One-Way Traffic

Ferdinand Mount: Ancient India, 12 September 2024

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World 
by William Dalrymple.
Bloomsbury, 482 pp., £30, September, 978 1 4088 6441 8
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... gods. The Brahmins brought with them not only their faiths and their epics but also the previously unknown art of writing. Sanskrit inscriptions, like Roman coins, turn up at the furthest flingings of Indian influence. Yet everything was subtly changed by the prevailing local cultures. When Rabindranath Tagore visited South-East Asia in 1927, he ...

Flash and Thunder

Michael Dobson: Marlowe’s Betrayals, 5 March 2026

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe 
by Stephen Greenblatt.
Bodley Head, 352 pp., £25, September 2025, 978 1 84792 713 2
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... including Marlowe himself, was trying to imitate for at least the next five years, was practically unknown by the time of the Civil War. It is true that Tamburlaine-like barbarian conquerors, and even versions of Tamburlaine himself, did return to the stage after the playhouses reopened in 1660, but the protagonists of Restoration heroic tragedy tend to speak ...

Wrong Sort of Citizen

Aziz Huq, 2 April 2026

... in treatment between the native-born and the naturalised. In practice, denaturalisation was unknown until the early 20th century. When Congress passed the first statutory denaturalisation provisions in 1906 and 1907, it was acting in the context of immigration law that linked citizenship to a particular view of equality in marriage. Since 1855, an ...

Freedom of the Press

Anthony Lewis, 26 November 1987

... the sacred quality of the law. The Court is closely divided at times, but I suppose that is not unknown in the courts of last resort of other countries. And almost invariably, over time, the sharpest conflict yields to the development of legal doctrine that commands general assent. Justices of all views are moved by institutional loyalty and ...

How the sanity of poets can be edited away

Arnold Rattenbury: The Sanity of Ivor Gurney, 14 October 1999

‘Severn and Somme’ and ‘War’s Embers’ 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £7.95, September 1997, 1 85754 348 3
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80 Poems or So 
by Ivor Gurney, edited by George Walter and R.K.R. Thornton.
Carcanet, 148 pp., £9.95, January 1997, 1 85754 344 0
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... bastard to deal with: on the scrounge for money, or tobacco, not turning up for meals, whereabouts unknown, walking away from jobs found for him by friends or relatives – as organist, tax clerk, cinema pianist, farm labourer – caring only to write, so the family thought, incomprehensible music and poems. In the presence of family and friends alike, he ...

Seizing the Senses

Derek Jarrett, 17 February 2000

Edmund Burke. Vol. I: 1730-84 
by F.P. Lock.
Oxford, 564 pp., £75, January 1999, 0 19 820676 3
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... which of them the King would appoint as his successor. When the King appointed the comparatively unknown Lord North, Burke seemed vindicated. This must be the cabal at work again. North, it appeared, would last no longer than his predecessors. However, by the time the pamphlet was published in April 1770, under the title Thoughts on the Cause of the Present ...

Canetti and Power

John Bayley, 17 December 1981

Auto da Fé 
by Elias Canetti, translated by C.V. Wedgwood.
Cape, 464 pp., £7.95, January 1982, 0 224 00568 5
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The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Continuum, 268 pp., $12.95, June 1979, 0 8164 9103 8
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The Human Province 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Continuum, 281 pp., $12.95, June 1978, 0 8164 9335 9
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Crowds and Power 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Carol Stewart.
Penguin, 575 pp., £2.95, October 1978, 0 14 003616 4
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Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Christopher Middleton.
Marion Boyars, 121 pp., £5.95, October 1976, 0 7145 1136 6
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The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit 
by Elias Canetti, translated by J.A. Underwood.
Marion Boyars, 103 pp., £5.50, January 1978, 0 7145 2579 0
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The Conscience of Words 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Continuum, 246 pp., $12.95, May 1979, 0 8164 9334 0
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... a magic ordeal yet to come – is typical. Nor, in this case, does it seem absurd. The Unknown God, dwelling in splendid intellectual isolation, is always a potent cult figure. Canetti chose a language and its literature, but his genius has no setting or home. He was born in 1905 in Ruschuk, Bulgaria, into a merchant clan of Sephardic Jews ...

