Under the Arrow Storm

Tom Shippey: The Battle of Crécy, 8 September 2022

Crécy: Battle of Five Kings 
by Michael Livingston.
Osprey, 303 pp., £20, June, 978 1 4728 4705 8
Show More
Show More
... in the military reputation of England across Europe, and with it an equally steep rise in English self-confidence, which lasted for centuries, reinforced by replays at Poitiers, Verneuil and Agincourt. It wasn’t much shaken by Jeanne d’Arc and has perhaps not entirely faded even now. To quote Shakespeare, ‘Come the three corners of the world in ...

Much more than a Man

Caroline Weber: The Sleeping Robespierre, 24 March 2022

The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris 
by Colin Jones.
Oxford, 571 pp., £25, August 2021, 978 0 19 871595 5
Show More
Show More
... novel The Gods Will Have Blood (1912): A young man with … a pockmarked face and an air of cold self-possession slowly mounted the tribune … Speaking in a clear voice, he delivered an eloquent, logical attack on the enemies of the Republic. He dealt forcibly [with them] by means of uncompromising and metaphysical arguments … He spoke at great ...

Golden Boy

Denis Donoghue, 22 December 1983

W.H.Auden: The Critical Heritage 
edited by John Haffenden.
Routledge, 535 pp., £19.95, September 1983, 0 7100 9350 0
Show More
Auden: A Carnival of Intellect 
by Edward Callan.
Oxford, 299 pp., £12.50, August 1983, 0 19 503168 7
Show More
Drawn from the Life: A Memoir 
by Robert Medley.
Faber, 251 pp., £12.50, November 1983, 0 571 13043 7
Show More
Show More
... in [Auden’s] own consciousness’. It expressed ‘an essential uncertainty of purpose and of self’, such that Auden’s ‘assured personal manner’ covered something very different. Taking up Empson’s account of the work, Leavis alluded to Empson’s own poems and their superiority, in mastery of their emotions, to Auden’s. ‘The ...

Diary

Megan Vaughan: Vampires in Malawi, 20 March 2003

... landholdings: even in a good year, some 75 per cent of the population are less than 25 per cent self-sufficient in the main food crop, maize. The statistics are miserable. In 2001, the UNDP Human Development Index placed Malawi at number 151 out of 162 countries (those ranked lower were all experiencing, or had recently experienced, a state of war). Life ...

Even the stones spoke German

Brendan Simms: Wrotizla, Breslau, Wroclaw, 28 November 2002

Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City 
by Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse.
Cape, 585 pp., £20, April 2002, 0 224 06243 3
Show More
Show More
... variety of socio-economic modernisation: industrialisation, the arrival of the railways, municipal self-government, poverty, class conflict and, above all, huge population growth. German unification in 1871 did not change Breslau’s status – Silesia remained within Prussia, the largest federal state – but it did bring to the city national political ...

‘Two in Torquay’

Alan Bennett: A short play, 10 July 2003

... about. MR MORTIMER: Dear lady, look at yourself. The knitting bag, the shapeless cardigan, the self-effacing attention to your employer’s every whim. Like the horse trough and the drinking fountain, you are a piece of social history. You are that thing of the past – the companion. MISS PLUNKETT: The companion! The companion? I am not the companion. Mrs ...

Flowery, rustic, tippy, smokey

Jenny Diski: A cup of tea, 19 June 2003

Green Gold: The Empire of Tea 
by Alan Macfarlane and Iris Macfarlane.
Ebury, 308 pp., £12.99, February 2003, 0 09 188309 1
Show More
Show More
... or widowed woman with a little cash in the bank. My mother was partial to Lyons’s teashops, self-service, though with nice ladies who poured the tea from big metal pots, and often enough another woman sitting at our table to whom my mother could get talking and tell her miserable fortune to. These were public teapot teas, where we pretended that we were ...

How did Blair get here?

Conor Gearty, 20 February 2003

... in London in January this year, that ‘we share their values’ and ‘it is massively in our self-interest to remain close allies.’ It might even be wise to strive to ‘remain the closest ally of the US, and influence them to continue broadening their agenda’. But Blair seems to have gone further: he insists on being the closest ally not only of the ...

Looking back at the rubble

David Simpson: War and the Built Environment, 25 May 2006

The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War 
by Robert Bevan.
Reaktion, 240 pp., £19.95, January 2006, 1 86189 205 5
Show More
Show More
... that the physical destruction of ancient Sparta would have been a less decisive blow to Spartan self-identity than the same destruction would have been to the Athenians? Do all cultures, or the same cultures at different times, invest the same beliefs in a strong correlation between what they build and who they are? Theorists and legislators have wrestled ...

‘Monocled Baron Charged’

David Coward: Vichy’s commissioner for Jewish affairs, 8 June 2006

Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland 
by Carmen Callil.
Cape, 614 pp., £20, April 2006, 0 224 07810 0
Show More
Show More
... profiteers who stayed at home, a chancer, a coward prepared to bully the weak to make his small self seem larger. In 1978, three years before he died, he gave an interview to L’Express, which Callil translates. In it he denies the Holocaust, saying that all the evidence for it is Jewish propaganda and lies. Anyway, he says, his task was to supply ...

Diary

Gillian Darley: John Evelyn and his gardens, 8 June 2006

... of the stars in Latin. But the seal barking away on the top of Evelyn’s headboard was his self-illustrated, thousand-page magnum opus on gardens, Elysium Britannicum. Sylva grew but the Elysium exploded. He included anything which could conceivably come under the heading of gardening, from the elements to compost, apiculture to hydraulics, classical ...

Heaps upon Heaps

Jenny Diski: The myth of Samson, 20 July 2006

Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Samson 
by David Grossman.
Canongate, 155 pp., £12.99, June 2006, 1 84195 656 2
Show More
Show More
... there? Is it Samson the hero, Samson the lummox, or Samson the poster boy for gang moronics, for self-destructive, incommensurate revenge? According to David Grossman, all Jewish children when they first hear the story learn to call him Samson the Hero. He is wrong about this, but then my Jewish childhood was not in Hebrew or in Israel. I recall the Samson ...

Those bastards, we’ve got to cut them back

Daniel S. Greenberg: Bush’s Scientists, 22 September 2005

The Republican War on Science 
by Chris Mooney.
Basic Books, 288 pp., £14.99, October 2005, 0 465 04675 4
Show More
Show More
... White House. Serving as Bush’s science adviser since near the beginning of his first term is a self-described Democrat, John Marburger III, a physicist and former university president. Unstinting in his repeated defence of the Bush administration’s maltreatment of science, Marburger is described by Mooney as ‘a rather tragic figure’. Yes, but ...

Diary

Eliot Weinberger: A poetry festival in Chengdu, 22 September 2005

... in India it is 64. The villages we happened to see in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces appeared to be self-sustaining farming communities, without the visible suffering of similar hamlets in India or Latin America. The Tibetans in these provinces – unlike, by most accounts, those in Tibet – seemed to be thriving, no doubt because they are an unthreatening ...

No Restraint

John Demos: Chief Much Business, 9 February 2006

White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America 
by Fintan O’Toole.
Faber, 402 pp., £20, August 2005, 0 571 21840 7
Show More
Show More
... individualism’ (thanks to the introduction of European firearms), a ‘new sense of self’ (thanks to European mirrors), and a rise in ‘male vanity’ (thanks to imported cosmetics). Such claims are asserted rather than demonstrated; to a reader they feel like interpretive missiles launched without plan or preparation from some authorial ...