At the Polling Station in Kibera

Daniel Branch: The Elections in Kenya, 24 January 2008

... in, among other places, Kisumu, Mombasa and Nairobi. Any protests were dealt with ruthlessly. An unknown number of protesters were shot in Kisumu on 30 December as police opened fire on a crowd attempting to congregate in the city centre. There were pitched battles in Kibera and gunfire filled the night elsewhere in Nairobi during the first few days of ...

This Is Not That Place

Thomas Jones: David Eggers escapes from Sudan, 21 June 2007

What Is the What 
by Dave Eggers.
Hamish Hamilton, 475 pp., £18.99, June 2007, 978 0 241 14257 8
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... of boys: ‘Come to me, children! I am your mother! Come to me!’ Achak hangs back as ‘the unknown boys ran toward her . . . When they were twenty feet from her, the woman turned, lifted a gun from the grass, and with her eyes full of white, she shot the taller boy through the heart.’ Achak and Achor Achor turn and run, as the woman still calls ...

Blood on the Block

Maurice Keen: Henry IV, 5 June 2008

The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made King 
by Ian Mortimer.
Vintage, 480 pp., £8.99, July 2008, 978 1 84413 529 5
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... in the Cottonian Collection, just readable under ultraviolet light, was a copy of a previously unknown declaration by Edward III of October 1376, strictly limiting the royal succession to his male heirs and their male descent. This declaration was never made public, and it was quite unclear that a king had any right to regulate the succession in this ...

New Model Criticism

Colin Burrow: Writing Under Cromwell, 19 June 2008

Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham 
by Blair Worden.
Oxford, 458 pp., December 2007, 978 0 19 923081 5
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... beyond the present moment, and imagine their readers abroad, in the future, in lands or times unknown, this kind of criticism can break down, or be reduced to seeking sedimentary layers of topicality in their composition, each of which must address and can only address its own time – which again should ideally mean a week or a month. Worden will no ...

Eyeballs v. Optics

Julian Bell: Western art, 13 December 2001

Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters 
by David Hockney.
Thames and Hudson, 296 pp., £35, October 2001, 0 500 23785 9
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... a conversation with the optical scientist Charles Falco opened his eyes to the existence, hitherto unknown to him, of concave mirror projections. With Falco, he started to analyse how paintings could be assembled from them, and then to find ways of distinguishing different eras in projection technique. Repeatedly, Hockney goes out of his way to stress that ...

Flattery and Whining

William Gass: Prologomania, 5 October 2000

The Book of Prefaces 
edited by Alasdair Gray.
Bloomsbury, 639 pp., £35, May 2000, 0 7475 4443 3
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... John Hawkes’s novel The Cannibal in 1948, he could properly feel both Hawkes and his novel were unknown to most readers. But this is what Guerard begins by saying: ‘Many introductions exist to persuade the reluctant reader that the classic text under consideration is deservedly a classic, with hidden meanings and beauties.’ Guerard had been teaching too ...

Plumage and Empire

Adam Phillips: This is an Ex-Parrot, 31 October 2002

Spix’s Macaw: The Race to Save the World’s Rarest Bird 
by Tony Juniper.
Fourth Estate, 296 pp., £16.99, September 2002, 1 84115 650 7
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... secret, the volume of commerce and the final destinations for birds being captured was unknown to anyone but a few dealers, trappers and rare-parrot collectors.’ The only hope, apart from wholehearted government protection, was collaboration and co-operation among the wealthy collectors. As Juniper remarks in passing, people don’t tend to get ...

Intergalactic Jesus

Jerry Coyne: Darwinian Christians, 9 May 2002

Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion 
by Michael Ruse.
Cambridge, 242 pp., £16.95, December 2001, 0 521 63144 0
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... give us a little modesty about what we can and cannot know, and a little humility before the unknown.’ One can only wish that Ruse had heeded his own advice. In the words of the physicist Richard Feynman: ‘I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be ...

Showboating

John Upton: George Carman, 9 May 2002

No Ordinary Man: A Life of George Carman 
by Dominic Carman.
Hodder, 331 pp., £18.99, January 2002, 0 340 82098 5
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... and the private man. Yet, despite the excesses to which some barristers are prone, it is almost unknown for them to become notorious for their bacchanalian lifestyles. So why is it that George Carman’s private exploits now threaten to overshadow his achievements in the courtroom? Because he had a son who was waiting until he died to get his own ...

Diary

Rubén Gallo: Mexico’s Shadow Presidency, 25 January 2007

... twittering bird found in the jungles of southern Mexico. Calderón, by contrast, was completely unknown to most voters and had little experience as a public servant; he was an uncharismatic technocrat whose speeches, which focused on interest rates and economic growth, found little resonance with the masses. In the beginning, he didn’t even have the ...

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 similar position. Either way, the couple were in for a very long engagement, something almost unknown in the 16th century. It was not until November 1532 that their relationship was consummated, the delays dictated by a most complicated politics. But Ives strongly suspects that the denouement, leading rapidly to pregnancy, was the result of a calculating ...

A, E♭, C, B

Paul Driver: Robert Schumann, 21 February 2008

Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician 
by John Worthen.
Yale, 496 pp., £25, July 2007, 978 0 300 11160 6
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The Cambridge Companion to Schumann 
edited by Beate Perrey.
Cambridge, 302 pp., £19.99, June 2007, 978 0 521 78950 9
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Schumann’s Late Style 
by Laura Tunbridge.
Cambridge, 246 pp., £50, October 2007, 978 0 521 87168 6
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... contracted syphilis, the lingering nature of the ‘pox’ and its hereditary transmission were unknown. Schumann thought himself cured. He didn’t pass it on either to Clara or to their many children, but it set him up for a life of ever greater derangement and a dreadful end. Schumann may not have been insane, but he was certainly odd. His taciturnity ...

Talking Corpses

Tim Parks: ‘Gomorrah’, 4 December 2008

Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia 
by Roberto Saviano, translated by Virginia Jewiss.
Pan, 424 pp., £8.99, October 2008, 978 0 330 45099 7
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Gomorrah 
directed by Matteo Garrone.
October 2008
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... point, Camorra lookouts – often very small boys – shout laconically to each other whenever an unknown car or a stranger enters the area. Close-up camerawork and low, or chiaroscuro lighting intensifies a sense of entrapment. There are no views of la bella Napoli, no middle-class pleasures, no escape. Even the occasional landscape scenes are gloomy and ...

Ventriloquism

Marina Warner: Dear Old Khayyám, 9 April 2009

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 
by Edward Fitzgerald, edited by Daniel Karlin.
Oxford, 167 pp., £9.99, January 2009, 978 0 19 954297 0
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... reminds us in a marvellous essay on FitzGerald, when ‘on an island to the north and west that is unknown to the cartographers of Islam, a Saxon king who defeated a king of Norway is defeated by a Norman duke.’ Khayyám’s work on cubic equations remains fundamental. It seems it was a sideline, versifying. Composing quatrains was a cultured pastime, just ...

Sons and Heirs

Robert Vitalis: The bin Ladens and Their Money, 4 December 2008

The Bin Ladens: The Story of a Family and Its Fortune 
by Steve Coll.
Allen Lane, 671 pp., £25, April 2008, 978 1 84614 124 9
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... firm has never made the global industry’s top 200 list and was, until September 2001, virtually unknown outside the Arabian peninsula. Nonetheless, Family Business magazine estimates it to be the world’s 62nd largest family business outside the US. Its wealth accumulation started seriously only after the death of Ibn Saud in 1953. Unlike his father, Saud ...