London Review of Books

Unnatural Rebellion

Malcolm Gaskill: ‘Witches’, 2 November 2017

The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present
by Ronald Hutton.
Yale, 360 pp., £25, August 2017, 978 0 300 22904 2Show More

“... repel us, they can excite us when they don’t pose a direct threat to our safety and comfort. Edmund Burke said that to empty a theatre one had only to announce that an execution was in progress outside, thus demonstrating ‘the comparative weakness of the imitative arts’. We still contrive to exclude others, and then either hide from the ...”

Dining Room Radicals

Rosemary Hill, 7 April 2022

Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age
by Daisy Hay.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, April 2022, 978 1 78474 018 4Show More

“... before Parliament. The last had been only narrowly defeated; this one was lost by 189 votes after Edmund Burke read extracts from Priestley’s works to the House. The quotations had been put together by anti-Dissenters and were highly selective, but Priestley had surely been unwise to compare the spread of Enlightenment ideals to a trail of ...”

Diary

Christopher Prendergast: Piss where you like, 17 March 2005

“... point, Jim turned to the bench and declared: ‘Your Honour, like Oliver Goldsmith, Dean Swift, Edmund Burke, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce, Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett, I occasionally have difficulties with the English language.’ Peals of laughter around the ...”

Humdrum Selfishness

Nicholas Guyatt: Simon Schama’s Chauvinism, 6 April 2006

Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
by Simon Schama.
BBC, 448 pp., £20, September 2005, 0 563 48709 7Show More

“... on the unsettling realisation that the colonists were justified in their complaints. From Edmund Burke to Richard Price, observers across the political spectrum struggled to see much evidence of British liberty in the crass mismanagement that led to the Revolution. Some even followed Jefferson, who in the first draft of the Declaration of ...”

The Wrong Head

Mike Jay: Am I Napoleon?, 21 May 2015

The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon: Towards a Political History of Madness
by Laure Murat, translated by Deke Dusinberre.
Chicago, 288 pp., £31.50, October 2014, 978 0 226 02573 5Show More

“... unsympathetic to its ends the conclusion was plain: revolution was madness on a national scale. Edmund Burke, also writing in 1790, argued that the fear engendered by violent mass upheaval ‘robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning’, and had surrendered the French people to an ‘incomprehensible spirit of delirium and delusion’. In ...”

Let us breakfast in splendour

Charles Nicholl: Francis Barber, 16 July 2015

The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir
by Michael Bundock.
Yale, 282 pp., £20, May 2015, 978 0 300 20710 1Show More

“... debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the ...”

Worth the Upbringing

Susan Pedersen: Thirsting for the Vote, 4 March 2021

Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel
by Rachel Holmes.
Bloomsbury, 976 pp., £35, September 2020, 978 1 4088 8041 8Show More

“... why else would Roy Jenkins choose to write about Asquith, Conor Cruise O’Brien about Edmund Burke, Michael Foot about Aneurin Bevan, E.P. Thompson about William Morris and (ridiculously) Boris Johnson about Winston Churchill? The problem is rather that identification has led Holmes to echo, rather than analyse and explain, Pankhurst’s own ...”

Foreigners are fiends!

Neal Ascherson: Poland’s Golden Freedom, 12 May 2022

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1733-95: Light and Flame
by Richard Butterwick.
Yale, 482 pp., £30, November 2020, 978 0 300 25220 0Show More

“... in the evening, the king stood on a chair and swore an oath of loyalty to the constitution. Edmund Burke contrasted Poland’s ‘glorious conspiracy in favour of the true and genuine rights and interests of men’ with the radicalism of the French Revolution, which he detested. And in truth the 3 May constitution was radical only in that it ...”

John Homer’s Odyssey

Claude Rawson, 9 January 1992

Customs in Common
by E.P. Thompson.
Merlin, 547 pp., £25, October 1991, 0 85036 411 6Show More

“... such a sense in what is perhaps the century’s most famous declaration of the sanctity of custom, Burke’s lament over the maltreatment of the French Queen in the Reflections on the Revolution in France. ‘All the pleasing illusions … which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private ...”

Keepers

Andrew Scull, 29 September 1988

Mind Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency
by Roy Porter.
Athlone, 412 pp., £25, August 1987, 0 485 11324 4Show More

The Past and the Present Revisited
by Lawrence Stone.
Routledge, 440 pp., £19.95, October 1987, 0 7102 1253 4Show More

Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in 17th-Century England
by Lucinda McCray Beier.
Routledge, 314 pp., £30, December 1987, 0 7102 1053 1Show More

Illness and Self in Society
by Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret, translated by Elborg Forster.
Johns Hopkins, 271 pp., £20.25, January 1988, 0 8018 3228 4Show More

Medicine and Society in Wakefield and Huddersfield 1780-1870
by Hilary Marland.
Cambridge, 503 pp., £40, September 1987, 0 521 32575 7Show More

A Social History of Madness: Stories of the Insane
by Roy Porter.
Weidenfeld, 261 pp., £14.95, October 1987, 0 297 79223 7Show More

“... with a cut-throat razor. As Frederick Reynolds related the story a quarter of a century later, Edmund Burke immediately demanded to know ‘If the Royal patient had become outrageous at the moment, what power the Doctor possessed of instantaneously terrifying him into obedience?’ ‘Place the candles between us, Mr ...”

The Strangely Inspired Hermit of Andover

Christine Stansell, 5 June 1997

Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing with the Moderns, 1915-31
by Jack Selzer.
Wisconsin, 284 pp., £45, February 1997, 0 299 15184 0Show More

“... many people who came to New York City in the high-flying years of the early 20th century, Kenneth Burke approached the city as a work of art. ‘I cannot express it, it is too sweeping,’ he rhapsodised to a friend, exiled at Harvard, shortly after his arrival from Pittsburgh in 1917. He marvelled at the skies: ‘Oh, oh! if I ever can express those things ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... for them, fabulously or otherwise. Having just surfaced from reimmersion in the writings of Edmund Burke, I find this disagreement a recurring, if not dominant theme in Burke’s attack on the French revolutionaries. ‘Men of letters,’ he complains, ‘fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to ...”

I came with a sword

Toril Moi: Simone Weil’s Way, 1 July 2021

The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas
by Robert Zaretsky.
Chicago, 181 pp., £16, February 2021, 978 0 226 54933 0Show More

“... for drawing parallels to other philosophers. He places Weil in the conservative tradition of Edmund Burke, Roger Scruton and other communitarian thinkers. He has a point: Weil’s account of the need for roots is a savage critique of modernity, which has uprooted every social class, including farmers and peasants. She insists that uprootedness ...”

The Real Price of Everything

Hilary Mantel: The Many Lives of Elizabeth Marsh, 21 June 2007

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History
by Linda Colley.
HarperPress, 363 pp., £25, June 2007, 978 0 00 719218 2Show More

“... Elizabeth Maria landed George Shee, the son of a Catholic landowner in Mayo, and a connection of Edmund Burke. He was an East India Company man, able, ambitious and popular, and he would have been out of the Marshs’ reach, except that he was implicated, glancingly, in a sexual scandal, when a friend of his attempted to seduce the child-bride of a ...”

Darkness Visible

George Steiner, 24 November 1988

Joseph de Maistre: An Intellectual Militant
by Richard Lebrun.
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 366 pp., £30.35, October 1988, 0 7735 0645 4Show More

“... of the whole enterprise of 1789. Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien’s preface to the Penguin edition of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France represents a brilliant exception. There is, in the Anglo-American domain, almost no awareness of Goethe’s meditative, fundamental critique of French Revolutionary ideals and practices. Professor ...”

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