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On the Sofa

David Thomson: ‘Babylon Berlin’, 2 August 2018

... it on the day the Supreme Court approved Trump’s ban on Muslims, and the day before Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement and Germany were knocked out of the World Cup. Not that episode 11 provided any answers; not that the series was confident about its questions. As fellow-victims will know, and in the pattern of many long-form television ...

The Vicar of Chippenham

Christopher Haigh: Religion and the life-cycle, 15 October 1998

Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England 
by David Cressy.
Oxford, 641 pp., £25, May 1998, 0 19 820168 0
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... some Catholic ceremonies, godly ministers might refuse to use a ring at weddings or to sign with a cross at baptisms: without these details, were couples properly married, or children properly christened? Couples themselves might object to a ring, or parents to a cross – and a conscientious minister might then report them ...

Diary

Patrick Hughes: What do artists do?, 24 July 1986

... Graphics. So I have a little pile of pieces of paper with ‘ideas’ roughly drawn on them: a cross with a pirate flag, a ghost caught on barbed wire, an egg on a tightrope, a cage in prison. Next to me I have a tea trolley with paints and water on it. I draw the picture in pen and ink, colour it in: if it works, I frame it. I can do about three a day at ...

Find the birch sticks

R.W. Johnson: A spy’s diary, 1 September 2005

The Guy Liddell Diaries. Vol. I: 1939-42 
edited by Nigel West.
Frank Cass, 329 pp., £25, February 2005, 0 415 35213 4
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... or anything personal. Yet Liddell was a considerable man in every way. After winning the Military Cross in the First World War, as both his brothers did, he spent the entire period after 1919 in counter-intelligence. He and his eccentric wife, the Hon. Calypso Baring, formed the centre of a large dinner-party world in their Cheyne Walk house designed by ...

Inside Out

John Bayley, 4 September 1980

The Collected Ewart 1933-1980 
by Gavin Ewart.
Hutchinson, 412 pp., £10, June 1980, 0 09 141000 2
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Selected Poems and Prose 
by Michael Roberts, edited by Frederick Grubb.
Carcanet, 205 pp., £7.95, June 1980, 0 85635 263 2
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... New Review, and the poem shows, with the kind of grim undemonstrative intelligence the novels of Anthony Powell know well how to reveal in horsey men, military men or men in bars (one of his characters called Odo Stevens writes Ewart-type poems), just how much Ewart as a poet owes to his attitude to other poets. I always try to dislike my poets, it’s good ...

They never married

Ian Hamilton, 10 May 1990

The Dictionary of National Biography: 1981-1985 
edited by Lord Blake and C.S. Nicholls.
Oxford, 518 pp., £40, March 1990, 0 19 865210 0
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... that Adams was guilty? And if we don’t, why does he get an entry? Wickedness, in the case of Anthony Blunt, actually pays off rather handsomely. He gets a four-column entry against the average two, and it is unlikely that this would have been his lot had he been listed merely as ‘art historian’ and not also as ‘a communist spy’. (Donald ...

Criollismo

Benedict Anderson, 21 January 1988

Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 
edited by Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden.
Princeton, 290 pp., £22, September 1987, 0 691 05372 3
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... or from Canton to Johor. As late as the 18th century, Eliza Pinckney averred that she ‘would not cross that frightful ocean’ again ‘for the best fortune in England’. But was this enough to create the peculiar synchronicity of Hampshire/New Hampshire? Probably not. The six authors in Colonial Identity rightly stress the immediate political, religious ...

Real Thing

John Naughton, 24 November 1988

Live from Number 10: The Inside Story of Prime Ministers and Television 
by Michael Cockerell.
Faber, 352 pp., £14.95, September 1988, 0 571 14757 7
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... political broadcasts (begun in 1951) and the odd ministerial broadcast of the kind pioneered by Anthony Eden. Mr Cockerell’s treatment of his subject is strictly chronological. He starts with Earliest Times and finishes at the Present Day. Well, not quite the present, for the closing chapter takes us only to the last General Election. Earliest times in ...

