Translucency

Gaby Wood: Cyanotypes, 13 August 2026

Anna Atkins: Cyanotypes 
edited by Peter Walther.
Taschen, 512 pp., £25, May, 978 3 7544 0122 4
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“... to stay on at Ferox Hall to recover (it was this accident that prompted him to hire an assistant, Michael Faraday). In 1815, the year before Mary Shelley wrote her story about the reanimating powers of electricity, Children constructed the most powerful galvanic battery yet invented, for which he received the Royal Institution Medal. The experiments exploring ...”

His Own Sort of Outsider

Philip Clark: Tippett’s Knack, 16 July 2020

Michael Tippett: The Biography 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 750 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4746 0602 8
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“... By​ the time his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage, had its premiere at Covent Garden in 1955, Michael Tippett was considered, alongside Benjamin Britten, the most significant and original British composer of his generation. Yet he was also the natural outsider in a scene that as well as Britten (born 1913), included William Walton (1902) and Lennox Berkeley (1903), with the reassuring presence of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872) hovering over them all ...”

Diary

Rebecca Solnit: Before 1776, 23 July 2026

“... out of the church carrying an icon. In the lower left appeared a hanged priest in a black cassock. Wood, presumably for a fire, was being piled beneath him by Native men. A woman was bringing more wood. Soft colours, clear outlines and an air of calm made the figures seem as if they were performing everyday activities rather ...”

Now he had opps

Daniel Trilling: Youth Work, 12 May 2022

Cut Short: Why We’re Failing Our Youth – and How to Fix It 
by Ciaran Thapar.
Penguin, 352 pp., £10.99, June 2022, 978 0 241 98870 1
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“... cheffed [stabbed] for nobody!’ – but was increasingly worried about his older half-brother, Michael, who had ‘been moving a bit mad recently’. Carl went to a community centre in Loughborough Junction where Thapar volunteered; he started getting into trouble after his father walked out, and was later expelled from school.As boys in these ...”

The Immortal Coil

Richard Barnett: Faraday’s Letters, 21 March 2013

The Correspondence of Michael Faraday Vol. VI, 1860-67 
by Frank James.
IET, 919 pp., £85, December 2011, 978 0 86341 957 7
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“... He sent this to the newly appointed Fullerian Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution, Michael Faraday. Faraday replied immediately: Pickersgill’s report had ‘greatly excited’ his curiosity, not least because ‘the meteor or whatever else it might be’ had been witnessed by ‘men of philosophical & correct habits of observation’. Would ...”

Entryism

Jacqueline Rose: ‘Specimen Days’, 22 September 2005

Specimen Days 
by Michael Cunningham.
Fourth Estate, 308 pp., £14.99, August 2005, 0 00 715605 7
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“... At the centre of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, in the second of its three tales, Cat, a black woman police investigator in New York, has the job of receiving and recording the calls of people threatening to blow themselves and others to pieces. Only because these deranged stories have become too familiar does she miss the one who really means it, a young boy, who, without forewarning or apparent motive, goes up to a stranger in Central Park, embraces him and explodes ...”

Who was David Peterley?

Michael Holroyd, 15 November 1984

“... biographer to ignore ... all these sights and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating and the wood chopping, began that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests.’ There had been a number of experiments in the late 1920s and early 1930s – among them Harold Nicolson’s delightful vignettes Some People, Lytton ...”

And you, what are you doing here?

Michael Gilsenan: The Haj, 19 October 2006

A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage 
by Abdellah Hammoudi, translated by Pascale Ghazaleh.
Polity, 293 pp., £12.99, January 2006, 0 7456 3789 2
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“... denunciation of those who timidly ask for guidance is swift: ‘Those who committed such deeds are wood for the fires of Hell!’ The despair this judgment brings is only slightly mitigated when Hammoudi reminds one man that he says the name of God before sacrificing an animal at a holy figure’s tomb, so he puts God first, doesn’t he? A companion is more ...”

