Voyagers

James Paradis, 18 June 1981

Sir Joseph Banks 
by Charles Lyte.
David and Charles, 248 pp., £10.50, October 1980, 0 7153 7884 8
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The Heyday of Natural History: 1820-1870 
by Lynn Barber.
Cape, 320 pp., £9.50, October 1980, 9780224014489
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A Vision of Eden 
by Marianne North.
Webb and Bower, 240 pp., £8.95, October 1980, 0 906671 18 3
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... tradition of science as wholly inadequate to the serious advancement of scientific knowledge. As young men now applied themselves to the study of law, he argued, future scientists must devote themselves to the mastery of their respective disciplines. Responding to the call of Babbage and others for a new professionalism in the sciences, researchers and ...

Hero of Our People

Adam Thirlwell: On Mário de Andrade, 22 May 2025

Macunaíma 
by Mário de Andrade, translated by Katrina Dodson.
Fitzcarraldo, 318 pp., £12.99, May 2023, 978 1 80427 026 4
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... however, wasn’t that it was condescending, but that it was itself borrowed from Paris. In 1920 Francis Picabia set up a Dada magazine called Cannibale, with its own aphorisms of plurality: ‘Je suis de plusieurs nationalités et Dada est comme moi.’For Andrade and his novel, it’s as if the Indigenous is the site of the authentically surreal: it ...

Where the Bomb Falls

Clair Wills: Marion Milner’s Method, 20 February 2025

A Life of One’s Own 
by Marion Milner.
Routledge, 276 pp., £17.99, May 2024, 978 1 032 75755 1
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An Experiment in Leisure 
by Marion Milner.
Routledge, 234 pp., £17.99, May 2024, 978 1 032 75753 7
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Marion Milner: On Creativity 
by David Russell.
Oxford, 163 pp., £18.99, October 2024, 978 0 19 285920 4
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... up the stairs to offer consultations to first Mr and then Mrs – he asked Milner to take on the young patient who would become known as Susan, who was then living in his house. It was bound to end in disaster, and it did. Susan had been rescued by Winnicott’s wife, Alice, from a psychiatric hospital where she had recently undergone two sessions of ...

Out of Rehab

Alice Hunt: Two Kings or One?, 25 December 2025

The Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of James VI & I 
by Clare Jackson.
Allen Lane, 524 pp., £35, August 2025, 978 0 241 61127 2
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Queen James: The Life and Loves of Britain’s First King 
by Gareth Russell.
William Collins, 478 pp., £25, February 2025, 978 0 00 866085 7
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... and excelled at debate. But Buchanan was a robust defender of popular sovereignty. He taught his young king about the sins of his mother. James learned about the brutality and the infidelities of the Scottish – specifically Stewart – monarchs. James VI came, Buchanan said, from ‘a bloody nest’. The perfect king, by contrast, would be a ‘lover of ...

Rodinsky’s Place

Patrick Wright, 29 October 1987

White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings 
by Iain Sinclair.
Goldmark, 210 pp., £12.50, October 1987, 1 870507 00 2
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... Brick Lane brewery to celebrate the organisation which had, in the words of its current chairman (Francis Carnwarth, the personable banker who took over from Mark Girouard), ‘saved 18th-century Spitalfields’. There were warm memories from the early days of art-historical activism: the squats and sit-ins which the Trust’s members undertook as they ...

‘Disgusting’

Frank Kermode: Remembering William Empson, 16 November 2006

William Empson. Vol. II: Against the Christians 
by John Haffenden.
Oxford, 797 pp., £30, November 2006, 0 19 927660 9
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... And time has not falsified yet Was always a love with three corners    I loved you in bed with young men, Your arousers and foils and adorers    Who would yield to me then. And so on, for 25 stanzas, unambiguous about the preferences of the parties, but also firm that the marriage was far from lacking in love. There were times when Hetta’s exercise ...

Diary

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s Grotto, 5 October 2023

... but when Ashley-Cooper’s protégé Thomas Hanmer gave instructions for an illustration to Francis Hayman in 1744 he was clear about the way the exiled magician’s home and its surroundings should look (rather like 18th-century parkland):A Landskip the most pleasing that can be design’d, varied with woods and plains and Rocks and vallies, and falls ...

