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Mercenary Knights and Princess Brides

Barbara Newman: Medieval Travel, 17 August 2017

The Medieval Invention of Travel 
by Shayne Aaron Legassie.
Chicago, 287 pp., £22, April 2017, 978 0 226 44662 2
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... In​ the Middle Ages,’ Shayne Aaron Legassie writes, ‘travel was nasty, brutish and long.’ Before planes, railways or steamships, it was inseparable from its etymological twin, travail – both derived from the name of an ancient Roman instrument of torture. Peregrinus, the medieval term for a ‘pilgrim’ or ‘traveller’, in classical Latin meant an ‘exile’ or ‘alien ...

Carved into the Flesh

Barbara Newman: Medieval Bodies, 11 October 2018

Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages 
by Jack Hartnell.
Wellcome, 346 pp., £25, March 2018, 978 1 78125 679 4
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... For​ medievalists, the bodily turn has had a profound impact not just on the histories of medicine and sexuality, as one would expect, but also on those of art, religion and ideas. Thirty-five years or so after the body emerged as a newly problematic category, an entity with a tangled history or a rebellious subaltern that had finally found its voice, ‘medieval bodies’ have become such a rich field of inquiry that Jack Hartnell can use them to ground a History of Everything for the common reader: ‘life, death and art in the Middle Ages ...

‘Kek kek! kokkow! quek quek!’

Barbara Newman: Chaucer’s Voices, 21 November 2019

Chaucer: A European Life 
by Marion Turner.
Princeton, 599 pp., £30, April 2019, 978 0 691 16009 2
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... Every age​ creates its own Chaucer. For Eustache Deschamps, a contemporary, he was the ‘grant translateur’. For Hoccleve, a disciple, he was ‘my deere maistir’ and ‘the firste fyndere [inventive poet] of our fair langage’. The 15th century revered him for his eloquence, while the 20th century gave us many Chaucers: genial naif, apostle of courtly love, austere Augustinian moralist, sycophantic courtier, ironist and, not least, duelling misogynist and feminist versions ...

Seven Centuries Too Late

Barbara Newman: Popes in Hell, 15 July 2021

Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy 
by Guy Raffa.
Harvard, 370 pp., £28.95, May 2020, 978 0 674 98083 9
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Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante 
by David Bowe.
Oxford, 225 pp., £60, November 2020, 978 0 19 884957 5
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Dante’s Christian Ethics: Purgatory and Its Moral Contexts 
by George Corbett.
Cambridge, 233 pp., £75, March 2020, 978 1 108 48941 6
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Why Dante Matters: An Intelligent Person’s Guide 
by John Took.
Bloomsbury, 207 pp., £20, October 2020, 978 1 4729 5103 8
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Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Literature, Doctrine, Reality 
by Zygmunt Barański.
Legenda, 658 pp., £75, February 2020, 978 1 78188 879 7
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... In​ one of the most poignant moments of Dante’s Commedia, the exiled poet anticipates his triumphant return to Florence:Should it ever come to pass that this sacred poem,to which both Heaven and Earth have set their hand …should overcome the cruelty that locks me outof the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb …then …shall I return a poet and, at the fontwhere I was baptised, take the laurel crown ...

Christ in Purple Silk

Irina Dumitrescu: Medieval Selfhood, 2 March 2023

The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships 
by Barbara Newman.
Pennsylvania, 378 pp., £58, September 2021, 978 0 8122 5334 4
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... and not only because she appears, with perhaps feigned humility, as a mere ‘creature’. As Barbara Newman shows in her brilliant new book, medieval Christians understood themselves to be interconnected to an extent that would surprise many people today, at least in Western cultures. Their minds and hearts were legible to other people as well as to ...

Short Cuts

Rosemary Hill: What Writers Wear, 27 July 2017

... of life. She took considerable care about her own appearance but like most of the writers Terry Newman discusses in Legendary Authors and the Clothes They Wore (HarperCollins, £20), she was not interested in fashion per se. Her friend Madge Garland, who edited Vogue and later gave her advice on clothes, was astonished when she met Woolf for the first time ...

Across the Tellyverse

Jenny Turner: Daleks v. Cybermen, 22 June 2006

Doctor Who 
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Doctor Who: A Critical Reading of the Series 
by Kim Newman.
BFI, 138 pp., £12, December 2005, 1 84457 090 8
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... and monsters it’s quite impossible that I ever saw. ‘All lazy writing about Doctor Who,’ Kim Newman writes in his ‘critical reading’ of what he calls ‘the franchise’, ‘trades on the stereotypes of children watching “from behind the sofa”’ – exactly what I remember doing, though in our house we called it the settee. So do I really ...

