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Charles Nicholl: ‘The Shakespeare Circle’, 19 May 2016

The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography 
edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells.
Cambridge, 358 pp., £18.99, October 2015, 978 1 107 69909 0
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... Shakspere’ was baptised at Holy Trinity Church on 26 April 1564. The actual date of his birth is unknown. The convention that it was 23 April, St George’s Day, is a wishful synchronicity first mooted in the 18th century; Thomas De Quincey’s counter-suggestion, that the date chosen for his granddaughter’s wedding – 22 April – commemorated his ...

Versailles with Panthers

James Davidson: A tribute to the Persians, 10 July 2003

From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire 
by Pierre Briant, translated by Peter Daniels.
Eisenbrauns, 1196 pp., $79.50, January 2002, 1 57506 031 0
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Ancient Persia from 550 BC to 650 AD: reissue 
by Josef Wiesehöfer, translated by Azizeh Azodi.
Tauris, 332 pp., £35, April 2001, 1 85043 999 0
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... will know that the Persian Man ruled in Egypt’, but even this was withdrawn to the centre at an unknown date for unknown reasons – statues are like chess pieces in the ancient Near East, full of power and significance, always being kidnapped, rescued and triumphantly returned. Perhaps the profligate stone-chiselling ...

Unquiet Bodies

Thomas Laqueur: Burying the 20th Century, 6 April 2006

Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism 
by István Rév.
Stanford, 340 pp., £19.95, January 2005, 0 8047 3644 8
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... in the West over the last century have been benign and healing. The body of what became the Unknown Soldier was exhumed from the sticky mud of Flanders, transported along with bags of surrounding dirt to a Quonset hut, where he was chosen by a blindfolded brigadier from several similarly exhumed bodies and shipped by train to the Channel. There, his ...

Cardenio’s Ghost

Charles Nicholl: The Bits Shakespeare Wrote, 2 December 2010

The Arden Shakespeare: Double Falsehood 
edited by Brean Hammond.
Arden Shakespeare, 443 pp., £16.99, March 2010, 978 1 903436 77 6
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... claim, teasingly publicised over the previous months, that his play was based on a hitherto unknown work by Shakespeare. ‘It is my good fortune to retrieve this remnant of his pen from obscurity,’ he says with studied modesty. He calls it ‘this orphan play’, and ‘this dear relick’. On the title page Double Falsehood is described as ‘A Play ...

Still Superior

Mark Greif: Sex and Susan Sontag, 12 February 2009

Reborn: Early Diaries, 1947-64 
by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff.
Hamish Hamilton, 318 pp., £16.99, January 2009, 978 0 241 14431 2
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... He memorably misassigned her to the journal’s theatre column, the post that had been held by an unknown Mary McCarthy in the late 1930s. In the diaries Sontag zaps McCarthy’s ‘low-fashion red+blue print suit’ and ‘clubwoman gossip’. An old story has it that when McCarthy met Sontag she sized her up with the cutting, ‘Oh, you’re the imitation ...

That Wild Mercury Sound

Charles Nicholl: Dylan’s Decade, 1 December 2016

The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965-66 
by Bob Dylan.
Columbia, £60, November 2015
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... It offers alternative versions of well-loved songs and, more occasionally, pristine versions of unknown songs. (It should be noted that these are official releases, so the use of the word ‘bootleg’ is inaccurate or at least ironic: the ‘true’ – i.e. illegal – Dylan bootlegs are another story.) The Cutting Edge takes us straight into the ...

The earth had need of me

Joanna Biggs: A nice girl like Simone, 16 April 2020

Becoming Beauvoir: A Life 
by Kate Kirkpatrick.
Bloomsbury, 476 pp., £20, August 2019, 978 1 350 04717 4
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Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Me, a Memoir 
by Deirdre Bair.
Atlantic, 347 pp., £18.99, February 2020, 978 1 78649 265 4
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Diary of a Philosophy Student, Vol. II: 1928-29 
by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Barbara Klaw.
Illinois, 374 pp., £40, June 2019, 978 0 252 04254 6
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... women including Christiane Rochefort and Monique Wittig attempted to lay a floral sheaf for the unknown soldier’s wife at the Arc de Triomphe. Their bedsheet and bamboo banners read: ‘Il y a plus inconnu que le soldat inconnu, sa femme’ (‘more unknown than the Unknown Soldier is ...

