Winging It

Clare Jackson: Early Modern Diplomacy, 5 March 2026

Lying Abroad: Henry Wotton and the Invention of Diplomacy 
by Carol Chillington Rutter.
Manchester, 313 pp., £20, February, 978 1 5261 7206 8
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... and fled to Florence, avoiding the disastrous Essex Rebellion and its vindictive aftermath.In self-imposed Continental exile, he offered his services as an intelligencer on matters concerning the British Isles to Ferdinando I, grand duke of Tuscany, whose concern to see a non-Habsburg nominee succeed Elizabeth I prompted him to send Wotton on a mission to ...

Slavdom

Greg Afinogenov: What Russians Want, 4 June 2026

Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime 
by Marlène Laruelle.
Stanford, 402 pp., £26.99, January 2025, 978 1 5036 4159 4
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Russia’s World Order: How Civilisationism Explains the Conflict with the West 
by Paul Robinson.
Cornell, 160 pp., £22.99, April 2025, 978 1 5017 8001 1
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Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance 
by Jeremy Morris.
Bloomsbury, 243 pp., £21.99, March 2025, 978 1 350 50931 3
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... Russian context). Unlike nationalism, civilisationism is not principally concerned with political self-determination: one may want, as many Eastern European nationalists do, to defend political statehood within the framework of European liberal civilisation. The inverse is trickier. In theory, a civilisation may incorporate many independent states, though in ...

Verie Sillie People

Keith Thomas: Bacon’s Lives, 7 February 2013

The Oxford Francis Bacon Vol. I: Early Writings 1584-96 
edited by Alan Stewart, with Harriet Knight.
Oxford, 1066 pp., £200, September 2012, 978 0 19 818313 6
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... a bad father, or a believing wife from an unbelieving husband. Age was superior to youth, and ‘self conceyted young men’ a constant menace. ‘The greatest number of Papists’ were ‘very yonge men’ and the most contentious Puritans were ‘for the most parte … men of yong yeeres & superficiall vnderstanding’. As for the common people, they were ...

The Grey Boneyard of Fifties England

Iain Sinclair, 22 August 1996

A Perfect Execution 
by Tim Binding.
Picador, 344 pp., £15.99, May 1996, 0 330 34564 8
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... night – takes its shape and tone from standard accounts of the A6 murder, the first case in any self-respecting compilation. In The Penguin Encyclopedia of Crime, Oliver Cyriax comments that ‘thirty years ago, it seemed inconceivable that a Briton might hang for a crime he was tied to by almost no evidence.’ Now we have no such misconceptions. Railways ...

A Feeling for Ice

Jenny Diski, 2 January 1997

... Irrationally but unmanageably outraged. This is very important to me, I replied to my reasoning self, but I was unable to explain why.The Arctic would have been easier, but I had no desire to head North. I wanted white and ice as far as the eye could see, and I wanted it in the one place in the world which was uninhabited. I wanted my white bedroom extended ...

In the Streets of Londonistan

John Upton: Terror, Muslims and the Met, 22 January 2004

... a security firm, with a website offering the chance to go on the ‘ultimate jihad challenge’, a self-defence training course in America. The offer was only ever taken up by one person, a security guard from Sainsbury’s. Sulayman attracted the attention of Special Branch and MI5, who made several attempts to recruit him as an agent. After 11 September the ...

In Praise of Spiders

Caleb Crain: Wilkie Collins’s Name Games, 11 September 2008

The Woman in White 
by Wilkie Collins.
Vintage, 609 pp., £5.99, October 2007, 978 0 09 951124 3
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... give me a power of control over her, even if I had known how to exercise it. I trace these lines, self-distrustfully, with the shadows of after-events darkening the very paper I write on; and still I say, what could I do? Of course he helps her. What Victorian man of feeling wouldn’t? But there’s something odd here, not apparent on a first reading, about ...

Talking Corpses

Tim Parks: ‘Gomorrah’, 4 December 2008

Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia 
by Roberto Saviano, translated by Virginia Jewiss.
Pan, 424 pp., £8.99, October 2008, 978 0 330 45099 7
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Gomorrah 
directed by Matteo Garrone.
October 2008
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... side bellows: ‘Facciamo i nostri morti’ (‘Let’s kill too’). Killing is always a powerful self-affirmation, however inoffensive the victim. These scenes are persuasive vehicles for Saviano’s message, and throughout the film the ugliness and poverty of people’s homes, the clashing colours of their cheap clothes, the squalor of the public ...

