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Dingy Quadrilaterals

Ian Gilmour: The Profumo Case, 19 October 2006

Bringing the House Down: A Family Memoir 
by David Profumo.
Murray, 291 pp., £20, September 2006, 0 7195 6608 8
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... the composer Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hammerstein) in New York, she was invited to star in The King and I and did so at Drury Lane. Profumo did not immediately gain office when Churchill won the 1951 election, but a year later he became parliamentary undersecretary at the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation. While he was still at that ministry and ...

A Walnut in Sacrifice

Nick Richardson: How to Cast a Spell, 7 November 2024

The Grimoire Encyclopedia: Volume 1 
by David Rankine.
Hadean Press, 739 pp., £39.99, April 2023, 978 1 914166 36 5
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The Grimoire Encyclopedia: Volume 2 
by David Rankine.
Hadean Press, 660 pp., £39.99, April 2023, 978 1 914166 37 2
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Art of the Grimoire 
by Owen Davies.
Yale, 256 pp., £25, October 2023, 978 0 300 27201 7
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... nominal Christians who made a great show of piety in their writing.‘Solomon, the Son of David, King of Israel, hath said that the beginning of our Key is to fear God, to adore Him, to honour Him with contrition of heart, to invoke Him in all matters which we wish to undertake, and to operate with very great devotion, for thus God will lead us in the right ...

Ogres are cool

Colin Burrow: Grimm Tales, 20 March 2025

The Brothers Grimm: A Biography 
by Ann Schmiesing.
Yale, 336 pp., £25, January, 978 0 300 22175 6
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... their jobs at Göttingen after protesting against the suspension of the constitution by the new king of Hanover, Ernst August, in 1837. After the revolution of 1848 Jacob was briefly a representative at the Frankfurt National Assembly, where he supported the establishment of a constitutional monarchy over a united Germany. But he was a liberal rather than a ...

Rainbows

Graham Coster, 12 September 1991

Paradise News 
by David Lodge.
Secker, 294 pp., £14.99, September 1991, 0 436 25668 1
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... dimple-cheeked deus ex machina Lodge pulls out, with the implacable defiance of a Blue Peter presenter exclaiming, ‘Here’s one I prepared earlier,’ as Ursula is conveniently rewarded with the discovery of a cache of immensely valuable IBM share certificates that pay for her new, improved nursing-home care (and a cool $100,000 left over to ...

Diary

Christopher Hitchens: In Washington, 7 February 1991

... of 15 January for the deadline, because it is the officially celebrated birthday of Martin Luther King and many felt that Bush either knew this and did not care or, worse still, had not noticed. But, except for a fistful of Trotskyists, all those attending the rally in Lafayette Park last weekend were complaining of the financial cost of the war and implying ...

Diary

Wendy Doniger: Crazy about Horses, 23 September 1993

... the killing of a white stallion, existed throughout the Indo-European world. In some, a queen or king pantomimes copulation with a stallion (or, as the case may be, a mare). The worship of a white horse in pre-Roman England is dramatically attested by the colossal outlines carved into the chalk hills. I vividly recall riding, again with Penelope Betjeman, up ...

German Trash

Misha Donat, 11 January 1990

1791: Mozart’s Last Year 
by H.C. Robbins Landon.
Thames and Hudson, 240 pp., £12.95, May 1987, 0 500 01411 6
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Mozart: The Golden Years 1781-1791 
by H.C. Robbins Landon.
Thames and Hudson, 272 pp., £14.95, October 1989, 0 500 01466 3
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... Salieri had to turn down the commission for the new opera to mark the coronation of Leopold II as King of Bohemia, on 6 September. Thus it was that Mozart found himself having to write a large-scale opera within the space of less than three weeks. He returned from Prague to Vienna barely a fortnight before the premiere of The Magic Flute (for which the ...

Grand Old Man

Robert Blake, 1 May 1980

The Last Edwardian at No 10: An Impression of Harold Macmillan 
by George Hutchinson.
Quartet, 151 pp., £6.50, February 1980, 0 7043 2232 3
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... for the contemporary biographer. There can be no doubt that Mr Macmillan, on his sick bed at King Edward’s Hospital for Officers and despite the aftermath of a major operation, was determined at almost all costs to prevent Mr R.A. Butler succeeding him. His illness would have given him every excuse to resign at once and proffer no advice to the Queen ...

