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Performances for Sleepless Tyrants

Marina Warner: ‘Tales of the Marvellous’, 8 January 2015

Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange 
translated by Malcolm Lyons, introduced by Robert Irwin.
Penguin, 600 pp., £25, November 2014, 978 0 14 139503 6
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... anything out. More is never enough. Fantastical nonsense, reaching out to grasp the astonishing unknown, does make a kind of sense for contemporary readers. As Angela Carter writes of her magus hero in ‘The Curious Room’, ‘He truly believed that nothing was unknowable. That is what makes him modern.’ Some of the tales are also concerned with ...

Miracles, Marvels, Magic

Caroline Walker Bynum: Medieval Marvels, 9 July 2009

The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages 
by Robert Bartlett.
Cambridge, 170 pp., £17.99, April 2008, 978 0 521 70255 3
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... smoke-filled churches mistook them for apparitions. Reductive explanations of this sort were not unknown even in the Middle Ages. Theologians and ecclesiastical authorities were aware that some miraculous hosts had mould on them; church lawyers ferreted out cases of feigned sanctity and fraudulent miracles; contemplatives wrote with great sophistication ...

The Pig Walked Free

Michael Grayshott: Animal Trials, 5 December 2013

Animal Trials 
by Edward Payson Evans.
Hesperus, 146 pp., £9.99, February 2013, 978 1 84391 382 5
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... supplied with food for the support of the said animals.’ The final outcome of this wrangling is unknown: ‘the last page of the records has been destroyed by rats or bugs of some sort.’ Trials could be long-drawn-out affairs, in which lawyers would lay elaborate theological and metaphysical groundwork. The prosecuting attorney would first set out the ...

Frazzle

Michael Wood: Chinese Whispers, 8 August 2013

Multiples 
edited by Adam Thirlwell.
Portobello, 380 pp., £20, August 2013, 978 1 84627 537 1
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... original is often experienced as multiple.’ For this reason he has chosen stories that are ‘as unknown as reasonably possible’. And yet the book is not finally frazzling; it is tamer than its prospectus promises. One of the reasons has to do with narrative, and we have already glimpsed it in the Borges essay. There is a lot of information in ...

Inside the Giant Eyeball of an Undefined Higher Being

Martin Riker: Mircea Cărtărescu, 20 March 2014

Blinding: Volume I 
by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter.
Archipelago, 464 pp., £15.99, October 2013, 978 1 935744 84 9
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... stretches to the horizon. He’s tied to a crystal chair and surrounded by robed men who speak an unknown language, until ‘an enormous eyelid began to slowly unstick from half the horizon and let a crescent of blinding light into the hall,’ and he finds himself inside the giant eyeball of an undefined higher being. Then the blind masseur says: I had been ...

Indoor Raincoat

Lavinia Greenlaw: Joy Division, 23 April 2015

So This Is Permanence: Joy Division Lyrics and Notebooks 
by Ian Curtis, edited by Deborah Curtis and Jon Savage.
Faber, 304 pp., £27, October 2014, 978 0 571 30955 9
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... me in on Friday … I’ll ring you soon or you ring me … please can you send me some more Unknown Pleasures badges cos Ive only 1 left.’ From Belgium: ‘Dear Joy Division, I write you stupidly but it’s a need … People are vulgar. I feel dispirit.’ And there’s a request from a girl in Leeds, written on jolly yellow notepaper, asking for ...

They were all foreigners

Michael Kulikowski: ‘SPQR’, 7 January 2016

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome 
by Mary Beard.
Profile, 606 pp., £25, October 2015, 978 1 84668 380 0
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... narrative time, because under the emperors Roman politics ceases to change. There are pages on the unknown archaic king whose inscription (RECEI, an early spelling of rex) was discovered in 1899 under one of the earliest parts of the forum, and who proves that a regal period of Roman history is not purely imaginary; on Scipio Barbatus, consul of 298 BC, whose ...

