At the Hayward

Marina Warner: Tracey Emin, 25 August 2011

... Woolf), ventriloquists and counterfeiters (‘Mark Rutherford’, the pseudonym used by William Hale White, and, you could add, Edward FitzGerald), foreshadow current developments in autofiction, in which memory acts become, as the filmmaker Chris Marker put it, ‘the lining of forgetting’, where ‘lining’ renders the French doublure, with an ...

Never Seen a Violet

Dinah Birch: Victorian men and girls, 6 September 2001

Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman 
by Catherine Robson.
Princeton, 250 pp., £19.95, June 2001, 0 691 00422 6
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... was agreed that England’s competitive advantage could not be allowed to depend on their labour. William Cobbett spoke with an ironic edge in the House of Commons in 1833: A most surprising discovery has been made, namely, that all our greatness and prosperity, that our superiority over other nations, is owing to 300,000 little girls in Lancashire. We had ...

Moderns and Masons

Peter Burke, 2 April 1981

The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century 
by Joseph Rykwert.
M.I.T., 585 pp., £27.50, September 1980, 0 262 18090 1
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... divine exemplar for all building’. Newton saw the drawings of the Temple made by the antiquarian William Stukeley. Where Villalpando’s Temple looks like the Escorial, Stukeley’s resembles Hawksmoor’s Christchurch Spitalfields. Another enthusiast for the Temple was Fischer von Erlach, whose Karlskirche in Vienna follows this exemplar. Stukeley was a ...

Rejoicings in a Dug-Out

Peter Howarth: Cecil, Ada and G.K., 15 December 2022

The Sins of G.K. Chesterton 
by Richard Ingrams.
Harbour, 292 pp., £20, August 2021, 978 1 905128 33 4
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... detective’s talent for noticing the deceptiveness of the taken-for-granted in his defences of Christian belief in a secular world. Some people began to wonder if there were something saintly about him.After his death in 1936, Chesterton was neglected by English departments more interested in The Waste Land than in rollicking ballads of the English ...

The Sound of Cracking

Pankaj Mishra: ‘The Age of the Crisis of Man’, 27 August 2015

The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-73 
by Mark Greif.
Princeton, 434 pp., £19.95, January 2015, 978 0 691 14639 3
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Moral Agents: Eight 20th-Century American Writers 
by Edward Mendelson.
New York Review, 216 pp., £12.99, May 2015, 978 1 59017 776 1
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... the 19th century’s certainties – primary among them Western universalism, the old Jewish-Christian claim to be able to create a life of universal validity now transposed into secular millenarianism – had been undermined by historical calamities and blistering critiques from across the ideological spectrum. Lévi-Strauss and Sartre both concluded ...

Knife, Stone, Paper

Stephen Sedley: Law Lords, 1 July 2021

English Law under Two Elizabeths: The Late Tudor Legal World and the Present 
by John Baker.
Cambridge, 222 pp., £22.99, January, 978 1 108 94732 9
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The Constitutional Balance 
by John Laws.
Hart, 144 pp., £30, January, 978 1 5099 3545 1
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... he dealt with an application for permission to appeal against a finding that the dismissal of a Christian relationship counsellor for refusing to help same-sex couples did not constitute religious discrimination. The application included a request that a special court should sit to hear the appeal, consisting of judges with ‘a proven sensitivity and ...

Liquor on Sundays

Anthony Grafton: The Week that Was, 17 November 2022

The Week: A History of the Unnatural Rhythms that Made Us Who We Are 
by David M. Henkin.
Yale, 264 pp., £20, January, 978 0 300 25732 8
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... which can’t be divided evenly by seven. In both, the Sun yields to the Moon at the climax of the Christian year. Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon. But the lunar month and year are no more divisible by seven than the solar year. The seven days of Creation, on the last of which God rested, were not a clear model for ...

Homage to Tyndale

J.B. Trapp, 17 December 1992

Tyndale’s New Testament 
edited by David Daniell.
Yale, 429 pp., £18.95, September 1989, 0 300 04419 4
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Tyndale’s Old Testament, being the Pentateuch of 1530, Joshua to II Chronicles of 1537 and Jonah 
edited by David Daniell.
Yale, 643 pp., £25, October 1992, 0 300 05211 1
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... after he had published the base text for his notion of a philosophy of Christ, the Manual of a Christian Soldier), gave it a new dimension along with increased circulation. The way to a reform of religion and morals, he was clear, was imitation of the manners and customs of the primitive church, where all was simplicity and sincerity, not pomposity and ...

