Enemies of All Mankind

Stephen Sedley: Pirates, 24 June 2010

The Treatment of Prisoners under International Law 
by Nigel Rodley, with Matt Pollard.
Oxford, 697 pp., £85, August 2009, 978 0 19 921507 2
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The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations 
by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Zone, 295 pp., £21.95, November 2009, 978 1 890951 94 8
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The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates 
by Peter Leeson.
Princeton, 271 pp., £16.95, May 2009, 978 0 691 13747 6
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... he is guilty of a crime known to the law. Captured guerrillas may have little ultimately to hope for, but they are entitled not to be summarily executed or tortured or held indefinitely without trial. The Bush administration after 9/11 set out to change all that. With the designation of unlawful combatant it created a self-sustaining doctrine that there ...

The Only True Throne

John Pemble: ‘Muckraker’, 19 July 2012

Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W.T. Stead 
by W. Sydney Robinson.
Robson, 281 pp., £20, May 2012, 978 1 84954 294 4
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... feminists; the public disgrace and political ruin of Parnell and the rising political star Charles Dilke following high-profile divorce cases; and, most sensational of all, the wave of moral rearmament that landed Britain with a regime of censorship, surveillance and repression. In 1885, following Stead’s revelations about child prostitution in ...

A Little ‘Foreign’

P.N. Furbank: Iris Origo, 27 June 2002

Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia 
by Caroline Moorehead.
Murray, 351 pp., £22, October 2000, 0 7195 5672 4
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... was ‘deeply happy – with a completeness and serenity of happiness for which I had never dared hope’. Later she said she had never been physically attracted to Antonio, but this was to a lover, so we can treat it with caution. In June 1925 she bore Antonio a son, whom they named Gianni. She idolised him. On the other hand, she did not spend all that much ...

Your life depends on it

Thomas Jones: Jonathan Raban, 19 October 2006

Surveillance 
by Jonathan Raban.
Picador, 327 pp., £16.99, September 2006, 0 330 41338 4
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... boy, he and his companions learned to be ‘adept and fantastic liars. Telling lies was their best hope of staying alive, and they lied to everybody, about everything. As Vanags wrote, “I knew that if ever I were caught telling the truth, I’d be sent to the camps.”’ If he’s lying now, he’s a very good liar. And if he’s a very good liar, it’s ...

He Who Must Bear All

John Watts: Henry V at Home, 2 March 2017

Henry V: The Conscience of a King 
by Malcolm Vale.
Yale, 308 pp., £20, August 2016, 978 0 300 14873 2
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... by the French king in the 1420 Treaty of Troyes, Henry joined forces with his new allies, Charles VI of France and Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, to send envoys to the crusader king of Poland, the Byzantine emperor and the Ottoman sultan. The exact purpose of the mission is unclear: the emperor was told of the kings’ ...

I’ll do the dishes

Sophie Lewis: Mothers’ Work, 4 May 2023

Essential Labour: Mothering as Social Change 
by Angela Garbes.
Harper Wave, 222 pp., £20, May 2022, 978 0 06 293736 0
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... been many attempts to imagine ways of organising care beyond the family unit. In the 19th century, Charles Fourier drew up blueprints for ‘phalansteries’, self-contained communities of around a thousand people who would undertake all the necessary tasks (children would be looked after in the ‘noisy area’, next to the carpenters and blacksmiths). Jane ...

At MoMA

Hal Foster: Käthe Kollwitz’s Figures, 4 July 2024

... Russia and China, and it also informed American artists of colour such as Jacob Lawrence, Charles White and Elizabeth Catlett (a genealogy traced in a superb exhibition curated by Buchloh with Michelle Harewood for the Reina Sofía in 2022). At moments one wonders why Kollwitz was embraced so readily: sometimes her workers appear degraded and her ...

Gender Wonder

Katie Ebner-Landy: Early Modern Women’s Writing, 2 April 2026

Sex and Style: Literary Criticism and Gender in Early Modern England 
by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann.
Princeton, 216 pp., £84, September 2025, 978 0 691 27201 6
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... author Scott-Baumann deals with is Aphra Behn (1640-89). Behn had a short career as a spy for Charles II, was probably imprisoned and was among the first women to make a living from her writing. Behn represents ‘a very important corner on the road’, Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own. With Behn, ‘we leave behind, shut up in their parks ...

