The Unlikeliest Loophole

Eamon Duffy: Catherine of Aragon, 28 July 2011

Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen 
by Giles Tremlett.
Faber, 458 pp., £9.99, April 2011, 978 0 571 23512 4
Show More
Show More
... Legatine Court and confounded Henry in a magnificent coup de théâtre. The court itself, held publicly at Blackfriars, was sensational enough, with the king and queen of England summoned before two cardinals to have their grievances aired in public. Henry, all anguished innocence, paraded his lacerated conscience, only to be struck dumb when ...

Manly Voices

Bernard Porter: Macaulay & Son, 22 November 2012

Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain 
by Catherine Hall.
Yale, 389 pp., £35, October 2012, 978 0 300 16023 9
Show More
Show More
... fairness it should be remembered that free market theory at the time – unlike today’s – held that capitalism would eventually produce economic and social equality. John Stuart Mill, one of its champions, declared that if it didn’t, he would become a socialist.) Macaulay’s History of England now reads obviously as a document of its time; which is ...

Diary

Adewale Maja-Pearce: ‘Make Nigeria Great Again’, 9 May 2019

... which took longer than it should have because there was only one inkpad, the polling officer held up each ballot paper in turn for all to see as he tallied the votes. There was a small fracas over the number of voided votes, which necessitated a recount. People were understandably suspicious. In the event, Buhari won the state, but only by a small ...

The Hell out of Dodge

Jeremy Harding: Woodstock 1969, 15 August 2019

Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music 
by Michael Lang.
Reel Art Press, 289 pp., £44.95, July 2019, 978 1 909526 62 4
Show More
Show More
... to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat and others. But Lang’s fifty-up began to unravel when his top-dog investor, the Japanese digicoms company Dentsu Aegis, announced from its London HQ that it was pulling ...

Waspish Civilities

Stephen Sedley: The Case for a Supreme Court, 21 May 2020

High Principle, Low Politics and the Emergence of the Supreme Court 
by Frederic Reynold.
Wildy, Simmonds and Hill, 154 pp., £14.95, September 2019, 978 0 85490 283 5
Show More
Show More
... at the invitation of the Constitution Unit at University College London.Tom Bingham at that point held the office of senior law lord. Seniority among the law lords had historically been determined solely by length of service. The most inspired achievement of Derry Irvine as Tony Blair’s lord chancellor was the creation in June 2000 of the office of senior ...

Pop Eye

Hal Foster: Handmade Readymades, 22 August 2002

Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art 
by Michael Lobel.
Yale, 196 pp., £35, March 2002, 0 300 08762 4
Show More
Show More
... comics and the like could be made to serve some of the goals set for high art from Rembrandt and David to Rothko and Barnett Newman: not only pictorial unity and dramatic focus, but also ‘significant form’ (as Roger Fry and Clive Bell urged) and ‘the integrity of the picture plane’ (the vaunted ‘flatness’ demanded of Modernist painting by Clement ...

Idi Roi

Victoria Brittain, 21 August 1980

Ghosts of Kampala: The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin 
by George Ivan Smith.
Weidenfeld, 198 pp., £7.95, June 1980, 0 297 77721 1
Show More
African Upheavals since Independence 
by G.S. Ibingira.
Westview/Benn, 349 pp., £14.95, January 1980, 0 89158 585 0
Show More
A Political History of Uganda 
by S.R. Karugire.
Heinemann, 240 pp., £7.50, May 1980, 0 435 94524 6
Show More
Show More
... on in interviews with ‘His Excellency’ by Bob Astles. Long after the publication in 1974 of David Martin’s General Amin might have been expected to bring some constraint, Fleet Street went on with the joke – spiced as it was with prurient pleasure in a wickedness hard to credit, completely, in the security of somewhere far away across the world. The ...

Trouble Transitioning

Adam Tooze: What energy transition?, 23 January 2025

More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy 
by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz.
Allen Lane, 310 pp., £25, October 2024, 978 0 241 71889 6
Show More
Show More
... space travel. As Fressoz points out, this schema is misleading. The first railways ran on rails held together by timber sleepers and, in the US, timber sleepers still predominate. American railway companies don’t want to spend more money than they have to and insist that timber handles extremes of temperature better than the concrete sleepers more ...

Heaven’s Waiting Room

Alex Harvey: When Powell met Pressburger, 20 March 2025

The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger 
edited by Nathalie Morris and Claire Smith.
BFI, 206 pp., £30, October 2023, 978 1 83871 917 3
Show More
Show More
... First World War, Theo returns at the outbreak of the next war to seek refuge. But he risks being held as an enemy alien (Pressburger himself had to report regularly to the police and was not permitted to stay on location overnight). When Theo is cross-examined by a sceptical judge about his reasons for returning to Britain, Pressburger shows us England ...

