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Keep your eye on the tide, Jock

Tom Shippey: Naval history, 4 June 1998

The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, Vol. I, 660-1649 
by N.A.M. Rodger.
HarperCollins, 691 pp., £25, September 1997, 0 00 255128 4
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Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe 
by Bert Hall.
Johns Hopkins, 300 pp., £25, June 1997, 0 8018 5531 4
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... Hall by contrast plunges straight into the unfamiliar world of Early Modern technology, the ‘black box’ as he calls it, whose inputs and outputs are commonly known to historians but whose inner functions are felt to be of no interest. Historians of technology (a small group) are concerned with the logic of technology, general historians, including ...

Like Buttermilk from a Jug

Oliver Soden: Ivor Gurney’s Groove, 22 September 2022

Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney 
by Kate Kennedy.
Princeton, 488 pp., £28, June 2021, 978 0 691 21278 4
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... volume of poetry, War’s Embers, appeared in 1919.Gurney’s previous biographer, the composer Michael Hurd, believed his subject’s truest vocation was music and that the songs are a greater achievement than the poetry. Trevor Hold, also a composer, disagreed, arguing that Gurney’s poetry is ‘more original than [the] music’. I am on Hold’s ...

When Medicine Failed

Barbara Newman: Saints, 7 May 2015

Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation 
by Robert Bartlett.
Princeton, 787 pp., £27.95, December 2013, 978 0 691 15913 3
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... The man awoke to find himself healed, but for the rest of his life, he had one white leg and one black. Not all miracles healed. The saints could also liberate prisoners, bring rain or fair weather, give children to the barren and bring about victory in combat or in court. But when scorned, they wrought ferocious miracles of punishment. Saints not only ...

Lola did the driving

Inigo Thomas: Pevsner’s Suffolk, 5 May 2016

Suffolk: East, The Buildings of England 
by James Bettley and Nikolaus Pevsner.
Yale, 677 pp., £35, April 2015, 978 0 300 19654 2
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... editions of the Pevsner Suffolk guide. Once slim, pocketable and beige, the volumes are now black, thick, and less handy. This may be the last print edition of the series. A digital version would expand the guides’ uses: and if you don’t have the right sort of imagination to visualise interiors or exteriors from written detail alone – I struggle ...

Neo-Catastrophism

Eric Klinenberg: Sinful Cities?, 9 October 2003

The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea 
by Thomas Bender.
New Press, 287 pp., $30, September 2002, 1 56584 736 9
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Dead Cities: and Other Tales 
by Mike Davis.
New Press, 448 pp., $16.95, October 2003, 1 56584 844 6
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... York’, expresses his familiar apocalyptic sensibility, suggesting that New York has become a ‘black utopia’, a place where skyscrapers collapse into infernos and the repressed roots of urban fear return with spectacular fury. ‘It’s conceivable that bin Laden et al have put a silver stake in the heart of the “downtown revival” in New York and ...

Don’t pick your nose

Hugh Pennington: Staphylococcus aureus, 15 December 2005

... safe. It was absorbed through the skin and poisoned patients and surgeons, causing kidney damage (black urine was a tell-tale symptom). And laboratory tests showed that it was much less lethal for bacteria than expected. The notion that it was no good in theory, even if it worked in practice, caused serious damage to its reputation.Sterilising dressings and ...

Each Cornflake

Ben Lerner: Knausgaard, Vol. 3, 22 May 2014

My Struggle: Vol. 3. Boyhood Island 
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Don Bartlett.
Harvill Secker, 490 pp., £12.99, March 2014, 978 1 84655 722 4
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... next volume like crack,’ Zadie Smith writes. As the literary critic – and former junkie – Michael Clune has pointed out, we tend to reach for drug metaphors when we find ourselves taking pleasure in a book without being able to ascribe our interest to respectable literary values. Is Knausgaard, despite all the comparisons to Proust, more like reality ...

Wide-Angled

Linda Colley: Global History, 26 September 2013

The French Revolution in Global Perspective 
edited by Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt and William Max Nelson.
Cornell, 240 pp., £16.50, April 2013, 978 0 8014 7868 0
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... in tandem. And while Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony than to ...

Stiffed

David Runciman: Occupy, 25 October 2012

The Occupy Handbook 
edited by Janet Byrne.
Back Bay, 535 pp., $15.99, April 2012, 978 0 316 22021 7
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... Occupy Handbook, one essay that stands out is an old-fashioned piece of historical reportage by Michael Hiltzik. It’s called ‘The 5 per cent’, and it tells the story of the campaign during the 1930s to secure a decent social security programme for the elderly. In 1934, the number of Americans over the age of 65 was seven million, or just 5 per cent of ...

Reproaches from the Past

Peter Clarke: Gordon Brown, 1 April 2004

The Prudence of Mr Gordon Brown 
by William Keegan.
Wiley, 356 pp., £18.99, October 2003, 0 470 84697 6
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... time of the general election in April 1992, at which Major squeaked home for another term. When Black Wednesday came in September, the forcible ejection of sterling from the ERM was, by rights, as much a refutation of Labour’s official policy as of the government’s; but this time it was the Conservatives who suffered as the party of devaluation. Had ...

Hate is the new love

Malcolm Bull: Slavoj Žižek, 25 January 2001

The Fragile Absolute or why is the christian legacy worth fighting for? 
by Slavoj Žižek.
Verso, 182 pp., £16, June 2000, 1 85984 770 6
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... City of God seems to have become the Left’s new paradigm of social change. In Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire, Augustine provides the model for a counter-empire in which ‘the divine city is a universal city of aliens, coming together, co-operating, communicating.’ And even Slavoj Žižek, who complains that ‘in today’s critical and ...

More ‘out’ than ‘on’

Glen Newey: Chris Mullin’s Diaries, 27 August 2009

A View from the Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin 
by Chris Mullin.
Profile, 590 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 1 84668 223 0
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... it in economy is infra dig: ‘It’s not the food, it’s the sort of people.’ Another Tory, Michael Mates, spells it out: ‘He doesn’t want to meet his constituents.’ Coverage of Mullin during the expenses hoo-ha dwelt on his black-and-white telly, when other members were blagging plasma screens the size of ...

Snakes and Leeches

Rosemary Hill: The Great Stink, 4 January 2018

One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Yale, 352 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 300 22726 0
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... mad’ in company with his intimate friend Mr Jericho Jabber, a thinly disguised Disraeli, who has black ringlets ‘that look as if they were made out of snakes and leeches’. Both men had had homosexual relationships and when, in February 1858, the Times reported that Bulwer-Lytton was in line for a cabinet post, Rosina wrote to the prime minister, Lord ...

Am I right to be angry?

Malcolm Bull: Superfluous Men, 2 August 2018

Age of Anger: A History of the Present 
by Pankaj Mishra.
Penguin, 416 pp., £9.99, February 2018, 978 0 14 198408 7
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... through the categories that define who they are, whereas, as Srinivasan notes, for a woman or a black person in the United States, it may be quite the opposite. As James Baldwin said in 1961, ‘to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.’ This seems to be the line of argument implicit in Mishra’s ...

Faking the Canon

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Forging the Bible, 6 February 2014

Forgery and Counter-Forgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics 
by Bart Ehrman.
Oxford, 628 pp., £27.50, January 2013, 978 0 19 992803 3
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... the tide of reverent reassessment did eventually march forwards through the text between the Bible-black covers. Some 19th-century scholars like Ferdinand Christian Baur of the University of Tübingen were radical in their hatchet jobs on authenticity: Baur contended that of all the Epistles attributed to Paul in the New Testament, the apostle had written only ...

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