In Disguise of a Merchant

Linda Colley: Company-States, 30 July 2020

Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World 
by Andrew Phillips and J.C. Sharman.
Princeton, 253 pp., £25, June 2020, 978 0 691 20351 5
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... 16th century, England had already set up companies to trade with Russia and the Levant. In 1600, Elizabeth I chartered the East India Company (EIC) with monopoly rights for trade in the Indian Ocean region. Two years later, the Dutch East India Company was founded, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC). These two organisations are prime examples of the ...

Trickes of the Clergye

Alexandra Walsham: Atheistical Thoughts, 25 April 2024

Atheists and Atheism before the Enlightenment: The English and Scottish Experience 
by Michael Hunter.
Cambridge, 223 pp., £30, July 2023, 978 1 009 26877 6
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... Jesus, no good angels, only a hell there was, and devils to carry me thither’. We also hear of Elizabeth, wife of the Nonconformist minister Oliver Heywood, who battled throughout her life with ‘the unbeleefe of her own heart’. But these are exceptions that seem to prove Hunter’s rule that Christian doubt differs from the rational scepticism of the ...

Because it’s pink

Stephen Mulhall: John Hyman’s objective eye, 25 January 2007

The Objective Eye: Colour, Form and Reality in the Theory of Art 
by John Hyman.
Chicago, 286 pp., £20, June 2006, 0 226 36553 0
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... a particular individual in the real world that the picture portrays – in my imagined case, Queen Elizabeth II. Plainly, one way we recognise the external subject of a picture is by seeing the resemblance between a particular real individual and the picture’s internal subject. But the question the resemblance theory is supposed to answer is not: ‘How does ...

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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... nearly contemporary Lighthouse at Two Lights by Edward Hopper. Hopper painted the light at Cape Elizabeth, Maine, by day in strong sun with his characteristic hard shadows. The lighthouse is unlit; the keeper’s gothic cottage beside it looks empty and the atmosphere is, if not sinister, then desolate and oppressive. Perhaps the greatest lighthouse image ...

Our Jewels, Our Pictures

Freya Johnston: Michael Field’s Diary, 1 June 2023

Chains of Love and Beauty: The Diary of Michael Field 
by Carolyn Dever.
Princeton, 261 pp., £30, July 2022, 978 0 691 20344 7
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... pseudonym of Arran Leigh (the name, as well as the poetry, revealed the influence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh). Celebrating the love of women and girls, this collection, a mixture of original compositions and translations, is full of sunlight and flowers. It is also prefaced by a sonnet in which the author addresses her ...

Did he leap?

Mendez: ‘Harlem Shuffle’, 16 December 2021

Harlem Shuffle 
by Colson Whitehead.
Fleet, 320 pp., £16.99, September 2021, 978 0 7088 9944 1
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... on Carney’s struggle to join the elite of Harlem society – the world of his in-laws. Elizabeth, Carney’s wife, was raised on Striver’s Row with notches on the doorframes marking her growth; now she lives in a ‘dark apartment with a back window that peered out onto an air shaft and a front window kitty-corner to the elevated 1 ...

I adjure you, egg

Tom Johnson: Medieval Magic, 21 March 2024

Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England 
by Katherine Storm Hindley.
Chicago, 299 pp., £36, August 2023, 978 0 226 82533 5
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... into foul stinking privies, where you can find as many gods as you want if you care to look.’ Elizabeth Sampson, hauled before the bishop of London, put it more succinctly: Our Lady of Willesden ‘was a brent ars Elfe’. But as bishops went hunting through parishes for heresy, they also found people who held the old ways disturbingly close, with a ...

