Lords of the World

Thomas Jones: Keeping Up with the Caesars, 5 February 2026

The Lives of the Caesars 
by Suetonius, translated by Tom Holland.
Penguin, 448 pp., £10.99, March, 978 0 14 198038 6
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... debaucheries on the island are sickening – including the oral and anal rape of sometimes very young children; on one occasion he broke the legs of two brothers who complained – but whether or not they are true (and there’s no particular reason to doubt them entirely), and whatever his moral failings, Tiberius’ political error was to have abandoned ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I Didn’t Do in 2007, 3 January 2008

... much, partly through not having been brought up to it but also having had a duodenal ulcer as a young man, I suppose I feel disqualified, or somehow got at, as I did when I had to do a poetry reading for Amis in 1976, though then it was his self-consciously chappish manner I found hardest to cope with, never knowing if it was piss-taking quite. It’s ...

Yawning and Screaming

John Bayley, 5 February 1987

Jane Austen 
by Tony Tanner.
Macmillan, 291 pp., £20, November 1986, 0 333 32317 3
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... love of fools and foolishness, that she turned back to them. It is the same with the absurd Sir Edward, who ‘knew his business’ when it came to seduction, and who thinks that Timbuktu would be an ideal venue for the rape of Clara Brereton, although his indigence ‘obliged him to prefer the quietest sort of ruin for the object of his affections’. The ...

More than one world

P.N. Furbank, 5 December 1991

D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 
by John Worthen.
Cambridge, 624 pp., £25, September 1991, 0 521 25419 1
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The Letters of D.H. Lawrence. Vol. VI: 1927-28 
edited by James Boulton, Margaret Boulton and Gerald Lacy.
Cambridge, 645 pp., £50, September 1991, 0 521 23115 9
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... non-prescriptive approach: for it must have been what inspired the ‘composite’ biography by Edward Nehls of thirty years ago, in which the biographer stood aside and allowed the torch of narrative to be handed on from one to another of a relay of competing voices. This seems to raise some fundamental questions about biography, or at least literary ...

No Gentleman

Jonathan Parry, 23 June 1994

Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics 
by Peter Marsh.
Yale, 725 pp., £30, May 1994, 0 300 05801 2
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... he was bored with it. His mental turmoil and bitterness was exacerbated by the death of two young wives in childbirth, which destroyed the little spiritual comfort that his austere brand of Unitarianism had ever given him. Avowedly puzzled about the purpose of existence, he was driven on by the psychological need to pit himself against all ...

For the Good of the Sex

Susan Eilenberg, 8 December 1994

The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld 
edited by William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft.
Georgia, 399 pp., £58.50, June 1994, 0 8203 1528 1
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... produce, For thro’ thy pocket oozed the viscous juice.                   Edward I scorn a tell-tale, or I cou’d declare How, leave unask’d, you sought the neighbouring fair; Then home by moon-light spurred your jaded steed, And scarce returned before the hour of bed. Think how thy trembling heart had felt affright, Had not our ...

Horrible Dead Years

Christopher Prendergast, 24 March 1994

Baudelaire 
by Joanna Richardson.
Murray, 602 pp., £30, March 1994, 0 7195 4813 6
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... and configurations of the 19th-century world. One would have thought, for example, that, after Edward Said’s Orientalism and the important work of Christopher Miller on Baudelairean ‘exoticism’, the youthful trip to the Ile de la Réunion would have produced something more analytically strenuous than references to ‘his Oriental ...

‘Faustus’ and the Politics of Magic

Charles Nicholl, 8 March 1990

Dr Faustus 
by Christopher Marlowe, edited by Roma Gill.
Black, 109 pp., £3.95, December 1989, 0 7136 3231 3
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Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age: The Occult Tradition and Marlowe, Jonson and Shakespeare 
by John Mebane.
Nebraska, 309 pp., £26.95, July 1989, 0 8032 3133 4
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Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance 
by William Huffman.
Routledge, 252 pp., £30, November 1989, 0 415 00129 3
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Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England 
by Patrick Curry.
Polity, 238 pp., £27.50, September 1989, 0 7456 0604 0
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... Greene, and by informers like Baines and Cholmeley – were just the opposite. They show him as a young man who constantly and recklessly broadcast heretical, free-thinking views. He considered religion a political tool to ‘keep men in awe’. He persuaded people to atheism, ‘willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins’. Even allowing for ...

