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A Dreadful Drumming

Theo Tait: Ghosts, 6 June 2013

The Undiscovered Country: Journeys among the Dead 
by Carl Watkins.
Bodley Head, 318 pp., £20, January 2012, 978 1 84792 140 6Show More
A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof 
by Roger Clarke.
Particular, 360 pp., £20, November 2012, 978 1 84614 333 5Show More
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“... Demon Drummer of Tedworth excited the interest of everyone from the era’s chief ghost-hunter, Joseph Glanvill, to Christopher Wren and Charles II. A Hampshire landowner called John Mompesson imprisoned William Drury, a busker and vagrant, and confiscated his drum. Mompesson’s house was then beset by terrible knockings ...”

Europe, what Europe?

Colin Kidd: J.G.A. Pocock, 6 November 2008

The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 344 pp., £18.99, September 2005, 9780521616454Show More
Barbarism and Religion. Vol. III: The First Decline and Fall 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 527 pp., £19.99, October 2005, 0 521 67233 3Show More
Barbarism and Religion. Vol. IV: Barbarians, Savages and Empires 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £17.99, February 2008, 978 0 521 72101 1Show More
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“... of history the history of political thought has travelled since the middle of the 20th century. John Pocock is often associated with the Cambridge School, with good reason. He took his doctorate at Cambridge, where he came into contact with Laslett, and has played a leading role, alongside Skinner, in the contextualist revolution. Yet his formative ...”

Up the Garden Path

R.W. Johnson: Michael Foot, 26 April 2007

Michael Foot: A Life 
by Kenneth O. Morgan.
Harper, 568 pp., £25, March 2007, 978 0 00 717826 1Show More
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“... face an economic typhoon of unparalleled ferocity, the worst the world has seen since the 1930s. Joseph Conrad once wrote a book called Typhoon, and at the end he told people how to deal with it. He said: ‘Always facing it, Captain MacWhirr, that’s the way to get through.’ Always facing it, that’s the way we have got to solve this problem . . . I ...”

Wall of Ice

Peter Thonemann: Pattison’s Scholarship, 7 February 2008

Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don 
by H.S. Jones.
Cambridge, 285 pp., £50, June 2007, 978 0 521 87605 6Show More
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“... It was very unfair to those young men.’ John Henry Newman’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 shattered the intellectual credit of the Oxford Movement. The long struggle – first from the pulpit of the University Church of St Mary, later through the radical pages of Tracts for the Times – to state the case for the Apostolic authority of the Anglican church had ended, as the Movement’s critics had always predicted, in total surrender to Catholic dogma ...”

Artovsky Millensky

Andrew O’Hagan: The Misfit, 1 January 2009

Arthur Miller, 1915-62 
by Christopher Bigsby.
Weidenfeld, 739 pp., £30, November 2008, 978 0 297 85441 8Show More
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“... understanding of what is personal in America. Willy Loman is a grandson of Tom Sawyer, just as John Proctor is a kinsman of the upholders of the Scarlet Letter: they are each sons of the singer of himself in Walt Whitman, or of the powerful American addressee, Ishmael. Loman bears a relation to the figment and self-projection that is Jay Gatsby, as much as ...”

Cauldrons for Helmets

Barbara Newman: Crusading Women, 13 April 2023

Women and the Crusades 
by Helen J. Nicholson.
Oxford, 287 pp., £25, February, 978 0 19 880672 1Show More
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“... Historians’ estimates range from 37 per cent (Jonathan Riley-Smith) to as high as 75 per cent (John France), with illness and starvation causing more deaths than combat. Women faced the additional hazard of pregnancy, which could be life-threatening at the best of times, and, like men, they could be taken captive. Despite the romance figure of the female ...”

People shouldn’t be fat

Zachary Leader, 3 October 1996

Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu 
by Simon Callow.
Cape, 640 pp., £20, March 1995, 0 224 03852 4Show More
Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles 
by David Thomson.
Little, Brown, 460 pp., £20, September 1996, 0 316 91437 1Show More
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“... know any other.’ He was not much good at sharing either, as Howard Koch, Herman Mankiewicz, John Houseman and others discovered to their cost. ‘Orson’s concern was entirely for Orson,’ Joan Fontaine, his co-star in Jane Eyre, remembers. James G. Stewart, the veteran dubbing mixer on Citizen Kane, describes what it was like to work with ...”

