Venisti tandem

Denis Donoghue, 7 February 1985

Selected Poems 
by Tony Harrison.
Viking, 204 pp., £9.95, September 1984, 0 670 80040 6
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Palladas: Poems 
by Tony Harrison.
Anvil, 47 pp., £2.95, October 1984, 9780856461279
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Men and Women 
by Frederick Seidel.
Chatto, 70 pp., £4.95, October 1984, 0 7011 2868 2
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Dangerous play: Poems 1974-1984 
by Andrew Motion.
Salamander, 110 pp., £8.95, October 1984, 0 907540 56 2
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Mister Punch 
by David Harsent.
Oxford, 70 pp., £4.50, October 1984, 0 19 211966 4
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An Umbrella from Piccadilly 
by Jaroslav Seifert and Ewald Osers.
London Magazine Editions, 80 pp., £5, November 1984, 0 904388 75 1
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“... railings made into shrapnel and grenade, acanthus leaf and fleur-de-lys, victorious artillery, James Cagney films (the only art Harrison shared with his father). When he alludes to other poems, they are mostly poems the War turned into momentously general truths, as in an echo of Empson: It’s not diseases, but the void that kills, The space, the ...”

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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“... honour of the Old. In England the foundation of Regius Chairs 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 ...”

Riches to riches

John Brooks, 20 November 1986

Bend’Or, Duke of Westminster: A Personal Memoir 
by George Ridley.
Robin Clark, 213 pp., £9.95, November 1985, 0 86072 096 9
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Getty: The Richest Man in the World 
by Robert Lenzner.
Hutchinson, 283 pp., £9.95, November 1985, 0 09 162840 7
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“... dated from the 15th century. The family’s first hereditary honour was a baronetcy conferred by James I in 1622, largely to raise revenue; the first baronet must have been a disappointment in that regard, as he went to prison for debt in 1629 and again in 1638. His son and heir was imprisoned for political reasons in 1646, and pardoned in 1651. The third ...”

Turncoats and Opportunists

Alexandra Walsham: Francis Walsingham, 5 July 2012

The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I 
by John Cooper.
Faber, 400 pp., £9.99, July 2012, 978 0 571 21827 1
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“... the most dubious morality. Building on the classic image of Walsingham as spymaster established by James Anthony Froude’s History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1856-70), his early 20th-century biographers, Sidney Lee and Conyers Read, presented him as an astute and distinguished patriot who laid the foundations for ...”

Buried Alive!

Nick Richardson: Houdini, 14 April 2011

Houdini: Art and Magic 
by Brooke Kamin Rapaport.
Yale, 261 pp., £25, November 2010, 978 0 300 14684 4
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“... himself locked up in the forbidding United States Jail in Washington DC, in the cell that had held James Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau. He not only escaped from it, but also, on the way out, opened the cells of two other inmates and made them switch places. Legend has it that he asked the occupant of one of the cells what he’d done to get locked ...”

The Strangest Piece of News

Nick Wilding: Galileo, 2 June 2011

Galileo: Watcher of the Skies 
by David Wootton.
Yale, 328 pp., £25, October 2010, 978 0 300 12536 8
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Galileo 
by J.L. Heilbron.
Oxford, 508 pp., £20, October 2010, 978 0 19 958352 2
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“... and potential employer, Cosimo de’ Medici. The same day, the English ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, sent a copy to James I, describing it as ‘the strangest piece of news (as I may justly call it)’ that he would ever have received ‘from any part of the world’. Most copies were probably sent over the Alps ...”

Amused, Bored or Exasperated

Christopher Prendergast: Gustave Flaubert, 13 December 2001

Flaubert: A Life 
by Geoffrey Wall.
Faber, 413 pp., £25, October 2001, 0 571 19521 0
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“... before it is properly ripe’). This self-flagellating devotion accounts in large measure for Henry James’s view of Flaubert as the ‘novelists’ novelist’. He did not necessarily mean it as a compliment: Flaubert’s cultivation of craft, James thought, went hand in hand with a thinning of the human ...”

They were bastards!

