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Grisly Creed

Patrick Collinson: John Wyclif, 22 February 2007

John Wyclif: Myth and Reality 
by G.R. Evans.
Lion, 320 pp., £20, October 2005, 0 7459 5154 6
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... in Oxford was soon smashed, the machinery for dealing with it otherwise (heresy had been almost unknown in England) was weak, and it took another twenty years, and a new regime, before a law was passed that began to send heretics to the stake. In the rather vicious academic context which Evans describes so well, Wyclif had begun to think the unthinkable: to ...

The Seven Million Dollar Question

A.W. Moore: The quest to solve the Millenium Problems, 22 July 2004

The Millennium Problems: The Seven Greatest Unsolved Mathematical Puzzles of Our Time 
by Keith Devlin.
Granta, 237 pp., £20, January 2004, 1 86207 686 3
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... in a space with more than four dimensions, but whether the original conjecture is true remains unknown. If the matter were settled, the solution could have implications for the design and manufacture of various electronic devices. There is less that can usefully be said at this level about the four remaining problems. One is concerned with a theory that ...

The Leader’s Cheerleaders

Simon Jenkins: Party Funding in Britain, 20 September 2007

The Cost of Democracy: Party Funding in Modern British Politics 
by K.D. Ewing.
Hart, 279 pp., £30, March 2007, 978 1 84113 716 2
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... in the same direction. Half the Tories’ annual conference platform used to be filled with the unknown faces of national association officials; not any more. At Labour conferences, motions binding the party leadership were voted by blocs of union delegates seated, often rowdily, in various parts of the hall. This has been swept away. Parties are no longer ...

Red Flowers, at a Wedding?

Tessa Hadley: Claire Keegan, 24 January 2008

Walk the Blue Fields 
by Claire Keegan.
Faber, 163 pp., £10.99, May 2007, 978 0 571 23306 9
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... present tense, structured in what feels like a headlong rush away: anywhere, elsewhere, towards an unknown America. In a finely managed surprise in the last sentences, however, the girl’s destination turns out to be somewhere closer at hand. ‘When you find it, there is hardly anyone there but you know this is the place.’ All along she has only been ...

The Project

O.A. Westad: The Downtrodden Majority, 24 January 2008

The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World 
by Vijay Prashad.
New Press, 364 pp., £16.99, January 2007, 978 1 56584 785 9
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... state farms, strategic hamlets or ujamaa villages was frightful and the number of victims is still unknown. Being opposed to ‘progress’, whether it was the grands projets of the colonisers or the collectivist fantasies of the new elites, was dangerous and usually deadly. In this respect the similarity between the colonial administrations and the successor ...

Fear of Words

Mark Kishlansky: The Cavalier Parliament, 18 December 2008

The Long Parliament of Charles II 
by Annabel Patterson.
Yale, 283 pp., £30, September 2008, 978 0 300 13708 8
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... France. Payments by one state to ensure an alliance with or the neutrality of another were not unknown in this period and backhand payments made by foreign lobbyists to government ministers were commonplace. Charles II’s foreign policy was certainly unprincipled (as was everyone else’s: both Charles I and Cromwell explored realistic opportunities to ...

Exit Humbug

David Edgar: Theatrical Families, 1 January 2009

A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families 
by Michael Holroyd.
Chatto, 620 pp., £25, September 2008, 978 0 7011 7987 8
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... in the play’. Although Irving’s butchery of Shakespeare’s texts is reprehensible, it’s not unknown today: Peter Brook is not the only contemporary director to follow Irving in cutting Fortinbras from Hamlet. And his critique of the emergent naturalism of the early 20th century has contemporary echoes too. As Holroyd-as-Irving puts it: ‘This new style ...

Crypto-Republican

Simon Adams: Was Mary Queen of Scots a Murderer?, 11 June 2009

Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I 
by Stephen Alford.
Yale, 412 pp., £25, May 2008, 978 0 300 11896 4
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... Davison, advanced the ‘other woman thesis’ – that some of the letters were written by an unknown spurned lover of Bothwell’s – which has influenced a number of subsequent biographies of Mary. Guy has justifiably rejected it and effectively returned to Hosack’s Darnley thesis. But he can’t explain how the letters to Darnley were obtained ...

