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Bang, Bang, Smash, Smash

Rosemary Hill: Beatrix Potter, 22 February 2007

Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature 
by Linda Lear.
Allen Lane, 584 pp., £25, January 2007, 978 0 7139 9560 2
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... in school room and another in larder, but nothing seen of poor Sally.’ From an early age she drew compulsively and documented her animals living and dead. She was attached to them, but not sentimental. When pets died, or were chloroformed to put an end to their suffering, they were boiled down so that she and Bertie could draw the skeletons. This was ...

I have written as I rode

Adam Smyth: ‘Brief Lives’, 8 October 2015

‘Brief Lives’ with ‘An Apparatus for the Lives of Our English Mathematical Writers’ 
by John Aubrey, edited by Kate Bennett.
Oxford, 1968 pp., £250, March 2015, 978 0 19 968953 8
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John Aubrey: My Own Life 
by Ruth Scurr.
Chatto, 518 pp., £25, March 2015, 978 0 7011 7907 6
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... of John Aubrey’s 17th-century writing. ‘My great Uncle … remembred him,’ Aubrey wrote of Philip Sidney, dead for three generations, ‘and sayd that he was wont, as he was hunting on our pleasant plaines, to take his Table booke out … and write downe his notions as they came into his head when he was writing his Arcadia.’ Searching for memories ...

Testing out the Route

Gabrielle Spiegel, 11 November 1999

The Lord’s First Night: The Myth of the Droit de Cuissage 
by Alain Boureau, translated by Lydia Cochrane.
Chicago, 310 pp., £15.25, September 1998, 0 226 06743 2
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... but rather to what he calls the ‘master-slave dialectic’. Viewed in this way, cuissage drew on a metaphorical language of sexual possession to underscore the threat of domination, and pretended to enact an ‘erotics of inequality’. More specifically, it articulated a discourse of seigniorial privilege which was part of a system of power and was ...

What you see is what you get

Terry Eagleton: Bishop Berkeley, 25 April 2013

The Correspondence of George Berkeley 
edited by Marc Hight.
Cambridge, 674 pp., £75, November 2012, 978 1 107 00074 2
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... Much of this is standard Neoplatonist stuff, by no means unique to Berkeley; it’s just that he drew some startling epistemological consequences from it. There had always been a certain aversion to materialism in Irish thought, and Berkeley simply presses it to a logical if implausible end-point, abolishing matter altogether. What replaces ...

Loose Woven

Peter Howarth: Edward Thomas’s contingencies, 4 August 2005

Collected Poems 
by Edward Thomas, edited by R. George Thomas.
Faber, 264 pp., £12.99, October 2004, 0 571 22260 9
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... Collected Poems (reprinted here as an appendix), his neat-minded friend Walter de la Mare drew attention to Thomas’s ‘loose-woven’ style, a wonderful epithet which simultaneously conjures up the Thomas of tweeds, pipes and trousers tucked in socks, and his verse, written in a form both ‘fixed and free’, which enacts Thomas’s encounters ...

The Unstoppable Upward

James Wolcott: ‘The Life of Saul Bellow’, 24 January 2019

The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005 
by Zachary Leader.
Cape, 864 pp., £35, November 2018, 978 0 224 10188 2
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... in the New York Times, ‘Jewish writers – Bernard Malamud, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, inter alia – have emerged as a dominant movement in our literature. Herzog, in several senses, is the great pay-off book of that movement. It is a masterpiece, the first the movement has produced.’ Herzog not only had critics whirling their ...

Bonkers about Boys

James Davidson: Alexander the Great, 1 November 2001

Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction 
edited by A.B. Bosworth and E.J. Baynham.
Oxford, 370 pp., £35, September 2000, 0 19 815287 6
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... Jolting miserably over the rough terrain, he began to wail. This – the thing I describe – drew a crowd. For his plight grew worse, yet his shouts were in a foreign language, desperately begging his ‘master’s mercy’. His funny way of talking made them laugh. His bodily contours, his fat suggested something alien, animal, Babylonian, gross. So the ...

