Farewell to the Log Cabin

Colin Kidd: America’s Royalist Revolution, 18 December 2014

The Royalist Revolution 
by Eric Nelson.
Harvard, 390 pp., £22.95, October 2014, 978 0 674 73534 7
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“... in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were scuppered after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 – when a young female aide drowned in a car he drove off a bridge. However, when it was revealed that the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee for 1972, Senator ...”

Made to Eat Wax

Lucy Wooding: Perfidious Lollards, 10 September 2026

Archbishop, Chancellor, Kingmaker: A Life of Thomas Arundel 
by Chris Given-Wilson.
Yale, 384 pp., £30, February, 978 0 300 28640 3
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“... In a​ 2005 poll to find the most infamous British villains of the last millennium, Thomas Arundel unexpectedly won the 15th-century nomination, emerging in the public eye as more dastardly than Richard III and as wicked as Jack the Ripper and Oswald Mosley. This startling condemnation reflects Arundel’s place in popular Protestant mythology as the man who persecuted the Lollards and – so the story goes – banned the Bible in English ...”

Head over heart for Europe

Peter Pulzer, 21 March 1991

Ever Closer Union: Britain’s Destiny in Europe 
by Hugh Thomas.
Hutchinson, 96 pp., £7.99, January 1991, 0 09 174908 5
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The Challenge of Europe: Can Britain win? 
by Michael Heseltine.
Pan, 226 pp., £5.99, February 1991, 9780330314367
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“... to ‘take Britain into Europe’ had a public relations problem. Is that still the case? Are Hugh Thomas and Michael Heseltine right in arguing that Britain’s leaders are now lagging behind public opinion in Europeanism or, at the very least, that they are failing in their duty to enthuse us? That two Conservative public figures should, within a space of ...”

Blood on the Block

Maurice Keen: Henry IV, 5 June 2008

The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made King 
by Ian Mortimer.
Vintage, 480 pp., £8.99, July 2008, 978 1 84413 529 5
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“... good lord King Henry the Third’. On 13 October he was crowned king. The son of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son, Henry was certainly Richard’s nearest male heir in 1399; but the seven-year-old Edmund, Earl of March, grandson of Philippa, the daughter of Edward III’s second son, Lionel, had through the female ...”

Adjusting the Mechanism

Colin Burrow: Robert Graves, 11 October 2018

Robert Graves: From a Great War Poet to ‘Goodbye to All That’, 1895-1929 
by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 461 pp., £25, August 2018, 978 1 4729 2914 3
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The Reader over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose 
by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge.
Seven Stories, 613 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 1 60980 733 7
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“... characters appeared on the stage.’ Moorcroft Wilson – who has written biographies of Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg and Sassoon – has a carefully forensic style, and tends to rely on remarks by Graves’s contemporaries to convey his character. She has such a store of these that one does get from the book a sense of what a fusion of ...”

A Conversation with Gore Vidal

Thomas Powers: Meeting Gore Vidal, 31 July 2014

“... to do with us. Drink and drugs. Did you know him when you were here? A very handsome boy named Edward Weeks [?]. So Morante and I were not exactly friends, but in between fucking this boy we sent each other polite little messages …’ A characteristic Vidal story: violent, unexpected, a bit pugnacious, interesting, and at heart a kind of adjustment of ...”

Was she nice?

Thomas McKeown, 17 February 1983

Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power 
by F.B. Smith.
Croom Helm, 216 pp., £12.95, March 1982, 0 7099 2314 7
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Edward Jenner: The Cheltenham Years 1795-1823 
by Paul Saunders.
University Press of New England, 469 pp., £15, May 1982, 0 87451 215 8
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“... point the finger but we should refrain from wagging it. Florence Nightingale knew many things – Edward Jenner one big thing: that a mild cowpox infection affords protection against smallpox. This observation was the origin of the vaccination procedure which has led to the international control of smallpox, the first, and so far the only, disease which can ...”

Tacky Dress

Dale Peck, 22 February 1996

Like People in History: A Gay American Epic 
by Felice Picano.
Viking, 512 pp., $23.95, July 1995, 0 670 86047 6
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How Long Has This Been Going On? 
by Ethan Mordden.
Villard, 590 pp., $25, April 1995, 0 679 41529 7
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The Facts of Life 
by Patrick Gale.
Flamingo, 511 pp., £15.99, June 1995, 0 602 24522 2
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Flesh and Blood 
by Michael Cunningham.
Hamish Hamilton, 480 pp., £14.99, June 1995, 9780241135150
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“... with his novel Faggots. Fiction with homosexual content had trickled out through the century, from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar to the work of Genet and Isherwood and Baldwin and Burroughs, but as each new novel or play or poem appeared it was treated as a one-off; if the work was a critical success it was despite ...”

