Democratic Sublime

Derek Hirst: Writing the English republic, 19 August 1999

Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627-60 
by David Norbrook.
Cambridge, 509 pp., £40, January 1999, 0 521 63275 7
Show More
Show More
... journalist Marchamont Nedham. All of these have been eclipsed in the recent preoccupation with James Harrington, the author of Oceana (1656), and his followers. The republicanism that emerges from Norbrook’s investigations is thus not confined to the militant saints and to those preoccupied with securing a Harringtonian ‘balance’ through ...

Mrs G

John Bayley, 11 March 1993

Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories 
by Jenny Uglow.
Faber, 690 pp., £20, February 1993, 0 571 15182 5
Show More
Show More
... complacence. On the contrary: her prose is always in too much of a rush (her cousin Henry Holland called her charming letters ‘a heterogeneous mass of nonsense’) ever to calm down and show itself pleased with itself. What is lacking is the note of intimacy, the tone so natural to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Bowen that ...

The Village Life

James Meek: Pushkin in English, 6 June 2019

Novels, Tales, Journeys 
by Aleksandr Pushkin, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Penguin, 512 pp., £9.99, October 2017, 978 0 241 29037 8
Show More
Show More
... to Europe at All Kazakhstan to Become China’s Window to Europe Russian Capital Cuts Window to Holland/New York/South-East Asia Patricia Kaas Cuts Window to the Provinces Two Windows Cut to Europe Small Ventilation Window Cut to Europe No Window to Europe, but a Lurid BalconyPushkin lies entombed in the vast mausoleum of his reputation. According to Oleg ...

Love in a Dark Time

Colm Tóibín: Oscar Wilde, 19 April 2001

The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde 
edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis.
Fourth Estate, 1270 pp., £35, November 2000, 1 85702 781 7
Show More
Show More
... Tite Street was the family home; he did not return there. The spectre of Wilde haunted Henry James in the first two months of 1895, and James’s correspondence gives us a much richer sense than Wilde’s does of what the opening of a new play could mean at the turn of the 19th century. ‘Who shall deny the immense ...

The Labour of Being at Ease

John Mullan, 28 October 1999

Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times: Volume I 
by Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, edited by Philip Ayres.
Oxford, 331 pp., £65, March 1999, 0 19 812376 0
Show More
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times: Volume II 
by Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, edited by Philip Ayres.
Oxford, 397 pp., £65, March 1999, 0 19 812377 9
Show More
Show More
... the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, leader of the Whigs opposed to the accession of the Catholic James II. The 1st Earl was immortalised as the satanic Achitophel of Dryden’s brilliant exercise in monarchist propaganda: ‘For close designs and crooked counsels fit,/Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit’. To his grandson, however, he was the epitome of ...

Rather Break than Bend

Clare Jackson: The Winter Queen, 26 May 2022

Elizabeth Stuart: Queen of Hearts 
by Nadine Akkerman.
Oxford, 581 pp., £20, December 2021, 978 0 19 966830 4
Show More
Show More
... Succeeds’ describes the plotters’ confessed intention, in the chaos following the death of James VI and I in the explosion at Westminster, of abducting his eldest daughter from her governor’s home in Warwickshire. Elizabeth would be placed on the English throne as a puppet sovereign, to be betrothed to a French or Spanish royal suitor and facilitate ...

I met murder on the way

Colin Kidd: Castlereagh, 24 May 2012

Castlereagh: Enlightenment, War and Tyranny 
by John Bew.
Quercus, 722 pp., £25, September 2011, 978 0 85738 186 6
Show More
Show More
... in Dublin, where Castlereagh was born, contained the classics of the commonwealth canon, including James Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana and the Memoirs of the regicide Edmund Ludlow. It wasn’t that Whig Presbyterians were against monarchy; rather, they argued that popular consent was the only acceptable basis for kingly government. The Presbyterianism ...

Daddy, ain’t you heard?

