sect, at least until the early years of Elizabeth. Christopher Haigh, who describes himself as an ex-Methodist Anglican agnostic, decided that this revisionist band needed a leader, and headed into battle with a stream of publications that came to full fruition in English Reformations: Religion, Politics and ...

Sagest of Usurpers

Ian Gilmour: Cromwell since Cromwell, 21 March 2002

Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity 
by Blair Worden.
Allen Lane, 387 pp., £20, November 2001, 9780713996036
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... Protector he had behaved like a monarch. Hence his reputation suffered with both sides because, as Christopher Hill put it, he had been both Robespierre and Napoleon. With Cromwell thus effectively hors de combat, the Roundheads’ successors concentrated on rehabilitating or redesigning Edmund Ludlow. A republican, a regicide and a Puritan, Ludlow had ...

Flight of Snakes

Tessa Hadley: Emily Holmes Coleman, 7 September 2023

The Shutter of Snow 
by Emily Holmes Coleman.
Faber, 171 pp., £9.99, February, 978 0 571 37520 2
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... Coleman ‘sitting in bed wearing a fisherman’s jersey busily defacing Miss Weil’s Letter to a Priest’. It’s nice of her to make it sound as if that’s funny. ‘If you borrow Emily’s Wordsworth you will not read Wordsworth but Emily’s Wordsworth,’ Antonia White said. ‘She will fearlessly correct and alter passages. She does not read; she ...

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