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Burning Questions

Fraser MacDonald: Home Fires, 5 January 2023

... that was apparent to distant generations of my rural family, for whom ‘natural’ fresh air was unknown. In the long winter months inside, they inhaled smoke and exhaled prayer.Other difficulties in assessing the significance of PM 2.5 are evident when it comes to the reasons people continue to use a wood-burning stove. Clean air advocates dismiss the ...

Knives in Candlelight

Adam Thirlwell: ‘Our Share of Night’, 16 March 2023

Our Share of Night 
by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell.
Granta, 725 pp., £18.99, October 2022, 978 1 78378 673 2
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... whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.This seems closer to Enríquez’s kind of writing, where all levels of ...

I’ll do the dishes

Sophie Lewis: Mothers’ Work, 4 May 2023

Essential Labour: Mothering as Social Change 
by Angela Garbes.
Harper Wave, 222 pp., £20, May 2022, 978 0 06 293736 0
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... city, whose citizens hid in their homes while cleaners and other ‘essential’ workers risked an unknown disease. The quote marks were an invitation to class struggle. Ukeles hadn’t shaken the hands of New York’s 8500 ‘san men’ in Touch Sanitation to encourage them to keep at it, chin up. Two days of wildcat strikes by New York rubbish collectors in ...

And That Rug!

Michael Dobson: Images of Shakespeare, 6 November 2003

Shakespeare’s Face: The Story behind the Newly Discovered Portrait 
by Stephanie Nolen.
Piatkus, 365 pp., £18.99, March 2003, 0 7499 2391 1
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Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions 
by Stephen Orgel.
Palgrave, 172 pp., £25, August 2003, 1 4039 1177 0
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Shakespeare in Art 
by Jane Martineau et al.
Merrell, 256 pp., £29.95, September 2003, 1 85894 229 2
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In Search of Shakespeare 
by Michael Wood.
BBC, 352 pp., £20, May 2003, 9780563534778
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... 2001, the Sanders portrait must be one of the most famous likenesses in the world of a completely unknown Elizabethan. By contrast, the second portrait has languished in obscurity, though its provenance is a good deal more picturesque and its connections with the name of Shakespeare are in one respect at least rather more verifiable. It depicts a ...

This is the day!

Ferdinand Mount: The Great Siege of Malta, 3 April 2025

The Great Siege of Malta 
by Marcus Bull.
Allen Lane, 324 pp., £30, January, 978 0 241 52365 0
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... seem irrational, yet their actions were not only suicidally brave but perfectly sensible; a not unknown combination in human carry-on. Crazy, yes, but lucky? I don’t think so.They stayed on Malta for another two centuries, until Napoleon threw them out in 1798. Dispersed once more across the world, the Knights of St John survive to this day, still with a ...
... McFarlane was one of the most influential medieval historians of postwar Britain, but his name is unknown outside academic circles. This would have pleased him. He grew up in Dulwich, the son of a civil servant in the Admiralty. A day boy at Dulwich College, he won an open scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford and then a senior demyship at Magdalen where in ...

Ardour

J.P. Stern, 3 November 1983

The Sacred Threshold: A Life of Rainer Maria Rilke 
by J.F. Hendry.
Carcanet, 184 pp., £9.95, July 1983, 0 85635 369 8
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Rilke: sein Leben, seine Welt, sein Werk 
by Wolfgang Leppmann.
Scherz Verlag, 483 pp., £11, May 1981, 3 502 18407 0
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Rainer Maria Rilke: Leben und Werk im Bild 
edited by Ingeborg Schnack.
Insel Verlag, 270 pp., £2.55, May 1977, 3 458 01735 6
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... display the writer’s eerie ability to enter another life, to appropriate a distant, apparently unknown landscape. Such letters make us revise our notions of the boundary between the known and the unknown, between poetry and life; merging that landscape’s natural, cultural and emotional features into one, the ...

