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Snakes and Leeches

Rosemary Hill: The Great Stink, 4 January 2018

One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Yale, 352 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 300 22726 0
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... the press and kept the specialist scandal sheets in business. One of the most entertaining was Robinson v. Robinson and Lane. Henry Robinson had read his wife Isabella’s diary and found that not only did she dislike him intensely but she had recorded in considerable detail a ...

Metaphysical Parenting

James Wood: Edward P. Jones, 21 June 2007

All Aunt Hagar’s Children 
by Edward P. Jones.
Harper Perennial, 399 pp., £7.99, March 2007, 978 0 00 724083 8
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... narrative on one character and then let memory and consciousness have their wayward reign. ‘Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister’ begins like this: ‘After the cab turned off East Capitol onto 8th Street, Noah Robinson saw further evidence that trees were disappearing from Washington.’ The next two ...

The Only True Throne

John Pemble: ‘Muckraker’, 19 July 2012

Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W.T. Stead 
by W. Sydney Robinson.
Robson, 281 pp., £20, May 2012, 978 1 84954 294 4
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... of the inquiry. The paper’s support was now a liability to opponents of Home Rule. As Sydney Robinson makes clear in his lively and laconic biography, Stead was a pioneer of what Arnold called the ‘New Journalism’. Under its first editors, the PMG had lived up to its fictional namesake: the paper ‘written by gentlemen for gentlemen’ that features ...

Defanged

Eric Foner: Deifying King, 5 October 2023

King: The Life of Martin Luther King 
by Jonathan Eig.
Simon & Schuster, 669 pp., £25, May, 978 1 4711 8100 9
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... own life. Eig’s previous subjects include Muhammad Ali, Al Capone and the baseball stars Jackie Robinson and Lou Gehrig. He is an indefatigable researcher, and King is based on a vast array of material, old and new, including documents collected by previous historians of the civil rights movement, thousands of pages of recently released FBI intercepts, more ...

New Guardians of Education

Gillian Avery, 17 July 1980

Racism and Sexism in Children’s Books 
edited by Judith Stinton.
Writers and Readers, 147 pp., £4.95, November 1979, 0 906495 19 9
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Babies need books 
by Dorothy Butler.
Bodley Head, 190 pp., £4.95, May 1980, 9780370301518
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... his rank, in a ridiculous situation, and provokes a laugh at the expense of conjugal affection’. Robinson Crusoe led to an early taste for a rambling life (she had known some little boys who had run away to sea because of it); Primrose Prettyface would suggest to girls of the lower orders that they might aspire to marry gentlemen (who would likewise think ...

What’s next?

James Wood: Afterlives, 14 April 2011

After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory 
by John Casey.
Oxford, 468 pp., £22.50, January 2010, 978 0 19 509295 0
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... hell. No one believes in eternal punishment any more (except for Islamic fundamentalists and those Christian evangelicals who think Christopher Hitchens will go to hell), but the concept of an afterlife is still hard to throw over. The other day, my parents told me of an ageing friend who had recently abandoned his lifelong atheism and become a ...

Short Cuts

Peter Geoghegan: At NatCon London, 1 June 2023

... law”, or other signals of middle-class virtue’. Kruger, an evangelical Christian, warned of ‘a new religion’ in which ‘everything is reduced to nothing, destroying the foundations of a civilisation that was built with care and sacrifice over centuries.’ Salvation will only come, in Kruger’s view, when the Tories deliver ...

Tired of Giving in

Eric Foner: Rosa Parks, 10 May 2001

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Life of Rosa Parks 
by Douglas Brinkley.
Weidenfeld, 248 pp., £12.99, January 2001, 0 297 60708 1
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... read the Bible daily, and while imbibing the principle of turning the other cheek, coupled Christian forgiveness with a determination to stand up for her rights. From her grandfather, an admirer of Marcus Garvey, she heard the message of racial pride and self-discipline, lessons reinforced at the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls. For a few ...

Double Doctrine

Colin Kidd: The Enlightenment, 5 December 2013

The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters 
by Anthony Pagden.
Oxford, 436 pp., £20, May 2013, 978 0 19 966093 3
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... right’ and associated ideas – advanced during the Enlightenment by the abbé de St Pierre, Christian Wolff, Jeremy Bentham and others – about how a global society, a civitas maxima, might be established and maintained. The construction of a perpetual peace on this scale would not be possible without treating the coarse timber of an all too tribal ...

Robinson’s Footprints

Richard Gott: Hugo Chávez and the Venezuelan Revolution, 17 February 2000

... had the hegemonic role, but to keep up the pretence that Venezuela was a democracy, an alternative Christian Democrat party, Copei, was allowed on occasion to win elections, though it had no real power. This cynical agreement was reached in the so-called Pact of Punto Fijo, signed in 1958, which effectively ensured that other parties, of left or right, would ...

Weimar in Partibus

Norman Stone, 1 July 1982

Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World 
by Elizabeth Young-Bruehl.
Yale, 563 pp., £12.95, May 1982, 0 300 02660 9
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Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy 
by Bhikhu Parekh.
Macmillan, 198 pp., £20, October 1981, 0 333 30474 8
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... of censoring letters to her. A highly-placed member of the Eichmann prosecution team, Dr Jacob Robinson, wrote a book to disprove what she had said: it was called The crooked shall be made straight. He it was who made a long list of her factual errors. These corrections included an absurdity or two. She had written, for instance, that in international law ...

That sh—te Creech

James Buchan: The Scottish Enlightenment, 5 April 2007

The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in 18th-Century Britain, Ireland and America 
by Richard Sher.
Chicago, 815 pp., £25.50, February 2007, 978 0 226 75252 5
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... writer such as Hume had no right to such marks of ‘politeness and respect’ from Christian gentlemen. This story, which opens Sher’s learned account of the 18th-century trade in Scottish literature, illustrates his belief that the form in which the Scottish Enlightenment was communicated to the world has been neglected and that the physical ...

Five Feet Tall in His Socks

Patrick Collinson: Farewell to the Muggletonians, 5 June 2008

Last Witnesses: The Muggletonian History, 1652-1979 
by William Lamont.
Ashgate, 267 pp., £55, August 2006, 0 7546 5532 6
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... later in the century the sect was ruled ‘by force of intellect’ rather than wealth by Thomas Robinson, a mostly unemployed shoemaker and recipient of the sect’s charity. Most members belonged to the lower levels of artisanship and trade, neither poor nor rich. They included, as one would expect, many women, whose role in transmitting the faith must not ...

Who killed Jesus?

Hyam Maccoby, 19 July 1984

Jesus and the Politics of his Day 
edited by Ernst Bammel and C.F.D. Moule.
Cambridge, 511 pp., £37.50, February 1984, 9780521220224
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... otherworldly theology is, in practice, the ally of reaction and tyranny. The failure of the German Christian Churches to make any effective protest against Hitler and, on the other hand, the heroic anti-Hitler action of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (against his Lutheran conviction that politics are no part of the business of the spiritual man) brought home to many ...

Killing Stones

Keith Thomas: Holy Places, 19 May 2011

The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland 
by Alexandra Walsham.
Oxford, 637 pp., £35, February 2011, 978 0 19 924355 6
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... their numinous aura. As Pope Gregory the Great remarked in his instructions of 601 for the Christian conversion of England, people were more likely to worship in places with which they were already familiar: pagan idols had to be destroyed, but the temples themselves should be kept and converted to ...

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