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Tom Crewe: ‘Parallel Lives’, 2 April 2020

... was in some sense normal’. As if, in the absence of a concept, the idea of midlife angst was unknown. ‘If Catherine lived now, she might well feel (as other women have felt) that her husband’s anger at her had nothing to do with her and a lot to do with his mother. But Catherine, in 1855, could have had no such consoling thought.’ As if, in ...

Shebeen Queens

Sophie Lewis: Carousing Women, 18 November 2021

Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol 
by Mallory O’Meara.
Hanover Square, 392 pp., $27.99, October, 978 1 335 28240 8
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... and jewel-encrusted cups; ‘an affluent Egyptian woman named Chratiankh (birth and death dates unknown)’ whose tomb inscription was said to read: ‘I was a mistress of drunkenness, one who loved a good day, who looked forward to [having sex] every day, anointed with myrrh and perfumed with lotus scent.’Alcohol legislation, O’Meara notes, is often ...

Do you wish to continue?

Edmund Gordon: ‘Homesickness’, 4 August 2022

Homesickness 
by Colin Barrett.
Cape, 213 pp., £14.99, March, 978 1 78733 381 9
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... the brittle wrists and yellowed skin, the nicks and weals and livid pink burn marks of unknown origin – and realised I was already way along on that project. It was go home or die, and home was an oblivion that was at least reversible.Home is somewhere in Co. Mayo: ‘a roundabout off a national road, an industrial estate, a five-screen ...

Lady with the Iron Nose

Tom Shippey: Pagan Survival, 3 November 2022

Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe, an Investigation 
by Ronald Hutton.
Yale, 245 pp., £18.99, May, 978 0 300 26101 1
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... Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches, published in 1899, professes to be the gospel of a previously unknown witch-religion practised by a secret society in northern Italy; Leland claimed he had been given the text by an Italian magician. It’s still in print, but no trace of the religion, the society or the magician has ever been found. Aradia looks very like ...

One Last Selfless Act

Thomas Jones: Sunjeev Sahota, 22 October 2015

The Year of the Runaways 
by Sunjeev Sahota.
Picador, 468 pp., £14.99, June 2015, 978 1 4472 4164 5
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... but the simile, back-to-front though it may be, works because it shows he considers himself in unknown and potentially dangerous territory. It’s there for our benefit, not Randeep’s. Because Sahota doesn’t explain everything straightaway, or translate the Punjabi phrases he uses, or spell out the meaning of Sikh customs and rituals, the uninformed ...

Diary

May Jeong: Femicide in Kandahar, 7 September 2017

... but she didn’t believe that meant the perpetrator had been caught. ‘The real killers are unknown,’ she said. At Mirwais Hospital, death records were kept in handwritten registries. I looked on as workers leafed through what they called the death book; perhaps ten women had been murdered in any given month. In September 2016, a woman named Babo had ...

Just Look at Them

Jonathan Beckman: Ears and Fingers, 27 January 2022

The Life of Giovanni Morelli in Risorgimento Italy 
by Jaynie Anderson.
Officina Libraria, 271 pp., £29.95, November 2019, 978 88 99765 95 8
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... who happened to be German. On publication, there was some surprise at the confidence of this unknown writer. In fact, ‘Lermolieff’ was the pseudonym, by way of an imprecise anagram, of a retired Italian politician called Giovanni Morelli.Morelli wasn’t simply spoiling for a fight. Art criticism, he thought, suffered from a serious failing: no one ...

Quisling and Occupier

Virginia Tilley: The One State Solution, 3 November 2005

... be determined, or gained, or changed, in the next three to six months? Waiting further, for some unknown sign of unforeseeable change, can only foster more paralysis among a concerned international community: a paralysis that enables Israel to complete its bantustan strategy in the West Bank. In fact, those governments and NGOs attempting to lobby harder for ...

Never Seen a Violet

Dinah Birch: Victorian men and girls, 6 September 2001

Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman 
by Catherine Robson.
Princeton, 250 pp., £19.95, June 2001, 0 691 00422 6
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... and with the elegiac sentiment which underlies all Wordsworth’s strongest poetry: She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her Grave, and Oh! The difference to me. The death of this imagined child was followed by the loss of real children: his three-year-old daughter Catharine and her six-year-old brother Thomas ...

Demented Brothers

Declan Kiberd: William Trevor, 8 March 2001

The Hill Bachelors 
by William Trevor.
Viking, 245 pp., £15.99, October 2000, 0 670 89256 4
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... for Fr Leahy, but only as it once was for those early Christian monks who rowed away into the unknown. All Trevor’s narrative gifts are evident in this story. The short paragraphs, cut and chiselled, are those of a puritan stylist. Vital pieces of information are quietly slipped in in mid-paragraph. The technique is the Joycean epiphany: a state of ...

In Transit

Geoff Dyer: Garry Winogrand, 20 June 2013

... his face is partly obscured, the guy kissing his girlfriend at an airport – location and date unknown – on page 51 of the posthumously compiled Arrivals & Departures – looks incredibly like the young Bob Dylan. He even has a pen in his shirt pocket! During this deranged phase of research I was also struck by the way that Winogrand himself looked, for ...

One and Only Physician

James Romm: Galen, 21 November 2013

The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire 
by Susan Mattern.
Oxford, 334 pp., £20, July 2013, 978 0 19 960545 3
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... Galen into his service. But hopes of an action sequence are quickly disappointed. Galen, for unknown reasons, declined to accompany the emperor; he stayed in Rome attending Commodus, the emperor’s son and heir, along with other physicians, a sinecure that helped make possible his huge outpouring of prose. He recorded only one face-to-face encounter ...

Diary

Alison Light: Wiltshire Baptists, 8 April 2010

... what he called ‘the fifth dimension’: a mix of moral philosophy, humility in the face of the unknown, Wellsian science and hedging his bets. I went to Shrewton because I miss him and it was one way of carrying on our talks, but I was also prompted by reading the Victoria County History of Wiltshire, which reveals that on Census Sunday 1851, 350 ...

Butcher, Baker, Wafer-Maker

Miri Rubin: A Medieval Mrs Beeton, 8 April 2010

The Good Wife’s Guide: A Medieval Household Book 
translated by Gina Greco and Christine Rose.
Cornell, 366 pp., £16.95, March 2009, 978 0 8014 7474 3
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... and equally ambitious. Yet unlike the energetic Mrs Beeton, the author of Le Ménagier de Paris is unknown and unknowable. He adopts the voice of ‘Husband’, addressing his ‘Young Wife’ and offering moral guidance, advice on hospitality and food and several cautionary tales, told in styles ranging from terse prose to poetry, as well as treatises on ...

L’Ingratitude

Charlotte Brontë, 8 March 2012

... a word to anyone, the ingrate abandoned his father and his paternal abode and departed for lands unknown. At first all seemed charming to him; the flowers were of a freshness, the trees of a greenness that he had never seen at home – and then, he saw so many wonders: an animal with a tail larger than its body (it was a squirrel), a little creature that ...

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