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The Corrupt Bargain

Eric Foner: Democracy? No thanks, 21 May 2020

Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? 
by Alexander Keyssar.
Harvard, 544 pp., £28.95, May, 978 0 674 66015 1
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Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College 
by Jesse Wegman.
St Martin’s Press, 304 pp., $24.50, March, 978 1 250 22197 1
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... would occupy the two highest offices. In 1796 this resulted in the winning candidate, John Adams of the Federalist party, ending up with Thomas Jefferson, leader of the opposition Republicans (not to be confused with today’s party), as vice president. Four years later, the Republican ticket consisted of Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for ...

Self-Made Man

Ruth Bernard Yeazell: Edith Wharton’s Domestic Arrangements, 5 April 2007

Edith Wharton 
by Hermione Lee.
Chatto, 853 pp., £25, February 2007, 978 0 7011 6665 6
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... don’t know her till you have seen her as builder and restorer, designer, decorator, gardener,’ Henry James wrote to another impassioned interior decorator, their mutual friend Mary Hunter, in 1913. At the time, Wharton was contemplating the purchase of a substantial estate near where Hunter lived in Essex; but while this came to nothing, the novelist’s ...

That sh—te Creech

James Buchan: The Scottish Enlightenment, 5 April 2007

The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in 18th-Century Britain, Ireland and America 
by Richard Sher.
Chicago, 815 pp., £25.50, February 2007, 978 0 226 75252 5
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... Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell ...

A Preference for Strenuous Ghosts

Michael Kammen: Theodore Roosevelt, 6 June 2002

Theodore Rex 
by Edmund Morris.
HarperCollins, 772 pp., £25, March 2002, 0 00 217708 0
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... Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the meantime, Robert ...

Miserable Creatures

C.H. Sisson, 2 August 1984

The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Vol. IV: 1909-1913 
edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate.
Oxford, 337 pp., £21, March 1984, 0 19 812621 2
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The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper. Vol. IV: 1792-1799 
edited by James King and Charles Ryskamp.
Oxford, 498 pp., £48, March 1984, 0 19 812681 6
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The Land and Literature of England: A Historical Account 
by Robert M. Adams.
Norton, 555 pp., £21, March 1984, 0 393 01704 4
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The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy. Vol. II 
edited by Samuel Hynes.
Oxford, 543 pp., £35, June 1984, 0 19 812783 9
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... have been the better for that is more doubtful. There is a more radical point in the remark to Henry Newbolt that ‘no man ever wrote himself out if he goes on living as he lived when he first began to write. It is the other thing, the social consequence of his first works, that does the mischief, – if he lets it.’ One could put many glosses on ...

The Beautiful Ones

Jon Day: The Rat in the Head, 24 July 2025

Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B. Calhoun 
by Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden.
Melville House, 358 pp., £30, July 2024, 978 1 68589 099 5
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Dr Calhoun’s Mousery: The Strange Tale of a Celebrated Scientist, a Rodent Dystopia and the Future of Humanity 
by Lee Alan Dugatkin.
Chicago, 295 pp., £22, October 2024, 978 0 226 82785 8
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... Rats had already been used for some time to teach dissection in European medical schools, and Henry Donaldson, a neurologist at the Wistar Institute who had been searching for an animal for his own experiments, thought Rattus norvegicus might be suitable.In 1909 Donaldson’s colleague Helen King began to breed rats, selecting offspring for their docility ...

Amigos

Christopher Ricks, 2 August 1984

The Faber Book of Parodies 
edited by Simon Brett.
Faber, 383 pp., £8.95, May 1984, 0 571 13125 5
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Lilibet: An Account in Verse of the Early Years of the Queen until the Time of her Accession 
by Her Majesty.
Blond and Briggs, 95 pp., £6.95, May 1984, 0 85634 157 6
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... surfaces like the Kraken; the poem is here a Mort and there a Morte. Max Beerbohm’s parody of Henry James is readily and roughly transcribed: for ‘caught in her tone’, read ‘caught her tone’; for ‘feverish’, read ‘feverishly’; for ‘physically’, read ‘psychically’ ... Mis-spelling, mis-punctuation and misquoting are much in ...

Putt for Dough

David Trotter: On the Golf Space, 24 July 2025

... which he will watch tournaments taking place on the far side of the world. Gibson’s guide, Mr Adams, is soon on the spot, and, glancing at the digital watch embedded in his signet ring, announces that dinner will shortly be served. After-dinner conversation turns at once to golf. Adams, who holds the post of Chief ...

