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What a Woman!

J.L. Nelson: Joan of Arc, 19 October 2000

Joan of Arc 
by Mary Gordon.
Weidenfeld, 168 pp., £12.99, April 2000, 0 297 64568 4
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Joan of Arc: A Military Leader 
by Kelly DeVries.
Sutton, 242 pp., £20, November 1999, 0 7509 1805 5
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The Interrogation of Joan of Arc 
by Karen Sullivan.
Minnesota, 208 pp., £30, November 1999, 0 8166 3267 7
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... Sullivan, Gordon and DeVries all acknowledge debts, and which, for this reviewer, remains the best book on the subject. But the clarity can be deceptive. For the fact is that the record preserves not just one voice but many, and our reception is marred by interference. Sullivan starts from the premise that questions shape answers. (Marc Bloch said that a ...

The poet steamed

Iain Sinclair: Tom Raworth, 19 August 2004

Collected Poems 
by Tom Raworth.
Carcanet, 576 pp., £16.95, February 2003, 1 85754 624 5
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Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth 
edited by Nate Dorward.
The Gig, 288 pp., £15, March 2003, 0 9685294 3 7
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... in leather jackets, peddled Raworth. ‘Read Raworth and Harwood,’ they said. ‘They’re the best we have.’ And there they were, Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood, linked in a Penguin, like Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn before them, markers for a generation. So where did it all go wrong? (Not for the poets, for us.) Raworth’s first proper book, The Relation ...

Hairy Teutons

Michael Ledger-Lomas: What William Morris Wanted, 8 May 2025

William Morris: Selected Writings 
edited by Ingrid Hanson.
Oxford, 632 pp., £110, July 2024, 978 0 19 289481 6
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... from Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’. The Virgin Mary – modelled by Jane – tends to St Nicholas, who had his throat cut by the Jews before miraculously returning to life.Furnishing the Red House inspired Morris to set up the Firm (it did not become Morris and Co. until 1875, when he bought out his founding partners). It initially traded on the ...

Uncle Max

Patricia Craig, 20 December 1984

The man who was M: The Life of Maxwell Knight 
by Anthony Masters.
Blackwell, 205 pp., £9.95, November 1984, 0 631 13392 5
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Unreliable Witness: Espionage Myths of the Second World War 
by Nigel West.
Weidenfeld, 166 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 297 78481 1
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The Great Betrayal: The Untold Story of Kim Philby’s Biggest Coup 
by Nicholas Bethell.
Hodder, 214 pp., £9.95, October 1984, 0 340 35701 0
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... to see that her guests had fun, apart from good food and good beds ... ’ Masters does his best with Gwladys but she remains unreclaimable, existing merely as a detail in the disquieting persona being built up by Knight. Up until the outbreak of the Second World War, Knight was busy acquiring the notable background that gave him a certain éclat in ...

Dwarf-Basher

Michael Dobson, 8 June 1995

Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar: A Literary Biography 
by Peter Martin.
Cambridge, 298 pp., £40, April 1995, 0 521 46030 1
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... he never finished a full-scale life. (Characteristically, his 1790 edition simply reprints Nicholas Rowe’s traditional 1709 biography, with extensive exasperated footnotes proving most of it wrong.) He bequeathed both these projects to Boswell’s younger son James, who spent nine years sorting Malone’s notes to produce the massive publication now ...

Hey, Mister, you want dirty book?

Edward Said: The CIA, 30 September 1999

Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War 
by Frances Stonor Saunders.
Granta, 509 pp., £20, July 1999, 1 86207 029 6
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... even dangerously mad. Paranoid megalomania and sense of divine mission ... [Oppenheimer] turned to Nicholas Nabokoff [sic]... and said the Congress was being run ‘without love’. After he had repeated this several times, I remarked that I thought the word ‘love’ should be reserved for the relation between the sexes ... George Kennan was there and gave a ...

Raskolnikov into Pnin

Tony Wood: Betraying the People’s Will in Tsarist Russia, 4 December 2003

The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia 
by Richard Pipes.
Yale, 153 pp., £16.95, April 2003, 0 300 09848 0
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... there was a split in the revolutionary populist movement. The gradualists, who believed that the best model for an equitable future was the traditional village commune, carried out propaganda work among the peasantry. As time went by, many of them turned their attention to urban workers; some became key figures in early Russian Marxism. And then there were ...