On a Chinese Mountain

Frank Kermode, 20 November 1986

The Royal Beasts 
by William Empson.
Chatto, 201 pp., £12.95, November 1986, 0 7011 3084 9
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Essays on Shakespeare 
by William Empson.
Cambridge, 246 pp., £25, May 1986, 0 521 25577 5
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... could he even appear under many guises, so that one might think of a particular person (Donne’s Elizabeth Drury, for example) as Christ? Although Empson has a lot of fun inventing a system of music appropriate to a ‘sexless’ species, and imagining the Wuzzoo attitude to babies (‘Do your women like having to look after these things? Of course they are ...

‘A Being full of Witching’

Charles Nicholl: The ‘poor half-harlot’ of Hazlitt’s affections, 18 May 2000

... to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah (Cajah), Leonora Elizabeth (Betsey), Emma and baby John. Here, in the summer of 1820, William Hazlitt entered their lives, and here Sarah steps into the limelight of the Liber Amoris. That book remains the primary source for what happened between them – how could it be ...

All I Can Stand

Thomas Powers: Joseph Mitchell, 18 June 2015

Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the ‘New Yorker’ 
by Thomas Kunkel.
Random House, 384 pp., £22.50, April 2015, 978 0 375 50890 5
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... Mitchell’s mother who had more to do with forming the taste and character of the man Joe became. Elizabeth Parker Mitchell, called Betty, was the first on either side of the family to earn a college degree (Southern Presbyterian in Red Springs, North Carolina) and she wanted her children to feel they were part of the larger world. She subscribed to dozens of ...

Who Lives and Who Dies

Paul Farmer: Who survives?, 5 February 2015

... claimed independence from Britain in 1966. The only public referral hospital, named after Queen Elizabeth, in the capital city, Maseru, was decrepit, poorly run and subject to explosive outbreaks of drug-resistant TB: few if any Basotho mourned plans for its closure and replacement. The question was who would build a new hospital and how it would be paid ...

A History of Disappointment

Jackson Lears: Obama’s Parents, 5 January 2012

The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama’s Father 
by Sally Jacobs.
Public Affairs, 336 pp., £20, July 2011, 978 1 58648 793 5
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A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother 
by Janny Scott.
Riverhead, 384 pp., £18.99, May 2011, 978 1 59448 797 2
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... him. Mathematically sharp, he yearned to be an economist. Among the activists in Nairobi was Sara Elizabeth Mooney, a 43-year-old Texan and literacy teacher, who offered Barack a job as her secretary. He cultivated an academic look, with horn-rimmed glasses and pipe. Mooney found him exceptionally promising: his ebullience, his self-confidence and his ...

Adieu, madame

Terry Castle: Sarah Bernhardt, 4 November 2010

Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt 
by Robert Gottlieb.
Yale, 233 pp., £18.99, October 2010, 978 0 300 14127 6
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... late in life that she and Henri had met at a costume ball in Brussels. She had been dressed as Elizabeth I; he – appropriately enough for a prince – had been a slim, pomaded, unusually fetching Hamlet. 3. The Doted-On Wastrel Son. Prince Henri’s By-Blow, Most Likely. Bernhardt had him in 1864, when she was 20. She named him Maurice but she might as ...

Colony, Aviary and Zoo

David Denby: New York Intellectuals, 10 July 2025

Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals 
by Ronnie A. Grinberg.
Princeton, 367 pp., £30, May 2024, 978 0 691 19309 0
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... crashed through the boys’ club indifference and scepticism. McCarthy was there at the beginning. Elizabeth Hardwick, a Southerner who moved to New York in 1939, aspiring ‘to be a Jewish New York intellectual’, began writing for the magazine in 1945. The umbrageous Diana Trilling, wife of Lionel and often at war with the others, started writing book ...

Art’ll fix it

John Bayley, 11 October 1990

The Penguin Book of Lies 
edited by Philip Kerr.
Viking, 543 pp., £15.99, October 1990, 0 670 82560 3
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... and the Glory that it showed ‘the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth’. That must raise a few Protestant eyebrows, for it tacitly implies that the achievements of Bloody Mary, who burned far more Protestant heretics than her unwilling sister executed Jesuit priests, were not really a persecution at all. Another ...