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The ‘R’ Word

Adam Smyth: For the Love of the Binding, 4 November 2021

Book Ownership in Stuart England 
by David Pearson.
Oxford, 352 pp., £69.99, January, 978 0 19 887012 8
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... across the title page. Wolfreston owned twelve Shakespeare quartos, including editions of Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet, as well as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and The Jew of Malta, Donne’s Poems and Mary Wroth’s Urania among many other works.She was also an enthusiastic tagger, recording not only her name but sometimes the hands through which a ...

To the Benefit of No One

Niamh Gallagher: Henry Wilson’s Assassination, 4 August 2022

Great Hatred: The Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP 
by Ronan McGreevy.
Faber, 442 pp., £20, May, 978 0 571 37280 5
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... the names of the 1220 men who had sacrificed their lives ‘in response to the call of their King and Country’. At six foot four, Wilson was an imposing figure. In 1886, on imperial service in Burma, he was attacked by local bandits, hostile to colonial rule, with a long, sharp knife used for cutting bamboo. The wound left a permanent scar over his ...

Middle-Aged and Dishevelled

Rebecca Solnit: Endangered Species?, 23 March 2006

In the Company of Crows and Ravens 
by John Marzluff and Tony Angell.
Yale, 384 pp., £18.95, October 2005, 0 300 10076 0
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... numbers, the ravens may be a worse danger still. The birds have become what the wildlife biologist Michael Soule calls a ‘subsidised species’, meaning that they have a stable food source in garbage, as house-cats preying on songbirds do in cat food. Urban garbage dumps around the edges of the deep desert have encouraged a population explosion among ...

Too Glorious for Words

Bernard Porter: Lawrence in Arabia, 3 April 2014

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East 
by Scott Anderson.
Atlantic, 592 pp., £25, March 2014, 978 1 78239 199 9
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... mess, muddle and brutalising effects. Anderson’s day job clearly hasn’t made him a militarist. Michael Gove would hate his take on the First World War: he calls the August 1914 celebrations in London ‘a death dance performed by gullible primitives’. The other local actors Anderson brings into the picture perform two related functions: taking some of ...

Going Against

Frank Kermode: Is There a Late Style?, 5 October 2006

On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain 
by Edward Said.
Bloomsbury, 176 pp., £16.99, April 2006, 9780747583653
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Late Thoughts: Reflections on Artists and Composers at Work 
edited by Karen Painter and Thomas Crow.
Getty, 235 pp., $40, August 2006, 0 89236 813 6
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... to other cases. Said’s book consists of lectures and other scattered pieces, deftly assembled by Michael Wood, and not all bearing directly on the topic, though it is always near at hand. The most surprising contribution is an essay on Richard Strauss, who certainly had spent a long life studying ‘the possibilities’. He set some well-known stylistic ...

Multiple Kingdoms

Linda Colley: The origins of the British Empire, 19 July 2001

The Ideological Origins of the British Empire 
by David Armitage.
Cambridge, 239 pp., £35, September 2000, 0 521 59081 7
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... ideas, patterns of consumerism, trade networks, secular culture, war efforts, as well as a king, with the people across the Atlantic. Consequently, Colonial American historians have long taken it for granted (as British historians rarely have) that their studies should have an Atlanticist scope, embracing aspects of Britain’s past as well as their ...

So Caucasian

Emily Wilson: ZZ Packer, 1 April 2004

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere 
by ZZ Packer.
Canongate, 238 pp., £9.99, February 2004, 1 84195 478 0
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... group. Everyone laughs at naive Janice, who says in her hokey country accent: ‘I love me some Michael Jackson.’ Even lower down the social scale is Daphne, the poor child of a cleaning woman. She hardly ever speaks, but once wrote a prize-winning poem containing the lines: ‘You are my father, the veteran/When you cry in the dark/It rains and rains and ...

Attila the Hus

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 4 November 1982

Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley 1896-1933 
by Nicholas Mosley.
Secker, 274 pp., £8.95, October 1982, 0 436 28849 4
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... youngest MP in the House. He was then a Tory. Cimmie had wanted a small, quiet wedding, but the King and Queen were present, as were the King and Queen of the Belgians, who were flown across the Channel in two two-seater aeroplanes for the occasion. The marriage lasted 13 years and there were three children – Nicholas ...

Forget the Dylai Lama

Thomas Jones: Bob Dylan, 6 November 2003

Dylan's Visions of Sin 
by Christopher Ricks.
Viking, 517 pp., £25, October 2003, 9780670801336
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... is the new sound – the song is the first on Highway 61 Revisited – of Dylan’s expanded band: Michael Bloomfield’s taut guitar-playing, the easy-going piano, the optimistic warble of the Hammond organ. But Ricks doesn’t write about any of that: instead, he writes about Larkin (‘Home is so sad’). This comes as less of a shock than perhaps it ...

Memories of Frank Kermode

Stefan Collini, Karl Miller, Adam Phillips, Jacqueline Rose, James Wood, Michael Wood and Wynne Godley, 23 September 2010

... in a sermon, learned, lucid, by no means arcane, one of his finest things, which was delivered in King’s College Chapel on 11 May 1986. The passage reads: God’s silent searching flight, When my Lord’s head is fill’d with dew, and all His locks are wet with the clear drops of night; His still, soft call; His knocking-time; the soul’s dumb ...

The Monster Plot

Thomas Powers: James Angleton, Spymaster, 10 May 2018

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton 
by Jefferson Morley.
Scribe, 336 pp., £20, December 2017, 978 1 911344 73 5
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... Gown (1987), which describes his introduction to counterintelligence in London during the war, and Michael Holzman’s James Jesus Angleton: The CIA and the Craft of Counterintelligence (2008). But Angleton laid out on the page is nothing like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for ...

Hey Big Spender

Donald MacKenzie: What Your Smartphone Knows About You, 15 August 2024

... two hundred million still do, according to the game’s makers, the Anglo-Swedish games studio King. Those players aren’t going to exhaust the game’s challenges any time soon: Candy Crush has more than fifteen thousand levels, and dozens more are added every week.Candy Crush is big business. By 2023, it had earned more than $20 billion in total for ...
... was too liberal-minded for that, which meant he ran the Party well’); the future Party leader, Michael Harmel (‘the brains of the Party and one of the laziest men I ever knew. Both things came from his private income – he didn’t have to work so he just sat around and read books’); and Ruth First (‘a tremendously able woman but very arrogant ...

Swanker

Ronald Bryden, 10 December 1987

The Life of Kenneth Tynan 
by Kathleen Tynan.
Weidenfeld, 407 pp., £16.95, September 1987, 9780297790822
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... wife and four older children in Warrington, where he had served six terms as mayor. So Ken went to King Edward’s School, got a better education than he would have found at most boarding-schools, grew up heterosexual and entered Magdalen, Oxford in 1945 on a demyship of £50 a year. His spending allowance, ten pounds a week, was larger than that of most ...

Newtopia

Christopher Hitchens, 24 August 1995

To Renew America 
by Newt Gingrich.
HarperCollins, 260 pp., £18, July 1995, 9780060173364
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... a draft deferment every bit as opportunist as Clinton’s. He also supported the Martin Luther King movement, and paid generous tribute to it (criticising his own party for its abstention and opposition) in his inaugural address as Speaker. Furthermore, he has admitted to smoking dope, to divorcing his first wife while she was in the recovery room after a ...

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