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Diary

Leslie Wilson: On Chinese Magic, 12 May 1994

... a Cabinet Minister. Su T’ung-p’o wrote this in the first century AD (the translation is by Arthur Waley). There is indeed nothing new under the sun. Space on mountains, however, is limited, and, for ordinary Chinese people, there have been other ways of surviving the harsh and inevitable conflicts of life: feng shui remains one of them. The feng shui ...

Howard’s End

John Sutherland, 18 September 1986

Redback 
by Howard Jacobson.
Bantam, 314 pp., £10.95, September 1986, 0 593 01212 7
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Coming from behind 
by Howard Jacobson.
Black Swan, 250 pp., £2.95, April 1984, 0 552 99063 9
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Peeping Tom 
by Howard Jacobson.
Black Swan, 351 pp., £2.95, October 1985, 0 552 99141 4
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... Bally slip-on snakeskin shoes decorated rather tastefully I’ve always thought, with a delicate gold chain and having the added advantage of slightly built-up heels’. He is, as who knows better than he, a blot on the landscape, an alien, a monstrous excrescence, Jacobsonian man. Redback is a novel of Australia and it will be some way into the narrative ...

Here Be Fog

J.H. Elliott: Mapping the American West, 23 February 2012

The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-63 
by Paul Mapp.
North Carolina, 455 pp., £44.50, February 2011, 978 0 8078 3395 7
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... these fabled places lured Coronado north to the plains, where he found neither great cities nor gold, but a few Indian villages and a ‘lord’ wearing a copper medallion around his neck. This and similar disappointments did much to reduce Spanish enthusiasm for the systematic exploration and charting of the lands to the north and east of New ...

Diary

Katherine Arcement: Fanfic, 7 March 2013

... it in loops and figure eights and diamonds. When he’s done, he shoves all his clothes and what gold he has on hand inside the bottomless bag, pulling it over his shoulder and grabbing his broom. The wind is cold, colder than it should be for this time of year, pouring through the open window, and he can feel his nose start to run. The wood of the ...

Flower or Fungus?

Barbara Graziosi: Bacchylides, 31 July 2008

Bacchylides: Politics, Performance, Poetic Tradition 
by David Fearn.
Oxford, 428 pp., £70, July 2007, 978 0 19 921550 8
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... to change the contours of ancient Greek literature. Between 1896 and 1907, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt excavated the ancient rubbish dumps at Oxyrhynchos, in Upper Egypt; hundreds of lost literary texts emerged, together with unprecedented information about the people who read and eventually discarded them.* Authors who had been little more than ...

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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... and after the eighth century: Pirenne, for example, had a typical inter-war obsession with the Gold Standard, and decried the virtual disappearance of gold from Charlemagne’s Europe, whereas this third school rightly points out that the lively silver coinage which replaced it was a great deal more use in everyday ...

Female Bandits? What next!

Wendy Doniger: The incarnations of Robin Hood, 22 July 2004

Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography 
by Stephen Knight.
Cornell, 247 pp., £14.50, May 2003, 0 8014 3885 3
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... at least unprovable, that a Mr R. Hood ever existed,’ though, for some people, Robin Hood, King Arthur ‘and even God himself all existed because of their manifold presence in human life and culture’. Knight concludes that ‘Robin Hood’s biography is mythic in that the multiform figure does not have physical identity.’ His biography is thus doubly ...

Je sui uns hom

Tom Shippey, 1 June 1989

Medieval Civilisation 400-1500 
by Jacques Le Goff, translated by Julia Barrow.
Blackwell, 393 pp., £19.95, November 1988, 0 631 15512 0
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The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages. Vol. I: 350-950 
edited by Robert Fossier, translated by Janet Sondheimer.
Cambridge, 556 pp., £30, February 1989, 0 521 26644 0
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The Medieval Imagination 
by Jacques Le Goff, translated by Arthur Goldhammer.
Chicago, 293 pp., £21.95, November 1988, 0 226 47084 9
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Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages 
by Georges Vigarello, translated by Jean Birrell.
Cambridge/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 239 pp., £25, October 1988, 0 521 34248 1
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Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas and Power 
by Jesse Byock.
California, 264 pp., $32.50, October 1988, 0 520 05420 2
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... closely by the Anglo-Saxons, broke open one bottleneck by getting the Western world off the gold standard and onto the handier silver currency of the sceatta or denier. The themes of the Illustrated History are, however, different from Medieval Civilisation, and more familiar. Michel Rouche especially is strongly pro-Medieval, even ...

