Lethal Pastoral

Paul Keegan: Housman’s Lethal Pastoral, 17 November 2016

Housman Country: Into the Heart of England 
by Peter Parker.
Little, Brown, 446 pp., £25, June 2016, 978 1 4087 0613 8
Show More
Show More
... yer:/Hallelujah, Hallelujah!/We will gather up the fragments that remain.’ In Housman Country, Peter Parker does it by writing the life and times not of the man but of his most famous book: the growing pains of A Shropshire Lad, the vicissitudes of its reception, its cultural ‘aftermaths’. The word comes from agriculture, as Parker points out (new ...

His Own Sort of Outsider

Philip Clark: Tippett’s Knack, 16 July 2020

Michael Tippett: The Biography 
by Oliver Soden.
Weidenfeld, 750 pp., £25, April 2019, 978 1 4746 0602 8
Show More
Show More
... were aware that others weren’t so fortunate. During trips to London, Michael and his brother, Peter, helped serve food in East End soup kitchens and were taken along to suffragist meetings. Tippett attended his first orchestral concert at this time: Henry Wood conducting music by Tchaikovsky at the Queen’s Hall. When the Great War began, the Hôtel ...

Unblenched

Lucie Elven: Homage to Brigid Brophy, 21 March 2024

Hackenfeller’s Ape 
by Brigid Brophy.
Faber, 133 pp., £9.99, October 2023, 978 0 571 38129 6
Show More
Show More
... intimate occasions of which this is not true.)’ In the jacket photograph she was decked out as James Joyce, with a felt-tip monocle over one eye. ‘The picture of you on the back rather turns my head,’ Murdoch wrote. ‘You dazzling creature.’ (Years later, she tried a new tack: ‘I am not a great writer. Neither are you.’)After Brophy’s first ...

Soul Bellow

Craig Raine, 12 November 1987

More die of heartbreak 
by Saul Bellow.
Alison Press/Secker, 335 pp., £10.95, October 1987, 0 436 03962 1
Show More
Show More
... meaning, you might say that someone now was flavoured with the essences belonging to, for example, Peter Ackroyd, Anita Brookner, William Boyd, Anthony Burgess and Peter Hall. This is typical, alas. First repetition: Kenneth has left Paris, even though his father has promised to introduce him to the ‘agent who had forced ...

Hypnotise Her

Thomas Jones: Axel Munthe’s exaggerations, 29 January 2009

Axel Munthe: The Road to San Michele 
by Bengt Jangfeldt, translated by Harry Watson.
Tauris, 381 pp., £25, March 2008, 978 1 84511 720 7
Show More
Show More
... travelling in Italy with her parents; he was the family’s doctor in Rome. They had two children, Peter and Malcolm, and remained technically married until his death in 1949, though they spent very little time together and he saw almost nothing of his sons as they were growing up. ‘There seems to have been no question of passionate love on Axel’s ...

Alan Bennett writes about his new play

Alan Bennett: ‘The Habit of Art’, 5 November 2009

... boys or just plain dull boys who could, nevertheless, sing like angels. What of them?Britten and Peter Pears came disastrously to Beyond the Fringe some time in 1961. Included in the show was a parody of Britten written by Dudley Moore, in which he sang and accompanied himself in ‘Little Miss Muffet’ done in a Pears and Britten-like way. I’m not sure ...

Good Housekeeping

Steven Shapin: William Petty, 20 January 2011

William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic 
by Ted McCormick.
Oxford, 347 pp., £63, September 2010, 978 0 19 954789 0
Show More
Show More
... Anthony Deane said Petty’s design ‘must needs prove a folly’. The navy commissioner Peter Pett told Pepys that the double-hulled ship was ‘the most dangerous thing in the world’: if it was successful, the secret would get out, and it would be the ruin of English trade and sea power. The Dutch, with whom England was about to fight the second ...

Dancing and Flirting

Mark Ford: Apollinaire, 24 May 2018

Zone: Selected Poems 
by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by Ron Padgett.
NYRB, 251 pp., £9.99, January 2016, 978 1 59017 924 6
Show More
Selected Poems 
by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by Martin Sorrell.
Oxford, 281 pp., £9.99, November 2015, 978 0 19 968759 6
Show More
Show More
... Apollinaire in the seat of honour as the ‘impresario of the avant-garde’. More recently Peter Read has explored in rich and rewarding detail the complex relationship between Apollinaire and Picasso, illustrating the way the ‘creative dialogue’ between them ‘fostered and inspired some of their finest art and poetry’. Apollinaire’s ...

Knife, Stone, Paper

Stephen Sedley: Law Lords, 1 July 2021

English Law under Two Elizabeths: The Late Tudor Legal World and the Present 
by John Baker.
Cambridge, 222 pp., £22.99, January, 978 1 108 94732 9
Show More
The Constitutional Balance 
by John Laws.
Hart, 144 pp., £30, January, 978 1 5099 3545 1
Show More
Show More
... common law and subject to its constraints. It was so when Elizabeth I’s autocratic successor, James I and VI, wanted to rule by proclamation; it was so in 2010 when Theresa May wanted to use the royal prerogative to bypass Parliament; it was still so in 2017 when it was proposed that the UK leave the EU by ministerial fiat rather than parliamentary ...