How Left was he?

Paul Addison, 7 January 1993

John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour 1920-1937 
by Robert Skidelsky.
Macmillan, 731 pp., £20, November 1992, 0 333 37138 0
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Maynard Keynes: An Economist’s Biography 
by D.E. Moggridge.
Routledge, 941 pp., £35, April 1992, 9780415051415
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... his appetite for power and influence. Though he returned to Cambridge to resume his fellowship at King’s, he was often to be seen, with his bowler-hat and brief-case, hurrying off to London for a board meeting or an appointment with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The passionate, and of necessity highly secret, homosexuality of the pre-war days was ...

Six Wolfs, Three Weills

David Simpson: Emigration from Nazi Germany, 5 October 2006

Weimar in Exile: The Anti-Fascist Emigration in Europe and America 
by Jean-Michel Palmier, translated by David Fernbach.
Verso, 852 pp., £29.99, July 2006, 1 84467 068 6
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... wielding a shovel in a French concentration camp had been received by Stalin, Roosevelt and the king of England’. After the French collapse these camps became ‘mousetraps’ from which escape was both necessary and difficult: Walter Benjamin, Ernst Weiss and Walter Hasenclever all committed suicide rather than fall into the hands of the Gestapo. Those ...

Not Just Yet

Frank Kermode: The Literature of Old Age, 13 December 2007

The Long Life 
by Helen Small.
Oxford, 346 pp., £25, December 2007, 978 0 19 922993 2
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... old people whose powers are failing by the criteria of virtuous behaviour appropriate to maturity. King Lear being an obvious case in point, Small gives an elaborate account of it. Is Lear mentally and morally impaired when he divides his kingdom? If he is so, and continues to be so as the action proceeds, we should perhaps take the fact into account when we ...

Joining the Gang

Nicholas Penny: Anthony Blunt, 29 November 2001

Anthony Blunt: His Lives 
by Miranda Carter.
Macmillan, 590 pp., £20, November 2001, 0 333 63350 4
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... Haskell was obviously suspect, since he had a Russian mother and a Russian wife and had been to King’s College, Cambridge, so the press surrounded his house, making it impossible for him to go out. I was staying there at the time and had to push my way past them to obtain basic provisions. They also repeatedly telephoned in the early hours of the ...

To Hairiness!

Cathy Gere: Hairy Guanches, 23 July 2009

The Marvellous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds 
by Merry Wiesner-Hanks.
Yale, 248 pp., £18.99, May 2009, 978 0 300 12733 1
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... gift. He was given a minor position in the elaborate hierarchy of servants who supplied the king with his every need. Later on he married a woman who was reputed to be a soft-skinned beauty, and the couple had a number of children, most of them hairy like their father. Among the hirsute offspring were three girls: Maddalena, Francesca and Antonietta. As ...

Erase, Deface, Transform

Hal Foster: Eduardo Paolozzi, 16 February 2017

Eduardo Paolozzi 
Whitechapel Gallery, until 18 May 2017Show More
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... also included the artists Nigel Henderson, William Turnbull and Magda Cordell, the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, and the critic Reyner Banham. In the late 1980s the Smithsons looked back on the ‘as found’ aesthetic of New Brutalism as ‘a confronting recognition of what the postwar world actually was like’: ‘In a society that had nothing ...

Rub gently out with stale bread

Adam Smyth: The Print Craze, 2 November 2017

The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking 1550-1820 
by Antony Griffiths.
British Museum, 560 pp., £60, August 2016, 978 0 7141 2695 1
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... sense, a mark impressed, engraved or otherwise made on a surface: a brand or stamp or cut. Peter Simon’s engraving of Fuseli’s ‘The Enchanted Island Before the Cell of Prospero’ for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (1797). The Compleat Drawing-Book is an example of the kind of educational artistic guide that flourished in the 18th century. The ...

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