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Bereft and Beruffed

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare’s Last Plays, 6 June 2019

Shakespeare’s Lyric Stage: Myth, Music and Poetry in the Last Plays 
by Seth Lerer.
Chicago, 276 pp., £20.50, November 2018, 978 0 226 58254 2
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... the 20-year-old actor Gabriel Spencer instead of being killed by him), but Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by ...

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 ...

Knights of the Road

Tom Clark: The Beat generation, 6 July 2000

This is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris 
by James Campbell.
Vintage, 320 pp., £7.99, May 2000, 0 09 928269 0
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... the 1960s on the last page of Campbell’s hard-eyed reconstruction of the legend, ‘and I am King of the Universe.’ When we met in England, Ginsberg had abdicated another impromptu throne, as King of the May (Kral Majales) in Prague. He had been expelled for taking off his clothes during a reading to his student ...

In-Betweeners

Malcolm Gaskill: Americans in 16th-Century Europe, 18 May 2023

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe 
by Caroline Dodds Pennock.
Weidenfeld, 302 pp., £22, January, 978 1 4746 1690 4
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... in Plymouth and travelled to London. With her came her husband, the English tobacco planter John Rolfe, and several members of her Native American family. Done up in embroidered silks and Flemish lace, she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in fact, a princess, however much ...

Was Ma Hump to blame?

John Sutherland: Aldous Huxley, 11 July 2002

Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual 
by Nicholas Murray.
Little, Brown, 496 pp., £20, April 2002, 0 316 85492 1
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The Cat's Meow 
directed by Peter Bogdanovich.
April 2002
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... signals the critical thrust of Murray’s book. He opposes the ‘new orthodoxy’ expounded by John Carey in his 1992 polemic, The Intellectuals and the Masses. This biography aims to vindicate Huxley as a humane thinker and artist rather than the crypto-fascist, eugenicist, public-school snob, or (in later life) the ‘fully fledged, fuzzy-brained ...

Out of Ottawa

John Bayley, 21 November 1991

By Heart. Elizabeth Smart: A Life 
by Rosemary Sullivan.
Lime Tree, 415 pp., £17.99, October 1991, 0 413 45341 3
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... girlhood’; in 1937 they were absorbed, both in London and Ottawa, in the preparations for King George VI’s coronation. Elizabeth – ‘all pink and white and golden’, as Ritchie remembered her – was much more enthusiastic than her sister Jane, an unimpressed aggressive girl who resented the flummery and chiefly remembered not having been able ...

Whip, Spur and Lash

John Ray: The Epic of Gilgamesh, 2 September 1999

The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation 
by Andrew George.
Allen Lane, 225 pp., £20, March 1999, 0 7139 9196 8
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... To a modern reader, this sounds like a cop-out, rather like Nahum Tate’s attempt to rewrite King Lear with a happy ending. Some of the ancient audience may have felt the same, though most might simply have savoured the irony, since they knew all along what the fate of Gilgamesh would be. Others might have reflected that it was better to be judged in the ...

Lights by the Ton

John Sturrock: Jean Echenoz, 18 June 1998

Lake 
by Jean Echenoz, translated by Guido Waldman.
Harvill, 122 pp., £8.99, June 1998, 1 86046 449 1
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Un An 
by Jean Echenoz.
Minuit, 111 pp., frs 65, September 1997, 2 7073 1587 7
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... to its own fictiveness, and revealing itself as the deceitful handiwork of fabulists like the mad King Boris, who is heard stamping about overhead in one of Robbe-Grillet’s own earliest fictions. As the author of novels that wouldn’t dream of pretending to be other than fictional, Echenoz is heir to that progressive line of thought, even if, diffident ...

