The Perfect Pattern of a Prelate

Eamon Duffy: Pius XII and the Jews, 26 September 2013

The Life and Pontificate of Pope Pius XII: Between History and Controversy 
by Frank Coppa.
Catholic University of America, 306 pp., £25.50, February 2013, 978 0 8132 2016 1
Show More
The Pope’s Jews: The Vatican’s Secret Plan to Save Jews from the Nazis 
by Gordon Thomas.
Robson, 336 pp., £20, February 2013, 978 1 84954 506 8
Show More
Soldier of Christ: The Life of Pope Pius XII 
by Robert Ventresca.
Harvard, 405 pp., £25, January 2013, 978 0 674 04961 1
Show More
Show More
... emerged as the very image of spiritual distinction, an austere swift-moving figure robed in white, his arms thrown wide and his face raised to heaven in prayer. In the flesh, as well as on celluloid, he charmed everyone who met him, from Kaiser Wilhelm II, who considered the young diplomat’s exquisite manners and refined intelligence ‘the perfect ...

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 ...

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
Show More
The Normans: The History of a Dynasty 
by David Crouch.
Hambledon, 345 pp., £25, July 2002, 1 85285 387 5
Show More
Domesday Book: A Complete Translation 
edited by Ann Williams and G.H. Martin.
Penguin, 1436 pp., £18.99, October 2003, 0 14 143994 7
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

What did you expect?

Steven Shapin: The banality of moon-talk, 1 September 2005

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth 
by Andrew Smith.
Bloomsbury, 308 pp., £17.99, April 2005, 0 7475 6368 3
Show More
Show More
... A British astronaut would have stuck in a flag and said: “I name this moon Elizabeth.”’ And Michael Collins – the Apollo 11 astronaut left behind orbiting in the command module – was the first of several Apollonians who suggested eventually sending a ‘priest, poet or philosopher’: ‘From these people you might get a much better feeling of what ...

Tod aus Luft

Steven Shapin: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, 26 January 2006

Between Genius and Genocide: The Tragedy of Fritz Haber, Father of Chemical Warfare 
by Daniel Charles.
Cape, 313 pp., £20, September 2005, 0 224 06444 4
Show More
Show More
... supply. This was a global crisis in the making, but, Crookes warned, it was especially acute for white people: ‘The fixation of nitrogen,’ he announced, ‘is a question of the not-far-distant future. Unless we can class it as among certainties to come, the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence ...

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
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

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
Show More
Show More
... 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 ...

An Address to the Nation

Clive James, 17 December 1981

... attempts he met defeat. Clearly it is the SDP connection Which has supplied the upsurge of white heat That melts the Tory vote to a minority And Labour’s to abject inferiority. This Pitt falls far short of so grand a name. Long in the beard, he’s less so in the legs. He lacks the stature for his sudden fame. It’s plain that of the Pitts he is the ...

Bratpackers

Richard Lloyd Parry: Alex Garland, 15 October 1998

The Beach 
by Alex Garland.
Penguin, 439 pp., £5.99, June 1997, 0 14 025841 8
Show More
The Tesseract 
by Alex Garland.
Viking, 215 pp., £9.99, September 1998, 0 670 87016 1
Show More
Show More
... a long flight to Jakarta. ‘Eric Lustbader?’ suggested Sean, and I shook my head. I’d seen Michael Herr sending dispatches. The hours flew by. The Beach is studded with non-cinematic references to popular culture of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on ...

Diary

Tom Paulin: Ulster’s Long Sunday, 24 August 1995

... some beech trees the car turns a corner and I catch sight of a Presbyterian meeting-house – white, shining, Neoclassical, two gold Greek letters above the door. He’s in a rush so I don’t ask to go back and look at this living image of the Ulster Enlightenment. I don’t remember ever having noticed it before. Later that day I’m walking along Ozone ...

Staying in power

Geoffrey Hawthorn, 7 January 1988

Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution: The Ending of the Socialist Era 
by Peter Jenkins.
Cape, 411 pp., £12.95, November 1988, 0 224 02516 3
Show More
De-Industrialisation and Foreign Trade 
by R.E. Rowthorn and J.R. Wells.
Cambridge, 422 pp., £40, November 1988, 0 521 26360 3
Show More
Show More
... Paper in 1986 conceded an at best ‘modest success’. It proposed the Community Charge, which a White Paper in 1983 had declared ‘unworkable’. But by then, many local authorities were having to account creatively and borrow from abroad. To the Government’s delight, that reduced what they needed from the Treasury in 1986-87 by more than a billion. And ...
Northern Antiquity: The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and Saga 
edited by Andrew Wawn.
Hisarlik, 342 pp., £35, October 1994, 1 874312 18 4
Show More
Heritage and Prophecy: Grundtvig and the English-Speaking World 
edited by A.M. Allchin.
Canterbury, 330 pp., £25, January 1994, 9781853110856
Show More
Show More
... fellow you mentioned just now could ever have stood up to him!’ In the end he buys the girl Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs instead. Any less unsophisticated reader who has come upon any of the Allan Quatermain sequence – which ran to 18 books – is bound, however, to remember the figure of Sir Henry Curtis, Bt. the English Victorian quasi-Viking whom ...

About as Useful as a String Condom

Glen Newey: Bum Decade for the Royals, 23 January 2003

... She bared all about self-harm and her frequent calls, during her bulimic phase, on the great white telephone. She fondled children and animals, dabbled in New Age pursuits, kibitzed in operating theatres and had been stiffed on a pedalo by the thick-set offspring of a Levantine grocer. In op-ed fable she presented the Windsor family’s lone human ...

You Dying Nations

Jeremy Adler: Georg Trakl, 17 April 2003

Poems and Prose 
by Georg Trakl, translated by Alexander Stillmark.
Libris, 192 pp., £40, March 2001, 1 870352 51 3
Show More
Show More
... stretches from Hölderlin to Rilke and Celan. Unlike them, however, he is little known in Britain. Michael Hamburger’s translations established Hölderlin and Celan in English, but he was less fortunate with Trakl, and Decline, his pamphlet of 1952, was not reprinted. There was a larger selection by James Wright and Robert Bly in 1961; and Hamburger’s ...

What news?

Patrick Collinson: The Pilgrimage of Grace, 1 November 2001

The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s 
by R.W. Hoyle.
Oxford, 487 pp., £30, May 2001, 9780198208747
Show More
Show More
... be challenged by ‘a rebellion attempted for matters of weddings, christenings, churches, eating white bread’, the King took time to respond, then demanded unqualified submission, which, given the military situation, was, Hoyle tells us, ‘nonsense’. Henry VIII had complained that the Pilgrims’ articles were ‘dark, general and obscure’. The North ...