Look over your shoulder

Christopher Hitchens, 25 May 1995

... eye. (An excellent book on the phenomenon also resulted from the Berg case: Armed and Dangerous by James Coates.)So, as well as being ahistorical in suggesting guilt by association, Clinton gave the conservative demagogues an excuse to change the subject. They began to talk in injured tones about American traditions of free speech and the First Amendment. And ...

At the Hop

Sukhdev Sandhu, 20 February 1997

Black England: Life before Emancipation 
by Gretchen Gerzina.
Murray, 244 pp., £19.99, October 1995, 0 7195 5251 6
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Reconstructing the Black Past: Blacks in Britain 1780-1830 
by Norma Myers.
Cass, 162 pp., £27.50, July 1996, 0 7146 4576 1
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... Blacks in Britain was held in the same year, at the University of London. Studies by Peter Fryer, James Walvin and David Dabydeen appeared in the next few years. Fryer, whose Staying Power is still the most detailed – and most often consulted – account of the subject, gave more than two hundred talks and lectures at adult education centres, schools and ...

Then place my purboil’d Head upon a Stake

Colin Burrow: British and Irish poetry, 7 January 1999

Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625-1660 
edited by Peter Davidson.
Oxford, 716 pp., £75, July 1998, 0 19 818441 7
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... slumbers fall, thoughts sit, and all turn finally into lullaby. It sounds a familiar tune – William Strode could turn it out by the yard (‘Oh Lull me, lull me charming ayre,/My sences rocke with wonder sweete,/like snow on wooll thy fallings are’) – yet its delicacy is unmistakable. The chief reason critical taste has for so long been dead to the ...

Hello, Fred

David Marquand, 21 March 1985

Hugh Dalton 
by Ben Pimlott.
Cape, 731 pp., £25, March 1985, 0 224 02100 1
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... front rank of politics. To be sure, he was a robust and formidable party warhorse – a kind of William Harcourt or Roy Hattersley, say – with enormous energy, considerable administrative drive and a powerful debating style. But he captured no imaginations, lifted no horizons and inspired no disciples. He left worthy memorials – the National Parks, for ...

Hebrew without tears

Blair Worden, 20 May 1982

Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603-1655 
by David Katz.
Oxford, 312 pp., £17.50, April 1982, 0 19 821885 0
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... of Hebrew at Oxford and Cambridge by Henry VIII, and later the influence of Rabbinical studies on James I’s Authorised Version, demonstrated the enhanced academic status of Hebraic studies, which were distinguished by the findings of Edward Pococke and John Lightfoot, and popularised through Baptists and Saturday-Sabbatarian ‘Judaisers’ such as John ...

Plays for Puritans

Anne Barton, 18 December 1980

Puritanism and Theatre 
by Margot Heinemann.
Cambridge, 300 pp., £12.50, March 1980, 0 521 22602 3
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John Webster: Citizen and Dramatist 
by M.C. Bradbrook.
Weidenfeld, 205 pp., £10, October 1980, 0 297 77813 7
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... committed than Jonson to the royalist or ‘court’ party. Shakespeare had at least one patron (William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke) with substantial Puritan affiliations. He himself must have been aware that the public theatres had enemies – and supporters – in both the Puritan and Anglican camps. Miss Heinemann sets out to distinguish Puritan ...

Witchcraft and the Inquisition

Robin Briggs, 18 June 1981

Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late 16th and Early 17th Centuries 
by D.P. Walker.
Scolar, 116 pp., £9.95, March 1981, 9780859676205
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The Witches’ Advocate 
by Gustav Henningsen.
Nevada, 607 pp., $24, November 1980, 0 87417 056 7
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... this awkward attack that Harsnett diverted attention back to the exorcisms conducted by the Jesuit William Weston at Denham and other places in 1585-6; various participants were tracked down to be interrogated, their depositions and a Book of Miracles kept by the priests forming the basis for Harsnett’s scornful treatise of 1603. Professor Walker makes ...

