Babylons

A.D. Moody, 19 June 1980

Henry James. Letters. Volume II: 1875-1883 
edited by Leon Edel.
Macmillan, 438 pp., £15, March 1980, 0 333 18045 3
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Henry James: The Later Novels 
by Nicola Bradbury.
Oxford, 228 pp., £12, December 1979, 0 19 812096 6
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... he will try to make it live a little longer) to the age, which is ‘the age of Panama Canals, of Sarah Bernhardt, of Western wheat-raising, of merely material expansion’. In another mood, he explains that Isabel Archer is not simply a portrait of Minnie Temple: ‘Poor Minny was essentially incomplete and I have attempted to make my young woman more ...

Peter Conrad’s Flight from Precision

Richard Poirier, 17 July 1980

Imagining America 
by Peter Conrad.
Routledge, 319 pp., £7.50, May 1980, 0 7100 0370 6
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... He died, in fact, while on a final lecture tour in England, collapsing after a reading in St James Hall in March 1870. Nor is Conrad any less misleading about Dickens’s first trip to America. Having served up some ersatz fare about American Notes (‘in Dickens’s nightmarish America, there is emptiness: panic has driven away even the houses’ – whatever ...

No King

Daisy Hay: Burke and Fox break up, 5 February 2026

Friends until the End: Edmund Burke and Charles Fox in the Age of Revolution 
by James Grant.
Norton, 477 pp., £35, September 2025, 978 0 393 54210 3
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... summer of 1776, Burke and Fox began to meet and talk with increasing regularity. Fox’s cousin Sarah Lennox remarked with some surprise that the princeling of Holland House had ‘left off all his fine acquaintances … and lived quite with Mr Burke’. By the time of Fox’s visit to Chatsworth in 1777, the friendship had been sealed and Burke’s ...

Oh those Lotharios

Alison Light: Jean Lucey Pratt, 17 March 2016

A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt 
edited by Simon Garfield.
Canongate, 736 pp., £12.99, April 2016, 978 1 78211 572 4
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... lessons in parody from The Diary of a Nobody and that her comic timing owes something to the music hall. Debunking the Victorian or fuddy-duddy in a flip tone, however, is more Coward or Waugh than Pooter. (In later years she would look back and ‘wriggle’ at her facetiousness.) She is not always high-spirited. Her diary is also a commonplace book where she ...

‘I’m coming, my Tetsie!’

Freya Johnston: Samuel Johnson’s Shoes, 9 May 2019

Samuel Johnson 
edited by David Womersley.
Oxford, 1344 pp., £95, May 2018, 978 0 19 960951 2
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... bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September 1709, the elder son of Michael Johnson and his wife, Sarah, rather old and very proud parents. They had, Johnson recalled, ‘not much happiness from each other’, and immediately deposited their ambitions in him. Michael, the son of a labourer, had had the rare good luck to receive a charity school education and ...

My Castaway This Week

Miranda Carter: Desert Island Dreams, 9 June 2022

... revelation – no reference, for example, to Oliver’s recent scandalous split from his wife, Sarah Churchill, the prime minister’s daughter. (Winston Churchill had always been appalled by the marriage and described Oliver as ‘common as dirt’.) That’s not to say there was no subtext. Oliver was Jewish and said to be on a Nazi blacklist. His final ...

Hegemonies

Patrick Wormald, 21 October 1982

Dark Age Economics: The Origins of Towns and Trade, AD 600-1000 
by Richard Hodges.
Duckworth, 230 pp., £24, March 1982, 0 7156 1531 9
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Londinium: London in the Roman Empire 
by John Morris.
Weidenfeld, 384 pp., £15, March 1982, 9780297780939
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... Mohammed and Charlemagne; unlike Pirenne’s work, it has been carefully revised and updated (by Sarah Macready). It is, remarkably, the first full-length historical treatment that Roman London has received. Morris’s book itself shows why this should have been so. If Roman Britain as a whole is a proto-historic part of a very historical world, Roman London ...

A Million Shades of Red

Adam Mars-Jones: Growing Up Gay, 8 September 2022

Young Mungo 
by Douglas Stuart.
Picador, 391 pp., £16.99, April, 978 1 5290 6876 4
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... no sort of solution to disown trauma in the act of recounting it.In her 2009 book Ties That Bind, Sarah Schulman explored the fact, so obvious as to be somehow invisible, that members of sexual minorities are rarely brought up by their own kind. They must construct an identity from sources outside the family, and what they learn at home is unlikely to be ...
Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot 
by Michael Rogin.
California, 320 pp., $24.95, May 1996, 0 520 20407 7
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... the Day of Atonement, on New York’s Lower East Side and 13-year-old Jakie, son of Cantor and Sarah Rabinowitz, is to chant Kol Nidre in his father’s synagogue. Cut to Jakie performing ‘My Gal Sal’ in a local saloon. The cantor arrives, drags him home by his ear and there, despite Sarah’s ...

Tricked Out as a Virgin

Bee Wilson: Respectable Enough, 4 November 2021

The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A True Story of Sex, Crime and the Meaning of Justice 
by Julia Laite.
Profile, 410 pp., £16.99, April, 978 1 78816 442 9
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... sounds. Last month, following Wayne Couzens’s conviction for the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard, a police commissioner, Philip Allott, resigned after giving a radio interview suggesting that Everard should not have ‘submitted’ to arrest by her killer, who was, at the time, a serving police officer.Newton also cross-examined Harvey about ...

Kipling and the Irish

Owen Dudley Edwards, 4 February 1988

Something of Myself 
by Rudyard Kipling, edited by Robert Hampson and Richard Holmes.
Penguin, 220 pp., £3.95, January 1987, 0 14 043308 2
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Stalky & Co 
by Rudyard Kipling, introduced by Isabel Quigley.
Oxford, 325 pp., £2.95, January 1987, 0 19 281660 8
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Kim 
by Rudyard Kipling, introduced by Alan Sandison.
Oxford, 306 pp., £2.95, January 1987, 0 19 281651 9
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... on him. His misery in the ‘House of Desolation’, and his victimisation at the hands of Mrs Sarah Holloway and her son, remained with him all his life. Little Rudyard had real uncles and aunts in England, and they were not poor people: the Poynters, the Burne-Joneses, the Baldwins. Yet his parents had wantonly placed him in the care of the Holloways at ...
... Rossa were aware of Alfred Nobel’s dynamite compound, invented in 1867. ‘Dynamite,’ as Sarah Cole wrote in her book At the Violet Hour (2012),held highly idealised associations. It offered new vistas of power, not solely for its potential to wreak destruction but also for its ability to terrify a wide public. The connotations of dynamite for ...

How many words does it take to make a mistake?

William Davies: Education, Education, Algorithm, 24 February 2022

... humanities depend was conceived as the product of transitions between spaces – library, lecture hall, seminar room, study – linked together by work with pen and paper. When all this is replaced by the interface with screen and keyboard, and everything dissolves into a unitary flow of ‘content’, the identity of the author – as distinct from the texts ...

Driving through a Postcard

Christian Lorentzen: In New Hampshire, 3 March 2016

... with the rise of Bernie Sanders. The Sanders crowd I joined two hours later at the Exeter Town Hall seemed the least menacing of mobs. One of the going media narratives equates the supporters of Trump and Sanders: both draw on an ample well of white male outrage. There’s little escape from white males in New Hampshire, but the difference in ethos between ...

Is this the end of the American century?

Adam Tooze: America Pivots, 4 April 2019

... Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only exacerbated the lurch to the right. The ...