Did Harold really get it in the eye?

Patrick Wormald: The Normans, 3 June 2004

The Battle of Hastings, 1066 
by M.K. Lawson.
Tempus, 288 pp., £16.99, October 2003, 0 7524 1998 6
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The Normans: The History of a Dynasty 
by David Crouch.
Hambledon, 345 pp., £25, July 2002, 1 85285 387 5
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Domesday Book: A Complete Translation 
edited by Ann Williams and G.H. Martin.
Penguin, 1436 pp., £18.99, October 2003, 0 14 143994 7
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... from left to right, cavalry charging an infantry group comprising a soldier brandishing a spear, a white-bearded standard-bearer who is also shown biting the dust, and a third – the central and most prominent figure – clutching a missile one end of which disappears behind his nose-guard. Then come a horseman striking at the knee of a prostrate man who ...

Species-Mongers

Steven Shapin: Joseph Hooker and the Dead Foreign Weeds, 20 November 2008

Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science 
by Jim Endersby.
Chicago, 429 pp., £18, May 2008, 978 0 226 20791 9
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... paper used in the initial drying process, ‘brown’ for later stages of drying, and a high-white ‘cartridge’ paper for mounting and drawing. Compared to the instrumentation of the physical sciences, this was humble technology, but colonial botanists often lacked such things, and, for that reason alone, Hooker and his metropolitan colleagues could ...

A Positive Future

David Simpson: Ernst Cassirer, 26 March 2009

Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture 
by Edward Skidelsky.
Princeton, 288 pp., £24.95, January 2009, 978 0 691 13134 4
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The Symbolic Construction of Reality: The Legacy of Ernst Cassirer 
edited by Jeffrey Andrew Barash.
Chicago, 223 pp., £26.50, January 2009, 978 0 226 03686 1
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... Cassirer and Heidegger. This was also a debate between ‘a Jew and a future Nazi’, as Michael Roubach puts it more bluntly in his essay in The Symbolic Construction of Reality. Melodrama is hard to resist here, although Roubach and Barash, who also has a long essay on the Davos debate and its contexts, play by the rules of scholarly ...

Who Won’t Be Voting for Trump

Eliot Weinberger: Anyone for Trump?, 20 October 2016

... plotting. They keep plotting, and this has been going on for so long and everybody knows it …’Michael Bloomberg After the former Republican New York mayor endorsed Clinton at the Democratic Convention (‘Let’s elect a sane, competent person’), Trump said: ‘I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy, I was gonna hit this guy so ...

Change at MoMA

Hal Foster, 7 November 2019

... in midtown Manhattan. In 1939 it received its own building, an International Style box clad in white marble designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on 53rd Street. A significant extension has followed every twenty years or so, each coolly modernist in style – totally abstract, highly engineered, fiercely refined, elegantly branded. The first ...

Clunk, Clack, Swish

Jon Day: Watching the Snooker, 8 February 2024

Unbreakable 
by Ronnie O’Sullivan.
Seven Dials, 262 pp., £22, May 2023, 978 1 3996 1001 8
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... Shaun Murphy, a solid player who was the world champion in 2005, named the retired footballer Michael Owen. Judd Trump, currently ranked second in the world, named the still-playing footballer Mason Mount. Mark Selby, who has been world champion four times and UK champion twice, said Nicko McBrain, the drummer from Iron Maiden. When the journalist asked ...

Diary

Dani Garavelli: Election Night in Glasgow, 18 July 2024

... his replacement, John Swinney, sullied their reputations by defending the former health secretary Michael Matheson, who misled Holyrood’s presiding officer over £11,000 of roaming charges racked up on his iPad. The SNP’s centralising tendencies, lack of transparency and clumsy handling of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill (which would have allowed ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: On failing to impress the queen, 5 January 2023

... look at the scene of the accident.We are en route down the A65 for the funeral of a close friend, Michael Hindle, my solicitor. Almost at Skipton we are in a traffic jam. There has been a fatal accident, with an ambulance already here, a police car and what looks like a body bag. We wait, and as we wait a herd of cows in a field overlooking the road slowly ...

Diary

Gaby Wood: Lucian Freud’s Printmaking, 1 June 2023

... to understand the person’s features in motion over time. That hadn’t always been the case. Michael Wishart, the son of Freud’s lover Lorna Wishart, said that when Freud was young, you couldn’t blink while he was painting your thumb or he became ‘distressed’. The majority of Freud’s prints, made three and a half decades later, were part of a ...

Woke Capital

Laleh Khalili, 7 September 2023

The Key Man: How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale 
by Simon Clark and Will Louch.
Penguin, 342 pp., £10.99, February 2023, 978 0 241 98894 7
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Icarus: The Life and Death of the Abraaj Group 
by Brian Brivati.
Biteback, 349 pp., £9.99, January 2022, 978 1 78590 733 3
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Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World 
by Brett Christophers.
Verso, 310 pp., £20, April 2023, 978 1 83976 898 9
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... When​ the conspiracy theorists, diehard Trumpers and (white) natalists gathered in London in May for the UK National Conservatism Conference, one fascinating sideshow was the brawl over the carcass of Margaret Thatcher. A few weeks before the event, Ryan Bourne, an economist at the libertarian Cato Institute, had warned those attending the conference against ‘importing the worst American narratives into British politics’ and in the process abandoning Thatcher’s free market legacies ...

Ownership Struggle

Susan Pedersen: Refusenik DPs, 5 June 2025

Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War 
by Sheila Fitzpatrick.
Princeton, 341 pp., £30, January, 978 0 691 23002 3
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... by faith, won entry to the US only after a lawyer persuaded the authorities that they were ‘white’. As the process became routine, anti-communism came to matter more. The 1948 US legislation theoretically barred entry to members of Nazi and communist organisations alike, but after 1950, immigrants to the US had to sign a loyalty oath affirming their ...

The Deaths Map

Jeremy Harding: At the Mexican Border, 20 October 2011

... in the south-western borderlands runs deep into Arizona, and into the defensive imagination of a white majority who take it as a god-given affirmation of the integrity of their state, and of the United States itself. A magnificent and costly border wall – ‘the fence’, ‘the barrier’ – now runs in sections, like a work by Christo and Jeanne ...

Freedom of the Press

Anthony Lewis, 26 November 1987

... force a President from office and which has pushed candidates out of the present campaign for the White House. That kind of press arouses resentment: hardly a surprise. ‘The press is the enemy,’ President Nixon instructed his staff. Politicians less prickly than he have felt victimised by the press. And resentment does not come only from the ...

The Last Years of Edward Kelley, Alchemist to the Emperor

Charles Nicholl: Edward Kelly, 19 April 2001

... at the lodgings he shared with Dee in Prague near the Bethlehem Chapel: E.K.: I see a garland of white rose-buds about the border of the stone: they be well-opened. But while I consider these buds better, they seem rather to be white lilies. They are 72 in number, seeming with their heads, alternatim, one to bend or hang ...

The World since 7 October

Adam Shatz, 24 July 2025

... a lot of fighting, and this stopped a lot of fighting’) when he welcomed Netanyahu to the White House on 6 July. The starvation and killing in Gaza grew still worse, but so long as Israel and Iran were at war, Palestinian suffering was off the front page.In the hallucinatory manner that is the signature of Trump’s foreign policy, all three parties ...