A Life without a Jolt

Ferdinand Mount: M.R. James, 26 January 2012

Collected Ghost Stories 
by M.R. James.
Oxford, 468 pp., £14.99, October 2011, 978 0 19 956884 0
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... his friends to cover huge distances on their Continental excursions to forgotten cathedrals and unknown libraries. Even his old school tutor H.E. Luxmoore was shocked by the frivolity of James and his circle. After spending Christmas at King’s one year, he complained: ‘O how the time goes in talk, talk, talk and overmuch eating.’ Last night Monty ...

Decrepit Lit

Lorna Scott Fox: David Lodge, 8 May 2008

Deaf Sentence 
by David Lodge.
Harvill Secker, 294 pp., £17.99, May 2008, 978 1 84655 167 3
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... person – attempts to perform itself. On the other hand, Lodge hasn’t taken a leap into the unknown. Just as Messenger was a version of the theoretically inclined American academic Morris Zapp, first seen in Changing Places, so Bates is the latest avatar of Philip Swallow, Zapp’s English foil: fussy, well-meaning, vain, hypocritical about sex, unable ...

Keeping Their Distance

Charles Tripp: Muqtada al-Sadr, 17 July 2008

Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq 
by Patrick Cockburn.
Faber, 289 pp., £16.99, April 2008, 978 0 571 23974 0
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... the early Baath Arab Socialist Party. In the present free-for-all that is the Iraqi economy, with unknown sums being siphoned off from the state budget and huge subventions coming from US, Iranian and other sources, those who have inserted themselves into the government on the basis that they are communal leaders have a great deal to lose if the ground rules ...

Pick the small ones

Marina Warner: Girls Are Rubbish, 17 February 2005

Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet: Women in Proverbs from around the World 
by Mineke Schipper.
Yale, 422 pp., £35, April 2004, 0 300 10249 6
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... maxims addressing the matter of Dorinda’s nature and future, from 240 languages, many of them unknown to Hippolito. It starts with a section on the ‘Female Body’ (an inventory from Head to Foot). Hippolito already finds Dorinda’s effect on him disturbing. ‘Women and sardines,’ he reads. ‘Pick the small ones.’ But while fish fill his net, he ...

Calcutta in the Cotswolds

David Gilmour: What did the British do for India?, 3 March 2005

Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India 
by Elizabeth Buettner.
Oxford, 324 pp., £25, July 2004, 0 19 924907 5
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... five and seven they were uprooted and sent ‘home’ to school and cold weather, and a variety of unknown relations, usually aunts, who took it in turns to look after them. In their ancestral country they were expected to become sturdy and sporty and to think British. Kipling, who was sent to a boarding-house and allowed to see his aunts only at ...

Is Israel more secure now?

Edward Said: Israel’s Dead End, 3 January 2002

... to murder 77 Palestinian leaders, for alleged terrorist offences, past or future. A group of unknown Israeli intelligence operatives have the authority to decide on these assassinations, presumably with the approval on each occasion of the Israeli Cabinet and, more generally, that of the US. The helicopters have also done an efficient job of bombing ...

Turning on Turtles

Stephen Sedley: Fundamental values, 15 November 2001

Fundamental Values 
edited by Kim Economides et al.
Hart, 359 pp., £40, December 2000, 1 84113 118 0
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... and no-win-no-fee has always been the rule in the United States, where ethical standards are not unknown or unobserved. Even so, the slashing of the legal aid bill, while it has put a smile on the face of the Treasury and while it has stopped some scandalous overcharging (which could have been dealt with by tougher management of legal aid), is going to ...

Better and Worse Worsts

Sadakat Kadri: American Trials, 24 May 2007

The Trial in American Life 
by Robert Ferguson.
Chicago, 400 pp., £18.50, March 2007, 978 0 226 24325 2
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... identify acceptable otherness, give victims a say, rationalise change, place controls on the unknown and publicise power. At still another level, they publicise the available answers to a problem and guard the status quo ante by seeking to return a community to its place before the disruption of crime. The other four case studies are the treason trial ...

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