Wanting Legs & Arms & Eyes

Clare Bucknell: Surplus Sons, 5 March 2020

Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune: How Younger Sons Made Their Way in Jane Austen’s England 
by Rory Muir.
Yale, 384 pp., £25, August 2019, 978 0 300 24431 1
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... about successful or extraordinary younger sons: about the Duke of Wellington, for instance, who as Arthur Wellesley – the third surviving son of an Anglo-Irish earl – took an ensign commission in the army because it wasn’t clear what else he’d be good at (he was ‘food for powder and nothing more’, his mother said). Rory Muir’s interest is in the ...

Upside Down, Inside Out

Colin Kidd: The 1975 Referendum, 25 October 2018

Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain 
by Robert Saunders.
Cambridge, 509 pp., £24.99, March 2018, 978 1 108 42535 3
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... men in grey suits to get out its message. It used endorsements from the boxer Henry Cooper and the gold medal-winning Olympic pentathlete Mary Peters; from subsidiary groupings such as Actors for Europe, which included Arthur Lowe and Richard Briers, and Writers for Europe, whose membership ranged from Agatha Christie to Tom ...

In Whose Interest?

Thomas Meaney: Truman’s Plan, 6 December 2018

The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months that Changed the World 
by A.J. Baime.
Doubleday, 431 pp., £20, February 2018, 978 0 85752 366 2
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The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War 
by Benn Steil.
Oxford, 606 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 0 19 875791 7
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... Plan did the opposite. Steil’s hero on the domestic front is another relatively unknown figure, Arthur Vandenberg, Republican senator for Michigan. Vandenberg understood that in order to get Congress to agree funding, and the US public to countenance troops remaining in Europe, another red scare would be needed. Vandenberg advised Truman to ‘scare the ...

Chop-Chop Spirit

Sean Jacobs: Festac ’77 Revisited, 9 May 2024

Last Day in Lagos 
by Marilyn Nance, edited by Oluremi C. Onabanjo.
Fourthwall, 299 pp., £37.50, October 2022, 978 0 9947009 9 5
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... of participants is impressive, especially the American delegation: the dancers and choreographers Arthur Mitchell, Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham; the musicians Duke Ellington and Marion Williams; the writers Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka. Senghor’s friend Césaire made an appearance, as did the Barbadian writer George Lamming, the South African writer ...

Brooksie and Faust

Angela Carter, 8 March 1990

Louise Brooks 
by Barry Paris.
Hamish Hamilton, 640 pp., £20, February 1990, 0 241 12541 3
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... in a brief but highly visible affair with Chaplin, then at the dizzy height of his fame. The Gold Rush was freshly out. Crowds followed them in the streets of New York. The dedicated dancer, moved by some ‘inner vision’ that Martha Graham, for one, saw in her, was now well on the way to becoming a grande horizontale. Men bought her furs. She let them ...

Beastliness

Harry Ricketts, 16 March 1989

Rudyard Kipling 
by Martin Seymour-Smith.
Macdonald, 373 pp., £16.95, February 1989, 0 356 15852 7
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... distinguished’, ‘critically and psychologically knowing’, having a ‘heart of gold’ and ‘humane’ – but Carrington’s unsensational presentation of the Southsea years carries more conviction than Seymour-Smith’s sandcastle of conjecture. Carrington’s view is that Kipling’s version of events is ‘true’ to the feelings of ...
... Selected Writings, Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth. Next year’s list will have Good as Gold by Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut’s Jail-bird, Joyce Carol Oates’s Unholy Loves, Michael Korda’s Charmed Lives, Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers, Bernard Malamud’s New Life, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in ...

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