Not Many Dead

Linda Colley, 10 September 1992

Riot, Risings and Revolution: Governance and Violence in 18th-Century England 
by Ian Gilmour.
Hutchinson, 504 pp., £25, May 1992, 0 09 175330 9
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... of its unconstitutionality but from Jacobite treason. By the same token, his Lord Chief Justice, Philip Hardwicke, was more concerned to link a crime wave in the 1730s with ‘the degeneracy of the present times, fruitful in the inventions of wickedness’, than with widespread human want and desperation. And there is an almost comical petulance in one ...

At the Foundling Museum

Joanne O’Leary: ‘Portraying Pregnancy’, 2 April 2020

... from 1554 depicts Mary in the throes of this phantom pregnancy, shortly after her marriage to Philip II. The queen is shown seated rather than standing, in the tradition of portraits of Habsburg brides, and the partlet concealing her shoulders and neck follows the conservative fashion of contemporary Spain. She is 37. What’s striking is her ...

Dry-Cleaned

Tom Vanderbilt: ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, 21 August 2003

The Manchurian Candidate: BFI Film Classics 
by Greil Marcus.
BFI, 75 pp., £8.99, July 2002, 0 85170 931 1
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... the subliminal exhortations warned of in Vance Packard’s 1957 book, The Hidden Persuaders, which drew attention to the use of mass psychology in advertising, public relations and political campaigning? The fear that returning Korean War POWs had been mentally compromised (many were sent to an Army facility in Valley Forge for an extensive series of ...

With Only Passing Reference to the Earth

James Hamilton-Paterson: The Martian Enterprise, 22 August 2002

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World 
by Oliver Morton.
Fourth Estate, 351 pp., £18.99, June 2002, 9781841156682
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... had already acquired fanciful names. Schiaparelli’s was a better map than any before, and he drew his names from the classics. He also saw features on the planet that he termed canali, or ‘channels’. He refused to decide whether they were natural or artificial, but his disciple, the American astronomer Percival Lowell, was in no doubt. Alone among ...

Not very good at drawing

Nicholas Penny: Titian, 6 June 2013

Titian: His Life 
by Sheila Hale.
Harper, 832 pp., £30, July 2012, 978 0 00 717582 6
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... of Titian’s friend and public-relations manager, Pietro Aretino, and his greatest patron, King Philip of Spain, are rich in revealing detail and seem, by contrast, fully rounded. No reliable record survives of the way Titian conducted himself in the company of friends, let alone in private. The Ferrarese ambassador in 1522 claims that the artist is ...

Everlasting Fudge

Theo Tait: The Difficult Fiction of Cynthia Ozick, 19 May 2005

The Bear Boy 
by Cynthia Ozick.
Weidenfeld, 310 pp., £12.99, March 2005, 0 297 84808 9
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... for the first International Man Booker Prize for career achievement, alongside Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood et al. Consequently, it is sometimes seen as surprising that she is so little read in Britain. Her formidable essays have been published and admired here; but, of her nine works of fiction, only The Bear Boy ...

Little Goldbug

Iain Bamforth: Tomi Ungerer, 19 July 2001

... he earned a living from the advertising agencies on Madison Avenue and shared an apartment with Philip Roth. In 1964 he designed the poster for Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. His pacifism and his posters against the war in Vietnam brought him to the attention of the FBI; he was blacklisted until 1993. He campaigned, too, on behalf of the civil rights ...

Diary

John Lanchester: Among the Balls, 20 July 2006

... a hard time beating Scotland 2-1 in 1998, Germany only squeaked 1-0 past Bolivia in 1994, Italy drew with Bulgaria in 1986 and Argentina (again) lost to Belgium in 1982. So that would have been a safe non-entrail-based prediction for today, that Brazil would have a hard time in the opening game. Except they aren’t playing in the opening game. Instead ...

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