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Positively Spaced Out

Rosemary Hill: ‘The Building of England’, 6 September 2001

The Buildings of England: A Celebration Compiled to Mark 50 Years of the Pevsner Architectural Guides 
edited by Simon Bradley and Bridget Cherry.
Penguin Collectors’ Society, 128 pp., £9.99, July 2001, 0 9527401 3 3
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... only one or two bees per bonnet. The Pevsnerian approach was different.In a witty essay, Michael Taylor, who drove Pevsner round Warwickshire, recalls the experience as stimulating and slightly nightmarish, ‘like viewing a video of a thousand years … of history … fast-forwarded’. Pevsner ‘robbed the word “specialist” of its meaning by ...

Novel and Naughty

Blair Worden: Parliament and the People, 26 September 2019

Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War 
by David Como.
Oxford, 457 pp., £85, July 2018, 978 0 19 954191 1
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The Common Freedom of the People: John Lilburne and the English Revolution 
by Michael Braddick.
Oxford, 391 pp., £25, August 2018, 978 0 19 880323 2
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... In​ 1972, during the era of student revolt, the Marxist historian Christopher Hill wooed its participants in his book The World Turned Upside Down. It explored the mid-17th century, a ‘period of glorious flux and intellectual excitement’, when the nation’s institutions broke down and Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of a Digger commune, declared ‘the old world’ to be ‘running up like parchment in the fire ...

Semi-Happy

Michael Wood, 22 February 1996

James Whale: A Biography 
by Mark Gatiss.
Cassell, 182 pp., £12.99, July 1995, 0 304 32861 8
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... own. Certainly when Dwight Frye, as Frankenstein’s crippled assistant Fritz, scuttles off down a hill, doubled over his very short walking-stick, it’s hard not to think of Marty Feldman and Gene Hackman and to murmur ‘Walk this way.’ The acting-style of the straight – that is, human – characters in Frankenstein as in other Thirties films seems to ...

Coats of Every Cut

Michael Mason, 9 June 1994

Robert Surtees and Early Victorian Society 
by Norman Gash.
Oxford, 407 pp., £40, September 1993, 0 19 820429 9
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... a hang-glider or a flight with Superman, with ‘hounds, horses and men, swinging away down the hill like a bundle of clock pendulums into the vale below’. The image of the hunt as a set of swinging pendulums was used by Surtees in two novels. He relished similes, and coined one of the best metaphors in Victorian fiction when he wrote of ‘coveys of ...

Diary

Tom Paulin: Summer in Donegal, 16 September 1999

... in the estuary below, but the fact it’s not circular, the way it’s set into the lee of the hill, makes me think it must be an old stone cabin, how old I don’t know, but it would have been inhabited by Gaelic speakers who cut hay on the two hidden meadows further up the hill, or grew potatoes or oats on them. It’s ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Parasite’, 6 February 2020

... and still postponing, the possibility.When it’s time for his job interview he walks up a hill to an architect-designed house and, once through the garden gate, up a long set of steps to the door. The theme of social ascent, or social difference as a landscape, could hardly be more obvious, but we are beginning to get the movie’s idea: not to avoid ...

Jokes

Donald Davie, 11 June 1992

In the Circumstances: About Poems and Poets 
by Peter Robinson.
Oxford, 260 pp., £35, May 1992, 0 19 811248 3
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... there was always something odd about Peter Robinson’s being the editor, in 1985, of Geoffrey Hill: Essays on His Work, from the Open University Press. Robinson’s sensibility, particularly as one had encountered it in his poems, pointed away from the aloofness of Hill’s attitude to his public, and away from ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’, 4 July 2019

... has to come back for another, and will in any case make another movie after this one: The Lavender Hill Mob, for example, or The Man in the White Suit, both released in 1951? It’s not that the deaths don’t work at the level of narrative, or that Guinness’s renderings of the various D’Ascoynes – at one point they appear together at a funeral – are ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Rebecca’, 20 July 2006

Rebecca 
directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
June 2006
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... now showing in a brand-new, sharp-focus print at the National Film Theatre and the Screen on the Hill, was a David O. Selznick film, ‘a picturisation’ as the title credits have it, of a very successful novel. ‘We bought Rebecca,’ Selznick wrote in a memo objecting strenuously to a first draft of the screenplay, ‘and we intend to make ...

One’s Self-Washed Drawers

Rosemary Hill: Ida John, 29 June 2017

The Good Bohemian: The Letters of Ida John 
edited by Rebecca John and Michael Holroyd.
Bloomsbury, 352 pp., £25, May 2017, 978 1 4088 7362 5
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... to keep a tight rein on her three daughters. Adaline’s moral code was worked out in what Michael Holroyd in his introduction memorably terms the ‘moral gymnasium’ of the last Victorian decades. He characterises it, too harshly, as a culture of ‘conceit and condemnation … complacency and fear of change’, but it was a period when conventions ...

You Know Who You Are

Colin Kidd: About Last Year, 25 January 2018

Fall Out: A Year Of Political Mayhem 
by Tim Shipman.
William Collins, 559 pp., £25, November 2017, 978 0 00 826438 3
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... Jeremy Corbyn, however maladroit and out of step with the party’s rebranding since the era of Michael Foot, is the darling of the growing Labour membership, and that his performance in the general election of 2017 vastly exceeded the party’s expectations. For all that the Labour Party has tried to exploit Remainer discontent with the May government’s ...

Snobs v. Herbivores

Colin Kidd: Non-Vanilla One-Nation Conservatism, 7 May 2020

Remaking One Nation: The Future of Conservatism 
by Nick Timothy.
Polity, 275 pp., £20, March 2020, 978 1 5095 3917 8
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... less run by May and her two main advisers: Timothy, the supposedly visionary strategist, and Fiona Hill, who was more street-smart and politically savvy.Everything fell apart on election night, when Hill and Timothy became scapegoats for the loss of the slim majority May inherited from David Cameron. But the real surprise ...

Downland Maniacs

Michael Mason, 5 October 1995

The Village that Died for England 
by Patrick Wright.
Cape, 420 pp., £17.99, March 1995, 0 224 03886 9
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... through various bureaucratic and Parliamentary sleights-of-hand, goes back to 1916, when Bindon Hill became the testing-ground of the newly created Tank Corps. Even at that date another vision, or set of visions, of the area was already in place: through the pseudo-archaeological ‘downland’ mania of H.J. Massingham, the neo-paganism of Llewellyn Powys ...

Where Romulus Stood

Michael Kulikowski: Roman Town-Planning, 16 November 2017

The Shape of the Roman Order: The Republic and Its Spaces 
by Daniel J. Gargola.
North Carolina, 320 pp., £47.95, March 2017, 978 1 4696 3182 0
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The Atlas of Ancient Rome: Biography and Portraits of the City 
edited by Andrea Carandini, translated by Andrew Campbell Halavais.
Princeton, 1280 pp., £148.95, February 2017, 978 0 691 16347 5
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... foundation was thought to have begun from a point on the Arx (one of two peaks of the Capitoline Hill, along with the Capitolium) and to have looked off south-southeast – the usual augural orientation – down the Via Sacra. When the Roman citizenry was divided into 35 tribes – to organise, among other things, voting in one of the popular assemblies ...

My Old, Sweet, Darling Mob

Iain Sinclair: Michael Moorcock, 30 November 2000

King of the City 
by Michael Moorcock.
Scribner, 421 pp., £9.99, May 2000, 0 684 86140 2
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Mother London 
by Michael Moorcock.
Scribner, 496 pp., £6.99, May 2000, 0 684 86141 0
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... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ‘the ...

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