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How to Be Tudor

Hilary Mantel: Can a King Have Friends?, 17 March 2016

Charles Brandon: Henry VIII’s Closest Friend 
by Steven Gunn.
Amberley, 304 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 1 4456 4184 3
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... war; his personal interest was in peace, at least with the French, because then his income flowed freely. With his wife, he necessarily spent time in his own territories, but there was always the danger of being supplanted by new favourites, and the king tended to seek the company of younger men, the new tournament stars. A courtier had to be vigilant and he ...

Renters v. Rentiers

Jack Shenker, 8 May 2025

Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis 
by Nick Bano.
Verso, 232 pp., £15.99, April, 978 1 80429 833 6
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... is the closest thing we have to a national industry. King Charles is a private landlord. John Lewis is a private landlord. The homelessness charity St Mungo’s is a private landlord. So are many MPs and, as Ruby found out, doctors.Landlordism has proliferated in tandem with soaring land and property values. A fifth of British homes are currently ...

Operation Backfire

Francis Spufford: Britain’s space programme, 28 October 1999

... ends. All the British rocketmen talk of the pleasure of working with very high levels of energy. John Scott-Scott was a hydrodynamicist at Armstrong Siddeley Rocket Motors at Ansty near Rugby, who worked on conventional turbine engines before switching to rockets. He invented a turbo-pump incorporating a floating ‘cavitation bubble’ which could turn at ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... round number pulled out of a hat. In the New York Times the PR spokesman identified himself as ‘John Barron’. In the Associated Press story the same publicity man called himself ‘Donald Baron’ and was quoted as saying that ‘the merit of these stones was not great enough to save them.’ Both ‘John’ and ...

The Olympics Scam

Iain Sinclair: The Razing of East London, 19 June 2008

... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...

Moderation or Death

Christopher Hitchens: Isaiah Berlin, 26 November 1998

Isaiah Berlin: A Life 
by Michael Ignatieff.
Chatto, 386 pp., £20, October 1998, 0 7011 6325 9
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The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin 
by György Dalos.
Murray, 250 pp., £17.95, September 2002, 0 7195 5476 4
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... making a patronising show of it, and stayed to tell a good story about Christopher Hill and John Sparrow, and of how he’d been the unwitting agent of a quarrel between them, while ignoring an ambitious and possessive American professor who kept yelling ‘Eye-zay-ah! Eye-zay-ah!’ from across the room. (‘Yes,’ he murmured at the conclusion of the ...

Roaming the Greenwood

Colm Tóibín: A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition by Gregory Woods, 21 January 1999

A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition 
by Gregory Woods.
Yale, 448 pp., £24.95, February 1998, 0 300 07201 5
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... Alcibiades. Then let his grace, whose youth is flexible, And promiseth as much as we can wish, Freely enjoy that vain light-headed earl, For riper years will wean him from such toys. ‘The sight of the instrument,’ Harry Levin wrote, referring to the red-hot spit which is shoved up Edward’s arse at the end of the play, ‘would have been enough to ...

The Last Witness

Colm Tóibín: The career of James Baldwin, 20 September 2001

... or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, ‘a high-faggot style’, or did it originate, as John Edgar Wideman claimed, from a mixture of the King James Bible and African American speech? Was it full of the clarity, eloquence and intelligence that Chinua Achebe suggested? And was Baldwin’s involvement with the Civil Rights Movement a cautionary tale ...

Emily of Fire & Violence

Paul Keegan: Eliot’s Letters, 22 October 2020

... When​ T.S. Eliot asked John Hayward in February 1938 to act as his literary executor (‘in case some unexpected calamity cuts me down like a flower’), he told him to prevent publication of his literary remains – including ‘any letters at all of any intimacy to anybody’. ‘In fact,’ he added, ‘I have a mania for posthumous privacy ...

The Uninvited

Jeremy Harding: At The Rich Man’s Gate, 3 February 2000

... commissioned a comprehensive survey of refugee movements. To superintend the project, it appointed John Hope Simpson, a persuasive and highly energetic man who had worked in India and Palestine, directed National Food Relief policy in China and served as vice-president of the Refugee Settlement Commission in Athens. Simpson’s mainstay in France was ...

Getting Rich

Pankaj Mishra: In Shanghai, 30 November 2006

... not seem conventionally left-wing and draw on a broad range of thinkers on political economy – John Stuart Mill, Braudel, Karl Polanyi, Immanuel Wallerstein, Joseph Stiglitz – in their critique of the neo-liberal model of growth. In recent years, Cui’s articles in Dushu, a monthly journal of ideas co-edited by Wang Hui, the New Left author of a history ...

Is this the end of the American century?

Adam Tooze: America Pivots, 4 April 2019

... on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only ...

Don’t break that fiddle

Tobias Gregory: Eclectic Imitators, 19 November 2020

Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity 
by Colin Burrow.
Oxford, 470 pp., £36.99, May 2019, 978 0 19 883808 1
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How the Classics Made Shakespeare 
by Jonathan Bate.
Princeton, 361 pp., £15.99, October 2020, 978 0 691 21014 8
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... 18th century saw a shift from imitation as a practice to ‘imitations’, which could mean freely adaptive works such as Pope’s Imitations of Horace, satirical poems in the Horatian tradition about 1730s England. Or ‘imitations’ could refer to particular instances of verbal correspondence, what we now call ‘allusions’, such as Milton’s ...
... or of prison routine are the best records of these phenomena we have from his period. Similarly, John Rechy is a lyric novelist akin to the Beats, but his City of Night remains the best study of the gay underworld of the late Fifties in America. Nor is this function of gay fiction by any means exhausted. To take at random just three books that I’ve read ...

Who to Be

Colm Tóibín: Beckett’s Letters, 6 August 2009

The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-40 
edited by Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck.
Cambridge, 782 pp., £30, February 2009, 978 0 521 86793 1
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... withdrawn courtesy, that he subsequently became. His loathing for the poet Austin Clarke emerges freely in these letters. He openly satirised him in his novel Murphy as Austin Ticklepenny and attacked his work in an essay for the Bookman in 1934. Nor was he known for his personal courtesy in the years before he left Dublin. When one night the playwright ...

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