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Abishag’s Revenge

Steven Shapin: Who wants to live for ever?, 26 March 2009

Mortal Coil: A Short History of Living Longer 
by David Boyd Haycock.
Yale, 308 pp., £18.99, June 2008, 978 0 300 11778 3
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... Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat ...

Fleas We Greatly Loathe

Francis Wade: The Rohingya, 5 July 2018

... The ethnonym is first mentioned in a 1799 survey of communities in Myanmar by a Scottish botanist, Francis Buchanan, but then, save for sporadic mentions over the next two hundred years, it disappears from records. No census carried out by the British during its 124 years of rule mentions the name. Despite the fact that the post-independence government of U Nu ...

Love that Bird

Francis Spufford: Supersonic, 6 June 2002

... from ticket sales never came close to covering operating costs.Then in February 1981 Sir John King was made chairman of BA, and suddenly – in the words of Bruce MacTavish, one of the civil servants who appeared with Lamont before the Select Committee – ‘it was “love that bird!” time.’ It was not that ...

Auchnasaugh

Patrick Parrinder, 7 November 1991

King Cameron 
by David Craig.
Carcanet, 212 pp., £12.95, May 1991, 0 85635 917 3
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The Hungry Generations 
by David Gilmour.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 194 pp., £13.95, August 1991, 1 85619 069 2
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O Caledonia 
by Elspeth Barker.
Hamish Hamilton, 152 pp., £13.99, August 1991, 0 241 13146 4
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... offered, among other things, both empirical and political grounds for questioning their work. King Cameron, rich in historical implication but deliberately restrained and local in its grasp, seems impeccable on both counts. The novel falls into two parts, moving abruptly from a popular rising in Strathtay in 1797 to an account of the Highland Clearances ...

Unusual Endowments

Patrick Collinson, 30 March 2000

Philip Sidney: A Double Life 
by Alan Stewart.
Chatto, 400 pp., £20, February 2000, 0 7011 6859 5
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... Anglo-French treaty and a marriage alliance with the house of Navarre. In early August the French King made him a gentleman of his bedchamber, which carried the title of baron. But by the end of the month he was caught up in the Massacre of St Bartholomew, a cowering refugee in the English Embassy; whence he was rescued by a French nobleman who thought it ...

Odd Union

David Cannadine, 20 October 1994

Mrs Jordan’s Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 415 pp., £18, October 1994, 0 670 84159 5
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... the early 20th century, the only English monarch who was both male and monogamous was probably King George III. Put the other way, this means that from Nell Gwyn to Mrs Keppel (and beyond), the courtesan was an integral part of royal history. But while much is known about such women as the Duchess of Portsmouth, Elizabeth Villiers, Henrietta Howard and the ...

On your way, phantom

Colin Burrow: ‘Bring Up the Bodies’, 7 June 2012

Bring Up the Bodies 
by Hilary Mantel.
Fourth Estate, 411 pp., £20, May 2012, 978 0 00 731509 3
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... and has Thomas More executed. At the end of the book, in the late summer of 1535, Cromwell, the king and his attendants stop off at Wolf Hall in Wiltshire, the home of the blandly charming Jane Seymour and her family. This is where Bring Up the Bodies begins. Its title may sound a bit Hammer Horror, but it comes from the phrase that was used when those ...

Shag another

Katrina Forrester: In Bed with the Police, 7 November 2013

Undercover: The True Story of Britain’s Secret Police 
by Rob Evans and Paul Lewis.
Faber and Guardian Books, 346 pp., £12.99, June 2013, 978 0 571 30217 8
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... to chart the history of secret policing. Their prize source is the former undercover officer Peter Francis, who spied on minor anti-fascist and anti-racist groups in North London in the early 1990s before infiltrating his target group, Anti-Fascist Action. While undercover, he lived alone in Highbury, drove a van and got a day job working in a school for ...

Liquid Fiction

Thomas Jones: ‘The Child that Books Built’, 25 April 2002

The Child that Books Built: A Memoir of Childhood and Reading 
by Francis Spufford.
Faber, 214 pp., £12.99, April 2002, 0 571 19132 0
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A Child’s Book of True Crime: A Novel 
by Chloe Hooper.
Cape, 238 pp., £12.99, February 2002, 0 224 06237 9
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... residual still, that there might be a mystical, if misty, relationship between reading and power. Francis Spufford, a third of the way into The Child that Books Built, tells the following story: I learnt to read around my sixth birthday. I was making a dinosaur in school from crepe bandage and toilet rolls when I started to feel as if an invisible pump was ...

Sex Sex Sex

Mark Kishlansky: Charles II, 27 May 2010

A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration 
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 580 pp., £25, October 2009, 978 0 571 21733 5
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... Folger collected 79). In 1912 the Wideners visited London, where Harry purchased a rare edition of Francis Bacon’s Essays. They set out for home on the Titanic, but only Harry’s mother arrived; her husband and son were never seen again. In her son’s memory, Eleanor Widener built the greatest university library in the world. Harry’s collection was ...

Rogue Socialists

Michael Mason, 1 September 1988

Francis Place, 1771-1854: The Life of a Remarkable Radical 
by Dudley Miles.
Harvester, 206 pp., £40, April 1988, 0 7108 1225 6
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Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 
by Iain McCalman.
Cambridge, 338 pp., £27.50, March 1988, 0 521 30755 4
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... minor subject. It would not be fair to the considerable achievement of Dudley Miles in his life of Francis Place simply to invert this formula: but Place’s life is a major subject, and this treatment of it – the first in almost a hundred years – does leave a sense of possibilities not explored. The enterprise in any form, of course, involved a crushing ...

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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... in public. ‘Blood has been moved between two dogs for the first time. Before the Society, Mr King and Mr Thomas Coxe successfully performed the experiment on a small bulldog and a spaniel.’ He fled debtors; was bankrupt from 1671; had to shift households and sell many of his books. He travelled to Paris with his friend George Ent, where he suffered ...

F.R. Leavis, Politics and Religion

Roger Poole, 20 December 1979

The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’ 
by Francis Mulhern.
New Left Books, 354 pp., £11.75
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The Literary Criticism of F.R. Leavis 
by R.P. Bilan.
Cambridge, 338 pp., £12.50
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... reminiscence and regret to hostility and outright Schadenfreude – there was still no consensus. Francis Mulhern, who now attempts to tell the whole story of that journal for the first time, announces: ‘The true measure of the problem is that, 25 years after its closure, and 15 after its triumphant reissue, there exists not a single systematic examination ...

One Cygnet Too Many

John Watts: Henry VII, 26 April 2012

Winter KingThe Dawn of Tudor England 
by Thomas Penn.
Penguin, 448 pp., £8.99, March 2012, 978 0 14 104053 0
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... Harrison told not one but two stories about Henry VII. ‘As the report goeth’, he wrote, the king had had all the mastiffs in England put to death because ‘they durst presume to fight against the lion, who is their king and sovereigne’. And again, ‘as some saie’, the king had ...

Open in a Scream

Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021

Francis Bacon: Revelations 
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January, 978 0 00 729841 9
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... The period​ in Francis Bacon’s life between 1933 and 1944 remains a mystery. We know who he was seeing and where he was living. We know what he painted: in 1933, when he was 23, his Crucifixion that looks like an X-ray; eleven years later, the contortions of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion ...

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