Dark and Deep

Helen Vendler, 4 July 1996

Robert Frost: A Biography 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Constable, 424 pp., £20, May 1996, 0 09 476130 2
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Collected Poems, Prose and Plays 
by Robert Frost, edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson.
Library of America, 1036 pp., $35, October 1995, 9781883011062
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... added that ‘the exact degree of intimacy between Frost and Kathleen Morrison at that point is unknown, although there has been, as is to be expected, rumour and conjecture.’ And he had quoted Frost’s 1939 comment after a visit to the Morrisons: ‘I came through the two weeks with the Morrisons pretty well considering all there was on all sides to ...

God’s Own

Angus Calder, 12 March 1992

Empire and English Character 
by Kathryn Tidrick.
Tauris, 338 pp., £24.95, August 1990, 1 85043 191 4
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Into Africa: The story of the East African Safari 
by Kenneth Cameron.
Constable, 229 pp., £14.95, June 1990, 0 09 469770 1
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Burton: Snow upon the Desert 
by Frank McLynn.
Murray, 428 pp., £19.95, September 1990, 0 7195 4818 7
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From the Sierras to the Pampas: Richard Burton’s Travels in the Americas, 1860-69 
by Frank McLynn.
Barrie and Jenkins, 258 pp., £16.99, July 1991, 0 7126 3789 3
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The Duke of Puddle Dock: Travels in the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles 
by Nigel Barley.
Viking, 276 pp., £16.99, March 1992, 0 670 83642 7
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... mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ‘explorer’ really needs to be dropped in favour of ‘traveller’, except when uninhabited tracts such as Antarctica are referred to. Cook was a genuine explorer when ...

The American Virus

Eliot Weinberger, 4 June 2020

... ill, and some are dying, from a new illness that is not Covid-19 but is connected to it in an unknown way. Besides severe respiratory conditions, the virus is also causing strokes in otherwise healthy, low-risk adults and permanent organ damage in some who have recovered.Eighty-two per cent of Americans believe in God. Sixty-two per cent of them believe ...

Museums of Melancholy

Iain Sinclair: Silence on the Euston Road, 18 August 2005

... Clare, who came from Helpston, a village near their own. Our investigation drew many previously unknown Hadmans from the ground where they had lain, undisturbed, for hundreds of years. They were known to each other, some of them, but unknown to us: lives summarised by uncertain dates and incompetent transcriptions of that ...

I only want the OM

Christopher Tayler: Somerset Maugham, 1 September 2005

Somerset Maugham: A Life 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Vintage, 411 pp., £12, April 2005, 1 4000 3052 8
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... more from Italian and French. Ashenden says that ‘posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown writers of a period, but from among the known’; and here too Maugham must have felt he was on the right track. He was the most highly paid writer of his day. During the 1950s he appeared on cinema screens, cigarette in hand, introducing adaptations of ...

The Brothers Koerbagh

Jonathan Rée: The Enlightenment, 14 January 2002

Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 
by Jonathan Israel.
Oxford, 810 pp., £30, February 2001, 0 19 820608 9
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... really object when he says that Een Ligt – though suppressed so effectively that it was almost unknown till the 20th century – was ‘one of the first and, by any reckoning, one of the most far-reaching texts of the European Radical Enlightenment’. No one would have recognised the idea of ‘European Radical Enlightenment’ at the time, after all, so ...

Ten Thousand Mile Mistake

Thomas Powers: Robert Stone in Saigon, 18 February 2021

Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone 
by Madison Smartt Bell.
Doubleday, 588 pp., £27, March 2020, 978 0 385 54160 2
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The Eye You See With: Selected Non-Fiction 
by Robert Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 320 pp., £20.99, April 2020, 978 0 618 38624 6
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‘Dog Soldiers’, A Flag for Sunrise’, Outerbridge Reach’ 
by Robert Stone, edited by Madison Smartt Bell.
Library of America, 1216 pp., £35, March 2020, 978 1 59853 654 6
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... came drugs. It seemed to Stone that among the writers he saw, a ragged mix of big names and the unknown, everybody was a user or a dealer. On Perry Lane, drugs had been a form of recreation; in Saigon their sale and consumption was of a different order of magnitude.Stone’s dozen days in Saigon were all passed in the shadow of the war. Everybody was in ...

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