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You can have it for a penny

Malcolm Gaskill: ‘Agent Sonya’, 6 January 2022

Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy 
by Ben Macintyre.
Viking, 377 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 0 241 40850 6
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... belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia; they were Germans first, Jews second. Their father, Robert, was a statistician, president of the Berlin Stock Exchange and owner of the largest private library in Germany. Like his son years later in London, Robert Kuczynski knew many prominent left-wingers, including Karl ...

Men Who Keep Wolves

Tom Shippey: Edward the Confessor, 3 December 2020

Edward the Confessor: Last of the Royal Blood 
by Tom Licence.
Yale, 332 pp., £25, August 2020, 978 0 300 21154 2
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... came looking for him. For the next twenty or so years he lived abroad at the court of his cousin, Robert of Normandy. He and Alfred remained, however, the last known representatives of ‘the royal blood’ of England. In 1036 both mounted invasions against their stepbrother Harold Harefoot. Neither invasion succeeded. Alfred was captured under obscure ...

Utopia in Texas

Glen Newey: Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’, 19 January 2017

Utopia 
by Thomas More, edited by George M. Logan, translated by Robert M. Adams.
Cambridge, 141 pp., £9.99, August 2016, 978 1 107 56873 0
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Utopia 
by Thomas More, translated by Gilbert Burnet.
Verso, 216 pp., £8.99, November 2016, 978 1 78478 760 8
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... much celebrated outside academia and St Peter’s. The fate of the Romanov obelisk in Moscow’s Alexander Garden, first put up in 1914 to mark the tercentenary of the dynasty, is illustrative. Bolsheviks re-engraved the obelisk with More’s name and other mooted harbingers of communism. In 2013, 99 years after it was put up, the Russian Ministry of Culture ...

Every Watermark and Stain

Gill Partington: Faked Editions, 20 June 2024

The Book Forger: The True Story of a Literary Crime That Fooled the World 
by Joseph Hone.
Chatto, 336 pp., £22, March, 978 1 78474 467 0
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... role in that most celebrated of literary love affairs, between Elizabeth and her fellow poet Robert Browning. Famously eloping in 1846 to escape her tyrannical father, they honeymooned in Pisa, and it was here one morning that Elizabeth shyly slipped a sheaf of papers into her new husband’s pocket. She hurried back to her private study, leaving ...

Wasp-Waisted Minoans

Miranda Carter: Mary Renault’s Heroes, 13 April 2023

‘The King Must Die’ and ‘The Bull from the Sea’ 
by Mary Renault.
Everyman, 632 pp., £16.99, October 2022, 978 1 84159 409 5
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... encountered a group of writers in Athens in 1962, the poet James Merrill and the British novelists Robert Liddell, Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym, she fled town as soon as she could, muttering that she wasn’t made for this kind of thing. She seems to have cut a formidable figure. ‘Mary Renault arrived all in gold lamé. Miss Pym (a failure) in her simple ...

A Degenerate Assemblage

Anthony Grafton: Bibliomania, 13 April 2023

Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America 
by Denise Gigante.
Yale, 378 pp., £25, January 2023, 978 0 300 24848 7
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... Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Wise, forger of rare editions. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the ...

Let every faction bloom

John Patrick Diggins, 6 March 1997

For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism 
edited by Joshua Cohen.
Beacon, 154 pp., $15, August 1996, 0 8070 4313 3
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For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism 
by Maurizio Viroli.
Oxford, 214 pp., £22.50, September 1995, 0 19 827952 3
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Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism 
edited by John Bodnar.
Princeton, 352 pp., £45, September 1996, 0 691 04397 3
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Buring the Flag: The Great 1989-90 American Flag Desecration Controversy 
by Robert Justin Goldstein.
Kent State, 453 pp., $39, July 1996, 0 87338 526 8
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... reflected the broad spectrum of opinion that saw the flag as a sacred symbol of American freedoms. Robert Justin Goldstein’s Burning the Flag thoughtfully draws on the disciplines of law, political science and history to analyse the controversy in all its dimensions. The author is on the side of the civil libertarians, and his book concludes with the Supreme ...

