Persons outside the Law

Catherine Hall: The Atlantic Family, 19 July 2018

Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833 
by Daniel Livesay.
North Carolina, 448 pp., £45, January 2018, 978 1 4696 3443 2
Show More
Show More
... be kept firmly in their place. The great rebellion of 1760, described by the historian of Jamaica Edward Long as ‘the grand enterprise, whose object was no other than the entire extirpation of the white inhabitants’, provoked a change of policy on the island. The population of people of colour had grown substantially and some had become significant ...

Danger: English Lessons

R.W. Johnson: French v. English, 16 March 2017

Power and Glory: France’s Secret Wars with Britain and America, 1945-2016 
by R.T. Howard.
Biteback, 344 pp., £20, October 2016, 978 1 78590 116 4
Show More
Show More
... and constitution and imposing their own candidate as head of state, the British, under General Edward Spears, forced a complete reversal. In both cases Paris suspected Britain of trying to ensure that the Union Jack would fly over the entire Levant. De Gaulle raged at the British ambassador, threatened to declare war and accused Britain of unforgivable ...

Propellers for Noses

Dennis Duncan: The Themerson Archive, 9 June 2022

The Themerson Archive Catalogue 
edited by Jasia Reichardt and Nick Wadley.
MIT, three vols, 1000 pp., £190, November 2020, 978 1 9162474 1 3
Show More
Show More
... Stefan from late 1940, she describes an encounter with the ‘beautiful nonsensical drawings’ of Edward Lear. ‘I felt electrified,’ she writes, ‘like someone who can suddenly feel the ground alive under her feet again. I cried like a fool looking at those wonderful drawings.’ Now her own line thins as she finds her signature style in the Lear-like ...

The Koreans and their Enemies

Jon Halliday, 17 December 1992

Korea Old and New: A History 
by Carter Eckert, Ki-baik Lee, Young Ick Lew, Michael Robinson and Edward Wagner.
Harvard, 454 pp., £11.95, September 1991, 0 9627713 0 9
Show More
The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World 
by Anthony Daniels.
Hutchinson, 202 pp., £16.99, April 1991, 9780091741532
Show More
Show More
... with Pyongyang told me that North Korea could hold out: ‘Our biggest surprise,’ he said, ‘is that juche (Kim II Sung’s strategy of ‘self-reliance’) actually seems to work – if at a very high cost.’ But reunification will also proceed cautiously because the participants recognise that, while the process will lead to the disappearance ...

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
Show More
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
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...
Dancing with Dogma: Britain under Thatcherism 
by Ian Gilmour.
Simon and Schuster, 328 pp., £16.99, October 1992, 0 671 71176 8
Show More
Show More
... of government policy under her was done very much in combination with them, as it is also said to be under her successor. Furthermore, the semi-paralysis in which the Labour Party now operates is primarily a result of its fear of how the tabloids will treat anything other than silence. Lord Gilmour describes the tabloids as effectively ...

Dirty Linen

Patrick O’Brian, 4 August 1994

Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the ‘Bounty’ 
by Greg Dening.
Canto, 445 pp., £7.95, April 1994, 0 521 46718 7
Show More
Admiral Satan: The Life and Campaigns of Suffren 
by Roderick Cavaliero.
Tauris, 312 pp., £29.95, May 1994, 9781850436867
Show More
Show More
... including coconuts. Some days later, on 27 April 1789, Bligh came on deck in the morning and said that his personal store of coconuts had shrunk. After a great deal of fuss and hectoring he made all hands turn out their own nuts, threatening them with this and that; and according to some accounts he called Christian, his acting lieutenant, a liar and a ...

