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Horrors and Cream

Hugh Tulloch, 21 August 1980

On the Edge of Paradise 
by David Newsome.
Murray, 405 pp., £17.50, June 1980, 0 7195 3690 1
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... set reason against feeling and convention against homosexual impulse, but unlike the youthful Hugh Walpole (one of the earliest kittens to fluster Benson with his friskiness) or Eton masters like William Johnson Cory and Oscar Browning, his fear of sex was so great that he could keep his footing in the ‘precarious trade’ of schoolmastering and avoid that ...

Are you having fun today?

Lorraine Daston: Serendipidity, 23 September 2004

The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science 
by Robert Merton and Elinor Barber.
Princeton, 313 pp., £18.95, February 2004, 0 691 11754 3
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... On 28 January 1754, Horace Walpole coined a pretty bauble of a word in a letter to Horace Mann, apropos of a happy discovery made while browsing in an old book of Venetian heraldry: Mann had just sent him the Vasari portrait of the Grand Duchess Bianca Capello, and Walpole stumbled on the Capello coat of arms ...

‘Drown her in the Avon’

Colin Kidd: Catharine Macaulay’s Radicalism, 7 September 2023

Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings 
edited by Max Skjönsberg.
Cambridge, 312 pp., £24.99, March, 978 1 009 30744 4
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... figures who went on to play a leading role in the French Revolution, including Marat and Brissot. Horace Walpole, the Whig politician and man of letters, lauded her as ‘the female Thucydides’, though when she attacked his late father, the former prime minister Robert Walpole, he backtracked, deciding she was a ...

Blistering Attacks

Claude Rawson, 6 November 1980

The Oxford Book of Satirical Verse 
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Oxford, 454 pp., £8.50, September 1980, 0 19 214110 4
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... Swift at the Juvenalian pole of what Mr Grigson calls ‘those ancestral antipodes in satire, Horace and Juvenal’. There is little that is identifiably Juvenalian in Swift, though the myth to the contrary dies hard. Swift’s temperamental dislike of ‘lofty stiles’ was too well-developed to tempt him often into the majesties of ‘tragical ...

Just Sceaux Stories

Angelica Goodden, 23 February 1995

Madame du Deffand and Her World 
by Benedetta Craveri, translated by Teresa Waugh.
Halban, 481 pp., £20, November 1994, 1 870015 51 7
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Lettres à Voltaire 
by Madame du Deffand, edited by Chantal Thomas.
Rivages, 215 pp., frs 55, October 1994, 2 86930 839 6
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... and his cynicism matched her disillusion. Another worldling became even more important to her. Horace Walpole evidently grew concerned at the interpretations which society might put on this much older woman’s amitié amoureuse for him, and directed that she eventually destroy his letters. But hers to him remain, betraying something of the ...

Scribbling Rascal

Leslie Mitchell, 1 August 1996

John Wilkes 
by Peter D.G. Thomas.
Oxford, 280 pp., £25, March 1996, 0 19 820544 9
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... and Liberty’ was a powerful, unifying totem, but Wilkes the man set Radical against Radical. Horace Walpole presciently thought that by temperament he was a man who might be ‘dulled into prudence’. When he became an exemplary City magistrate, defending the Bank of England against the Gordon Rioters, there was little comment. When he became a ...

Mastering the Art of Understating Your Wealth

Thomas Keymer: The Tonsons, 5 May 2016

The Literary Correspondences of the Tonsons 
edited by Stephen Bernard.
Oxford, 386 pp., £95, March 2015, 978 0 19 870085 2
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... Finch and Jonathan Swift. His sumptuous editions of classical poets in Latin or English (Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius, Ovid, Virgil) cast reflected glory on his vernacular list. When an ambitious Oxford graduate called Basil Kennett told Tonson in 1696 that he felt ‘a higher respect than ever for Poetry and You’, it was as though poetry were now ...

Walking on Eyeballs

E.S. Turner: The history of gout, 7 January 1999

Gout: The Patrician Malady 
by Roy Porter and G.S. Rousseau.
Yale, 393 pp., £25, September 1998, 0 300 07386 0
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... It not only created fiery anguish in the big toe but caused a white precipitation at the knuckles. Horace Walpole wrote of ‘chalky rills running from the fingers’ and ‘a hail of chalkstones and liquid chalk’, as if from a burst pipe. The authors have spotted in a Sherlock Holmes story an old man ‘cram full of gout’ of whom it was said that he ...