She Who Can Do No Wrong

Jenny Turner, 6 August 1992

Curriculum Vitae 
by Muriel Spark.
Constable, 213 pp., £14.95, July 1992, 0 09 469650 0
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... frantically, sending out poem after poem, keeping critical projects on T.S. Eliot, Cardinal Newman and possibly the Book of Job all bubbling on the back-burner at the same time. Spark then became anorexic, using dexedrine as a substitute for regular meals. Her breakdown when it came appeared as a visitation from Eliot, whose poetry, Spark convinced ...

Through Plate-Glass

Ian Sansom: Jonathan Coe, 10 May 2001

The Rotters’ Club 
by Jonathan Coe.
Viking, 405 pp., £14.99, April 2001, 0 670 89252 1
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... a Colin, a Sheila, a Benjamin, a Paul and a Lois Trotter, a Bill; an Irene and Doug Anderton; Barbara, Sam and Philip Chase, Malcolm, Roy Slater, Sean Harding, Steve Richards, Culpepper, Cicely Boyd, Donald, Claire and Miriam Newman, and Mr Plumb. And these are only some of the speaking parts. To try to summarise the ...

Some Sad Turtle

Alison Light: Spinsters and Clerics, 29 July 2021

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym: A Biography 
by Paula Byrne.
William Collins, 686 pp., £25, April 2021, 978 0 00 832220 5
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... In the summer​ of 1934, after finishing her English degree at Oxford, Barbara Pym drafted a comic novel. Sending up her closest friends, she cast the arrogant fellow graduate she was in love with as a self-centred cleric, Archdeacon Hoccleve, given to complaining loudly about his wife and numbing his congregation with abstruse sermons ...

Superchild

John Bayley, 6 September 1984

The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. V: 1936-1941 
edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie.
Chatto, 402 pp., £17.50, June 1984, 0 7012 0566 0
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Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood 
by Angelica Garnett.
Chatto, 181 pp., £9.95, August 1984, 0 7011 2821 6
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... Pepys does that, and Rousseau, and Chateaubriand, and Stendhal in La Vie de Henri Brulard, and Newman and Ruskin and Hardy – all the way down to Anthony Powell in his Memoirs and the just published diaries of Barbara Pym. Indeed this contribution to the state of the art by a humbler sister in the fiction business ...

He-Said, They-Said

John Lanchester: Crypto Corruption, 2 November 2023

Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon 
by Michael Lewis.
Penguin, 255 pp., £35, October, 978 0 241 65111 7
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Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall 
by Zeke Faux.
Weidenfeld, 267 pp., £25, September, 978 1 3996 1134 3
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... of Tracts for the Times in 1833, grew in fame along with its great polemicist John Henry Newman, was denounced for being a semi-covert form of Roman Catholicism, and then suffered a colossal scandal in 1845 when Newman became the highest profile convert to Catholicism in the history of England, thus confirming what ...

It’s Modern but is it contemporary?

Hal Foster, 16 December 2004

... and climb to a great atrium, 110 feet high, punctuated by the huge Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman in the centre (it looks like a rusty exclamation point from God) and a panoramic Water Lilies by Monet on the wall opposite (unfortunately, it shrinks in this vast space). The second floor also contains the cavernous Contemporary Galleries, including a ...

This Singing Thing

Malin Hay: On Barbra Streisand, 12 September 2024

My Name Is Barbra 
by Barbra Streisand.
Century, 992 pp., £35, November 2023, 978 1 5291 3689 0
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... to set the record straight about ‘the diva myth that has followed me all my life’.She was born Barbara Joan Streisand in 1942 in Brooklyn. Her mother, Diana Rosen, was a gifted singer; Streisand never shook the feeling that her mother was jealous of her. When she was fifteen months old her father, Emanuel, died of a seizure at a summer camp in the ...

Things Ill-Done and Undone

Helen Thaventhiran: T.S. Eliot’s Alibis, 8 September 2022

Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’ 
by Robert Crawford.
Cape, 609 pp., £25, June, 978 0 224 09389 7
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... a figure of primarily biographical interest (‘the “life” without the “literature”’, as Barbara Everett put it), there was a weary familiarity to discussions of the relation between his work and his biography. Without capitulating to the sensationalism of the romance plot, Crawford demonstrates that the letters refresh our sense of Eliot because ...

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