A Dreame of Passion

Barbara Everett: Shakespeare’s Most Peculiar Play, 2 January 2003

... right-hand man, Escalus. Our modern verb ‘escalate’ was then, and for a long time to come, unknown, but had a predecessor in a noun now rare, ‘escalade’; both words are derived from the Latin word for a ladder, scala. An escalade is an assault in which soldiers climb over a defensive wall with ladders. The process of escalade is possibly referred ...

A Lazarus beside Me

Avies Platt: An Encounter with Yeats, 27 August 2015

... in that noisy, ugly room, and in his direct sincerity of speech with me, who was, after all, an unknown stranger. And I was a woman. Do not mistake me; this is no self-deprecation! The point is, and to me it is vital, that I am acutely aware that there are many men with alleged claims to greatness, sex equality creeds, and intimate friendships with ...

Magic Beans, Baby

David Runciman, 7 January 2021

A Promised Land 
by Barack Obama.
Viking, 768 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 0 241 49151 5
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... preyed on the weak and we inevitably fell back into clans and tribes, lashing out against the unknown and huddling against the darkness.’ If he can heal himself, he can heal America. If he can heal America, America can heal the world. It’s as simple – or as complicated – as that.This mix of personal uncertainty and political portentousness gives ...

With A, then B, then C

Susan Eilenberg: The Sexual Life of Iris M., 5 September 2002

Iris Murdoch: A Life 
by Peter Conradi.
HarperCollins, 706 pp., £9.99, August 2002, 9780006531753
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... apparently normal young man glanced out a window, caught a glimpse of her as she passed by – an unknown young woman in an academic gown walking with a friend – and immediately jumped up, ran outside, and followed her into Fraenkel’s Agamemnon seminar, where the young infatuate proceeded to ignore Fraenkel and to look at her, entranced, until the seminar ...

A Different Life

Thomas Laqueur: Can cellos remember?, 9 October 2025

Cello: A Journey through Silence to Sound 
by Kate Kennedy.
Apollo, 468 pp., £10.99, August, 978 1 80328 704 1
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... to Lucas from the Robert Schumann Hochschule, a conservatory in Düsseldorf. How it got there is unknown.) Wang contacted the British cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, who in turn contacted Kennedy. On 29 September 2024 the cello, lost for eighty years, made its first proper public appearance. Lucas played the Allegro Cantabile from Hermann’s Cello Concerto at ...

Citizens

David Marquand, 20 December 1990

Citizenship and Community: Civic Republicanism and the Modern World 
by Adrian Oldfield.
Routledge, 196 pp., £30, August 1990, 0 415 04875 3
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Community and the Economy: The Theory of Public Co-operation 
by Jonathan Boswell.
Routledge, 226 pp., £30, October 1990, 0 415 05556 3
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Encouraging citizenship: Report of the Commission on Citizenship 
HMSO, 129 pp., £8, September 1990, 0 11 701464 8Show More
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... with New Right doctrine even before the change of government. John Major himself is, of course, an unknown quantity, but the opposition parties have succumbed to wishful thinking in assuming that he will be a carbon copy of his old boss. Thatcherism was always an aberration from the norm of advanced capitalism. Major may not know how to get back to the ...

Consider the lions

Peter Campbell, 22 July 1993

The House of Gold 
by Richard Goy.
Cambridge, 304 pp., £60, January 1993, 0 521 40513 0
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The Palace of the Sun 
by Robert Berger.
Pennsylvania State, 232 pp., £55, April 1993, 0 271 00847 4
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... one of organisation rather than technique. He points out that there was no structural principle unknown to medieval practice involved in building the Louvre. One can even make modern comparisons. Goy calculates that Contarini’s workmen laid bricks at about the same rate (around four hundred per day) as a modern bricklayer. Building load-bearing structures ...

The Biographer’s Story

Jonathan Coe, 8 September 1994

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers 
by Roger Lewis.
Century, 817 pp., £20, April 1994, 0 7126 3801 6
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... art of acting can achieve. I’d rate it higher than Being There’), he also discusses the other unknown Sellers films like Ghost in the Noonday Sun and the Polanski-produced A Day at the Beach (a print of which has recently come to light). As in Stage People, where he wrote poignantly about the missing footage from Billy Wilder’s masterpiece The Private ...