A Common Playhouse

Charles Nicholl: The Globe Theatre, 8 January 2015

Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle That Gave Birth to the Globe 
by Chris Laoutaris.
Fig Tree, 528 pp., £20, April 2015, 978 1 905490 96 7
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... married to the all-powerful Lord Treasurer, Burghley; another sister, Anne, was the wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper. Elizabeth was thus aunt to two of Shakespeare’s most influential contemporaries, Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Francis Bacon. The Cooke sisters were a byword for intelligence and high education. Their family home at Gidea Hall, near ...

Time Lords

Anthony Grafton: In the Catacombs, 31 July 2014

Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs 
by Paul Koudounaris.
Thames and Hudson, 189 pp., £18.95, September 2013, 978 0 500 25195 9
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... of living an ancient life. We do not know whether Hugh Latimer really said to his friend Nicholas Ridley, when the two were burned at Oxford in October 1555, ‘Be of good comfort, master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ Foxe claimed that he did ...

On Trying to Be Portugal

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Zionist Terrorism, 6 August 2009

‘A Senseless, Squalid War’: Voices from Palestine 1945-48 
by Norman Rose.
Bodley Head, 278 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 0 224 07938 9
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Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War against Jewish Terrorism 1945-48 
by David Cesarani.
Heinemann, 290 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 0 434 01844 4
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... own random revenge. But the true mood of the British army was less hatred than angry frustration, best expressed by a graffiti exchange on a wall in Jerusalem described by Piers Brendon in The Decline and Fall of the British Empire (2007). Under the Zionist slogan ‘Tommy Go Home,’ one such Tommy replied: ‘I Wish I Fucking Well Could.’ These events are ...

Verie Sillie People

Keith Thomas: Bacon’s Lives, 7 February 2013

The Oxford Francis Bacon Vol. I: Early Writings 1584-96 
edited by Alan Stewart, with Harriet Knight.
Oxford, 1066 pp., £200, September 2012, 978 0 19 818313 6
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... sand in the hour-glass.’ But the lure of political advancement was too great. As the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth I’s second most important adviser, and the nephew of Lord Burghley, her chief counsellor, he had been born to the purple. But he was the youngest of five sons, and was still unprovided for financially when his father died suddenly in ...

Where do we go from here?

R.W. Johnson: In Zimbabwe, 8 May 2008

... vigorously shaking their heads even as their mission head gave his blessing to it all. But the best-laid plans . . . It is unlikely that Mbeki paid attention to the detail of the administrative changes made by his SADC underlings, but a few of these were crucial. One was an amendment to the Public Order Act which removed the need to get police permission ...

Into the Second Term

R.W. Johnson: New Labour, 5 April 2001

Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour 
by Andrew Rawnsley.
Hamish Hamilton, 434 pp., £17.99, September 2000, 0 241 14029 3
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Mandelson and the Making of New Labour 
by Donald Macintyre.
HarperCollins, 638 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 00 653062 1
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Mo Mowlam: The Biography 
by Julia Langdon.
Little, Brown, 324 pp., £16.99, September 2000, 0 316 85304 6
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Ann Widdecombe: Right from the Beginning 
by Nicholas Kochan.
Politico’s, 302 pp., September 2000, 1 902301 55 2
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The Paymaster: Geoffrey Robinson, Maxwell and New Labour 
by Tom Bower.
Simon and Schuster, 272 pp., £17.99, March 2001, 0 7432 0689 4
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The Future of Politics 
by Charles Kennedy.
HarperCollins, 235 pp., £17.99, September 2000, 0 00 710131 7
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... while the only real heavyweight now besides Blair is Gordon Brown. Parliament’s weakness is best gauged by the way the number of MPs keeps creeping up – from 615 before the war to 659 now. America, with over four times Britain’s population, manages with 435 Congressmen. That number never goes up because Congressmen have real power and even a few ...

The Cookson Story

Stefan Collini: The British Working Class, 13 December 2001

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes 
by Jonathan Rose.
Yale, 534 pp., £29.95, June 2001, 0 300 08886 8
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... and Bunyan’: namely Dickens, and here the earlier, lighter novels, such as Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist, were preferred to the darker, more complex works of the later 1850s and 1860s. Both the reading public and the supply of reading matter expanded dramatically later in the 19th century, partly fuelled by the ...

Diary

Thomas Jones: The Bomb in My Head, 5 April 2018

... this year. But Reagan’s speech – in its way as chilling as anything Trump has said – is best remembered now for his description of the leaders of the USSR as ‘the focus of evil in the modern world’ and for his warnings against ‘the aggressive impulses of an evil empire’. He introduced those final thoughts with the story of ‘a young ...

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