Strange, Angry Objects

Owen Hatherley: The Brutalist Decades, 17 November 2016

A3: Threads and Connections 
by Peter Ahrends.
Right Angle, 128 pp., £18, December 2015, 978 0 9532848 9 4
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Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism 
by Barnabas Calder.
Heinemann, 416 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 0 434 02244 1
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Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture 1945-75 
by Elain Harwood.
Yale, 512 pp., £60, September 2015, 978 0 300 20446 9
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Concrete Concept: Brutalist Buildings around the World 
by Christopher Beanland.
Frances Lincoln, 192 pp., £18, February 2016, 978 0 7112 3764 3
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This Brutal World 
by Peter Chadwick.
Phaidon, 224 pp., £29.95, April 2016, 978 0 7148 7108 0
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Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th-Century Architecture 
by Nicolas Grospierre.
Prestel, 224 pp., £29.99, February 2016, 978 3 7913 8229 6
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Modernist Estates: The Buildings and the People Who Live in Them 
by Stefi Orazi.
Frances Lincoln, 192 pp., £25, September 2015, 978 0 7112 3675 2
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Architecture an Inspiration 
by Ivor Smith.
Troubador, 224 pp., £24.95, November 2014, 978 1 78462 069 1
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... tallest building, Seifert deliberately submitted an ugly low-rise and an elegant high-rise, in the hope that the latter would be selected (as it was). The touchy, serious and wholly establishment architect Denys Lasdun is Calder’s anti-Seifert and his real great love. He writes beautifully about the concrete structure of the National Theatre, of how the ...

Olivier Rex

Ronald Bryden, 1 September 1988

Olivier 
by Anthony Holden.
Weidenfeld, 504 pp., £16, May 1988, 0 297 79089 7
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... a windfall of new evidence, but Mr Holden is too courtly (his previous subjects include Prince Charles and the Queen Mum) to name it. He merely says demurely that he persuaded Olivier’s friend, their shared publisher Lord Weidenfeld, that – how does he put it? – ‘between them [Olivier’s] two books did not add up to a comprehensive, let alone ...

Confounding the Apes

P.N. Furbank, 22 August 1996

The Divine Comedy 
by Dante Alighieri, translated by Allen Mandelbaum.
Everyman, 798 pp., £14.99, May 1995, 1 85715 183 6
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The Inferno of Dante. A New Verse Translation 
by Robert Pinsky, illustrated by Michael Mazur.
Dent, 427 pp., £20, February 1996, 9780460877640
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Dante’s Hell 
translated by Steve Ellis.
Chatto, 208 pp., £15.99, March 1994, 0 7011 6127 2
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... to the atrocities of my translation, all that can be said in excuse is that they are, I hope, for the most part intentional, and committed with the aim of driving the reader’s perception further into the original than it would without them have penetrated.’ Of these three new translations of Dante (not all of them quite new, for Allen ...

Back from the Underworld

Marina Warner: The Liveliness of the Dead, 17 August 2017

The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains 
by Thomas Laqueur.
Princeton, 711 pp., £27.95, October 2015, 978 0 691 15778 8
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... are always in civilian clothes when I dream of you & and I have never seen you in those dear … I hope that will come true.’ When he was killed, in March 1917, she began the long struggle to find the whereabouts of his body. Though bits of news raised her hopes, he was declared missing along with thousands of others in the Battle of the Somme. She asked to ...

Making Media Great Again

Peter Geoghegan, 6 March 2025

... stepped down as chair and trustee of Ark Schools last April, after the campaign group Hope Not Hate reported that his locked X account, @aeropagus123, had repeatedly liked or reposted far-right, homophobic and Islamophobic tweets. One of the tweets Marshall endorsed, according to Hope Not Hate, said that ...

Tolerant Repression

Blair Worden, 10 May 1990

Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal 
by Tom Mayer.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £32.50, April 1989, 0 521 36104 4
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Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII 
by Alistair Fox.
Blackwell, 317 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 631 13566 9
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The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Portraits at the Court of Henry VIII 
by Retha Warnicke.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 521 37000 0
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English Travellers Abroad 1604-1667 
by John Stoye.
Yale, 448 pp., £12.95, January 1990, 0 300 04180 2
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... VIII was greeted by More, as More’s friends abroad greeted Francis I of France and the Emperor Charles V, as a Humanist prince who would reform Church and commonwealth. Hope soon turned to disillusionment, disillusionment to fear. The King had the cowardice of the bully and a proneness to suspicion which his advisers ...

Self-Interpreting Animals

Stephen Mulhall, 9 October 2025

Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment 
by Charles Taylor.
Harvard, 620 pp., £31.95, June 2024, 978 0 674 29608 4
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... Charles Taylor​ has had a long, fêted career as a philosopher with a particular interest in bringing the French and German traditions into productive conversation with their Anglo-American counterparts, and in bringing political and ethical theorising to bear on contemporary politics both in the UK and in his country of birth, Canada: he was an active participant in the British New Left, and stood more than once as a New Democratic Party candidate for the Canadian parliament ...