Go away and learn

J.L. Nelson: Charlemagne’s Superstate, 15 April 2004

Charlemagne 
by Matthias Becher, translated by David Bachrach.
Yale, 170 pp., £16.95, September 2003, 0 300 09796 4
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... by contemporaries than today’. Yet Charlemagne’s state was at least as much a welfare state as Elizabeth I’s England; its people demanded similarly effective deployment of prayer and charity, and they demanded justice, too. As for the state’s demands on its people, they were, for us unexpectedly, in some senses more numerous, if also more ...

Merry Kicks

Mark Ford: The Madness of Marinetti, 20 May 2004

Selected Poems and Related Prose 
by F.T. Marinetti, translated by Elizabeth Napier and Barbara Studholme.
Yale, 250 pp., £35, January 2003, 0 300 04103 9
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... F.T. (Filippo Tommaso) Marinetti liked to describe himself as the ‘caffeine of Europe’. He was undoubtedly the most daring and inventive artistic propagandist of the 20th century, and Futurism, the movement he launched with a manifesto published on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, reconfigured the popular notion of modern art and the modern artist more widely and decisively than any of the other isms now gathered under the umbrella heading of Modernism ...

A Turk, a Turk, a Turk

Christopher Tayler: Orhan Pamuk, 5 August 2004

Snow 
by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely.
Faber, 436 pp., £12.99, May 2004, 0 571 22065 7
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... the education director’s pious assassin, who tells his victim that ‘the celebrated film star Elizabeth Taylor . . . might have known some happiness’ if she’d taken the veil. (‘Why are you laughing, sir?’) Kars is haunted by its Armenian history, and Pamuk has Ipek discuss a local museum commemorating ‘the Armenian Massacre. Naturally, she ...

Regrets, Vexations, Lassitudes

Seamus Perry: Wordsworth’s Trouble, 18 December 2008

William Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’: A Casebook 
edited by Stephen Gill.
Oxford, 406 pp., £19.99, September 2006, 0 19 518092 5
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... written a poem about, say, catching an old fish and staring at it and then just letting it go? As Elizabeth Bishop told Robert Lowell, ‘I find I’m really a minor female ...

Unnatural Rebellion

Malcolm Gaskill: ‘Witches’, 2 November 2017

The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present 
by Ronald Hutton.
Yale, 360 pp., £25, August 2017, 978 0 300 22904 2
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... and witchcraft are far differing sciences,’ an idea with a long pedigree in the English state. Elizabeth I made witchcraft a felony in 1563, yet employed Dr John Dee as court magician. Not everyone agreed with the distinction. Exasperated Protestant clerics held that magic and witchcraft were the same, insisting even that village white witches were worse ...

Strange Little Woman

Ferdinand Mount: First and Only Empress, 22 November 2018

Empress: Queen Victoria and India 
by Miles Taylor.
Yale, 388 pp., £25, August 2018, 978 0 300 11809 4
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Eastern Encounters: Four Centuries of Paintings and Manuscripts from the Indian Subcontinent 
by Emily Hannam.
Royal Collections Trust, 256 pp., £45, June 2018, 978 1 909741 45 4
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Splendours of the Subcontinent: A Prince’s Tour of India 1875-76 
by Kajal Meghani.
Royal Collections Trust, 216 pp., £29.95, March 2017, 978 1 909741 42 3
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... woven from yarn he had spun as a wedding present for Mountbatten’s nephew Philip and Princess Elizabeth (this piece too still in the royal collection). By comparison with the 1858 proclamation, the Proclamation of Victoria as empress of India was a botch. Disraeli mishandled the Royal Titles Bill in Parliament so badly that he nearly lost it. In ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2019, 2 January 2020

... lover turns out to be a Spanish chef capable and indeed only too pleased to produce delicious pre-Elizabeth David food for the ravenous Radletts.13 February. ‘God’s honour’ we used to swear as boys. This remembered in the middle of an acute attack of arthritis pain this morning when I’m marooned on the sofa, cold, thirsty but unable to move. ‘I ...

