Late Picasso at the Tate

David Sylvester, 1 September 1988

... not diminish after a hundred encounters. It is the sort of piece which establishes that, while it may be open to question whether Picasso is this century’s greatest painter, he is undoubtedly its greatest sculptor. The late style surely emerges in October 1964 with works such as the two large paintings of The Artist and his Model dated 25 October and 26 ...

Herstory

Linda Colley, 9 July 1992

The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay 
by Bridget Hill.
Oxford, 263 pp., £30, March 1992, 0 19 812978 5
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... drawn into the company of the so-called Real Whigs, dissenting intellectuals like Thomas Hollis, Richard Barron, Sylas Neville and Caleb Fleming. She also met and initially admired John Wilkes, whose radicalism took a far more activist form. It was – presumably – in discussions and arguments with men such as these that she hit upon the idea of ...

Brattishness

Colin Burrow: Henry Howard, 11 November 1999

Henry Howard, the Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life 
by W.A. Sessions.
Oxford, 448 pp., £60, March 1999, 9780198186243
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... chief delight, Drowned in teares to mourne my losse I stand the bitter night In my window, where I may see Before the windes how the cloudes flee. Lo what a mariner love hath made me! As others embrace, she looks out of the window, a mariner just in a poetic conceit. Surrey is the only early Tudor poet to explore this form of feminine pathos – waiting and ...

Disappearing Acts

Terry Eagleton: Aquinas, 5 December 2013

Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait 
by Denys Turner.
Yale, 300 pp., £18.99, May 2013, 978 0 300 18855 4
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... weren’t very good on the subject of matter. Aquinas believed in the soul, as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins do not; but one reason he did so was because he thought it yielded the richest possible understanding of the lump of matter known as the body. As Wittgenstein once remarked: if you want an image of the soul, look at the body. The soul for Thomas ...

Holy-Rowly-Powliness

Patrick Collinson: The Prayer Book, 4 January 2001

Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England 
Churchhouse, 864 pp., £15, December 2000, 9780715120002Show More
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... only from John Major’s little old ladies on bicycles, and from the Prayer Book Society – which may well have more members than those lobbies of fuel protesters. It was Cranmer’s intention that what was said in church should be ‘understanded of the people’. The minister was to speak ‘with a loud voice’, so turning his body ‘as the people ...

Why can’t doctors be more scientific?

Hugh Pennington: The Great MMR Disaster, 8 July 2004

... and passes over quickly, is looked upon with greater feelings of terror than the disease which may be more fatal, but more common. The words of another Scottish MOH, Alexander MacGregor of Glasgow, illustrate why this perception was wrong for measles: ‘In 1907-08 it gave notice of its presence by appearing on the outskirts of the city in the ...

Reasons for Corbyn

William Davies, 13 July 2017

... is the compression of historical time. ‘Is it really fifty years since Sergeant Pepper?’ you may ask. But the time lapse feels immaterial. The internet turns up a perpetual series of anniversaries, disparate moments from disparate epochs, and presents them all as equivalent and accessible in the here and now. ‘In 1981,’ the late cultural theorist ...

Diary

Nick Richardson: Elves and Aliens, 2 August 2018

... trails – and they can manoeuvre with acrobatic flexibility. Some have suggested that the UFOs may be prototypes that belong to the US, citing precedents like the Roswell incident of 1947, when an object that many believed to be an alien craft crash-landed on a ranch in New Mexico: it wasn’t until the 1990s that the US government revealed that what was ...

Your hat sucks

Gill Partington: UbuWeb, 1 April 2021

Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics and Poetics of UbuWeb 
by Kenneth Goldsmith.
Columbia, 328 pp., £20, July 2020, 978 0 231 18695 7
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... might expect. As well as Slonimsky’s hymn to Castoria, there are Samuel Beckett’s radio plays, Richard Serra’s video art, Maurice Blanchot’s mystery novels and a 1971 promotional disc made by Salvador Dalí for the Crédit Commercial de France. One of UbuWeb’s specialities is the B-sides and rarities overshadowed by an artist’s greatest hits. Want ...