Not Many Dead

Linda Colley, 10 September 1992

Riot, Risings and Revolution: Governance and Violence in 18th-Century England 
by Ian Gilmour.
Hutchinson, 504 pp., £25, May 1992, 0 09 175330 9
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... examples of this self-serving tendency, while supplying plenty from the 18th century. Sir Robert Walpole, effective prime minister from 1722 to 1742, was both joyously corrupt and a ruthless exponent of one-party government, yet he seems genuinely to have believed that all expressions of hostility to his protracted regime stemmed not from a sense of ...

Summer Simmer

Tom Vanderbilt: Chicago heatwaves, 22 August 2002

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago 
by Eric Klinenberg.
Chicago, 305 pp., £19.50, August 2002, 0 226 44321 3
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... summer, we have the heat index, first proposed in 1979 by the Australian environmental scientist Robert Steadman in an article in the Journal of Applied Meteorology entitled ‘The Assessment of Sultriness Part I: A Temperature-Humidity Index Based on Human Physiology and Clothing Science’. Steadman’s index depends on two variables – temperature and ...

Gide’s Cuttlefish

John Bayley, 17 February 2000

The Charterhouse of Parma 
by Henri B. Stendhal, translated by Richard Howard.
Modern Library, 688 pp., £20.95, January 1999, 0 679 60245 3
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... had lately crossed the Lodi bridge and taught the world that after so many centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of valour and genius Italy had witnessed in a few months wakened a slumbering nation ... Soon new and impassioned standards of behaviour were observed ... risking one’s life became fashionable; happiness depended, after ...

Careful Readers

J.L. Heilbron: A Copernican monomaniac, 22 September 2005

The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus 
by Owen Gingerich.
Arrow, 320 pp., £7.99, July 2005, 0 09 947644 4
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... of the system Tycho first published in 1588. The volume had been deposited in the Vatican by Pope Alexander VIII, who had inherited it from the apostate Queen Christina, who had found it in the Royal Library in Stockholm, where it had been brought as booty from Prague during the Thirty Years’ War. ‘In a state of euphoria’, Gingerich revealed the Vatican ...

Everything but the Glue

Richard Fortey: A Victorian sensation, 22 August 2002

Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ 
by James Secord.
Chicago, 624 pp., £22.50, February 2002, 0 226 74410 8
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... respectability or aristocratic imprimatur. When the author of Vestiges was finally revealed to be Robert Chambers, Scottish encyclopedist and prolific publisher of improving works, the exposure curiously diminished the book’s effectiveness, because it could be regarded from that point on as no more than a ‘popular’ book. Its marginalisation had ...

Thus were the British defeated

Colin Munro: ‘Tipu’s Tiger’, 4 January 2018

... record of his baptism at St Marylebone in London. In May 1792 he was sponsored for a cadetship by Robert Thornton MP, an East India Company director. A note signed by Sir Hector corrected the error in the baptismal record. Young Hector was a ‘cadet for Madras’ and sailed on the Earl Talbot a month later, arriving at Calcutta on 8 November. His expected ...

At the Driehaus Museum

Rosemary Hill: Tulips, Fritillaries and Auriculas, 10 July 2025

... do with what I am?’What he did immediately after Cambridge was become, along with his brother Alexander, an internationally famous folk singer. Having grown up listening to their older brother’s blues records, the McEwens made a pilgrimage to the US, visiting Lead Belly’s widow to see his 12-string guitar and finding themselves, with a characteristic ...

Peace without Empire

Perry Anderson, 2 December 2021

Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union 
by Stella Ghervas.
Harvard, 528 pp., £31.95, March, 978 0 674 97526 2
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... Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance, a study of the diplomat and thinker Alexander Sturdza – father a Romanian boyar, mother a Phanariot Greek – in the era of the European Restoration.2Secretary in his twenties to Ioannis Capodistrias, Alexander I’s Greek envoy to the Congress of Vienna, with ...

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