In such a Labyrinth

Jonathan Rée: Hume, 17 December 2015

Hume: An Intellectual Biography 
by James Harris.
Cambridge, 621 pp., £35, September 2015, 978 0 521 83725 5
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... histories that coalesced over a decade into a six-volume History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 that sold in vast quantities. He took uncomplicated pleasure in his fame and commercial success, and by the time of his death in 1776 at the age of 65 he prided himself on being ‘not only independent, but ...

Identity Parade

Linda Colley, 25 February 1993

People and Places: Country House Donors and the National Trust 
by James Lees-Milne.
Murray, 232 pp., £19.99, October 1992, 0 7195 5145 5
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The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769 
by Michael Dobson.
Oxford, 266 pp., £30, October 1992, 0 19 811233 5
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Myths of the English 
edited by Roy Porter.
Polity, 280 pp., £39.50, October 1992, 0 7456 0844 2
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Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States 
by Stephen Daniels.
Polity, 257 pp., £39.50, November 1992, 0 7456 0450 1
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... be comfortable. Yet it was this very political content which assisted Shakespeare’s apotheosis. Julius Caesar was adapted so as to legitimise tyrannicide and by implication the events of 1688. And in the 1730s, the opponents of Walpole campaigned (successfully) for a monument to the Bard in Westminster Abbey as a way of advertising their superior ...

Stage Emperor

James Davidson, 28 April 1994

Reflections of Nero: Culture, History and Representation 
edited by Jás Elsner and Jamie Masters.
Duckworth, 239 pp., £35, January 1994, 0 7156 2479 2
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... that contained a profound truth about the new regime. For after witnessing the assassination of Julius Caesar, Augustus had been very careful to avoid creating the institutions of a monarchy, cobbling together for himself a set of quasi-republican titles and extraordinary prerogatives, while leaving the core of the office entirely hollow and pretending ...

Transparent Criticism

Anne Barton, 21 June 1984

A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality 
by A.D. Nuttall.
Methuen, 209 pp., £12.95, September 1983, 0 416 31780 4
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... obscure, Nuttall relies almost entirely upon Shakespeare, and then upon only a handful of plays: Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello and Henry IV. This Shakespeare criticism, moreover, is concentrated in the third of the book’s four chapters: ‘Shakespeare’s Imitation of the World’. Even there, it seems to exist less for ...

What the Romans did

Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 5 February 1987

English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson and Housman 
by C.O. Brink.
James Clark, 243 pp., £11.95, February 1986, 0 227 67872 9
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Latin Poets and Roman Life 
by Jasper Griffin.
Duckworth, 226 pp., £24, January 1986, 0 7156 1970 5
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The Mirror of Myth: Classical Themes and Variations 
by Jasper Griffin.
Faber, 144 pp., £15, February 1986, 0 571 13805 5
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... pursuit of pleasure, after the manner of the Hellenistic princes such as Demetrius Poliorcetes. Julius Caesar himself was a notable example of the type, which survived into the Imperial period in the guise of men like Otho and Petronius. Even Augustus, at least during the early part of his career, seems not to have been without a taste for some of the ...

What does a chicken know of bombs?

David Thomson: A Key to Brando, 5 December 2019

The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando 
by William J. Mann.
HarperCollins, 718 pp., £22, November 2019, 978 0 06 242764 9
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... or James Tyrone. His one shot at Shakespeare was as Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film of Julius Caesar (1953), where he amazed many doubters and impressed John Gielgud (his Cassius), by handling the verse as easily as he had muttered and snarled in Streetcar and The Wild One. But he did make movies, like Désirée, Teahouse of the August ...

Dante’s Mastery

Gabriel Josipovici, 21 August 1980

Dante 
by George Holmes.
Oxford, 104 pp., £95, April 1980, 0 19 287504 3
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The Divine Comedy: A New Verse Translation 
by C.H. Sisson.
Carcanet, 455 pp., £8.95, April 1980, 9780856352737
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... was,’ and proceeds to explain that his parents were Lombards and that he himself was born under Julius Caesar and lived in Rome under the good Augustus ‘at the time of the false and lying gods’. Only after he has said this does he go on to explain what he did in life: ‘I was a poet, and I sang of that just son of Anchises who came from Troy after ...

Diary

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s Grotto, 5 October 2023

... Abbey statue of Shakespeare, even contributing a prologue for the benefit performance of Julius Caesar that the countess organised in 1738. When the family gave up their holdings in Barbados, however, is less clear, and the sale of their interest in Carolina is unlikely to have been an exercise in disinvestment motivated by abolitionism. The 4th ...

