Mosquitoes in Paradise

Ange Mlinko: ‘The Magic Kingdom’, 2 February 2023

The Magic Kingdom 
by Russell Banks.
Knopf, 331 pp., £9.99, February, 978 0 85730 547 3
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... to the letter: Elder John is based on Brother Egbert Gillette, who was tried alongside Eldress Elizabeth Sears. Rumours that Marchant was pregnant, and not really at death’s door, were disproved by the medical examiner. (In Banks’s version, the medical examiner gives false testimony about the pregnancy after poor Sadie’s body is exhumed.) In fact, no ...

How did she get those feet?

Alice Spawls: The Female Detective, 20 February 2014

The Notting Hill Mystery: The First Detective Novel 
by Charles Warren Adams.
British Library, 312 pp., £8.99, February 2012, 978 0 7123 5859 0
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The Female Detective: The Original Lady Detective 
by Andrew Forrester.
British Library, 328 pp., £8.99, October 2012, 978 0 7123 5878 1
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Revelations of a Lady Detective 
by William Stephens Hayward.
British Library, 278 pp., £8.99, February 2013, 978 0 7123 5896 5
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... him. (Van Dine’s 19th rule: ‘The motive should always be personal.’) Crowe, whom Mary Elizabeth Braddon admired, fell out of favour (Dickens wrote that she had gone ‘stark mad – and stark naked – on the spirit-rapping imposition. She was found t’other day in the street, clothed only in her chastity, a pocket-handkerchief and a visiting ...

Philosophical Vinegar, Marvellous Salt

Malcolm Gaskill: Alchemical Pursuits, 15 July 2021

The Experimental Fire: Inventing English Alchemy, 1300-1700 
by Jennifer M. Rampling.
Chicago, 408 pp., £28, December 2020, 978 0 226 71070 9
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... rich and powerful didn’t abandon hope that a lowly alchemist might yet change the world. In 1565 Elizabeth set up a Dutch alchemist in his own workshop at Somerset House, prompting a flurry of envious petitions to the crown. By now, England’s entitlement to alchemic rewards was no longer justified only by antique precedent, but by the approval that had ...

Browbeating

Randall Kennedy: Congress v. Harvard, 25 January 2024

... quickly backed by its board of trustees, unlike the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, who apologised for her testimony and resigned soon after. Claudine Gay also apologised. Her bosses on the Harvard Corporation kept their counsel for several days but eventually gave her their backing – just about. ‘Our extensive ...

Diary

Oliver Whang: Two Appalachias, 1 August 2024

... on a particular image of an Appalachian: a hard-working, white frontiersman. Yet this account, as Elizabeth Catte argues in What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia, depends on tracing Central Appalachia’s inhabitants back to Scots-Irish pioneers whose values – self-reliance, pride, violence – were insulated from modern culture by the mountains that ...

Not Cricket

Peter Phillips: On Charles Villiers Stanford, 6 February 2025

Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician 
by Jeremy Dibble.
Boydell, 701 pp., £70, April 2024, 978 1 78327 795 7
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... was so recognised until the run ended with William McKie, knighted after he had conducted at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.The person to whom most credit should go for moderating this traditional prejudice and opening the door to a new era of composition was an Irishman. Stanford was born in Dublin in 1852 to a musical family: his father was a ...

Screaming in the Streets

Lucie Elven: On Nan Goldin, 20 February 2025

This Will Not End Well 
Neue Nationalgalerie, until 6 April 2025Show More
Nan Goldin: This Will Not End Well 
edited by Fredrik Liew.
Steidl, 216 pp., £44, January 2023, 978 3 96999 058 2
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... the Gemäldegalerie houses Gothic statues of wimpled ladies, a Virgin Mary with St Elizabeth, two miserable-looking canons from Utrecht. Goldin’s own phantom is her sister. Sisters, Saints and Sibyls is projected onto three parallel screens, like a triptych. It was first shown in 2004 in the chapel of the Salpêtrière in Paris, an octagonal ...

Why Twice?

Rosemary Hill: Fire at the Mack, 24 October 2024

The Mack: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art 
by Robyne Calvert.
Yale, 208 pp., £35, April, 978 0 300 23985 0
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... on an ongoing basis and the most recent ones [sic] … are available on our media centre.’ As Elizabeth Davidson, senior project manager for the post-2014 restoration, points out, once the first SOBC in 2021 found in favour of rebuilding it would have been possible to secure the structure internally and remove the scaffolding, which continues to cost a ...