Closely Missed Trains

Joanna Biggs: Florian Zeller’s Hair, 12 March 2009

Artificial Snow 
by Florian Zeller, translated by Sue Rose.
Pushkin, 119 pp., £10, January 2009, 978 1 901285 84 0
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Elle t’attend 
by Florian Zeller.
Flammarion, 154 pp., €12, September 2008, 978 2 08 120749 3
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... English, and indeed, despite his quickly achieved yet continuing fame in France, he is almost unknown here. In the opening pages of Artificial Snow, the narrator misses the last métro, just as he is left behind by life. (The novel is full of trains and buses that abandon the narrator – if they turn up at all.) He has just left a dinner party hosted by ...

Where’s the Gravy?

Barbara Graziosi: Homeric Travel, 27 August 2009

Travelling Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer 
by Robin Lane Fox.
Penguin, 528 pp., £10.99, September 2009, 978 0 14 024499 1
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... definition of ‘Homer’, pointing out that the issue or evidence in question would have been unknown to ‘him’. Of course, echoes of Gilgamesh may have affected Greek hexameter epic before the eighth century – but they are nevertheless relevant to our Iliad. Despite some obvious difficulties, Lane Fox is clearly right to combine pots and ...

A Formidable Proposition

R.W. Johnson: D-Day, 10 September 2009

D-Day: The Battle for Normandy 
by Antony Beevor.
Viking, 591 pp., £25, May 2009, 978 0 670 88703 3
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... crucially, had access to data from weather ships further out in the western Atlantic.* Another unknown, or hardly known, is Captain Scott-Bowden, who reconnoitred Omaha Beach by midget submarine under the nose of German sentries, and on his return to London warned his superiors that there were bound to be tremendous casualties: the beach, he said, was ‘a ...

Princess Jasmine strips

Deborah Baker: Saleem Haddad, 16 February 2017

Guapa 
by Saleem Haddad.
Europa Editions, 304 pp., £10.99, October 2016, 978 1 60945 413 5
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... elicit a brutal government crackdown and his former schoolmates disappear into jails or suffer unknown fates, Rasa realises that the words of the officials he is asked to translate are flagrant lies. Rather than be complicit, he decides he will misinterpret. ‘There is an art to misinterpreting,’ he reflects. It needs to be done subtly so that it ...

Elzābet of Anletār

John Gallagher, 22 September 2016

This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World 
by Jerry Brotton.
Allen Lane, 358 pp., £20, March 2016, 978 0 241 00402 9
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... is more work to be done. Brotton works sensitively with a range of sources, most of which will be unknown to the general reader, but the archive is far from exhausted. The history of the Levant Company in the 16th and early 17th century – and its diplomats, traders, interpreters, chancers and hangers-on – remains patchy and opaque. New, multilingual ...

A Vast Masquerade

Deborah Cohen: Dr James Barry, 2 March 2017

Dr James Barry: A Woman ahead of Her Time 
by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield.
Oneworld, 479 pp., £16.99, August 2016, 978 1 78074 831 3
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... constant warfare, the phenomenon of women dressing as men to join the army or navy was far from unknown: scholars have identified a host of such cases in the British Empire. The Georgians felt delight and sometimes appalled fascination at what the historian Dror Wahrman has called the ‘protean mutability of identity’. If, as Fielding claimed in ...

Britain is Your Friend

Rosemary Hill: British WW2 Propaganda, 15 December 2016

Persuading the People: British Propaganda in World War Two 
by David Welch.
British Library, 224 pp., £25, September 2016, 978 0 7123 5654 1
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... to demonising the enemy the approach seems to have been calibrated according to nation. Japan was unknown to most Europeans. So while detailed depictions of hand-to-hand fighting were generally avoided as more disturbing than encouraging, Allied soldiers bayoneting combatants over the slogan ‘Smash the Japs’ were thought to be effective. Japan could be ...

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