A Chance for the Irish Right

John Horgan, 21 April 1983

The Irish Labour Party in Transition 1957-82 
by Michael Gallagher.
Manchester, 326 pp., £19.50, January 1983, 0 7190 0866 2
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... parties (one composed, paradoxically, of ‘independents’), both swearing allegiance to King Hassan, and a tiny socialist party on the fringe of political life. Elsewhere in Africa you will find, without searching too hard, countries in which national liberation continues – long after it has been achieved – to provide the chief focus for ...

Seeing Things

John Bayley, 18 July 1996

The World, the World 
by Norman Lewis.
Cape, 293 pp., £18.99, April 1996, 0 224 04234 3
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Omnibus: ‘A Dragon Apparent’, ‘Golden Earth’, ‘A Goddess in the Stones’ 
by Norman Lewis.
Picador, 834 pp., £9.99, January 1996, 0 330 33780 7
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... would have been drawn to this nondescript patch of water by legends concerned with a divine king or a god. Here there is nothing, no legends, no history, no creative essences in the water that can cure sickness of body and mind. In India the pond would have been ringed by hucksters, half-naked holy men smeared with ashes, epileptics, sellers of fake ...

Haleking

John Bossy: Simon Forman, 22 February 2001

The Notorious Astrological Physician of London: Works and Days of Simon Forman 
by Barbara Howard Traister.
Chicago, 260 pp., £19, February 2001, 0 226 81140 9
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Dr Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician 
by Judith Cook.
Chatto, 228 pp., £18.99, January 2001, 0 7011 6899 4
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... form of prayer, invented in early medieval monasteries and much cultivated by the laity, like King Richard III, in the 15th century. Forman’s practice of this old-fashioned kind of prayer is the best guide we have to the kind of Christian he was. Not, by the exacting standards of the seminary priests of his time, any kind of Catholic, or he wouldn’t ...

Behind the Sandwall

Jeremy Harding: Morocco’s Shame, 23 February 2006

Endgame in the Western Sahara: What Future for Africa’s Last Colony? 
by Toby Shelley.
Zed, 215 pp., £16.95, November 2004, 1 84277 341 0
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... formidable ally with ample weapons stocks, which nursed a long-standing animosity, reciprocated by King Hassan II and his government, towards the largely pro-Western monarchy on its western border. East Timor and Western Sahara are post-colonial narratives in the proper sense; and how badly they read. General Franco’s death followed within a year and a half ...

Devil take the hindmost

John Sutherland, 14 December 1995

Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy 
by Patrick Parrinder.
Liverpool, 170 pp., £25, July 1995, 0 85323 439 6
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The History of Mr Wells 
by Michael Foot.
Doubleday, 318 pp., £20, October 1995, 0 385 40366 6
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A Modern Utopia 
by H.G. Wells, edited by Krishan Kumar.
Everyman, 271 pp., £5.99, November 1994, 0 460 87498 5
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... he opted for schemes that make us shudder today.’ At the same time as Coren’s assault, John Carey in The Intellectuals and the Masses branded Wells an inveterate despiser of the common man. All in all, 1992 was a bad year for the Wellsian cause. Coren’s book was dealt with in this paper by Patrick Parrinder (8 April 1993). Parenthetically ...

Shriek of the Milkman

John Gallagher: London Hawking, 2 November 2023

Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London 
by Charlie Taverner.
Oxford, 256 pp., £30, January, 978 0 19 284694 5
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... the Victorian city. But not everything had moved on since the 16th-century martyrologist John Foxe described the only lights on London Bridge and some of the capital’s streets as coming from the candles of costermongers trading along the way. For a long time, even as London changed, hawkers traversed the city and fed its residents in ways that kept ...

Antigone in middle age

Peter Parsons, 21 August 1980

... who rules in their native Thebes; in the battle, the brothers kill one another; Creon, the next king, orders that Eteocles be buried as a hero, Polynices left unburied as a traitor; Antigone, the sister of the dead men, defies the order and symbolically buries Polynices; Creon condemns her to an underground prison; there she hangs herself, and Creon’s son ...

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