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Mushrooms

Michael Dobson: How to Be a Favourite, 5 October 2006

Literature and Favouritism in Early Modern England 
by Curtis Perry.
Cambridge, 328 pp., £50, February 2006, 0 521 85405 9
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... I do what I will … Mine enemies will I plague, my friends advance.’) In Shakespeare’s Richard II (1595), Bolingbroke returns early from banishment while his cousin Richard is in Ireland, and says that he has come only to claim his dead father’s estate and to purge the court of ...

Ultimate Place

Seamus Deane, 16 March 1989

Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage 
by Tim Robinson.
Viking, 298 pp., £12.95, February 1989, 0 670 82485 2
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... wind and sea for a fifty-yard wide stretch below the storm beach. Here in 1975, the English artist Richard Long created one of his characteristic circles out of the available stones. Robinson and his wife first saw it from an aeroplane as they flew in from Galway. Later they found it. By the autumn, it had gone, wiped out by the seasonal storms. Another ...

Supermax

John Bayley, 8 December 1988

The Letters of Max Beerbohm 1892-1956 
edited by Rupert Hart-Davis.
Murray, 244 pp., £16.95, August 1988, 0 7195 4537 4
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The Faber Book of Letters 
edited by Felix Pryor.
Faber, 319 pp., £12.95, October 1988, 0 571 15269 4
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... their subjects. I have something in common with Joyce, and with Wilde, is the modest assumption of Richard Ellmann. Max was a bit like me, implies Cecil. That brings them, and us, all the closer to the subject. It can also lead to misunderstanding. Oddly enough, as Cecil’s admirable biography shows, both he and Max understood Oscar Wilde a good deal better ...
... hardened around them, needed to throw stones at the Irish Literary Revival, led by Yeats and Lady Gregory. ‘The “Irish” Literary Theatre,’ Pearse wrote in 1899,is, in my opinion, more dangerous, because less glaringly anti-national than Trinity College. If we once admit the Irish literature is English idea, then the language movement is a mistake. Mr ...

tarry easty

Roy Foster: Joyce in Trieste, 30 November 2000

The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904-20 
by John McCourt.
Lilliput, 306 pp., £25, June 2000, 1 901866 45 9
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... before, who told Yeats to his face that he was ‘too old to be helped’, who mocked Augusta Gregory even as she helped him, and who left Dublin in 1904 aged 22, with a glamorous student reputation and little else. Four years later Stanislaus Joyce remarked that his brother had failed ‘as a poet in Paris, as a journalist in Dublin, as a lover and ...

Early Kermode

Stefan Collini, 13 August 2020

... that in the summer of 1955 he wrote a lecture on Yeats’s poem ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, which, as he liked to put it 26 years later, ‘turned almost spontaneously into a book’, namely, Romantic Image. The book does have the assured, focused quality of an argument that writes itself, which may obscure what a bold move it ...

Lunacies

Ian Campbell Ross: ‘provincial genius’, 23 October 2003

Hermsprong; or Man as He Is Not 
by Robert Bage, edited by Pamela Perkins.
Broadview, 387 pp., £8.99, March 2002, 1 55111 279 5
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... facetious humour of his earlier fiction – represented most obviously by his Shandean narrator, Gregory Glen – Bage involves his characters in some of the most commonly debated political and philosophical issues of the day. Hermsprong is the idealised product of a childhood passed among Native Americans whose simple virtues he absorbs before his ...

Rolling Back the Reformation

Eamon Duffy: Bloody Mary’s Church, 7 February 2008

... and made at least one donation towards its running costs. But a memorandum prepared for Pope Gregory XIII in the early 1570s, very probably by Nicolo Ormanetto, one of Pole’s closest collaborators, reveals that Pole had had ideas of his own for an English college in Rome which would do for England what the Germanicum was to do for Germany. Ever since ...

Ireland at Swim

Denis Donoghue, 21 April 1983

The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, 1977-1981 
edited by M.P. Hederman and R. Kearney, with a preface by Seamus Heaney.
Blackwater Press/Colin Smythe, 930 pp., £25, October 1982, 9780905471136
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A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers 
by Hugh Kenner.
Knopf, 352 pp., $16.95, April 1983, 0 394 42225 2
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... of people who did ‘some not wholly fulfilling thing’ – Cuchulain fighting the waves, Robert Gregory taking to the air – their fulfilment to be achieved only when Yeats had emblematised them in strong verse. Seven: Dublin is a capital city in which ‘eight decades’ experience of the telephone has not yet fostered the habit of returning ...