Looking Away

Stephen Holmes: Questions of Intervention, 14 November 2002

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide 
by Samantha Power.
Basic Books, 640 pp., £21.99, January 2002, 0 465 06150 8
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War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals 
by David Halberstam.
Bloomsbury, 540 pp., £20, April 2002, 0 7475 5946 5
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... thing, although cruel leaders of lesser states, faced with the threat of prosecution for genocide, may, it is true, be deterred, they are just as likely to cling ferociously to power whatever the cost in human lives. Stimulated to think ahead, inveterate adventurers may even plot to eliminate any witnesses who might testify ...

Underwater Living

James Meek, 5 January 2023

... in what were, for Lincolnshire, a strange few weeks in 2007. In a bloodless localist uprising in May, Boston’s mainstream parties were voted out of office by a single-issue movement demanding a new bypass. The Boston Bypass Independents won 25 out of 32 seats at the local elections, wiping out Labour, which lost 11 seats, and leaving the Conservatives with ...

Swift radiant morning

D.J. Enright, 21 February 1991

The Collected Letters of Charles Hamilton Sorley 
edited by Jean Moorcroft Wilson.
Cecil Woolf, 310 pp., £25, November 1990, 9780900821547
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Ivor Gurney: Collected Letters 
edited by R.K.R Thornton.
Mid-Northumberland Arts Group/Carcanet, 579 pp., £25, February 1991, 0 85635 941 6
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... dividing his time between games, the Officers’ Training Corps, walking in the countryside (Richard Jefferies was an enduring hero), and excitedly discovering writers. With Shakespeare, Blake was an early enthusiasm (everything was early in Sorley’s life); Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, he told his parents, was supposed to be the finest drama ...

Tomb for Two

Adam Mars-Jones, 10 February 1994

The Father 
by Sharon Olds.
Secker, 88 pp., £6, February 1993, 0 436 33952 8
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The Sign of Saturn 
by Sharon Olds.
Secker, 92 pp., £8, March 1991, 0 436 20029 5
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... Father as a book of elegies lies in its exploring of what has been called in another context (by Richard Sennett in his book Authority) ‘bonds of rejection’: the way a person continues to be determined by forces or people who have consciously been thrown off. The structures underlying the emotions need not change just because the emotions now bear a ...

Protestant Country

George Bernard, 14 June 1990

Humanism, Reform and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher 
edited by Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy.
Cambridge, 260 pp., £27.50, January 1989, 0 521 34034 9
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The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation 
by Robert Whiting.
Cambridge, 302 pp., £30, July 1989, 0 521 35606 7
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The Reformation of Cathedrals: Cathedrals in English Society, 1485-1603 
by Stanford Lehmberg.
Princeton, 319 pp., £37.30, March 1989, 0 691 05539 4
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Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England 
by David Cressy.
Weidenfeld, 271 pp., £25, October 1989, 0 297 79343 8
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The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the 16th and 17th Centuries 
by Patrick Collinson.
Macmillan, 188 pp., £29.50, February 1989, 0 333 43971 6
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Life’s Preservative against Self-Killing 
by John Sym, edited by Michael MacDonald.
Routledge, 342 pp., £29.95, February 1989, 0 415 00639 2
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Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 
by Nigel Smith.
Oxford, 396 pp., £40, February 1989, 0 19 812879 7
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... Church of England within Christendom. Fisher was undoubtedly the victim of royal tyranny, but it may be unhelpful to describe Henry VIII as ‘the most contemptible human specimen ever to sit upon the throne of England’. Moreover it is questionable whether Fisher displayed that capacity for leadership – ‘clarity and confidence of vision, tenacity of ...

Carnival Time

Peter Craven, 18 February 1988

The Remake 
by Clive James.
Cape, 223 pp., £10.95, October 1987, 0 224 02515 5
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In the Land of Oz 
by Howard Jacobson.
Hamish Hamilton, 380 pp., £12.95, September 1987, 0 241 12110 8
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... was described as having nothing ‘remotely Poundian or Objectivist’ about it. Of course he may say that this is simply a matter of opinion but he should bear in mind that the extensive and expert Australian reviews of The Nightmarkets, hyperconscious one might think of the context in which such things are valued, saw no such parallels, no such ...