Horrible Dead Years

Christopher Prendergast, 24 March 1994

Baudelaire 
by Joanna Richardson.
Murray, 602 pp., £30, March 1994, 0 7195 4813 6
Show More
Show More
... though whether for himself or itself is not always clear (at Béranger’s funeral, Baudelaire said to Roger de Beauvoir: ‘Make no mistake, I am in mourning for Les Fleurs du mal’). Perhaps only Baudelaire could have imagined coffins at the sound of logs being unloaded on a winter’s afternoon. He compared his heart to ‘chambres d’éternel ...

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
Show More
Show More
... against all comers. Gentlemen considered Chamberlain’s judgment and character unreliable. Sir Edward Grey called him ‘a dangerous man, because being very masterful, impulsive and sanguine, he always believes he can get through a tight place by pushing’. It was his personality, more than his ideas, which really threatened the traditions of Victorian ...

Pleased to Be Loony

Alice Spawls: The Janeites, 8 November 2012

Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures 
by Claudia Johnson.
Chicago, 224 pp., £22.50, June 2012, 978 0 226 40203 1
Show More
Show More
... not a great deal of ingenuity themselves.’ One of these dull elves was Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, whose 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen captured the public’s imagination with its portrayal of Austen as the masterful miniaturist. Like her novels, Austen has always been read in different ways and Austen-Leigh took full advantage of the reading ...

A bout de Bogart

Jenny Diski, 19 May 2011

Tough without a Gun: The Extraordinary Life of Humphrey Bogart 
by Stefan Kanfer.
Faber, 288 pp., £14.99, February 2011, 978 0 571 26072 0
Show More
Show More
... NFT’s regular retrospectives of Hollywood film noir, so I came to Bogart (as to Cagney, Raft, Edward G., Stanwyck, Hayworth, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Gloria Grahame) retrospectively and as a ready-made – I think I need to use the word – icon. They were vast beings moving across the screen, on prints patinated with the time that had passed. The women ...

The Rupert Trunk

Christopher Tayler: Alan Hollinghurst, 28 July 2011

The Stranger’s Child 
by Alan Hollinghurst.
Picador, 565 pp., £20, June 2011, 978 0 330 48324 7
Show More
Show More
... white shirt and white flannel trousers, took charge of a punting trip on the Cam. ‘Oh yes,’ he said later, ‘I did the fresh, boyish stunt, and it was a great success.’ James sent thanks to all concerned, ‘with a definite stretch towards the Rupert’, and after the poet’s death in 1915 he agreed to write a preface to Brooke’s Letters from ...

Diary

David Runciman: AI, 25 January 2018

... going, is vertiginous. Hearing its maker express his own astonishment at its prowess – Hassabis said he had no idea that it would turn out to be so good, so fast – was a little otherworldly, like a fleeting echo of the moment of divine creation. But the feeling soon passed. Really, is AlphaZero anything more than a toy? Hassabis’s critics, of whom there ...

Positively Spaced Out

Rosemary Hill: ‘The Building of England’, 6 September 2001

The Buildings of England: A Celebration Compiled to Mark 50 Years of the Pevsner Architectural Guides 
edited by Simon Bradley and Bridget Cherry.
Penguin Collectors’ Society, 128 pp., £9.99, July 2001, 0 9527401 3 3
Show More
Show More
... expert on the windmills of Nottinghamshire in 1951, to Rosemary Cook, who rubbed the brass of Sir Edward Grey for the Staffordshire volume.So as the series developed it took on some of the colouring of the local antiquarian tradition. It was a successor not only to Dehio but also to Britton and Brayley’s early 19th-century series, The Beauties of England ...

Radical Heritage

Conrad Russell, 1 September 1988

Bertrand Russell: A Political Life 
by Alan Ryan.
Allen Lane, 226 pp., £16.95, June 1988, 0 7139 9005 8
Show More
Show More
... to the remark that he could never again vote for the Liberals, because they were the party of Sir Edward Grey. That remark surely indicates what had been, in the technical sense, a traumatic experience. One of the key temptations of socialism, to a former liberal optimist, was the belief that, as Dr Ryan puts it, ‘only socialism could avert another ...