Ghost Ions

Jonathan Coe: AA-Rated Memories, 18 August 2022

Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems 
edited by Julian Upton.
Headpress, 595 pp., £22.99, April, 978 1 909394 93 3
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The Magic Box: Viewing Britain through the Rectangular Window 
by Rob Young.
Faber, 500 pp., £12.99, August, 978 0 571 28460 3
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... the British cinematic imagination can be seen in the differences between Tony Richardson’s two Henry Fielding adaptations, Tom Jones (1963) and Joseph Andrews (1977). Both films are, for the most part, faithful to the spirit of their source novels, but in one extended sequence, Joseph Andrews offers a glaring exception. In Book III, Chapter 7 of the ...

Why name a ship after a defeated race?

Thomas Laqueur: New Lives of the ‘Titanic’, 24 January 2013

The Wreck of the ‘Titan’ 
by Morgan Robertson.
Hesperus, 85 pp., £8, March 2012, 978 1 84391 359 7
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Shadow of the ‘Titanic’ 
by Andrew Wilson.
Simon and Schuster, 392 pp., £8.99, March 2012, 978 1 84739 882 6
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‘Titanic’ 100th Anniversary Edition: A Night Remembered 
by Stephanie Barczewski.
Continuum, 350 pp., £15.99, December 2011, 978 1 4411 6169 7
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The Story of the Unsinkable ‘Titanic’: Day by Day Facsimile Reports 
by Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton.
Transatlantic, 127 pp., £16.99, November 2011, 978 1 907176 83 8
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‘Titanic’ Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew 
by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Harper, 404 pp., £9.99, September 2012, 978 0 00 732166 7
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Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage 
by Hugh Brewster.
Robson, 338 pp., £20, March 2012, 978 1 84954 179 4
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‘Titanic’ Calling 
edited by Michael Hughes and Katherine Bosworth.
Bodleian, 163 pp., £14.99, April 2012, 978 1 85124 377 8
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... it should have some ‘chastening influence … on the self-confidence of mankind’, and Henry Adams likened the news to the foundering of the Republican Party: ‘the sum and triumph of civilisation … our greatest achievement sinks at a touch … Nature jeers at us for our folly.’ The sinking of the Titanic very quickly seemed freighted ...

Kill the tuna can

Christopher Tayler: George Saunders, 8 June 2006

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and In Persuasion Nation 
by George Saunders.
Bloomsbury, 358 pp., £10.99, June 2006, 0 7475 8221 1
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... to the writing-school circuit as a teacher and collected numerous National Magazine and O. Henry Awards. Each story in his second collection, Pastoralia (2000), was first published in the New Yorker. Saunders’s employment history is worth sketching out because his vision of America and the American workplace could easily be mistaken for something ...

Habits of Empire

David Priestland: Financial Imperialism, 27 July 2023

The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance 
by Jamie Martin.
Harvard, 345 pp., £34.95, June 2022, 978 0 674 97654 2
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... debt. European involvement in the Egyptian economy steadily increased: the American economist Henry Carter Adams believed the commission was so powerful it was becoming the ‘practical dictator of Egypt’. This exercise of ‘soft’ imperialism led to a nationalist rebellion, British military intervention and the ...

How did she get those feet?

Alice Spawls: The Female Detective, 20 February 2014

The Notting Hill Mystery: The First Detective Novel 
by Charles Warren Adams.
British Library, 312 pp., £8.99, February 2012, 978 0 7123 5859 0
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The Female Detective: The Original Lady Detective 
by Andrew Forrester.
British Library, 328 pp., £8.99, October 2012, 978 0 7123 5878 1
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Revelations of a Lady Detective 
by William Stephens Hayward.
British Library, 278 pp., £8.99, February 2013, 978 0 7123 5896 5
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... of the fragment and then an attempt to complete and translate it. The book’s author, Charles Adams, may have been trying to compensate for the flimsy plot. Twin girls, who share a psychic ability to feel each other’s pain, are separated as children when the younger, Catherine, is stolen by Gypsies. The elder, Gertie, grows up and gets married but is ...

The dogs in the street know that

Nick Laird: A Week in Mid-Ulster, 5 May 2005

... have all these 18 to 25 year olds who are new to the political scene, and they think that Adams and McGuinness are doing a good job. It doesn’t seem to matter what Sinn Féin do, their vote stays. What can the SDLP do now? We don’t need guns, we’re not robbing banks. We don’t have millions of pounds behind us. We don’t wear three-piece ...

Brattishness

Colin Burrow: Henry Howard, 11 November 1999

Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life 
by W.A. Sessions.
Oxford, 448 pp., £60, March 1999, 9780198186243
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... queens (Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard). He spent four years of his youth as the companion of Henry VIII’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy. Howard blood was blue enough to pose a threat to the succession, as Surrey’s uncle Thomas discovered when he was imprisoned in 1536 after a rash engagement to Lady Margaret ...

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