Clare Bucknell: Guggenheim’s Bohemia, 10 October 2024

Peggy: A Novel 
by Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamison.
John Murray, 366 pp., £18.99, August, 978 1 4736 0574 9
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“... the copper mines in Mexico’. The richer they became, the less people liked it. Florette recalls Henry Hilton trying to ban ‘the Seligman Jews’ from his fine hotels in 1877. Their descendants know that New York society still associates the rough, uncouth origins of their wealth – ‘the dank dirt of mines, underground, filth’ – with their ...”

Freak Anatomist

John Mullan: Hilary Mantel, 1 October 1998

The Giant, O'Brien 
by Hilary Mantel.
Fourth Estate, 211 pp., £14.99, September 1998, 1 85702 884 8
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“... in 1788, soon after it was finished, and there is also a small, fine-enamel-on-copper copy by Henry Bone, made ten years later. From these we can see more clearly not only what Reynolds saw, but how Hunter saw himself. He is dressed in the rumpled velvet suit of the intellectual in the privacy of his study. On his table the ink is uncorked; his right hand ...”

Improving the Plays

Frank Kermode, 7 March 1996

Shakespeare at Work 
by John Jones.
Oxford, 293 pp., £35, December 1995, 0 19 811966 6
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“... She lives, Master Shallow. The italicised words, found in the Folio, are not in the Quarto of Henry IV, published in 1600 – a text almost certainly derived from Shakespeare’s autograph. The fuller text can therefore be taken either as evidence of revision, or as suggesting that the printers of the Quarto for some reason omitted the italicised ...”

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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“... it is so much cut-and-paste soup. In the final article in this section the political scientist James Miller asks ‘Is Bad Writing Necessary?’ This is essentially a comparison of Orwell and Adorno as models of criticism, and you can guess who wins. But in fact no one does: the opposition serves neither, since the intellectual difficulty of Adorno is ...”

Manufacturing in Manhattan

Eric Foner, 1 June 2000

Working-Class New York: Life and Labour Since World War Two 
by Joshua Freeman.
New Press, 393 pp., $35, May 2000, 1 56584 575 7
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“... to the richest fifth of the population. Always a city of ‘Progress and Poverty’ (the title of Henry George’s bestseller of the 1880s), New York today is more polarised economically than anywhere else in the US – a fact explained in part by the decline of the labour movement. Joshua Freeman’s Working-Class New York chronicles the events from 1945 to ...”

Berenson’s Elixir

Simon Schama, 1 May 1980

Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur 
by Ernest Samuels.
Harvard, 477 pp., £9.50, June 1979, 0 674 06775 4
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Being Bernard Berenson 
by Meryle Secrest.
Weidenfeld, 473 pp., £8.50, January 1980, 0 297 77564 2
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“... trip to the United States, where the big-game of major-league millionaires – Peter Widener, James G. Johnson, Samuel Kress – had leapt to profit from his publicised expertise. This was sometimes prompted by motives of undisguised envy and covetousness amongst themselves. On learning of BB’s descent on Widener’s optimistically attributed collection ...”

The Atmosphere of the Clyde

Jean McNicol: Red Clydeside, 2 January 2020

When the Clyde Ran Red: A Social History of Red Clydeside 
by Maggie Craig.
Birlinn, 313 pp., £9.99, March 2018, 978 1 78027 506 2
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Glasgow 1919: The Rise of Red Clydeside 
by Kenny MacAskill.
Biteback, 310 pp., £20, January 2019, 978 1 78590 454 7
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John Maclean: Hero of Red Clydeside 
by Henry Bell.
Pluto, 242 pp., £14.99, October 2018, 978 0 7453 3838 5
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“... still shocking.In 1922 thousands had gathered to watch the new MPs take the night mail to London. James Maxton, the most charismatic of the group, assured the crowd that ‘they would see the atmosphere of the Clyde getting the better of the House of Commons.’ Maxton and his colleagues were members of the Independent Labour Party (until 1918 you couldn’t ...”

The Reptile Oculist

John Barrell, 1 April 2004

“... the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous churchmen, a duchess. One hundred or so of these ...”