Modest House in the Judengasse

C.H. Sisson, 5 July 1984

Random Variables 
by Lord Rothschild.
Collins, 238 pp., £12.50, May 1984, 0 00 217334 4
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... about the lepidoptera. The second is an anecdote about Professor Stanley Gardiner and Inspector David of the Cambridge Police. The third records a moment in 1944 when Rothschild just happened to be the senior British officer in Paris and had a delicate passage with the Préfet and our ambassador Duff Cooper about the latter’s relations with Madame Louise ...

At the Musée de la Libération

Jeremy Harding: During the Occupation, 10 October 2019

... The index is on view in a chamber at the side of a magnificent crypt with a marble Star of David commemorating all six million who died in the Holocaust. The files are on loan from the state archives. A second site opened in 2012. It overlooks La Muette, a housing project in Drancy begun in the 1930s and still unfinished when it was requisitioned by ...

Yearning for Polar Seas

James Hamilton-Paterson: North, 1 September 2005

The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule 
by Joanna Kavenna.
Viking, 334 pp., £16.99, February 2005, 0 670 91395 2
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The Idea of North 
by Peter Davidson.
Reaktion, 271 pp., £16.95, January 2005, 1 86189 230 6
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... I had satisfied this naive touristic urge there was a disaster to confront. The closure of the Grand Banks cod fishery was slowly overwhelming this large island. Newfoundland’s waters had been exploited by Spanish, Portuguese and Cornish fishermen since at least the 16th century. Theirs was a hugely profitable industry that supplied the whole of Catholic ...

Music and Beyond

Hans Keller, 21 October 1982

Hanns Eisler: Political Musician 
by Albrecht Betz, translated by Bill Hopkins.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £25, June 1982, 0 521 24022 0
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Music and Political: Collected Writings 1953-81 
by Hans Werner Henze, translated by Peter Labanyi.
Faber, 286 pp., £15, July 1982, 0 571 11719 8
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Vindications: Essays on Romantic Music 
by Deryck Cooke and Bryan Magee.
Faber, 226 pp., £12.50, July 1982, 0 571 11795 3
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... is telling enough. Nor are those fractures and alienations necessarily uncommunicative. The grand illusion which, yes, alienates, estranges, both our exceptionally gifted Marxist composers from real people the reader will note without surprise. In Henze’s words, I could envisage composing becoming something that all people could do, simply by taking ...

Upward Mobility

Bruce Boucher, 31 March 1988

Venetian Villas 
by Michelangelo Muraro.
Rizzoli, 514 pp., $85, January 1987, 0 8478 0762 2
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Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550-1700 
by Zirka Zaremba Filipczak.
Princeton, 247 pp., £37.60, February 1988, 0 691 04047 8
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The Painful Birth of the Art Book 
by Francis Haskell.
Thames and Hudson, 64 pp., £5.95, February 1988, 0 500 55019 0
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... part of the century. Filipczak draws attention to the career of another upwardly-mobile painter, David Teniers II, who fashioned a variant of the gallery picture at mid-century: shells, scientific instruments and so on are jettisoned in favour of works of art placed in an environment reminiscent of a modern picture collection, a constcamer. This change of ...

The Torturer’s Apprentice

E.S. Turner, 5 October 1995

The Railway Man 
by Eric Lomax.
Cape, 278 pp., £15.99, August 1995, 0 224 04187 8
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... Overseas service, for which he volunteered, introduced him to life in commandeered luxury liners, grand hotels, special trains. Footloose in Cape Town he spied the first locomotive ever to work in the Cape Colony, a small tank engine built in Leith in 1859. From Bombay he rode 1400 miles by Frontier Mail to Rawalpindi, where he was given a bearer and a dhobi ...

More aggressive, dear!

Zachary Leader, 31 July 1997

My Aces, My Faults 
by Nick Bollettieri and Dick Schaap.
Robson, 346 pp., £17.95, June 1997, 1 86105 087 9
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... gets all the credit,’ Becker announced after winning the Australian Open in 1996, his first Grand Slam victory in five years. ‘This man is responsible,’ he later declared, ‘he gave me the will again, he gave me the motivation, he gave me his eyes.’ But when Bollettieri continued to divide his time between Becker, Mary Pierce and the ...