Mark Ford: Langston Hughes’s Journeys, 16 November 2023

Let America Be America Again: Conversations with Langston Hughes 
edited by Christopher C. De Santis.
Oxford, 339 pp., £32, August 2022, 978 0 19 285504 6
Show More
Show More
... was in due course used as a blanket for the infant Langston (a middle name – he was baptised James, after his father). Mary’s next husband, Charles Henry Langston, was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent ...

Hair-splitting

Peter E. Gordon: Versions of Marx, 3 April 2025

Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 
by Karl Marx, edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter, translated by Paul Reitter.
Princeton, 857 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 691 19007 5
Show More
Show More
... of the great working-class movement, not only in Germany and Switzerland, but in France, in Holland and Belgium, in America, and even in Italy and Spain’. Growing in stature and influence as its message spread across the Continent, Capital had become ‘the Bible of the working class’ (a phrase Engels used without irony). In a letter of April 1886 ...

Whapper

Norman Page, 8 January 1987

Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton 
by Flora Fraser.
Weidenfeld, 410 pp., £14.95, September 1986, 0 297 78895 7
Show More
Loving Emma 
by Nigel Foxell.
Harvester, 201 pp., £8.95, March 1986, 0 7108 1056 3
Show More
Show More
... much use, it seems, looking and behaving like Cleopatra if you sound like Gracie Fields.) Lady Holland recounted an anecdote of Emma ‘lying down in the pose of a water nymph, her head resting on a Greek vase. “Don’t be afeard Sir Willum; I’ll not break your joug,” said the nymph.’ The sounds that came out of the perfectly formed mouth must have ...

Prinney, Boney, Boot

Roy Porter, 20 March 1986

The English Satirical Print 1600-1832 
edited by Michael Duffy.
Chadwyck-Healey, February 1986
Show More
Show More
... proved key impediments), and as late as the South Sea Bubble, most visual satires hailed from Holland (Grub Street was Dulness in words). Even the age of Hogarth saw only stop-and-start developments, partly because the master himself steered almost totally clear of personal lampoons against politicians. It was the reign of George III that put political ...

The Strangest Piece of News

Nick Wilding: Galileo, 2 June 2011

Galileo: Watcher of the Skies 
by David Wootton.
Yale, 328 pp., £25, October 2010, 978 0 300 12536 8
Show More
Galileo 
by J.L. Heilbron.
Oxford, 508 pp., £20, October 2010, 978 0 19 958352 2
Show More
Show More
... de’ Medici. The same day, the English ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, sent a copy to James I, describing it as ‘the strangest piece of news (as I may justly call it)’ that he would ever have received ‘from any part of the world’. Most copies were probably sent over the Alps by Tommaso Baglioni, the book’s nominal publisher, or his ...

On Not Going Home

James Wood, 20 February 2014

... people in America who tell me that they miss their native countries – Britain, Germany, Russia, Holland, South Africa – and who in the next breath say they cannot imagine returning. It is possible, I suppose, to miss home terribly, not know what home really is anymore, and refuse to go home, all at once. Such a tangle of feelings might then be a ...

The Best Barnet

Jeremy Harding, 20 February 1997

With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer 
by Susannah Clapp.
Cape, 246 pp., £15.99, January 1997, 0 224 03258 5
Show More
Show More
... tree in the south of France, having his hair combed by his wife. The ravenous Francis Wyndham and James Fox spoon up a pitifully notional soufflé made from wild strawberries which they have picked ‘all day’ at Chatwin’s insistence and which he has finicked down to an airy nothing. His host in Shropshire, Martin Wilkinson, recalls a local pub in which ...

Carry on up the Corner Flag

R.W. Johnson: The sociology of football, 24 July 2003

Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Football in Europe during the Second World War 
by Simon Kuper.
Orion, 244 pp., £14.99, January 2003, 0 7528 5149 7
Show More
Broken Dreams: Vanity, Greed and the Souring of British Football 
by Tom Bower.
Simon and Schuster, 342 pp., £17.99, February 2003, 9780743220798
Show More
Show More
... Eichmann’s recollection of the ease of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, ‘The trains from Holland – it was a delight,’ he claims that among the villains who made it so were ‘several Ajax men’. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Kuper seems to regard the Second World War as a contest mainly between Germans and Jews: all the other ...