Cold-Shouldered

James Wood: John Carey, 8 March 2001

Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the 20th Century’s Most Enjoyable Books 
by John Carey.
Faber, 173 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 571 20448 1Show More
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“... John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities ...”

Fielding in the dock

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1990

Henry Fielding: A Life 
by Martin Battestin and Ruthe Battestin.
Routledge, 738 pp., £29.50, October 1989, 0 415 01438 7Show More
New Essays 
by Henry Fielding, edited by Martin Battestin.
Virginia, 604 pp., $50, November 1989, 0 8139 1221 0Show More
The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding. The True Patriot, and Related Writings 
edited by W.B. Coley.
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An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, and Related Writings 
edited by Malvin Zirker.
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The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register Office 
by Henry Fielding, edited by Bertrand Goldgar.
Oxford, 446 pp., £50, December 1988, 0 19 818511 1Show More
Fielding and the Woman Question: The Novels of Henry Fielding and the Feminist Debate 1700-1750 
by Angela Smallwood.
Harvester, 230 pp., £35, March 1989, 0 7108 0639 6Show More
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“... sympathies and even antithetical to them. His first two works of prose fiction, Shamela and Joseph Andrews, were triggered by his dislike of one of the earliest English novels, Richardson’s Pamela, and both treated its author as a low vulgarian, in a manner plainly derived from the older satirists’ treatment of the dunces and Grub Street hacks. One ...”

Undesirable

Tom Paulin, 9 May 1996

T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form 
by Anthony Julius.
Cambridge, 308 pp., £30, September 1995, 0 521 47063 3Show More
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“... king. Coincidentally, Shapiro quotes from a popular postwar textbook, The Plantagenets, in which John Hooper Harvey states that the Jews engaged in a series of ‘most sinister crimes committed against Christian children, including murder (allegedly ritual) and forcible circumcision’. Harvey’s prejudices must have helped shape his interest in the ...”

De Mortuis

Christopher Driver, 28 June 1990

The Ruffian on the Stair: Reflection on Death 
edited by Rosemary Dinnage.
Viking, 291 pp., £14.99, April 1990, 0 670 82763 0Show More
Death, Ritual and Bereavement 
edited by Ralph Houlbrooke.
Routledge, 250 pp., £35, October 1990, 0 415 01165 5Show More
In the Face of Death 
by Peter Noll, translated by Hans Noll.
Viking, 254 pp., £15.99, April 1990, 0 670 80703 6Show More
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“... But if the obsequies are awkward, ‘a good death’ in the 17th-century sense, like John Evelyn’s touching description at his mother’s bedside in 1635 – now that is really difficult. One name is common to Rosemary Dinnage’s thanatological anthology of personal views about hopes and fears, and the social-historical essays edited by Ralph ...”

Human Rights and Wrongs

Alexander Cockburn, 9 May 1991

“... the correct, impartial course between unpalatable extremes. Amnesty International’s US director, John Healey, even suggested that those critics doubting the incubator story were in effect denying all Iraqi human rights abuses as disclosed by Amnesty. In fact, there was only one critic – me – and I emphasised that most of Amnesty’s other charges had ...”

On Thatcher

“... what she liked, and her own part in the Heathite reign of error only magnified her disgust. As John Ranelagh, who once worked for her at the Conservative Research Department, says, she was no intellectual. His book purports to be about the people who did her intellectual work for her, and what they undoubtedly had in common was the conviction that the ...”

At the Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh

Tom Crewe: Roger Fenton, 16 November 2017

“... photographs of wounded veterans commissioned by Queen Victoria: glimpsed only in reproduction is Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett’s stark portrayal of three amputees, two double and one single, sat together on a bed, taking up not enough space between them. Victoria commissioned this quiet image and many others like them for her personal collection (they ...”

Who has the biggest books?

Craig Clunas: Missionaries in China, 7 February 2008

Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 
by Liam Matthew Brockey.
Harvard, 496 pp., £22.95, March 2007, 978 0 674 02448 9Show More
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“... to the ear), is a crucial stage in learning Chinese – foreigners who possess one, like Li Yuese (Joseph Needham), author of Science and Civilisation in China, have a quite different status from those who do not, like George Bush or Alex Ferguson. Only an educated Chinese could have decided that Matteo Ricci would be Li Madou, that Nicolas Trigault would be ...”

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