Back to the Border

Niamh Gallagher: Ulsterism, 17 June 2021

The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925 
by Charles Townshend.
Allen Lane, 368 pp., £20, April, 978 0 241 30086 2
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... the Gaelic League, receives two sentences. The contributions of Alice Milligan, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Constance Markievicz are ignored, presumably because they too were Protestants. So are the contributions of other revivalists, such as James Joyce, a Catholic nationalist who loathed the Church because of its condemnation of the nationalist leader ...

Michael Gove recommends …

Robert Hanks: Dennis Wheatley, 20 January 2011

The Devil Is a Gentleman: The Life and Times of Dennis Wheatley 
by Phil Baker.
Dedalus, 699 pp., £25, October 2009, 978 1 903517 75 8
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... Van Ryn, a brash, genial American multimillionaire, and the comparatively colourless Englishman Richard Eaton, supposedly a self-portrait. The plot (a hunt for tsarist treasure, a Bolshevik scheme for world domination – plus a bit of romance) is a helter-skelter mess. Wheatley liked to talk about his ‘snakes and ladders’ technique: in effect, a ...

Gloves Off

Glen Newey: Torture, 29 January 2009

Death by a Thousand Cuts 
by Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon and Gregory Blue.
Harvard, 320 pp., £22.95, March 2008, 978 0 674 02773 2
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Standard Operating Procedure: A War Story 
by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris.
Picador, 286 pp., £8.99, January 2009, 978 0 330 45201 4
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Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law 
by Philippe Sands.
Allen Lane, 315 pp., £20, May 2008, 978 1 84614 008 2
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... out, in the words of the King of Brobdingnag, as a pernicious race of little odious vermin. Even Richard Rorty, the self-styled postmodernist liberal, felt able to pronounce that cruelty was ‘the worst thing we do’. Torture has posed a problem for philosophers. Simple utilitarianism has notorious difficulties in explaining why torture or other such abuse ...

A Monk’s-Eye View

Diarmaid MacCulloch, 10 March 2022

The Dissolution of the Monasteries: A New History 
by James G. Clark.
Yale, 649 pp., £25, October 2021, 978 0 300 11572 7
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Going to Church in Medieval England 
by Nicholas Orme.
Yale, 483 pp., £20, July 2021, 978 0 300 25650 5
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... England’s varied landscapes – sometimes neutralised as picturesque garden features, as at Richard Tracey’s Cotswold mansion, which cannibalised parts of the former Hailes Abbey; sometimes gaunt safety hazards like Crowland Abbey church, where the tottering nave roof-vaults (twin to those in Westminster Abbey) loomed over the parish church and across ...

Canterbury Tale

Charles Nicholl, 8 December 1988

Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury 
by William Urry, edited by Andrew Butcher.
Faber, 184 pp., £12.95, May 1988, 0 571 14566 3
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John Weever 
by E.A.J. Honigmann.
Manchester, 134 pp., £27.50, April 1987, 0 7190 2217 7
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Rare Sir William Davenant 
by Mary Edmond.
Manchester, 264 pp., £27.50, July 1987, 9780719022869
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... evening in 1579 and said, ‘Michael Shaw thou art a thief, and so I will prove thee to be’; and Gregory Roose the capper, husband to the local midwife Goodwife Roose, who probably brought Christopher Marlowe into the world. Though compact – population about 3500 – Elizabethan Canterbury was a cosmopolitan city. Its ecclesiastical eminence drew visitors ...

Mitteleuropa am Aldwych

Ian Hacking: The Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence, 20 January 2000

For and against Method: including Lakatos’s Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence 
by Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, edited by Matteo Motterlini.
Chicago, 451 pp., £24, October 1999, 0 226 46774 0
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... of the correspondence has reproduced what seem to be extraordinarily faithful notes taken by Gregory Currie of lectures given by Lakatos in 1973. Once again, I found no new philosophy here but people who did not know Lakatos may be fascinated by the way in which he baited all and sundry, and marvel at his arrogant jokes. His contempt for fashion, for ...

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