Coiling in Anarchy

Rosemary Hill: Top of the Lighthouse, 16 February 2023

Where Light in Darkness Lies: The Story of the Lighthouse 
by Veronica della Dora.
Reaktion, 280 pp., £25, March 2022, 978 1 78914 549 6
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... a go of Moominpappa’s ambition to be a lighthouse keeper. Tove Jansson’s Moominpappa at Sea may well owe something to Poe. In it, the trolls find the lighthouse deserted, the light broken and on a table hundreds of tiny scratches in groups of six, with a seventh drawn through to mark the weeks: ‘Week after week all the same, except one which had only ...

Strange Outlandish Word

Clare Jackson: Tudor to Stuart, 26 September 2024

From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I 
by Susan Doran.
Oxford, 656 pp., £30, June, 978 0 19 875464 0
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... and unproblematic, even something of an anticlimax’. Elizabeth’s principal secretary, Robert Cecil, had without her knowledge masterminded a succession plan, starting a clandestine correspondence with James two years before her death. Accordingly, James had been shown the proclamation announcing his accession that was read aloud at Richmond Palace ...

Power Systems

John Bayley, 15 March 1984

Dante and English Poetry: Shelley to T.S. Eliot 
by Steve Ellis.
Cambridge, 280 pp., £20, October 1983, 0 521 25126 5
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Dante the Maker 
by William Anderson.
Hutchinson, 497 pp., £7.95, September 1983, 0 09 153201 9
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Dante: Purgatory 
translated with notes and commentary by Mark Musa.
Indiana, 373 pp., £19.25, September 1981, 0 253 17926 2
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Dante: Paradiso and Purgatorio 
with translation and commentary by Charles Singleton .
Princeton, 610 pp., £11.80, May 1982, 0 691 01844 8
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Virgil: The Aeneid 
translated by Robert Fitzgerald.
Harvill, 403 pp., £12.50, March 1984, 0 00 271008 0
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... he know what he has said. It is also true, and for the same reason, that what the poet has said may be taken in many different ways by his readers. Blake would have agreed with Shelley’s note about God at the end of ‘Queen Mab’, that ‘the works of His fingers have borne witness against Him.’ In whatever spirit of humility a great poet undertakes ...

Yes and No

John Bayley, 24 July 1986

Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism 
by Mark Krupnick.
Northwestern, 207 pp., $25.95, April 1986, 0 8101 0712 0
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... It is a very seductive technique, and not quite like any other in recent writing, however much it may borrow from Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener, the Schlegels and Wilcoxes of Howards End. It borrows in the sense that the stories and characters deployed are mythological and exemplary, as they are in the American tradition of Hawthorne and ...

Johnson’s Business

Keith Walker, 7 August 1980

A Dictionary of the English Language 
by Samuel Johnson.
Times, 2558 pp., £45, June 1980, 0 7230 0228 2
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Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson’s Middle Years 
by James Clifford.
Heinemann, 372 pp., £10, February 1980, 0 434 13805 3
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... Gay and Arbuthnot. Thomson’s Seasons. For theology he went to Hooker, Tillotson, William Law and Robert South. For technical and ‘philosophic’ (i.e. scientific) expressions he went to John Ray’s Wisdom of God in the Creation, Grew’s Cosmologia Sacra, William Derham’s Physico-Theology, Thomas Burnett’s Theory of the Earth, Richard Bentley’s ...

Docility Rampant

Margaret Anne Doody, 31 October 1996

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Romance Writings 
edited by Isobel Grundy.
Oxford, 276 pp., £14.50, August 1996, 0 19 812288 8
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... was stimulated by the pain of absence (for which Lady Bute, fostering her husband’s ambition, may have been secretly grateful). Lady Mary returned to England only after her husband’s death in 1761; she died a year later of breast cancer. In her lifetime she was the victim of many covert sneers and attacks, which redoubled after she did the scandalous ...