A Stick on Fire

Gillian Beer, 7 February 1985

Clarkey: A Portrait in Letters of Mary Clarke Mohl 1793-1883 
by Margaret Lesser.
Oxford, 235 pp., £15, September 1984, 0 19 211787 4
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George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form 
by Suzanne Graver.
California, 340 pp., £22.70, August 1984, 0 520 04802 4
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... and valued friend of Voltaire, in England ‘a blind old woman is only a pitiable object’ and ‘Horace Walpole was in a ludicrous state of terror lest her letters should be seen, for he fancied people might think she was in love with him, forsooth.’In 1827 Mary Mohl was projecting ‘a history of women’, and was searching out material on ‘the ...

Disarming the English

David Wootton, 21 July 1994

To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right 
by Joyce Lee Malcolm.
Harvard, 232 pp., £23.95, March 1994, 0 674 89306 9
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... a mile from my own house after sunset without one or two servants with blunderbusses,’ wrote Horace Walpole in 1782. A footpad or a highwayman might be round any turn in the road. Highwaymen were proud to carry pistols because the pistol, like the sword, was a mark of status, but the pistols they carried were close-quarter weapons, to be thrust in ...

Nothing without a Grievance

P.D.G. Thomas: John Horne Tooke, 19 August 1999

Gentleman Radical: A Life of John Horne Tooke 1736-1812 
by Christina Bewley and David Bewley.
Tauris, 297 pp., £42, June 1998, 1 86064 344 2
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... of Commons, Horne astonished MPs by his respectful behaviour and respectable attire. According to Horace Walpole, he was ‘pale, but well made, and had a sensible countenance. He was neatly and decently dressed in grey. He spoke with affected respect, much deliberation and firmness.’ He was acquitted of contempt since there was no proof of his ...

Diary

Marc Weissman: Mysteries of the Russian Mind, 18 April 1985

... the Soviet public – though not equally well, of course. The Soviet period has seen editions of Horace Walpole, Ludwig Tieck, the brothers Brentano, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Charles Maturin, Jacques Casot, Novalis and others in a revised Russian translation. Although the editions were limited and the books were to become bibliographical rarities almost as soon ...

Boys wearing wings

Nicholas Penny, 15 March 1984

Caravaggio 
by Howard Hibbard.
Thames and Hudson, 404 pp., £22.50, May 1983, 0 500 09161 7
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Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting 
by S.J. Freedberg.
Harvard, 125 pp., £21.25, January 1983, 0 674 13156 8
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Domenichino 
by Richard Spear.
Yale, 382 pp., £75, November 1982, 0 300 02359 6
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... prospects of high art might be in any way connected with the priorities of evangelism. This was Horace Walpole, who whimsically hoped that the Methodists might ‘adopt the artifices of the Catholics’and ‘borrow the paraphernalia of enthusiasm now waning in Italy’. He was not thinking of waxwork horrors and saccharine sacré coeurs but of Raphael ...

The Sacred Sofa

E.S. Turner, 11 December 1997

The House of Lords: From Saxon Wargods to a Modern Senate 
by John Wells.
Hodder, 298 pp., £20, October 1997, 0 340 64928 3
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... he sat, the Lord Chief Justice, spectacles broken, ‘quivering like an aspen’ according to Horace Walpole, while his fellow peers, who had been torn from their chariots and chased over roofs, arrived ‘dis-wigged’ and debris-spattered; one had been relieved of his watch and a bishop had had his lawn sleeves ripped off. There, too, I would have ...

The water-doctors vanish

E.S. Turner: The social history of British spas, 4 June 1998

British Spas from 1815 to the Present Day: A Social History 
by Phyllis Hembry and Leonard Cowie.
Athlone, 292 pp., £50, June 1997, 0 485 11502 6
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... to be greeted by a peal on the abbey bells and qualified for a passing bell if things went ill. Horace Walpole said: ‘The English are like ducks; they are for ever waddling to the waters.’ That was in 1790. The English were about to undergo a collective change in behaviour: the waters to which they would increasingly waddle were the coastal ...

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