London Review of Books

Elizabethan Spirits

William Empson, 17 April 1980

The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age
by Frances Yates.
Routledge, 224 pp., £7.75, November 1979, 9780710003201Show More

“... most of the countryside); it had now become hard to tell the difference between them and devils. King James in his Demonology (1597) is indignant at the idea of devils who live in the storm-clouds: probably he felt that this practically lets you get back to believing in the pagan demigods. The familiar of Faust in the original German has never been to ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... breath. We all have our links. I was once married to Jean Brodie of Annandale Street, who went to James Gillespie’s High School, the one in Muriel Spark’s novel. When I asked her the other day how she would vote, she shrugged. But almost immediately she added: ‘Well, it does seem that the notion of social justice is still alive, just, in Scotland.’ I ...”

Owning Art

Arthur C. Danto, 7 March 1996

Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in 17th-Century Europe
by Jonathan Brown.
Yale, 264 pp., £35, September 1995, 0 300 06437 3Show More

Art & Money
by Marc Shell.
Chicago, 230 pp., £27.95, June 1995, 0 226 75213 5Show More

“... the comparison vivid by observing that the cost of lace on a gown worn in 1613 by the daughter of James I was, at £1700, ‘more valuable than all but a few paintings in the famous collection of his brother, Charles I’. At the same time a certain value, undefinable in economic terms, came to be attached to the ownership of paintings which had no equivalent ...”

Sweaney Peregraine

Paul Muldoon, 1 November 1984

Station Island
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 123 pp., £5.95, October 1984, 0 571 13301 0Show More

Sweeney Astray: A Version
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 85 pp., £6.95, October 1984, 0 571 13360 6Show More

Rich
by Craig Raine.
Faber, 109 pp., £5.95, September 1984, 0 571 13215 4Show More

“... however, Heaney rather ‘expectedly’ throws his voice through the figure of Sweeney, the Ulster king who’s cursed by Saint Ronan and is transformed into a bird-man. In a note to Station Island Heaney writes: ‘A version of the Irish tale is available in my Sweeney Astray, but I trust these glosses can survive without the support system of the original ...”

Where have all the horses gone?

Eric Banks: Horse Power, 5 July 2018

The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey through Human History
by Susanna Forrest.
Atlantic, 418 pp., £9.99, October 2017, 978 0 85789 900 2Show More

Farewell to the Horse: The Final Century of Our Relationship
by Ulrich Raulff, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp.
Penguin, 448 pp., £9.99, February 2018, 978 0 14 198317 2Show More

“... of the Middle Ages; or tracing the mounted political figure from Kant’s grumbling about the new King of Prussia arriving in Königsberg in a carriage to the caparisoned horse of President Kennedy’s funeral cortège. Figures from Paul Mellon to Siegfried Kracauer, Robespierre to Claude Simon, whose cavalry unit was massacred in World War Two, put in ...”

Peter opened Paul the door

Leofranc Holford-Strevens: The Case for Case, 9 July 2009

The Oxford Handbook of Case
edited by Andrej Malchukov and Andrew Spencer.
Oxford, 928 pp., £85, November 2008, 978 0 19 920647 6Show More

“... contribute the double genitives hers and theirs, and shares with Danish the phrasal genitive the king of Spain’s daughter. The nature and the manifestations of case are the subject of the new Oxford Handbook; anyone who wishes to understand the phenomenon of case from any point of view will find something of interest in its 57 chapters (not counting the ...”

Guinea Pigs

Barbara Taylor: Eighteenth-Century Surveillance Culture, 8 February 2007

The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s
by John Barrell.
Oxford, 278 pp., £53, January 2006, 0 19 928120 3Show More

“... trials of 1794 the charge against Thelwall and his LCS comrades was that of ‘imagining the King’s death’. ‘Imagining’ was medieval legalese for ‘intending’, but in the political hysteria surrounding the trials even regicidal fantasies, expressed or attributed – the ‘levities of imagination’, as John Thelwall wrote, a touch ...”

Motorised Youth Rebellion

Andy Beckett: Radical LA, 18 February 2021

Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties
by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener.
Verso, 788 pp., £25, April 2020, 978 1 78478 022 7Show More

“... rest of his mayoralty. Since the 1960s, such shadowy goings-on have provided rich material for ‘James Ellroy and other pulp writers’, as Davis and Wiener sum up LA’s long line of novelist-historians. They themselves take a more sober approach, describing the city’s labyrinthine municipal politics not with relish so much as clarity and distaste.Their ...”