Close Relations

T.H. Barrett: Tibet and the Dalai Lama, 2 April 1998

The Buddha of Brewer Street 
by Michael Dobbs.
HarperCollins, 288 pp., £16.99, January 1998, 0 00 225412 3
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The Book of Tibetan Elders: Life Stories and Wisdom from the Great Spiritual Masters of Tibet 
by Sandy Johnson.
Constable, 282 pp., £17.95, February 1997, 0 09 476950 8
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The Art of Tibet 
by Robert Fisher.
Thames and Hudson, 224 pp., £7.95, November 1997, 0 500 20308 3
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Tibetan Nation: A History of Tibetan Nationalism and Sino-Tibetan Relations 
by Warren Smith Jr..
Westview, 732 pp., £59.50, December 1996, 0 8133 3155 2
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The Way to Freedom 
by His Holiness The Dalai Lama.
Thorsons, 181 pp., £7.99, February 1997, 0 00 220043 0
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Awakening the Mind, Lightening the Heart 
by His Holiness The Dalai Lama.
Thorsons, 238 pp., £8.99, February 1997, 0 00 220045 7
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Kundun: A Biography of the Family of the Dalai Lama 
by Mary Craig.
HarperCollins, 392 pp., £17.99, May 1997, 0 00 627838 8
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... quantity has found its way to the West to merit a compact but lavishly illustrated history from Robert Fisher, a grasp of the current situation needs more explicit testimony than even these powerful images provide. It is obvious from Warren Smith’s marathon retelling of the tangled tale of Tibet and its longstanding relationship with China that things ...

Something Fine and Powerful

Thomas Laqueur: Pearl Harbor Redux, 25 August 2011

Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor/Hiroshima/9-11/Iraq 
by John Dower.
Norton/The New Press, 596 pp., £22, October 2010, 978 0 393 06150 5
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... organisation on unsuspecting civilian targets and a massive Japanese attack on a naval base may seem a misjudgment, but it was not surprising. That a president would use such a crisis for his own purposes – Roosevelt effectively, Bush disastrously – might also have been expected. But that ‘Ground Zero’, the hypocentre of the first nuclear bomb ...

A Little Swine

Sheila Fitzpatrick: On Snitching, 3 November 2005

Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero 
by Catriona Kelly.
Granta, 352 pp., £17.99, May 2005, 1 86207 747 9
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... financial rewards: the Roman Empire is one example, Restoration England another. Or the state may proclaim a duty to denounce and punish citizens who fail to honour it: Muscovite Russia comes immediately to mind, but the Napoleonic Penal Code made similar provision. During the Spanish Inquisition, as Henry Kamen writes, ‘there was no need to rely on a ...

Diary

Stephen Spender: Towards a Kind of Neo-Paganism, 21 April 1983

... in Vietnam who were drug addicts, the many Russians who are alcoholics. Just as a neurosis may be not merely the symptom of an illness but also, in itself, an attempt to cure that illness, so the drop-outs from our society, whose symptoms are covered by what I call paganism, may, consciously or unconsciously, be both ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Prestige’, 14 December 2006

The Prestige 
directed by Christopher Nolan.
October 2006
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... invasion of the act of another. Alfred Borden, played by Christian Bale, wrecks a performance by Robert Angier, played by Hugh Jackman, with dire consequences: in the novel an abortion for Angier’s wife, in the movie the wife’s death. But this plausible bit of plotting very soon comes to look like an excuse. The two men are slugging it out in what they ...

At Tate Britain

Peter Campbell: Van Dyck’s Portraits, 12 March 2009

... familiar aspect of his work that dominates the current exhibition, Van Dyck and Britain (until 17 May). It includes about a tenth of the 400-odd portraits that emerged from his studio – around one a week – during seven and a half years of court patronage. In England a rare talent was diverted; what is more to the point, a portrait painter with an ...

At the Jeu de Paume

Brian Dillon: Peter Hujar, 19 December 2019

... and legs emerge. The impression of solidity was partly a matter of form. Like Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, Hujar created square, black and white images, typically using a Rolleiflex or the more sophisticated Hasselblad, plus tripod. The geometry of the square encourages a photographer to centre the subject and face it head on, turning unruly ...

Dunbar’s Disappearance

Sally Mapstone: William Dunbar, 24 May 2001

The Poems of William Dunbar 
edited by Priscilla Bawcutt.
Association for Scottish Literary Studies, £70, May 1999, 0 948877 38 3
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... he com furth of Ingland’. It is not known for sure what he had been doing there. He may well have been in the entourage of the Scottish embassy which was conducting the negotiations with Henry VII that led to the marriage two years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV. ‘London thow art of Towynys A per se’, an anonymous poem, is said ...

At the Courtauld

Nicholas Penny: Hanging Paintings, 27 January 2022

... When​ the Courtauld Institute of Art moved in 1989 from a house designed by Robert Adam in Portman Square to a wing of Somerset House, William Chambers’s masterpiece, it seemed a very satisfactory solution, especially because it provided an opportunity for the Courtauld Gallery to join the institute in its new premises ...