Leader of the Martians

Thomas Nagel: J.L. Austin’s War, 7 September 2023

J.L. Austin: Philosopher and D-Day Intelligence Officer 
by M.W. Rowe.
Oxford, 660 pp., £30, May 2023, 978 0 19 870758 5
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... next week’; ‘I take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife’; ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’; ‘I give and bequeath my watch to my brother’; ‘I bet you sixpence it will rain tomorrow.’ Austin’s systematic exploration and analysis of the complex linguistic territory of speech as a form of action was presented as the William James ...

Pop, Crackle and Bang

Malcolm Gaskill: Fireworks!, 7 November 2024

A History of Fireworks: From Their Origins to the Present Day 
by John Withington.
Reaktion, 331 pp., £25, August 2024, 978 1 78914 935 7
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... fiery birds and flowers. Experts entered the picture, such as the Dutchmen hired by Henry VIII; Elizabeth I, who had a soft spot for fireworks, created the position of ‘Fire Master of England’. A massive display at Warwick Castle in 1572 resulted in several houses being burned down (the queen raised a £25 compensation fund from her loyal subjects), and ...

Blood and Confusion

Jonathan Healey: England’s Republic, 10 July 2025

Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-60 
by Alice Hunt.
Faber, 493 pp., £12.99, June, 978 0 571 30320 5
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The Fall: The Last Days of the English Republic 
by Henry Reece.
Yale, 464 pp., £35, June 2024, 978 0 300 21149 8
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... too dowdy, perhaps, and too complex. But now it’s all the rage. Just possibly the death of Queen Elizabeth II, which brought an end to a long age of stability for the British monarchy, has opened up the prospect that the country might one day want to think of alternatives. Whatever the reason, the resurgence in interest is to be welcomed. The republic is a ...

Turning Wolfe Tone

John Kerrigan: A Third Way for Ireland, 20 October 2022

Belfast 
directed by Kenneth Branagh.
January
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Small World: Ireland 1798-2018 
by Seamus Deane.
Cambridge, 343 pp., £20, June 2021, 978 1 108 84086 6
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Irish Literature in Transition 
edited by Claire Connolly and Marjorie Howes.
Cambridge, six vols, £564, March 2020, 978 1 108 42750 0
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Ireland, Literature and the Coast: Seatangled 
by Nicholas Allen.
Oxford, 305 pp., £70, November 2020, 978 0 19 885787 7
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A History of Irish Literature and the Environment 
edited by Malcolm Sen.
Cambridge, 457 pp., £90, July, 978 1 108 49013 9
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... in 1969. The success of Sinn Féin in the May elections added fuel to the fire, while the death of Elizabeth II and the recent census result, showing a Catholic majority in the North, are sure to increase unease.But loyalism has never been just one thing, and in Northern Protestants Susan McKay finds people from staunch unionist backgrounds voting Alliance and ...

His Own Prophet

Michael Hofmann: Read Robert Lowell!, 11 September 2003

Collected Poems 
by Robert Lowell, edited by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter.
Faber, 1186 pp., £40, July 2003, 0 571 16340 8
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... legitimation – Bidart makes the case against it when he turns up a 1959 letter of Lowell’s to Elizabeth Bishop: ‘In the hospital I spent a mad month or more rewriting everything in my three books’ – Lord Weary’s Castle, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, Life Studies. ‘I arranged the poems chronologically, starting in Greek and Roman times and finally ...

Our Island Story

Stefan Collini: The New DNB, 20 January 2005

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 
edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison.
Oxford, sixty volumes, £7,500, September 2004, 9780198614111
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... about which, of course, we know a good deal more. The usual suspects are close on his heels – Elizabeth I (1533-1603, ‘queen of England and Ireland’), Cromwell (1599-1658, ‘Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland’), Wellington (1769-1852, ‘army officer and prime minister’), Victoria (1819-1901, ‘queen of the United Kingdom of Great ...

Histories of Australia

Stuart Macintyre, 28 September 1989

The Oxford History of Autralia. Vol III: 1860-1900 
by Beverley Kingston.
Oxford, 368 pp., £22.50, July 1989, 0 19 554611 3
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The Road from Coorain: An Australian Memoir 
by Jill Ker Conway.
Heinemann, 238 pp., £12.95, September 1989, 0 434 14244 1
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A Secret Country 
by John Pilger.
Cape, 286 pp., £12.95, September 1989, 0 224 02600 3
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Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past 
edited by Stephen Nicholas.
Cambridge, 246 pp., $45, June 1989, 0 521 36126 5
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... then, still convalescent from illness, only because of an aberrant desire to meet the young Queen Elizabeth during her tour of the Antipodes in 1954. She charmed him. Stricken by remorse for a lifetime of stiffnecked pride, he dragged himself again from his sickbed on the following Sunday to seek forgiveness at the nearest church. He died from a stroke within ...