Private Thomas

Andrew Motion, 19 December 1985

Edward Thomas: A Portrait 
by R. George Thomas.
Oxford, 331 pp., £12.95, October 1985, 0 19 818527 8
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... revelations, they reinforce the impression – already given in biographies by R.P. Eckert and William Cooke – of a character of great complexity. Thomas, the eldest of six boys, was born in Lambeth 107 years ago, and was brought up to feel ‘proud of thinking that both Father and Mother came from Wales.’ The remark implies displacement as well as ...

Real Power

Conrad Russell, 7 August 1986

Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660 
by David Underdown.
Oxford, 324 pp., £17.50, November 1985, 0 19 822795 7
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The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics 
by David Starkey.
George Philip, 174 pp., £9.95, November 1985, 0 540 01093 6
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... in his own evidence. The idea of the Civil War as a cultural conflict is not new: it goes back to William Chillingworth, preaching before the King in 1643, and saying all the scribes and pharisees were on one side, and all the publicans and sinners on the other. What is new here is the meticulous investigation, town by town and village by village, of the ...

Men in Love

Paul Delany, 3 September 1987

Women in Love 
by D.H. Lawrence, edited by David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen.
Cambridge, 633 pp., £40, May 1987, 0 521 23565 0
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The Letters of D.H. Lawrence: Vol. IV, 1921-24 
edited by Warren Roberts, James Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield.
Cambridge, 627 pp., £35, May 1987, 0 521 23113 2
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... In the summer of 1918 Lawrence probably consummated his infatuation with the Cornish farmer, William Hocking; then, just as he was putting the finishing touches on Women in Love, came his involvement with the failing marriage of Godwin and Rosalind Baynes. Lawrence wrote Godwin a crucial letter about the ‘real solution’ to the problem of ...

At the Foundling Museum

Joanne O’Leary: ‘Portraying Pregnancy’, 2 April 2020

... of Fashion, a parody of the short-lived vogue for belly pads that sprang up in London in 1793, and James Gillray’s Dido, in Despair (1801), which lampoons Emma Hamilton’s scandalous pregnancy by Lord Nelson. Seven months gone, Hamilton is portrayed as a grotesque battleaxe, arms and legs outstretched as she rises from bed in a bulging white nightgown and ...

The Real Thing

Jenni Quilter, 21 April 2016

Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter 
by Cathy Curtis.
Oxford, 432 pp., £20.99, April 2015, 978 0 19 939450 0
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... which toured Europe during 1958-59. Nelson Rockefeller bought a painting, as did the playwright William Inge. Life magazine called her ‘the most celebrated of the young American women painters’. Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler and Grace Hartigan at the opening of Frankenthaler’s solo exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York (1957) That ...

Nutty Professors

Hal Foster: ‘Lingua Franca’, 8 May 2003

Quick Studies: The Best of ‘Lingua Franca’ 
edited by Alexander Star.
Farrar, Straus, 514 pp., $18, September 2002, 0 374 52863 2
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... firepower – not only old warhorses like Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan, but new stalwarts such as William Bennett, head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and then Secretary of Education under Reagan, who worked to abolish both agencies, and Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick and head of the NEH under George I, who wanted to absolve American history from ...

Vibrating to the Chord of Queer

Elaine Showalter: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 6 March 2003

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity 
by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
Duke, 216 pp., £14.95, March 2003, 0 8223 3015 6
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Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory 
edited by Stephen Barber and David Clark.
Routledge, 285 pp., £55, September 2002, 0 415 92818 4
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... about J.L. Austin, Judith Butler, Melanie Klein, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins, Foucault, Henry James and Proust. The book is framed by an ‘interlude, pedagogic’, an autobiographical essay on Sedgwick’s experience of fainting at an Aids protest early in her cancer treatment, and a concluding essay on the pedagogy of Buddhism and the metaphor of ...

Dry-Cleaned

Tom Vanderbilt: ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, 21 August 2003

The Manchurian Candidate: BFI Film Classics 
by Greil Marcus.
BFI, 75 pp., £8.99, July 2002, 0 85170 931 1
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... operator – actually his mother (played by Lansbury), the wife of the McCarthyite Senator Iselin (James Gregory) – Shaw is set to assassinate the Presidential appointee at Madison Square Garden, clearing the way for her husband’s ascendancy. The film doesn’t give much of an explanation – the book is no better – for the Lansbury character’s embrace ...