I told you so!

James Davidson: Oracles, 2 December 2004

The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles 
by Michael Wood.
Chatto, 271 pp., £17.99, January 2004, 0 7011 6546 4
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... only at the very margins of the noteworthy, depending on mere inadvertence to keep its secrets unknown. Stories about seers sometimes make it sound as if animals talk to them, but most often that is probably shorthand for an expert reading of animal placements in and movements across the ouija board of the world, just as closely watched sacrifices might be ...

What more could we want of ourselves!

Jacqueline Rose: On Rosa Luxemburg, 16 June 2011

The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg 
edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis and Annelies Laschitza, translated by George Shriver.
Verso, 609 pp., £25, February 2011, 978 1 84467 453 4
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... the ruins of the annihilated city,’ she wrote in a newspaper article, ‘a new guest arrives, unknown, never seen before – the human being.’ It was, for Luxemburg, the revenge of the earth against the tyrannies and abuses of the world. She had nothing but contempt for the statesmen who were rushing to commiserate hot from the ravages of empire and the ...

Uganda’s New Men

Victoria Brittain, 13 September 1990

... fall of Amin in 1979; the forests by the side of the road to Kampala saw countless executions of unknown men by the thugs of Amin’s State Research Bureau – once omnipresent in their dark glasses and sharp suits. Now the young soldiers at the rare roadblocks are the products of a very different military culture: during the war that brought this regime to ...
The Alternative: Politics for a Change 
edited by Ben Pimlott, Anthony Wright and Tony Flower.
W.H. Allen, 260 pp., £14.95, July 1990, 9781852271688
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... who present them are all men and women who possess the kind of informed knowledge and experience unknown to our present dilettante ruling class. Much of what they propose, furthermore, is unquestionable: no one can contemplate the last twenty years of our history without instinctively assenting to it. Whether a hypothetical progressive government should ...

The Meaning of Mngwotngwotiki

Eric Korn, 10 January 1991

The Anthropology of Numbers 
by Thomas Crump.
Cambridge, 201 pp., £30, July 1990, 0 521 38045 6
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... to a child of ten. (I was six weeks older.) But I couldn’t get across the notion of x as an unknown, because he knew, stubborn little kabbalist, that x was 24. He would have burned me at the stake if he’d been allowed to play with matches. In traditional cosmology, the math stays simple, but may be elaborate. Yin and yang are the archetypes of every ...

Audrey’s Eye

Anthony Quinn, 21 February 1991

Leaving Brooklyn 
by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.
Minerva, 146 pp., £4.99, December 1990, 0 7493 9072 7
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Surrogate City 
by Hugo Hamilton.
Faber, 197 pp., £12.99, November 1990, 0 571 14432 2
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... volatile nature of things before they congeal, of the tenuousness and vulnerability of all things, unknown to those with a common binary vision who saw the world of a piece, with a seamless skin like the skin of a sausage holding things together. My right eye removed the skin of the visible world.’ The imagery of excoriation is also appropriate to Audrey’s ...

Other People

Dinah Birch, 6 July 1989

The Middleman, and Other Stories 
by Bharati Mukherjee.
Virago, 197 pp., £11.95, June 1989, 1 85381 058 4
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The Burning Boys 
by John Fuller.
Chatto, 128 pp., £10.95, June 1989, 9780701134648
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Termination Rock 
by Gillian Freeman.
Pandora, 182 pp., £12.95, June 1989, 0 04 440352 6
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Blackground 
by Joan Aiken.
Gollancz, 254 pp., £11.95, June 1989, 0 575 04502 7
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... there’s a something in this breast’), he breaks out of his stale existence and makes for the unknown satisfactions of the West. Against all expectations, including his own, it looks as though he might succeed. The last story, ‘The Management of Grief’, shows how the bereavements of our dissonant world can create room for opportunities, albeit bleak ...

Diary

John Barrell: On Allon White, 29 August 1991

... for the crime, that I had a dreadful guilty secret that I would henceforth carry with me unknown to myself for thirty years.’ It is, or so Allon came to believe, this secret – whatever it stood for, whatever crouched behind it – that would have found a way, one day, of writing itself, in defiance of the distance that writing was meant to ...

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