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
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... 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Bentham and Bureaucracy 
by L.J. Hume.
Cambridge, 320 pp., £22.50, September 1981, 0 521 23542 1
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Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democracy: A Study of the Constitutional Code 
by Frederick Rosen.
Oxford, 255 pp., £19.50, May 1983, 9780198226567
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Bentham 
by Ross Harrison.
Routledge, 286 pp., £14.95, September 1983, 0 7100 9526 0
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... 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
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Colour Conscious: The Political Morality of Race 
by Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann.
Princeton, 200 pp., £11.95, May 1998, 0 691 05909 8
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Race: The History of an Idea in the West 
by Ivan Hannaford.
Johns Hopkins, 464 pp., £49.50, June 1996, 0 8018 5222 6
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... 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
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... 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
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The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations 
by Maria Wyke.
Oxford, 452 pp., £40, March 2002, 9780198150756
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... 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 ...

A Sense of Humour in Daddy’s Presence

J.L. Nelson: Medieval Europe, 5 June 2003

The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe 
by Patrick Geary.
Princeton, £11.95, March 2003, 0 691 09054 8
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Europe in the High Middle Ages 
by William Chester Jordan.
Penguin, 383 pp., £9.99, August 2002, 0 14 016664 5
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... dat animum (‘It is the holy love of the fatherland which moves us’). Half a century ago, Dom David Knowles, doyen of humane medievalism, hailed the MGH among the ‘great historical enterprises’, which it certainly was (and is) despite its original nationalist agenda. Medievalist Wissenschaft (the term has scientific connotations largely absent from ...

Journey to Arezzo

Nicholas Penny: The Apotheosis of Piero, 17 April 2003

Piero della Francesca 
by Roberto Longhi, translated by David Tabbat.
Sheep Meadow, 364 pp., £32.50, September 2002, 1 878818 77 5
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... of his painting and his lack of interest in appealing to our ‘tenderer feelings’ was not held against him and, once Fry had discovered Seurat and embraced formalism, these became emphatically positive qualities. Only the quietest of human exchanges are rendered memorably by Piero, and this has suited those artists who have learned from him. Semiramis ...

Iraq Must Go!

Charles Glass: The Making and Unmaking of Iraq, 3 October 2002

... the cry: ‘The Turk must go!’ At the beginning of 1916, the Turk was not going anywhere: he held fast at Gallipoli, driving off the Allied landings in January, and accepted the surrender of a British Mesopotamian invasion force at Kut, south of Baghdad, in April. The Turkish war was both unsuccessful and unpopular. In the view of the new Imperial ...

Stinking Rich

Jenny Diski: Richard Branson, 16 November 2000

Branson 
by Tom Bower.
Fourth Estate, 384 pp., £17.99, September 2000, 1 84115 386 9
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... and victim, a virgin forever being interfered with by corrupt and powerful old men, a dewy David battling the thug Goliath. And people, the people apparently, have loved it. They love him being rich, having his own island in the sun, shaming the suits at board meetings, tieless in jumpers knitted by his auntie, getting drunk and randy, blowing millions ...

Scaling Up

Peter Wollen: At Tate Modern, 20 July 2000

... his microminiatures. His first exhibition, sponsored by the Armenian Allied Arts Association, was held in 1986 and featured ‘eye-of-a-needle portraits’ of Napoleon, a Spanish dancer, Donald Duck and several other Disney characters, as well as a grain of rice inscribed with verse. The show was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times and the Wall ...

La Bolaing

Patrick Collinson: Anne Boleyn, 18 November 2004

The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn 
by Eric Ives.
Blackwell, 458 pp., £25, July 2004, 0 631 23479 9
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... a native-born Frenchwoman.’ She was ‘La Bolaing’. So far so good. But how it was that Anne held out for marriage rather than a more conventional relationship, and why Henry allowed her to dictate her terms when his original intention was to make her his mistress, are other questions altogether. Henry was already trying to free himself from the ...

AmeriKKKa

Thomas Sugrue: Civil Rights v. Black Power, 5 October 2006

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice 
by Raymond Arsenault.
Oxford, 690 pp., £19.99, March 2006, 0 19 513674 8
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... egalitarianism, colour blindness and individual liberty against the forces of oppression that long held blacks in a subservient status. Americans remember the struggle for racial equality as a morality play, pitting nonviolence against racist violence, love against hatred. It is a Christian story of redemptive suffering and even martyrdom, as activists ...

‘Wondered at as an owl’

Blair Worden: Cromwell’s Bad Idea, 7 February 2002

Cromwell’s Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution 
by Christopher Durston.
Manchester, 270 pp., £15.99, May 2001, 0 7190 6065 6
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... aberration, England’s sole experience of open military rule since the Conquest. Their powers, David Hume ruled, were exercised ‘not in the legal manner of European nations, but according to the maxims of eastern tyranny’. Nineteenth-century Whiggish historians queued to condemn that ‘despotism’. That the sword reigned in Cromwellian England is ...

The Jump-out Boys

J. Robert Lennon: The Drug-Bust that Wasn’t, 3 August 2006

Tulia: Race, Cocaine and Corruption in a Small Texas Town 
by Nate Blakeslee.
PublicAffairs, 450 pp., £15.99, September 2005, 9781586482190
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... something more akin to a gut instinct’. Gut instinct, in this case, was the widespread and long-held conviction that black people were criminals. Remember Lana Barnett: ‘We know these people; we grew up with them. And we know what they sell.’ Blakeslee mentions other cases, tangential to the drug busts, that reveal Tulians’ willingness to convict and ...