Jews’ Harps

Gabriel Josipovici, 4 February 1982

Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse 
by T. Carmi.
Penguin, 608 pp., £6.95, September 1981, 0 14 042197 1
Show More
Show More
... Israeli poet), Yehuda Amichai, Leah Goldberg, Moshe Dor, Shlomo Viner, Dahlia Ravikovitch and David Vogel; Oxford have published Amichai and Carcanet Pagis; Tony Rudolf and Howard Schwarz have recently edited an enormous volume of modern Jewish poetry, which includes a 300-page section on Hebrew poetry.* All these, of course, are in English only. But some ...

Parliamentary Sovereignty

Betty Kemp, 22 December 1983

The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Vol. II: Party, Parliament and the American Crisis, 1766-1774 
edited by Paul Langford.
Oxford, 508 pp., £40, April 1981, 0 19 822416 8
Show More
The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. Vol. V: India: Madras and Bengal, 1774-1785 
edited by P.J. Marshall.
Oxford, 667 pp., £55, July 1983, 0 19 822417 6
Show More
The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Constitutional Code, Vol. I 
edited by F. Rosen and J.H. Burns.
Oxford, 612 pp., £48, April 1983, 9780198226086
Show More
The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Deontology, together with a Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitarianism 
edited by Amnon Goldworth.
Oxford, 394 pp., £38, July 1983, 0 19 822609 8
Show More
The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Chrestomathia 
edited by M.J. Smith and W.H. Burston.
Oxford, 451 pp., £40, November 1983, 0 19 822610 1
Show More
Bentham and Bureaucracy 
by L.J. Hume.
Cambridge, 320 pp., £22.50, September 1981, 0 521 23542 1
Show More
Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democracy: A Study of the Constitutional Code 
by Frederick Rosen.
Oxford, 255 pp., £19.50, May 1983, 9780198226567
Show More
Bentham 
by Ross Harrison.
Routledge, 286 pp., £14.95, September 1983, 0 7100 9526 0
Show More
Show More
... that obedience to natural law means ‘that every man shall pursue his own happiness’ (echo of David Hume and foretaste of Bentham himself?). The puzzle is rather, as Ross Harrison suggests in his discussion of Bentham’s thought as a whole – a considerable achievement – why Bentham did not enlist natural law as an ally of utility: they had much in ...

Whose Nuremberg Laws?

Jeremy Waldron: Race, 19 March 1998

Seeing a Colour-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race 
by Patricia Williams.
Virago, 72 pp., £5.99, April 1997, 1 86049 365 3
Show More
Colour Conscious: The Political Morality of Race 
by Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann.
Princeton, 200 pp., £11.95, May 1998, 0 691 05909 8
Show More
Race: The History of an Idea in the West 
by Ivan Hannaford.
Johns Hopkins, 464 pp., £49.50, June 1996, 0 8018 5222 6
Show More
Show More
... who would pay the price of its not being noticed? Whites? In his Introduction to Colour Conscious, David Wilkins observes that the white citizens of America and Britain mostly don’t see themselves as having a race. Their culture is just ‘British culture’ or ‘American culture’ or, unselfconsciously, simply the way things are. Wilkins, Appiah, Gutmann ...

Diary

Ian Gilmour: Our Ignominious Government, 23 May 1996

... for human rights than its predecessors. People are picked up in the middle of the night and held in prison without notification of their relatives. Trials also take place after dark – they are known as ‘the midnight specials’ – and make no pretence of justice. The economic position is disastrous. Unemployment, we are told, is 70 percent, and ...

Martinis with the Bellinis

Mary Beard, 31 July 1997

The Roy Strong Diaries 1967-87 
Weidenfeld, 461 pp., £20, May 1997, 0 297 81841 4Show More
Show More
... a prototype Civil War Experience. Amazingly, Strong’s Diaries (which cover the period when he held two of the top jobs in British museums, first the directorship of the National Portrait Gallery, then of the V&A) never touch on any of these central issues. Strong’s view seems to be a very simple one. He has no time at all for what he once described as ...

How do you see Susan?

Mary Beard: No Asp for Zenobia, 20 March 2003

Cleopatra: Beyond the Myth 
by Michel Chauveau, translated by David Lorton.
Cornell, 104 pp., £14.95, April 2002, 0 8014 3867 5
Show More
The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations 
by Maria Wyke.
Oxford, 452 pp., £40, March 2002, 9780198150756
Show More
Show More
... than hints at the difference of ‘inner character’. The two parts of The Roman Mistress are held together by the figure of Cleopatra, with one essay on her image in Rome under Augustus leading into two chapters on Cleopatra movies from the early 20th century to Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1963 ‘Lizpatra’, as the Taylor/Burton epic was nicknamed. The first ...