The Caviar Club

Azadeh Moaveni: Rebel with a Hermès Scarf, 9 September 2021

The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Rejected and Rediscovered Modern Art 
by Donna Stein.
Skira, 277 pp., £38, March, 978 88 572 4434 1
Show More
Epic Iran 
V&A, until 12 September 2021Show More
Show More
... portraits, paintings by Van Gogh and Magritte, and a few more difficult works, such as James Ensor’s Mariage des masques.Paintings that documented the West’s preoccupation with the East were a productive theme: Matisse’s mysterious Persian Woman; Gauguin’s Still Life with Japanese Print; a photograph of Edward Lane in Persian ...

Friends with Benefits

Tom Stevenson: The Five Eyes, 19 January 2023

The Secret History of the Five Eyes: The Untold Story of the Shadowy International Spy Network, through Its Targets, Traitors and Spies 
by Richard Kerbaj.
John Blake, 416 pp., £25, September 2022, 978 1 78946 503 7
Show More
Sub-Imperial Power: Australia in the International Arena 
by Clinton Fernandes.
Melbourne, 176 pp., £35.95, October 2022, 978 0 522 87926 1
Show More
Show More
... what remained of its North American possessions: in the 1840s Toronto tripled in size). As James Belich showed in Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World (2009), more British investment went to the Australian colonies in the 1870s and 1880s than anywhere else in the world. In 1835, Melbourne had no permanent ...

What’s so good about Reid?

Galen Strawson, 22 February 1990

Thomas Reid’s ‘Inquiry’: The Geometry of Visibles and the Case for Realism 
by Norman Daniels.
Stanford, 160 pp., £25, May 1989, 0 8047 1504 1
Show More
Common Sense 
by Lynd Forguson.
Routledge, 193 pp., £30, November 1989, 0 415 02302 5
Show More
Thomas Reid and the ‘Way of Ideas’ 
by Roger Gallie.
Reidel, 287 pp., £42, July 1989, 0 7923 0390 3
Show More
Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment 
edited by Peter Jones.
John Donald, 230 pp., £20, October 1989, 0 85976 225 4
Show More
Studies in the Philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment 
edited by M.A. Stewart.
Oxford, 328 pp., £37.50, January 1990, 0 19 824967 5
Show More
Thomas Reid 
by Keith Lehrer.
Routledge, 311 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 415 03886 3
Show More
Show More
... there is a sense in which Reid merely rotates Hume through 90 degrees: a fact noted by Sir James Mackintosh in 1812, when he remarked to Thomas Brown that on the question of the existence of the external world Reid and Hume ‘differed more in words that in opinion’. ‘Yes,’ answered Brown. ‘Reid bawled out, We must believe an outward world; but ...

Patron Saints

Jean McNicol, 12 May 1994

Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich 
by Alison Owings.
Rutgers, 494 pp., £24.95, October 1993, 0 8135 1992 6
Show More
Solidarity and Treason: Resistance and Exile, 1933-1940 
by Lisa Fittko, translated by Roslyn Theobald.
Northwestern, 160 pp., £29.95, December 1993, 0 8101 1129 2
Show More
Show More
... prevalent. Dubnack’s sister was raped, but she was not: ‘I made myself look old and held my Peter to me and they probably overlooked me ... That was the worst for us.’ At least two million German women were raped at the end of the war, the majority by Red Army soldiers. Several of the women Owings talked to were raped at this time; most didn’t want ...

Puritan Neuroses

Blair Worden, 19 April 1984

The Puritan Gentry: The Great Puritan Families of Early Stuart England 
by J.T. Cliffe.
Routledge, 313 pp., £18.95, March 1984, 0 7102 0007 2
Show More
The Puritan Moment: The Coming of Revolution in an English County 
by William Hunt.
Harvard, 365 pp., £30.60, April 1983, 0 674 73903 5
Show More
Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism 
by Patrick Collinson.
Hambledon, 604 pp., £24, July 1982, 9780907628156
Show More
Laud’s Laboratory: The Diocese of Bath and Wells in the Early 17th Century 
by Margaret Steig.
Associated University Presses, 416 pp., £30, September 1983, 0 8387 5019 2
Show More
The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression 
by Patricia Caldwell.
Cambridge, 210 pp., £17.50, December 1983, 0 521 25460 4
Show More
Protestant Reformers in Elizabethan Oxford 
by C.M. Dent.
Oxford, 262 pp., £17.50, June 1983, 0 19 826723 1
Show More
Show More
... of Charles I to Henrietta Maria. In a recent essay (published in Past and Present, November 1983) Peter White has thrown the Tyacke thesis into question. He contends (as H.C. Porter has long done) that the pre-Laudian Church was never narrowly Calvinist. Yet at least White and Tyacke can find common ground in their emphasis on the 1620s: a decade which Hugh ...

Shaving-Pot in Waiting

Rosemary Hill: Victoria’s Albert, 23 February 2012

Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death That Changed the Monarchy 
by Helen Rappaport.
Hutchinson, 336 pp., £20, November 2011, 978 0 09 193154 4
Show More
Albert 
by Jules Stewart.
I.B. Tauris, 276 pp., £19.99, October 2011, 978 1 84885 977 7
Show More
Show More
... if technically difficult way to decorate a Gothic building, was obtained from the German painter Peter von Cornelius. Hugely popular exhibitions of potential schemes were held in Westminster Hall and much discussed, for the public expected a lot for their money. The scheme was supposed to encourage artists, educate visitors, stimulate the members of the ...