Writing about Shakespeare

Frank Kermode, 9 December 1999

... in obscurity. A few quotations roughly suggest the stages by which this development occurred. In Julius Caesar, one of the first Globe plays as well as a play with deep political interests, Brutus has to decide whether to join the conspiracy against Caesar. So here is a man thinking about something we take to be ...

Glimpsed in the Glare

Michael Neill: Shakespeare in 1606, 17 December 2015

1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear 
by James Shapiro.
Faber, 423 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 0 571 23578 0
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... detail takes the place of the speculatively personal. If 1599 – when Shakespeare wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar and As You Like It, as well as beginning Hamlet – was ‘the most decisive year of his career, one in which he redefined himself and his theatre’, that transformation could be understood only in relation to the year’s turbulent ...

Seven Centuries Too Late

Barbara Newman: Popes in Hell, 15 July 2021

Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy 
by Guy Raffa.
Harvard, 370 pp., £28.95, May 2020, 978 0 674 98083 9
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Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante 
by David Bowe.
Oxford, 225 pp., £60, November 2020, 978 0 19 884957 5
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Dante’s Christian Ethics: Purgatory and Its Moral Contexts 
by George Corbett.
Cambridge, 233 pp., £75, March 2020, 978 1 108 48941 6
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Why Dante Matters: An Intelligent Person’s Guide 
by John Took.
Bloomsbury, 207 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 4729 5103 8
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Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Literature, Doctrine, Reality 
by Zygmunt Barański.
Legenda, 658 pp., £75, February 2020, 978 1 78188 879 7
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... philosophers, the physicians Hippocrates and Galen, the Amazons Camilla and Penthesilia, Aeneas, Julius Caesar, the sultan Saladin, and others renowned for their wisdom or courage. Virgil himself, consigned to the same realm, explains that together ‘sanza speme vivemo in disio’ – ‘we live in desire without hope.’Virgil’s​ damnation has ...

A Pound a Glimpse

Daniel Smith: Epilepsy, 16 November 2017

A Smell of Burning: The Story of Epilepsy 
by Colin Grant.
Cape, 242 pp., £16.99, August 2016, 978 0 224 10182 0
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The End of Epilepsy? A History of the Modern Era of Epilepsy, 1860-2010 
by Dieter Schmidt and Simon Shorvon.
Oxford, 208 pp., £39.99, September 2016, 978 0 19 872590 9
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... like St Paul, Joan of Arc and Van Gogh, may or may not have had epilepsy, and some of whom, like Julius Caesar, Dostoevsky and Harriet Tubman, almost certainly did. He also keeps vigil over his brother, determined ‘to discover what it was that marked him with epilepsy’ – how he had been changed by the condition and what it was that made him ...

Hard Eggs and Radishes

Thomas Jones: Shelley at Sea, 21 July 2022

The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Vol. VII 
edited by Nora Crook.
Johns Hopkins, 931 pp., £103.50, May 2021, 978 1 4214 3783 5
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... Great), Kant, Catherine (the Great), Plato, Alexander (the Great), Aristotle, Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Constantine, ‘the Anarchs old’ – before describing ‘how and by what paths I have been brought/To this dread pass’.One spring morning, Rousseau found himself ‘asleep/Under a mountain’ beside a ‘gentle rivulet’ when a ...

What the Badger Found

Michael Kulikowski: Moneybags, 2 February 2023

When Money Talks: A History of Coins and Numismatics 
by Frank L. Holt.
Oxford, 336 pp., £25.99, October 2021, 978 0 19 751765 9
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Coin Hoards and Hoarding in the Roman World 
edited by Jerome Mairat, Andrew Wilson and Chris Howgego.
Oxford, 368 pp., £90, May 2022, 978 0 19 886638 1
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... in the Greek tradition, though almost never as aesthetically pleasing.As the republic fractured, Julius Caesar became the first living man to see his portrait on a Roman coin; his ideological heir, Mark Antony, and his legal heir, Octavian, followed suit, as did some of their rivals. After Octavian, as Augustus, cemented ...

Nationalising English

Patrick Parrinder, 28 January 1993

The Great Betrayal: Memoirs of a Life in Education 
by Brian Cox.
Chapmans, 386 pp., £17.99, September 1992, 1 85592 605 9
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... in England and Wales would be tested on one of three Shakespeare plays – Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Later it emerged that all that most pupils will face is a test based on extracts of verse and prose in a 45-page anthology which has just been published. Meanwhile Mr Patten, who has no powers to control ...