Twenty Kicks in the Backside

Tom Stammers: Rosa Bonheur’s Flock, 5 November 2020

Art Is a Tyrant: The Unconventional Life of Rosa Bonheur 
by Catherine Hewitt.
Icon, 483 pp., £20, February, 978 1 78578 621 1
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... on Havana cigars. Feminist art historians have often found her exasperating. As in the case of Elizabeth Butler, the pre-eminent battle painter of Victorian Britain, Bonheur’s subjects don’t easily lend themselves to gendered analysis. Linda Nochlin deplored Bonheur’s indecision in both asserting and shunning her femininity (Nochlin called it ...

Red Flag, Green Light

Rosa Lyster: Keep the Con Going, 16 November 2023

Anansi’s Gold: The Man Who Swindled the World 
by Yepoka Yeebo.
Bloomsbury, 378 pp., £20, August 2023, 978 1 5266 6857 8
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... her indictment in 2018 for defrauding investors in her blood-testing startup of $700 million, Elizabeth Holmes has been the subject of two books, four documentaries and a hit miniseries. Anna Delvey, who posed as an heiress in order to swindle banks, hotels and benefactors, got out of prison last year and has since launched a podcast and released a single ...

Hey man, we’re out of runway

Christian Lorentzen: Bad Times for Biden, 18 July 2024

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future 
by Franklin Foer.
Penguin, 432 pp., £24, September 2023, 978 1 101 98114 6
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The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House 
by Chris Whipple.
Scribner, 409 pp., £12.99, December 2023, 978 1 9821 0644 7
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The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump 
by Alexander Ward.
Portfolio, 354 pp., £28.99, February, 978 0 593 53907 1
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... Plan and that name stuck to the last of the bills) incorporated many of the ideas put forward by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even if they fell short of their Green New Deal. Lawrence Summers, Clinton’s neoliberal Treasury secretary, was left out of the administration and Warren’s people were invited in.It’s after the ...

Life on Sark

Jonathan Parry: Life on Sark, 18 May 2023

... power of the tenants. It’s true that the dame or seigneur has held Sark as a Crown fief since Elizabeth I granted the island to Helier de Carteret in 1565, on condition that he defend it against her enemies. He divided the land into forty tenements, each with property rights in perpetuity and reciprocal duties of defence and tithe. (Until 2021, tenements ...

The Wrong Blond

Alan Bennett, 23 May 1985

Auden in Love 
by Dorothy Farnan.
Faber, 264 pp., £9.95, March 1985, 0 571 13399 1
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... only to be expected. Even a literary wife as talented as her husband, like the second Mrs Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, finds her work calibrated on the scale of accomplishment not achievement, and the sincerest recognition still hints at the escape from the washing-up or stolen hours while children sleep. Whether you call this condescension or ...

Eye to the Keyhole

Tom Crewe: Pratt and Smith, 25 April 2024

James and John: A True Story of Prejudice and Murder 
by Chris Bryant.
Bloomsbury, 313 pp., £25, February, 978 1 5266 4497 8
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... as the defence of such a crime’. There was also a petition organised by Pratt’s wife, Elizabeth, signed by 55 respectable citizens, including – and this seems to fit my picture of them – the Berkshires, at least semi-repentant.All of this, Bryant thinks, should have told on Russell and on the other members of the government who gathered to ...

Nation-building

Rosamond McKitterick: Capetian Kings, 24 October 2024

House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France 
by Justine Firnhaber-Baker.
Allen Lane, 408 pp., £30, March, 978 0 241 55277 3
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... 987-1328’, but his interpretation has served as a model for many subsequent studies, including Elizabeth Hallam’s Capetian France, 987-1328 (1980) and Dominique Barthélémy’s Nouvelle Histoire des Capétiens 987-1214 (2012), with its emphasis on the creation of ‘la patrimoine’ and accounts of the rule of particular monarchs. Jean Dunbabin’s ...

Scoops and Leaks

Neal Ascherson: On Claud Cockburn, 24 October 2024

Believe Nothing until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism 
by Patrick Cockburn.
Verso, 293 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 1 80429 075 0
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... Cockburn was born overseas, the son of Henry Cockburn, a senior diplomat in Beijing, and his wife, Elizabeth. Two years after his birth in 1904, he was sent back to Britain, soon followed by his parents: Henry had resigned on a complex matter of principle. They settled at Tring in Hertfordshire and Claud was sent to school at Berkhamstead. The headmaster ...