Good at Being Gods

Caleb Crain: Buckminster Fuller’s Visions, 18 December 2008

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe 
edited by K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller.
Yale, 257 pp., £35, July 2008, 978 0 300 12620 4
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... different this time is that no one expects new technologies to be democratic or to encourage ‘self-reliance and non-violence’, as AT was supposed to. Perhaps that’s just as well. The rebels of the East Village eventually gave up on their windmill because it required too much maintenance. Geodesic domes, too, failed to live up to their promise. The ...

Blood on the Block

Maurice Keen: Henry IV, 5 June 2008

The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made King 
by Ian Mortimer.
Vintage, 480 pp., £8.99, July 2008, 978 1 84413 529 5
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... of 1399 wrought in Henry a ‘deep change of character’; or was he merely revealing his true self? And how did the experience colour his outlook and actions as king? Henry’s story cannot be told without addressing these questions. Mortimer’s account of Henry’s upbringing and early career is full and perceptive. His father ensured that he knew the ...

Degoogled

Joanna Biggs: Keith Gessen, 22 May 2008

All the Sad Young Literary Men 
by Keith Gessen.
Heinemann, 242 pp., £11.99, May 2008, 978 0 434 01848 2
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... only wanted to kiss the throats of women, and who only wanted peace’. Sam may be ridiculously self-obsessed but we tuck him in and turn off the light. Keith’s summer job means he ends up meeting his intellectual hero, Morris Binkel. Keith wants Binkel to say he sees something in him. What he does say is: ‘Even the most mediocre mediocrity can make a ...

Impervious to Draughts

Rosemary Hill: Das englische Haus, 22 May 2008

The English House 
by Hermann Muthesius, edited by Dennis Sharp, translated by Janet Seligman and Stewart Spencer.
Frances Lincoln, 699 pp., £125, June 2007, 978 0 7112 2688 3
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... Then the Gothic triumphed again with the birth of Romanticism, which began in England, ‘this self-sufficient island kingdom’, where ‘the Germanic character had not allowed itself to be overrun.’ As a critic Muthesius was more subtle. The architects he singled out, Norman Shaw and Baillie Scott, Mackintosh and the very young Lutyens among them, are ...

Fraught with Ought

Tim Crane: Wilfrid Sellars, 19 June 2008

In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars 
edited by Kevin Scharp and Robert Brandom.
Harvard, 491 pp., £29.95, May 2007, 978 0 674 02498 4
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Wilfrid Sellars: Fusing the Images 
by Jay Rosenberg.
Oxford, 320 pp., £45, September 2007, 978 0 19 921455 6
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... and could be adopted by those who take much more traditional approaches to questions of the self and the mind. In fact, Sellars’s own endorsement of mind-body identity owes little to his inferentialism; its motivation lies rather in a quite orthodox conception of the authority of science, as well as a refusal to deny the reality of the mental. He may ...

On the Brink

James Lever: Philip Roth, 28 January 2010

The Humbling 
by Philip Roth.
Cape, 140 pp., £12.99, November 2009, 978 0 224 08793 3
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... as Konstantin on Broadway long ago, meaning that he’s channelling his own best, happiest self as well as the role – touching, which is the real twist of the knife. To add that pathos to the black, black joke is the touch of genius, because, unlike, say, the nice family who miraculously show up at the end of Cormac McCarthy’s Treplevianly bleak ...

Fellow Freaks

Sam Thompson: Wells Tower, 9 July 2009

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned 
by Wells Tower.
Granta, 238 pp., £10.99, April 2009, 978 1 84708 048 6
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... of Important Energies’, who carries a lifetime’s resentment of his charismatic, self-centred father, Roger. Burt spent his childhood with a crush on his young stepmother, Lucy, and cherished a vague belief that, around his 16th birthday, he would somehow inherit her, perhaps along with his father’s Mustang fastback. But Roger has never ...