Nothing without a Grievance

P.D.G. Thomas: John Horne Tooke, 19 August 1999

Gentleman Radical: A Life of John Horne Tooke 1736-1812 
by Christina Bewley and David Bewley.
Tauris, 297 pp., £42, June 1998, 1 86064 344 2
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... During the 1760s, he took every opportunity to escape from his parochial duties, twice going on Grand Tours as companion to rich men’s sons. On the second occasion he went with an introduction to Wilkes, who was in exile in Paris, avoiding trial. When Wilkes returned to fight the famous Middlesex election of 1768, Horne played a key role in his ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: Hairdressing, 2 March 2000

... a social drama of heartache and struggle equal to the torments and terrors of Arthur Miller or David Mamet’s salesmen. As Zdatny explains and Long complains, hairdressers were at the bottom of a hierarchy of fashion, helpless in the face of the couturiers of the great fashion houses who kept their models’ hair short and simple so as not to distract ...

Into Extra Time

Deborah Steiner: Living too long, 23 February 2006

Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton 
by Emily Wilson.
Johns Hopkins, 289 pp., £35.50, December 2004, 0 8018 7964 7
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... or literary career barely begun, or that authors suffer from the sense of being footnotes to the grand poets of an earlier age. Wilson tells us that the precocious emperor despised the old, mocking the grey hairs on a victim’s head. With everyone in a hurry to make hay while the fierce and unpredictable imperial sun shines, images of excessively rapid ...

The Garden, the Park and the Meadow

David Runciman: After the Nation State, 6 June 2002

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History 
by Philip Bobbitt.
Allen Lane, 960 pp., £25, June 2002, 0 7139 9616 1
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Reordering the World: The Long-Term Implications of 11 September 
edited by Mark Leonard.
Foreign Policy Centre, 124 pp., £9.95, March 2002, 1 903558 10 7
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... one it had been at the outset: how to objectify personal relations in such a way as to sustain the grand collective projects on which individual security was seen to depend. Initially, in the case of the princely state, the individual whose security was at stake was simply the prince himself. Nevertheless, the solution to princely insecurity in a world of ...

So, puss, I shall know you another time

Peter Campbell, 8 December 1988

The World through Blunted Sight 
by Patrick Trevor-Roper.
Allen Lane, 207 pp., £16.95, August 1988, 0 7139 9006 6
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Visual Fact over Verbal Fiction 
by Carl Goldstein.
Cambridge, 244 pp., £40, September 1988, 0 521 34331 3
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Hockney on Photography: Conversations with Paul Joyce 
Cape, 192 pp., £25, October 1988, 0 224 02484 1Show More
Portrait of David Hockney 
by Peter Webb.
Chatto, £17.95, November 1988, 0 7011 3401 1
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... of the unease which, despite the best efforts of art historians, much 17th-century painting in the grand manner produces in modern eyes may lie in perceptual as well as in cultural embarrassment. A laconic note from David Hockney prefaces Paul Joyce’s conversations with him. It ends: ‘My photographer friends said it ...

Hate, Greed, Lust and Doom

Sean O’Faolain, 16 April 1981

William Faulkner: His Life and Work 
by David Minter.
Johns Hopkins, 325 pp., £9.50, January 1981, 0 8018 2347 1
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... worshipped at least one of its characters, the girl Candace, bluntly called the whole novel ‘a grand failure’. However, indulgence is the virtually unavoidable frailty of all scholarly biographers who live too long too closely with their subject, noting, spying, checking, watching, loving, quarrelling, confessing, agreeing for year after year; and this ...

Frisking the Bishops

Ferdinand Mount: Poor Henry, 21 September 2023

Henry III: Reform, Rebellion, Civil War, Settlement 1258-72 
by David Carpenter.
Yale, 711 pp., £30, May, 978 0 300 24805 0
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Henry III: The Rise to Power and Personal Rule 1207-58 
by David Carpenter.
Yale, 763 pp., £30, October 2021, 978 0 300 25919 3
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... Revolution. Yet he remains curiously absent from popular memory, and from the academic curriculum. David Carpenter, long-time professor of medieval history at King’s College London, remembers that his tutor at Oxford jumped straight from John to Edward I and left out Henry III altogether. During his long labours on this massive two-volume ...

Gravity’s Smoothest Dream

Matthew Bevis: A.R. Ammons, 7 March 2019

The Complete Poems 
by A.R. Ammons.
Norton, two vols, 2133 pp., £74, December 2017, 978 0 393 25489 1
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... Nashville.’ Royalties for the first year amounted to four four-cent stamps; five years later a grand total of 16 copies had been sold. Ammons had been writing poetry for nearly twenty years when his next collection, Expressions of Sea Level, came out in 1963. Then, suddenly, six volumes followed in quick succession, including a Selected Poems in ...