Bring some Madeira

Thomas Keymer: Thomas Love Peacock, 8 February 2018

Nightmare Abbey 
by Thomas Love Peacock, edited by Nicholas A. Joukovsky.
Cambridge, 297 pp., £84.99, December 2016, 978 1 107 03186 9
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Crotchet Castle 
by Thomas Love Peacock, edited by Freya Johnston and Matthew Bevis.
Cambridge, 328 pp., £79.99, December 2016, 978 1 107 03072 5
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“... family annuities expired. He so inhabited his dour poetic persona that his friend and publisher Edward Hookham, writing to the Literary Fund, ‘had but too just reason to dread that the Fate of Chatterton might be that of Peacock’. The committee awarded him £30. Numerous failed courtships intensified the gloom. Peacock was, his cousin remembered, ‘a ...”

Wicked Converse

Keith Thomas: Bewitched by the Brickmaker, 12 May 2022

The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World 
by Malcolm Gaskill.
Allen Lane, 308 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 0 241 41338 8
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“... that there was anything very equitable about his dealings with them. As the Jacobean diplomat Sir Edward Hoby observed, it was ‘lawful for a Christian to take away anything from infidels’. Pynchon was a restless man and six years after his arrival in America he headed a group of settlers who moved from Massachusetts Bay to a new site. Formerly the home ...”

Mr Lukacs changes trains

Edward Timms, 19 February 1987

Georg Lukacs: Selected Correspondence 1902-1920 
translated by Judith Marcus and Zoltan Tar.
Columbia, 318 pp., $25, September 1986, 9780231059688
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“... Ernst Bloch, Martin Buber, Georg Simmel, Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Jaspers, Max Weber, Paul Ernst and Thomas Mann. By interweaving, in chronological sequence, letters written by Lukacs with letters he received, this collection draws the strands of his early life together into a variegated pattern. Lukacs was brought up bilingually, and approximately half of these ...”

Always on Top

Edward Said: From Birmingham to Jamaica, 20 March 2003

Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-67 
by Catherine Hall.
Polity, 556 pp., £60, April 2002, 0 7456 1820 0
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“... of her study are the 1831 and Morant Bay rebellions, which made Jamaica’s repressive proconsul, Edward Eyre, a colonial cause célèbre, much as Warren Hastings had been seventy years earlier. She borrows creatively from Stuart Hall’s distinction between ‘cultural differentialism’ and ‘biological racism’, allowing her to examine gender, sexual ...”

Young Man’s Nostalgia

Diarmaid MacCulloch: William Byrd, 31 July 2014

Byrd 
by Kerry McCarthy.
Oxford, 282 pp., £25, August 2013, 978 0 19 538875 6
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“... adapted through the centuries when most Tudor music was relegated to the archives.2 Beside him are Thomas Sackville, earl of Dorset, and the earls and cousins Charles and Henry Howard. All three were Byrd’s patrons, and to various degrees shared the shifts and ambiguities of his religious convictions; it was odds-on that all of them would have conformed to a ...”

At the V&A

Esther Chadwick: Opus Anglicanum, 5 January 2017

“... of Enfield, Catherine of Lincoln, Maud of Canterbury, John Machon, Alyse Darcy, Alice Catour and Thomas Bell could be added those of Alexius and Andronicus Effomatus, Greek ‘workers of damask gold’ (drawn gold wire) in London; John of Cologne, a German immigrant working for Edward III in the 1330s; Giles Avenel of ...”

Convenient Death of a Hero

Arnold Rattenbury, 8 May 1997

Beyond the Frontier: the Politics of a Failed Mission, Bulgaria 1944 
by E.P. Thompson.
Merlin/Stanford, 120 pp., £12.95, December 1996, 0 85036 457 4
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“... E.P. Thompson, historian and peacemaker, known as Edward to his friends, died at his home near Worcester in 1993. Four years on, Beyond the Frontier is a volume of material set aside far earlier. Indeed, there occurs in it a passing reference to ‘the raw material for half-finished books on William Blake and Customs in Common’, works long since published ...”