Freebooter

Maurice Keen: The diabolical Sir John Hawkwood, 5 May 2005

Hawkwood: Diabolical Englishman 
by Frances Stonor Saunders.
Faber, 366 pp., £17.99, November 2004, 9780571219087
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... for 30,000 florins. It was an extraordinarily spectacular coup, news of which resounded through Christian Europe. A key element of the agreement between the pope and the Great Company’s leaders was that after leaving the Avignon region they would take service (at papal expense) under the Marquis of Montferrat in his and the pope’s war against the ...

Look over your shoulder

Christopher Hitchens, 25 May 1995

... about animal rights, the purity of hunting and the wide open spaces. Indeed he does resemble, as William Burroughs once wrote of his own visage, ‘one of them sheep-killing dogs’. He and his kind hate the cities and the city-dwellers, especially those cities that have become sinks of immigration and race-mixing and alien religions.Clinton’s second ...

I Should Have Shrieked

Patricia Beer, 8 December 1994

John Betjeman: Letters, Vol. I, 1926-1951 
edited by Candida Lycett Green.
Methuen, 584 pp., £20, April 1994, 0 413 66950 5
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... approach to a personal credo that his honesty and confusion of mind would permit: ‘I choose the Christian’s way (and completely fail to live up to it) because I believe it true and because I believe – for possibly a split second in six months but that’s enough – that Christ is really the incarnate son of God and that Sacraments are a means of grace ...

Staggering on

Stephen Howe, 23 May 1996

The ‘New Statesman’: Portrait of a Political Weekly, 1913-31 
by Adrian Smith.
Cass, 340 pp., £30, February 1996, 0 7146 4645 8
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... that is, it was (English) national rather than merely metropolitan – imbued with the spirit of William Morris, enthusiastic for the new idea of a decentralising, anti-statist, bottom-up Guild Socialism. Ironically, various New Age luminaries, notably G.D.H. Cole, became some of the Statesman’s most prolific and influential contributors. Indeed the New ...

God’s Endurance

Peter Clarke, 30 November 1995

Gladstone 
by Roy Jenkins.
Macmillan, 698 pp., £20, October 1995, 0 333 60216 1
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... of Oxford University. Above all, there is a chasm between Gladstone’s all-encompassing Christian theodicy and Jenkins’s secular, sceptical, post-Freudian outlook. Yet many of their common experiences and career parallels amount to more than trivial coincidences. They testify to affinities which help inform Jenkins’s Gladstone with sustained ...

A couple of peep-holes in the pillowcase and off we go a-lynching

Ian Hamilton: The Ku Klux Klan, 30 September 1999

Inside the Klavern: The Secret History of the Ku Klux Klan of the Twenties 
by David Horowitz.
Southern Illinois, 191 pp., £39.95, July 1999, 0 8093 2247 1
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... years or so, was that. In 1915, the year of Griffith’s film, the Klan was refounded, by one William Simmons, an ex-minister and ‘promoter of fraternal societies’, but this time its ambitions and influence spread far beyond the South. The original white supremacist and Southern-based agenda became the blueprint for a nationwide campaign of moral ...

Not Not To Be

Malcolm Schofield: Aristotle’s legacy, 17 February 2005

A New History of Western Philosophy. Vol. I: Ancient Philosophy 
by Anthony Kenny.
Oxford, 341 pp., £17.99, June 2005, 0 19 875273 3
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... interpretation of the ideas they contain. One early achievement, due to Benson Mates (1953) and William and Martha Kneale (1962), was the recovery of Stoic propositional logic and its recognition as a system more general and powerful – and more like the logic of Frege and Russell – than Aristotle’s. The Stoic physics of the continuum was championed in ...

I lerne song

Tom Shippey: Medieval schooling, 22 February 2007

Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England 
by Nicholas Orme.
Yale, 430 pp., £25, June 2006, 0 300 11102 9
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... named Hyglac. When Harold was killed at Hastings, the canon who went to beg the body from William was Ailric the ‘Childemaister’ of Waltham. And among the many works of Aelfric of Cerne, and later of Eynsham, were the first Latin grammar written in Old English, and a Latin Colloquy that was designed as a simple text for use in school; it was later ...