I have written as I rode

Adam Smyth: ‘Brief Lives’, 8 October 2015

‘Brief Lives’ with ‘An Apparatus for the Lives of Our English Mathematical Writers’ 
by John Aubrey, edited by Kate Bennett.
Oxford, 1968 pp., £250, March 2015, 978 0 19 968953 8
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John Aubrey: My Own Life 
by Ruth Scurr.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, March 2015, 978 0 7011 7907 6
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... William Pitt the Younger’s voice. Or at least that’s how the story goes. New versions of this cross-generational vaulting circulate now and then: a man who saw Abraham Lincoln being shot in 1865 was on a TV show in 1956; a retired friend in Canada recalls her now deceased Hungarian friend Dorothy telling her that her mother had been walking in the park at ...

Rivonia Days

R.W. Johnson: Remembering the trial, 16 August 2007

The State v. Nelson Mandela: The Trial That Changed South Africa 
by Joel Joffe.
Oneworld, 288 pp., £16.99, July 2007, 978 1 85168 500 4
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... of the most senior SACP members, made no mention of it during the five days that he spent under cross-examination. Although far more was made of Mandela’s five-hour speech, Sisulu’s performance was more remarkable. Held in isolation, unable to consult his comrades or his lawyers, surrounded by intimidating policemen and warders, hectored and pilloried ...

He blinks and night is day

Adam Mars-Jones: ‘Light Perpetual’, 17 June 2021

Light Perpetual 
by Francis Spufford.
Faber, 336 pp., £16.99, February, 978 0 571 33648 7
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... London. The place and time correspond with a particularly terrible missile strike on New Cross on 25 November 1944. The novel is a sort of counter-history, imagining that five of the children killed on that day escaped unharmed, and charting the lives that they might have gone on to lead. Although Spufford makes clear in his acknowledgments that the ...

Hurricane Brooke

Brian Bond, 2 September 1982

Alanbrooke 
by David Fraser.
Collins, 604 pp., £12.95, April 1982, 0 00 216360 8
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... suddenly pervaded the place. I could feel it stabbing through me. This was the CIGS. Thus Anthony Powell brilliantly evokes the dynamic personal impact of General Sir Alan Brooke in his novel The Military Philosophers. Brooke held positions of critical responsibility and as CIGS was titular head of the Army for the greater part of the Second World ...

Female Bandits? What next!

Wendy Doniger: The incarnations of Robin Hood, 22 July 2004

Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography 
by Stephen Knight.
Cornell, 247 pp., £14.50, May 2003, 0 8014 3885 3
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... were, And lived lesse in awe; Now, God be thanked! People feare More to ofend the law. Anthony Munday, in his play The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington (1598), redated the hero to the end of the 12th century, which had ‘the remarkable effect of reversing his political tendency’. Munday makes Robin’s enemies ‘only the corrupt and the ...

Diary

W.G. Runciman: 1920s v. 1980s, 17 March 1988

... to do battle against her, but of the services of such invaluable allies as General Galtieri, Anthony Wedgwood Benn and ‘King Arthur’ Scargill? And was there anyone at Tory Central Office so absurdly optimistic as to foresee the hilarious shambles which would be made of itself by the so-called ‘Alliance’? Yet I wonder. Asquith’s long tenure as ...

Places Never Explained

Colm Tóibín: Anthony Hecht, 8 August 2013

The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht 
edited by Jonathan Post.
Johns Hopkins, 365 pp., £18, November 2012, 978 1 4214 0730 2
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... lucky for the past six months – my job and Tucson are swell, Mackie has an awfully nice Red Cross job (so we’ve enough money), I live off post and get to play tennis, I like the people in my department, I’m even writing poems. My two subjects are: bombing Hamburg and bombing crews – I feel sympathetic and sorry for both of them. Jarrell wrote to ...

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