At the Whitney

Hal Foster: Jeff Koons, 31 July 2014

“... Hope’ (1986) ‘Naked’ (1988) ‘Balloon Dog’ (1994-2000) ‘Bear and Policeman’ (1998) ‘Michael Jackson and Bubbles’ (1988)PreviousNext Koons broke through in the early 1980s with a series titled ‘The New’ consisting of store-bought vacuum cleaners and other pristine appliances; set on or placed inside fluorescent light boxes, each immaculate ...”

A Regular Grey

Jonathan Parry, 3 December 2020

Statesman of Europe: a Life of Sir Edward Grey 
by T.G. Otte.
Allen Lane, 858 pp., £35, November, 978 0 241 41336 4
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“... reliable and businesslike cabinet supporters: Sir George Grey, Charles’s nephew, and Sir Charles Wood, Charles’s son-in-law. Commentators fond of political flamboyance considered both men dispensable, but dispensing with them was not on the agenda. George, who inherited the smaller of the family’s two Northumberland estates, at Fallodon, served as home ...”

Diary

Iain Sinclair: My Olympics, 30 August 2012

“... bonanza. The soft-spoken Californian rodent was attended by his sleepover pal and minder, Michael Jackson. We have heard it stated, quite accurately, that construction work on the Olympic Park has been carried out with few casualties. But cycle deaths are mounting, from the early casualties of the fresh-painted lanes at the base of the Bow ...”

Crotchet Castles

Peter Campbell, 6 December 1984

William Kent 
by Michael Wilson.
Routledge, 276 pp., £30, July 1984, 0 7100 9983 5
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James Gibbs 
by Terry Friedman.
Yale, 362 pp., £40, November 1984, 0 300 03172 6
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Sir John Soane, Architect 
by Dorothy Stroud.
Faber, 300 pp., £32, May 1984, 9780571130504
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The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable 
by Graham Reynolds.
Yale, 880 pp., £140, October 1984, 0 300 03151 3
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“... work they undertook and the erosion of the independence of the worker in stone, plaster, brick or wood accelerated. The drawing-men took over from the making-men. Conception and execution became separate provinces. Thinking, not building, became the architect’s highest achievement. Finally, some time around the third quarter of the 18th ...”

Barbarians

Stuart Airlie, 17 November 1983

Medieval Germany and its Neighbours 900-1250 
by K.J. Leyser.
Hambledon, 302 pp., £18, February 1983, 0 907628 08 7
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TheFrankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians 751-987 
by Rosamond McKitterick.
Longman, 414 pp., £9.95, June 1983, 0 582 49005 7
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Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies presented to J.M. Wallace-Hadrill 
edited by Patrick Wormald, Donald Bullough and Roger Collins.
Blackwell, 345 pp., £27.50, September 1983, 0 631 12661 9
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“... Society is an important collection of new essays by 13 of the pupils and associates of Professor Michael Wallace-Hadrill presented to him on his retirement from the Chichele Chair in Oxford. Despite the varieties of subject-matter and approach in these essays and of gender and age among the contributors, the degree of coherence claimed for this volume by the ...”

Makeshiftness

Barry Schwabsky: Who is Menzel?, 17 April 2003

Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in 19th-Century Berlin 
by Michael Fried.
Yale, 313 pp., £35, September 2002, 0 300 09219 9
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“... Michael Fried, who is also a poet, has a dense, self-questioning, fervent prose style. Somewhat perversely he has, over the last three decades – that is, since his doctoral dissertation on Manet was printed as a special issue of Artforum in 1969 – put this prose to the service of art-historical scholarship. It might have been otherwise ...”

Multinational Soap

Emily Witt: Teju Cole’s ‘Tremor’, 2 November 2023

Tremor 
by Teju Cole.
Faber, 239 pp., £18.99, October, 978 0 571 28335 4
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“... taught agriculture to humanity. ‘It stands around four feet tall and appears to be old, its wood stained dark, the information on the label imprecise.’ The shopkeepers tell Tunde that they believe the headdress to be ‘authentic’. He bristles at the word:It was in a shop among the unrelated treasures white people had collected by fair means or foul ...”