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What is there to celebrate?

Eric Foner: C. Vann Woodward, 20 October 2022

C. Vann Woodward: America’s Historian 
by James Cobb.
North Carolina Press, 504 pp., £39.50, October, 978 1 4696 7021 8
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... his presidential address to criticism of Black studies. Coming a year after the assassination of Martin Luther King, the title of his lecture, ‘Clio with Soul’, seemed condescending to Black historians. He warned white scholars against aligning with this ‘fashionable cause’ and advised the ‘brother in ...

Help yourself

Malcolm Bull: Global Justice, 21 February 2013

On Global Justice 
by Mathias Risse.
Princeton, 465 pp., £27.95, October 2012, 978 0 691 14269 2
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... making the world as a whole more just. ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’ Martin Luther King said. Although he uses the quotation, Risse can’t possibly agree, for in his view ‘domestic justice and global justice have different standards’: what is unjust on one ground may be just on another, and ...

Got to go make that dollar

Alex Abramovich: Otis Redding, 3 January 2019

Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life 
by Jonathan Gould.
Crown, 544 pp., £12.99, May 2018, 978 0 307 45395 2
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... on Sam and Dave, the studio’s breadwinners now that Redding was gone. Then, in April 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated a few miles away at the Lorraine, a motel which had been a safe haven for Stax musicians. ‘That was the turning point,’ Steve Cropper’s musical partner, Booker T. Jones, told ...

In America’s Blood

Deborah Friedell, 24 September 2020

The NRA: The Unauthorised History 
by Frank Smyth.
Flatiron, 295 pp., $28.99, March 2020, 978 1 250 21028 9
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... legally, on state capitols with loaded shotguns. The NRA has taken to honouring the birthday of Martin Luther King because, before he became America’s most famous proponent of non-violence, he had once been denied a gun permit in Alabama, and so, according to NRA logic, was actually a ‘victim of gun control’ when he ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’, 22 April 2021

... Shaka King’s​ Judas and the Black Messiah (available on Amazon Prime) leaves us in no doubt as to who is the more interesting character. This preference is obscured (or perhaps highlighted) by the fact that the actors playing the two parts (LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya) have both been nominated as ‘best supporting actor’ at this year’s Oscars, as if there were no main role, or it might be dangerous to say which it is ...

Holy Relics

Alan Milward, 3 April 1986

Selling Hitler: The story of the Hitler Diaries 
by Robert Harris.
Faber, 402 pp., £10.95, February 1986, 0 571 13557 9
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... the plausibility of the whole story diminished. Their genuineness had been confirmed to him by Martin Bormann. By the time of the publication he had paid at least £130,000 to meet Bormann, who was commuting between Argentina, Egypt, Paraguay, Spain and Switzerland. The difficult circumstances of Bormann’s life always made the meeting impossible, yet ...

Gobblebook

Rosemary Hill: Unhappy Ever After, 21 June 2018

In Byron’s Wake: The Turbulent Lives of Lord Byron’s Wife and Daughter 
by Miranda Seymour.
Simon and Schuster, 560 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 1 4711 3857 7
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Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist 
by Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin and Adrian Rice.
Bodleian, 128 pp., £20, April 2018, 978 1 85124 488 1
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... as anachronistic. In their brief, well-illustrated and lucid account of her career, Hollings, Martin and Rice all firmly distance themselves from any aspirations to ‘relevance’ as might be implied by the book’s presentation, while Seymour, who gives a less detailed account of the mathematics, offers an illuminating view of the ...

Close Shaves

Gerald Hammond, 31 October 1996

Thomas Cranmer: A Life 
by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
Yale, 692 pp., £29.95, May 1996, 0 300 06688 0
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... personal danger, and even when times were good his reforming zeal was always constrained by the King’s theological conservatism. With Henry’s death, the close shaves were apparently over and Cranmer could at last begin to build a truly reformed Church under the new Josiah, Edward VI, with the aim, as MacCulloch repeatedly documents, of making England ...

Flat-Nose, Stocky and Beautugly

James Davidson: Greek Names, 23 September 2010

A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names. Vol. V.A Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia 
edited by T. Corsten.
Oxford, 496 pp., £125, March 2010, 978 0 19 956743 0
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... by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in ...

Diary

Patrick Mauriès: Halfway between France and Britain, 3 November 1983

... like some pop-star badge, an enamel medallion exhibiting a boar – the emblem of her favourite king. To my regret, I could not make out whether she was also wearing the ring and bracelet which usually go with the medallion. Reality had outdone fiction. This little Tube scene I shall always retain as the epitome of a certain vision of Britain today – a ...

In the Twilight Zone

Terry Eagleton, 12 May 1994

The Frankfurt School 
by Rolf Wiggershaus, translated by Michael Robertson.
Polity, 787 pp., £45, January 1994, 0 7456 0534 6
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... There was once a king who was troubled by all the misery he observed about him. So he summoned his wise men and commanded them to inquire into its causes. The wise men duly looked into the matter, and reported back to the king that the cause of all the misery was him. So runs Bertolt Brecht’s parable of the founding in 1923 of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, a centre for Marxist studies endowed by a wealthy German capitalist ...

Builder of Ruins

Mary Beard: Arthur Evans, 30 November 2000

Minotaur: Sir Arthur Evans and the Archaeology of the Minoan Myth 
by J.A. MacGillivray.
Cape, 313 pp., £20, August 2000, 0 224 04352 8
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... excavations had long suggested was the location of prehistoric Knossos, in legend the city of King Minos, Princess Ariadne and the murderous minotaur in its labyrinth. Others had tried to get their hands on the place; Schliemann himself had made a half-hearted attempt to acquire it in the 1880s, boasting that with a hundred men he could excavate it in a ...

Collapses of Civilisation

Anthony Snodgrass, 25 July 1991

Centuries of Darkness 
by Peter James.
Chatto, 434 pp., £19.99, April 1991, 9780224026475
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... methods is a separate issue. Four years ago, in another revolutionary work, Black Athena, Martin Bernal argued that outsiders have been responsible for most fundamental challenges to disciplines. The first interesting point about this book is that its origins are of a quite different kind. Peter James is a graduate student of University College London ...

Diary

Hilary Gaskin: From Nuremberg to the Gulf, 25 April 1991

... Brudno, Smith Brookhart, Nick Doman, Benjamin Ferencz, Whitney Harris, Charles Horsky, Henry King, Daniel Margolies and Walter Rockler, and they had all been prosecuting lawyers at the Nuremberg Trial and Subsequent Proceedings in 1945-9. Their audience was just as extraordinary: over a hundred men and women who had been ...

Dining with Ivan the Terrible

Malcolm Gaskill: Seeking London’s Fortune, 8 February 2018

London’s Triumph: Merchant Adventurers and the Tudor City 
by Stephen Alford.
Allen Lane, 316 pp., £20, April 2017, 978 0 241 00358 9
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... forced loan on the Merchant Adventurers Company. By its terms, his fellow merchants would make the king solvent using the profits from their business in Antwerp. They complained, but in the end, they were according to Gresham ‘the great gainers’ from the arrangement. It was a masterstroke of financial wizardry. Gresham had the right credentials for this ...

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