Adored Image

Marina Warner: Celia Paul’s Ghosts, 9 July 2026

Celia Paul:  Works 1975-2025 
edited by Michael Mack and Liv Constable-Maxwell.
Mack, 543 pp., £150, February 2025, 978 1 915743 65 7
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... John Deakin took sixty years ago of the ‘School of London’ and Colony Room members Freud, Francis Bacon, Michael Andrews and Frank Auerbach together at Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho. Paul wanted to conjure the power of that boys’ gang and express her own uneasy position vis-à-vis this now auratic company. ‘I belong among them,’ she ...

Adulation or Eggs

Susan Eilenberg: At home with the Carlyles, 7 October 2004

Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Pimlico, 560 pp., £15, February 2003, 0 7126 6634 6
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... a man (so Andrew Lang remarked) ‘talking angrily and vehemently to himself’. When he was still young, Carlyle confessed in his notebooks that the world had lost its solidity for him. ‘I attend to few things as I was wont: few things have any interest for me; I live in a sort of waking dream.’ When his belief fails, which means when transcendentalism ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: A Shameful Year, 8 January 2004

... the screen Nazi he had once or twice played in his early days as an actor; he was a scaled down Francis L. Sullivan, managing nevertheless to be surprisingly successful in finding partners. Not invariably, though. Sometime in the 1970s he was in a New York bath house where the practice was for someone wanting a partner to leave the cubicle door open. This ...

Why name a ship after a defeated race?

Thomas Laqueur: New Lives of the ‘Titanic’, 24 January 2013

The Wreck of the ‘Titan’ 
by Morgan Robertson.
Hesperus, 85 pp., £8, March 2012, 978 1 84391 359 7
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Shadow of the ‘Titanic’ 
by Andrew Wilson.
Simon and Schuster, 392 pp., £8.99, March 2012, 978 1 84739 882 6
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‘Titanic’ 100th Anniversary Edition: A Night Remembered 
by Stephanie Barczewski.
Continuum, 350 pp., £15.99, December 2011, 978 1 4411 6169 7
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The Story of the Unsinkable ‘Titanic’: Day by Day Facsimile Reports 
by Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton.
Transatlantic, 127 pp., £16.99, November 2011, 978 1 907176 83 8
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‘Titanic’ Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew 
by Richard Davenport-Hines.
Harper, 404 pp., £9.99, September 2012, 978 0 00 732166 7
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Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage 
by Hugh Brewster.
Robson, 338 pp., £20, March 2012, 978 1 84954 179 4
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‘Titanic’ Calling 
edited by Michael Hughes and Katherine Bosworth.
Bodleian, 163 pp., £14.99, April 2012, 978 1 85124 377 8
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... a necklace, the Heart of the Ocean, that went down with the ship but found instead a sketch of a young woman wearing it. She contacts the expedition’s leader and tells him that she is that woman. Today for between $549.99 and $799.99 (on eBay) you can buy a reproduction of the fictional necklace made soon after the film came out; or you can buy a ...

From a Novel in Progress

James Wood, 9 May 2002

... ever bother to bury saints in the first place? Father used to joke that if all the limbs of St Francis of Asissi claimed as relics had really belonged to him, he would have been a millipede. And below the cathedral, there was the grey main street, the cloudy café owned by the Italian family called Bimbi, the old cinema whose carpets had always been ...

Writer’s Writer and Writer’s Writer’s Writer

Julian Barnes: ‘Madame Bovary’, 18 November 2010

Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways 
by Gustave Flaubert and Lydia Davis.
Penguin, 342 pp., £20, November 2010, 978 1 84614 104 1
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... In between, most of the 15 or more versions have been made by men. The best-known of them are Francis Steegmuller and Gerard Hopkins; and though Steegmuller did write some fiction – including mysteries under the name of David Keith – it’s a fair bet that Davis is the best fiction writer ever to translate the novel. Which suggests a further question ...

Old Corruption

Benedict Anderson, 5 February 1987

... educational institutions of Manila, and soon afterwards in Europe. By the 1870s, a small, young mestizo intelligentsia – the so-called ilustrados – was coming into existence. And it was through this younger generation, attending the same schools, reading (and writing for) the same young Spanish-language ...

Rwanda in Six Scenes

Stephen W. Smith: Fables of Rwanda, 17 March 2011

... Burundi. On the way, I’m stopped at numerous Hutu roadblocks. The barriers are manned mostly by young people with clubs, hammers or machetes. At one, a small boy is holding a nail-studded cudgel with tufts of bloody hair. The smell of putrefying bodies by the roadside is sickening. The starter of my dilapidated car is defective and the militiamen lay down ...