In His White Uniform

Rosemary Hill: Accidental Gods, 10 February 2022

Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine 
by Anna Della Subin.
Granta, 462 pp., £20, January 2022, 978 1 78378 501 8Show More
Show More
“... Duke of Gloucester, who represented George V at the coronation) had bowed before the Black king. ‘We of the black race are now free.’ Haile Selassie was, he said, the Black Messiah. Events unfolded from this point in a way that becomes familiar as Subin’s book goes on.Howell was imprisoned by the colonial authorities and while detained wrote The ...”

Diary

Michael Dobson: The Russell-Cotes, 23 February 2012

“... hinged double set, trying to throw the baby Jesus across the intervening frame at the kneeling king on the left? And why was I supposed to care about the mustard-coloured pot on the mustard-coloured table with the mustard-coloured dead sunflowers in it? Pictures were another matter. You could imagine living with pictures; my parents’ house had pictures ...”

Short Cuts

Inigo Thomas: At the Ladbroke Arms, 22 February 2018

“... The pub has become as much a restaurant as it is a place to have a drink. It is owned by Greene King, the brewing company, and run by a Polish woman who lives upstairs. It is full most evenings: customers smoking cigarettes stand on the pavement. One of the barmen is from Stettin – ‘Paris of the Baltic’, as he likes to say – and studied politics at ...”

At the Queen’s Gallery

Brigid von Preussen: ‘Dressing the Georgians’, 29 June 2023

“... Charlotte, meanwhile, is dressed in white silk and lace. She is dressed for dinner with the king, but has paused at her toilette to attend to her children, while a maid hovers in the next room.Zoffany’s portrait is a conversation piece (if toddlers can be said to make conversation), which purports to depict a private and natural familial scene, albeit ...”

Stop talking englissh

Marion Turner: Medieval Polyglots, 9 May 2024

Fixers: Agency, Translation and the Early Global History of Literature 
by Zrinka Stahuljak.
Chicago, 345 pp., £85, February, 978 0 226 83039 1Show More
Show More
“... Persian, Koman, Chaldean and other ‘schismatic languages’ in order to aid conversion. In 1276 James II of Aragon agreed to found a monastery at Miramar in Majorca for the study of Eastern languages, and Llull himself travelled to Tunis, Cyprus, Armenia and Libya. At the Council of Vienne in 1311, the Catholic Church decided to set up chairs in ...”

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
Show 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 ...”

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
Show 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 ...”

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
Show 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 ...”

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
Show 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
Show 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 ...”

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
Show 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 ...”

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
Show 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 ...”

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
Show 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 ...”
Show more articles