Swiftly Encircling Gloom

Tim Radford, 8 May 1997

Promising The Earth 
by Robert Lamb.
Routledge, 204 pp., £35, September 1996, 0 415 14443 4
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... whale lives by getting between the harpoon and the whale. Lamb’s book instead has pictures of young people holding up placards saying ‘Who Needs Sperm Oil?’; of a bus with a David Bowie poster on the front because FoE persuaded Ziggy Stardust himself to dedicate a performance to Save the Whale. FoE also took out quarter-page adverts in the ...

I just worked it out from the novel

Michael Wood, 24 April 1997

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me 
by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Harvill, 313 pp., £8.99, October 1996, 1 86046 199 9
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The Club Dumas 
by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, translated by Sonia Soto.
Harcourt Brace, 368 pp., $23, February 1997, 0 15 100182 0
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... despair, and die!’ The ghosts are those of the people we know as the Duke of Clarence, Prince Edward, Queen Anne and others. The movie is Richard III, although the man in the novel doesn’t know this, since he has caught only part of the film on television, and the time is the eve of the battle of Bosworth Field. The toy planes and the movie run through ...

Superpriest

Denton Fox, 21 January 1988

Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe 
by R.W. Southern.
Oxford, 337 pp., £30, July 1986, 9780198264507
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Politics, Policy and Finance under Henry III, 1216-1245 
by Robert Stacey.
Oxford, 284 pp., £27.50, July 1987, 0 19 820086 2
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... the normal pattern of a successful career. It may be that this preferment was connected with the young Henry III, who was released from the control of his guardians in the early 1220s, and whom Grosseteste may have served as secretary and keeper of his secret seal. With his new independence, Grosseteste went to Oxford, where he was from about 1225 to ...

Diary

Andrew Saint: The Jubilee Line Extension, 20 January 2000

... to have created a ‘classic’ Underground image and tradition: signs, a language for posters, Edward Johnston’s alphabet, Henry Beck’s diagrammatic map and so forth. All this has survived in more or less watered-down form. Even now it has been only partly upstaged by the swagger and individualism of the new Jubilee Line stations. Pick saw all this ...

Diary

Paul Laity: Henry Woodd Nevinson, 3 February 2000

... go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and got into fights on Tottenham Court Road. It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, David Bomberg ...

Wodehouse in America

D.A.N. Jones, 20 May 1982

P.G. Wodehouse: A Literary Biography 
by Benny Green.
Joseph, 256 pp., £8.95, October 1981, 0 907516 04 1
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Wodehouse on Wodehouse: Bring on the girls (with Guy Bolton), Performing Flea, Over Seventy 
Penguin, 655 pp., £2.95, September 1981, 0 14 005245 3Show More
P.G. Wodehouse: An Illustrated Biography 
by Joseph Connolly.
Eel Pie, 160 pp., £3.95, September 1981, 0 906008 44 1
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P.G. Wodehouse: A Centenary Celebration 1881-1981 
edited by James Heineman and Donald Bensen.
Oxford, 197 pp., £40, February 1982, 0 19 520357 7
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The World of P.G. Wodehouse 
by Herbert Warren Wind.
Hutchinson, 256 pp., £5.95, October 1981, 0 09 145670 3
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... anything to do with the Nazis was as damaging to the nation’s soul as anything alleged against Edward VIII. Wodehouse had been an emblem of Britishness for the smug, Daily Telegraph elements in the United Kingdom: his work was ‘the sort of thing foreigners don’t understand’ – like cricket, Gilbert and Sullivan. Malcolm Muggeridge has told an ...

Mortal Beauty

Paul Delany, 21 May 1981

Feminine Beauty 
by Kenneth Clark.
Weidenfeld, 199 pp., £10, October 1980, 0 297 77677 0
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Of Women and their Elegance 
by Norman Mailer.
Hodder, 288 pp., £12.50, March 1981, 0 340 23920 4
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Nude Photographs 1850-1980 
edited by Constance Sullivan.
Harper and Row, 204 pp., £19.95, September 1981, 0 06 012708 2
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... it seems to make superfluous the whole later development of the cheesecake genre. A shamefaced young woman looks quizzically at the photographer while fending off a half-tumescent man who simultaneously kisses her and displays her genitals to the camera (in today’s convention, a more dishonest one, she displays them herself). How appropriate, one ...