Every one values Mr Pope

James Winn, 16 December 1993

Alexander Pope: A Critical Edition 
edited by Pat Rogers.
Oxford, 706 pp., £11.95, July 1993, 0 19 281346 3
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Essays on Pope 
by Pat Rogers.
Cambridge, 273 pp., £30, September 1993, 0 521 41869 0
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... essays. Observations of the gardens at Chatsworth, culled from a forgotten book by the antiquarian William Stukeley and an unpublished diary by Sir John Percival, make possible a significant contribution to the debate about the models for Timon’s villa in the Epistle to Burlington. Patient research into Chancery records yields an amusing note on ‘The Case ...

Allendistas

D.A.N. Jones, 5 November 1992

Death in Chile: A Memoir and a Journey 
by Tony Gould.
Picador, 277 pp., £15.99, July 1992, 0 330 32271 0
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Some write to the future 
by Ariel Dorfman, translated by George Shivers and Ariel Dorfman.
Duke, 271 pp., £10.95, May 1992, 0 8223 1269 7
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... the end of Gould’s Cambridge period, in 1964, Eduardo Frei won the Presidential election for the Christian Democrats in Chile: this decent, respectable election was too boring for Huneeus, who had supported the left-wing Salvador Allende. Huneeus wrote to Gould: ‘Our candidate lost, as you may have learnt in one of your few moments of ...

The Road to Chandrapore

Eric Stokes, 17 April 1980

Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics 
by Kenneth Ballhatchet.
Weidenfeld, 199 pp., £9.50, January 1980, 0 297 77646 0
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Queen Victoria’s Maharajah: Duleep Singh 1838-1898 
by Michael Alexander and Sushila Anand.
Weidenfeld, 326 pp., £9.95, February 1980, 0 297 77656 8
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... the European force on whose bayonets British rule in the last resort depended. In the 1830s Lord William Bentinck’s economy-conscious administration and a more censorious European opinion stirred by Evangelical religion led to the discontinuance of many lock hospitals and to an attack on what Bishop Daniel Wilson called the ‘licensed brothels’ which ...

Hello to All That

Martin Seymour-Smith, 9 October 1986

Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic 1895-1926 
by Richard Perceval Graves.
Weidenfeld, 387 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 297 78943 0
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... 1931 and the death of Alfred Perceval. As Richard Perceval Graves remarks, John was ‘a devout Christian, a loving father, and a most honourable, unselfish man’. The difficulties begin here. This author, who has written accounts of the lives of T.E. Lawrence, Housman and the Powys brothers, closely resembles his father. But Robert Graves did not at all ...

Don’t do what Allende did

Greg Grandin: Allende, 19 July 2012

Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War 
by Tanya Harmer.
North Carolina, 375 pp., £38.95, October 2011, 978 0 8078 3495 4
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... Socialist and Communist Parties, social democrats and a leftist faction that had split from the Christian Democrats, he had more than a million. The alliance was called Popular Unity, echoing the earlier Popular Front, but Allende made it clear that what Chileans meant by democracy had changed since the 1930s: ‘We do not want a repetition of the Popular ...

Resurrecting the Tudors

John Pemble: James Anthony Froude, 23 May 2013

James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet 
by Ciaran Brady.
Oxford, 500 pp., £45, May 2013, 978 0 19 966803 8
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... of 1688 but the Reformation. The medieval Catholic Church had been truly and beautifully Christian, but by the late 15th century it was rotten. It had transformed the religion of Christ into the Christian religion and this was destroying the idyll of merry England. Turpitude was rife behind a thicket of ...

The Unpredictable Cactus

Emily Witt: Mescaline, 2 January 2020

Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic 
by Mike Jay.
Yale, 297 pp., £18.99, May 2019, 978 0 300 23107 6
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... by a healer, and to the Spanish the ritual bore a suspicious and confusing resemblance to the Christian Eucharist. According to what survived of the pre-conquest written record, the Nahua believed peyote came from the ‘House of the Sun’, a place the psychoactive plants made it possible to visit.‘It was a bright world of radiant colour,’ Jay ...