Tragedy in Tights

Rosemary Hill: Poor Queen Caroline, 22 June 2006

Rebel Queen: The Trial of Caroline 
by Jane Robins.
Simon and Schuster, 370 pp., £20, June 2006, 0 7432 4862 7
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... and focusing the discontent of the country at large. In this they were immensely successful. Soon William Cobbett was writing Caroline’s propaganda and she was receiving numerous ‘addresses’ or petitions of support from the ‘loyal voices of Suffolk’, the people of Sunderland and many more. To Sunderland she – or rather Cobbett – replied that ...

Absolutely Bleedin’ Obvious

Ian Sansom: Will Self, 6 July 2006

The Book of Dave 
by Will Self.
Viking, 496 pp., £17.99, June 2006, 0 670 91443 6
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... Also like his namesake, Dave is a verbal genius. Reading Self is often reminiscent not of William Burroughs, as Self himself might wish, or of J.G. Ballard, whom Self obviously admires and seeks to emulate (clear echoes in The Book of Dave of The Drowned World), but rather of Norman Mailer, particularly the vainglorious, dick-swinging Mailer of ‘The ...

Can you close your eyes without falling over?

Hugh Pennington: Symptoms of Syphilis, 11 September 2003

Pox: Genius, Madness and the Mysteries of Syphilis 
by Deborah Hayden.
Basic Books, 379 pp., £20.99, January 2003, 0 465 02881 0
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... diseases. ‘Know syphilis . . . and all things clinical will be added unto you,’ the great Sir William Osler had said. But it was vital to get things right. Drugs were available, but they were dangerous and expensive. In the untreated, symptoms could disappear quickly, as the organism went to ground, only to re-emerge randomly and unpredictably decades ...

Thunder in the Mountains

J. Hoberman: Orson Welles, 6 September 2007

Orson Welles: Hello Americans 
by Simon Callow.
Vintage, 507 pp., £8.99, May 2007, 978 0 09 946261 3
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What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? A Portrait of an Independent Career 
by Joseph McBride.
Kentucky, 344 pp., $29.95, October 2006, 0 8131 2410 7
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... Party’s campaign to smear one of its most effective and consistent opponents’, namely William Randolph Hearst, had long been interested in Welles. He was regarded as a threat, and placed on the FBI Security Index largely because of his political activities on behalf of the committee organised to defend the beleaguered Communist labour leader Harry ...

Demand Stolen Rings

Mike Jay: The Dangerous Dead, 19 February 2026

Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World 
by John Blair.
Princeton, 519 pp., £30, September 2025, 978 0 691 22479 4
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... this period there are written chronicles to supplement the archaeology; the Benedictine historian William of Malmesbury tells us that in this case the dangerous dead were malefactors, some excommunicated and others corrupt priests, who had risen from their graves and were seen walking by night, groaning and spreading disease. These two vampire epidemics, as ...

Ich dien

Michael Neill: Shakespeare and the Servants, 22 October 2009

Shakespeare, Love and Service 
by David Schalkwyk.
Cambridge, 317 pp., £50, June 2008, 978 0 521 88639 0
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... seruants place and dutie’ was acknowledged to be ‘of more abiect and inferiour kinde’, as William Gouge put it in Of Domesticall Duties (1622). By the mid-20th century, the material conditions of service had changed beyond recognition, yet the ideological assumptions that had governed the early modern household continued to colour the language and ...

On a Chinese Mountain

Frank Kermode, 20 November 1986

The Royal Beasts 
by William Empson.
Chatto, 201 pp., £12.95, November 1986, 0 7011 3084 9
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Essays on Shakespeare 
by William Empson.
Cambridge, 246 pp., £25, May 1986, 0 521 25577 5
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... feeling that he is better off without opportunities. The sexual suggestion of blush brings in the Christian idea that virginity is good in itself, so that any renunciation is good ... And so it goes on, one of the texts that taught a generation to read well and feel good about it. Here we feel we are really seeing through Gray; his poem has a ‘massive ...