We possess all things

Pamela Crossley: The Macartney Embassy, 18 August 2022

The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire
by Henrietta Harrison.
Princeton, 341 pp., £25, January 2022, 978 0 691 22545 6Show More

“... European language scholarship on the Macartney saga by John Cranmer-Byng, Alain Peyrefitte, James Hevia, John Watt and others, redirecting our attention to those who did the real work of communicating.The Chinese world order (or ‘tributary system’) that Macartney sought to challenge is mostly imaginary. Empires in China had long used ‘guest ...”

In-Betweeners

Malcolm Gaskill: Americans in 16th-Century Europe, 18 May 2023

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe
by Caroline Dodds Pennock.
Weidenfeld, 302 pp., £22, January, 978 1 4746 1690 4Show More

“... she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in fact, a princess, however much it suited the Virginia Company to pretend she was. Nor was her name Pocahontas, which means ‘playful girl’ and like so many other aspects of Indigenous culture had been misunderstood. Yet the name is a ...”

Battle of Britain

Patrick O’Brian, 7 July 1988

The Spanish Armada
by Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker.
Hamish Hamilton, 296 pp., £15, April 1988, 0 241 12125 6Show More

Armada 1588-1988
by M.J. Rodriguez-Salgado.
Penguin and the National Maritime Museum, 295 pp., £12.95, April 1988, 0 14 010301 5Show More

Armada: A Celebration of the 400th Anniversary of the Defeat of the Spanish Armada 1588-1988
by Peter Padfield.
Gollancz, 208 pp., £14.95, April 1988, 0 575 03729 6Show More

Froude’s ‘Spanish Story of the Armada’, and Other Essays
edited by A.L. Rowse.
Sutton, 262 pp., £5.95, May 1988, 0 86299 500 0Show More

Ireland’s Armada Legacy
by Laurence Flanagan.
Sutton, 210 pp., £9.95, April 1988, 9780862994730Show More

The Armada in the Public Records
by N.A.M. Rodger.
HMSO, 76 pp., £5.95, April 1988, 0 11 440215 9Show More

The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588
by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto.
Oxford, 300 pp., £14.95, June 1988, 0 19 822926 7Show More

“... servants only two were fit to wait on him; he himself was very ill and very tired. He wrote to the King, saw that his men and invalids were paid and looked after, and then went straight home to San Lucar, which he had never wished to leave. On being offered the command in the first place he had asked to be excused ‘for I know by the small experience I have ...”

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 8Show More

“... tested operatic techniques to retell an existing story, and even Britten, in his setting of Henry James, leaned heavily on technique when genuine inspiration dimmed. But in composing The Midsummer Marriage Tippett, typically, discovered the techniques that he needed to write the piece as he went along. The music shimmered and sparkled, but without an ounce of ...”

Putin’s Counter-Revolution

James Meek, 20 March 2014

“... singing the Ukrainian national anthem, Ukrainian revolutionary rap, a video of a savage Rodney King-style assault by Ukrainian policemen on a defenceless civilian, and as much more in the same vein as your eyes can bear. If you replace ‘Maidan’ with ‘Banderovtsy’, the catch-all term opponents of the revolution use to refer to its activists (after ...”

Dashing for Freedom

Paul Foot, 12 December 1996

Full Disclosure
by Andrew Neil.
Macmillan, 481 pp., £20, October 1996, 0 333 64682 7Show More

“... Later in the book, describing a weekend journey to the countryside to meet his new amanuensis, James Adams, Neil gives a pretty clear idea of how he likes to see himself: ‘James,’ Neil writes, ‘was surprised when somebody his own age emerged one sunny Sunday in shorts and open-necked shirt from a black convertible ...”

Reasons

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 1 April 1983

A Treatise on Social Theory. Vol. I: The Methodology of Social Theory
by W.G. Runciman.
Cambridge, 350 pp., £25, March 1983, 0 521 24906 6Show More

“... than rows of ponderous foxhunters, fat with Staffordshire and Devonshire ale, men who drank to the King across the Water and believed all the fundholders were Jews,’ is, Runciman says, to lapse into ‘too much conscious literary merit to be counted even under the most generous rubric’ – and Runciman’s own rubric stretches to history itself – ‘as ...”

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