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Wicked Converse

Keith Thomas: Bewitched by the Brickmaker, 12 May 2022

The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World 
by Malcolm Gaskill.
Allen Lane, 308 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 0 241 41338 8
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... to him in the night on the bed and sucked him.’ She even searched his body for the devil’s mark when he was asleep. Convinced that her husband had murdered their son Samuel by witchcraft, in order to make her work longer hours, she had no inhibition about publicising her fears. Parsons did nothing to allay the mounting suspicion. Reluctant to settle a ...

Diary

Marina Warner: Why I Quit, 11 September 2014

... the world to rural Essex, a place with a long history of boat-building and Dionysiac boho revels: Francis Bacon, John Deakin and ‘Dicky’ Chopping, who made a fortune designing the dust jackets for James Bond books, all drank in the Rose & Crown on the quayside at Wivenhoe. Constable condensed the dominant myth of the English countryside in his painting of ...

Rub gently out with stale bread

Adam Smyth: The Print Craze, 2 November 2017

The Print Before Photography: An Introduction to European Printmaking 1550-1820 
by Antony Griffiths.
British Museum, 560 pp., £60, August 2016, 978 0 7141 2695 1
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... but they also remind us that ‘character’ means both personality, and, in its original sense, a mark impressed, engraved or otherwise made on a surface: a brand or stamp or cut. Peter Simon’s engraving of Fuseli’s ‘The Enchanted Island Before the Cell of Prospero’ for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (1797). The Compleat Drawing-Book is an ...

The People’s Goya

Nicholas Penny: A Fascination with Atrocity, 23 September 2004

Goya 
by Robert Hughes.
Harvill, 429 pp., £25, October 2003, 1 84343 054 1
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... a true believer. All the same, like many who have written about Goya (notable examples are Francis Klingender in Goya in the Democratic Tradition and Fred Licht in Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art), Hughes argues that Goya is in some ways our contemporary; or that he was, at least, the first modern artist. Not unexpectedly, it is Goya as a ...

In the Hothouse

Peter Howarth: Swinburne, 8 November 2018

21st-Century Oxford Authors: Algernon Charles Swinburne 
edited by Francis O’Gorman.
Oxford, 722 pp., £95, December 2016, 978 0 19 967224 0
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... the growing thunder yearns/With hot swift pulses all the silence burns.’ In the last poem in Francis O’Gorman’s Oxford edition, ‘The Transvaal’ (1899), republican freedom is still under attack and Swinburne is still fuming: ‘Patience, long sick to death, is dead,’ it begins. ‘Too long/Have sloth and doubt and treason bidden us be/What ...

Memories of Catriona

Hilary Mantel, 6 February 2003

... I was wary of the trap that seemed ready to spring. I was ambitious, on my own account, to make a mark on the world. I didn’t want to carry someone else’s thwarted expectations. If I failed to make something of myself, wouldn’t I heap my frustration onto my daughter? And she, in the course of time, onto her daughter? When is it a woman’s turn, I ...

Beyond Textualism

Christopher Norris, 19 January 1984

Text Production 
by Michael Riffaterre, translated by Terese Lyons.
Columbia, 341 pp., $32.50, September 1983, 0 231 05334 7
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Writing and the Experience of Limits 
by Philippe Sollers, edited by David Hayman, translated by Philip Barnard.
Columbia, 242 pp., $31.50, September 1983, 0 231 05292 8
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The Reach of Criticism: Method and Perception in Literary Theory 
by Paul Fry.
Yale, 239 pp., £18, October 1984, 0 300 02924 1
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Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism 
by Paul de Man, edited by Wlad Godzich.
Methuen, 308 pp., £7.50, November 1983, 0 416 35860 8
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Displacement: Derrida and After 
edited by Mark Krupnick.
Indiana, 198 pp., £9.75, December 1983, 0 253 31803 3
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Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre 
by Susan Rubin Suleiman.
Columbia, 299 pp., £39, August 1983, 0 231 05492 0
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... level. This move ‘from mimesis to semiosis’ – from naive to sophisticated reading – is the mark of a genuinely ‘literary’ response. From there it is a matter of going on to recognise that details which lack ‘motivation’ in straightforward mimetic terms may take on a high charge of meaning as elements in the complex textual weave. This is what ...

Frocks and Shocks

Hilary Mantel: Jane Boleyn, 24 April 2008

Jane Boleyn: The Infamous Lady Rochford 
by Julia Fox.
Phoenix, 398 pp., £9.99, March 2008, 978 0 7538 2386 6
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... and Anne Boleyn’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. Arrests took place in the first week of May: of Mark Smeaton, a court musician, and a number of gentlemen close to the king. George Boleyn was one of them. Along with the queen, the suspects were sent to the Tower, and a trial process set in motion. In the end, five men, including George, were charged with ...

Friend or Food?

Alexander Bevilacqua, 14 December 2023

The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 
by Marcy Norton.
Harvard, 419 pp., £33.95, January, 978 0 674 73752 5
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The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding and Race in the Renaissance 
by Mackenzie Cooley.
Chicago, 353 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 226 82228 0
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... 16th-century trainer Federico Grisone, the horse was ‘a thing of worth beyond any might and a mark of honour above all other marks’. Not only was it the most expensive domesticated animal kept at court, it was also essential to warfare. The designations cavaliere, chevalier and caballero in Italian, French and Spanish respectively identified nobility or ...

To litel Latin

Tom Shippey, 11 October 1990

Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age 
by J.W. Binns.
Francis Cairns Press, 761 pp., £75, July 1990, 0 905205 73 1
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... be easier to read. One of Binns’s innumerable sidelights is his reminder of the existence of Sir Francis Kynaston’s translation of Chaucer, the Amorum Troili et Creseidae libri duo priores angli-co-latini, published with a facing-page text of Thynne, dedicated to the Royal Librarian, and beginning: Dolorem Troili duplicem narrare, ‘The double sorwe of ...

A Mistrust of Thunder and Lightning

Jeremy Waldron: Hobbes, 20 January 2000

Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes 
by Quentin Skinner.
Cambridge, 477 pp., £15.95, July 1997, 0 521 59645 9
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... and Quintilian. We follow the rise of the Christian Grand Style in Renaissance Europe, we ponder Francis Bacon’s thesis of the colours of good and evil, we trace the slow movement of the study of human memory from rhetoric to medical science in the late 16th century, and we learn about the importance for irony of ‘drawing the lippe awry, or shrinking up ...

Public Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre, 18 February 1982

Explaining America: The ‘Federalist’ 
by Garry Wills.
Athlone, 286 pp., £14.50, August 1981, 0 485 30003 6
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James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition 
by David Hoeveler.
Princeton, 374 pp., £13.70, June 1981, 0 691 04670 0
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... suggest, although no more than that, that he takes the end of the 18th-century Enlightenment to mark the demise of public virtue as an effective republican ideal. But in fact there were important features of American public life in the first half of the 19th century which sustained the ideal of public virtue even if in somewhat impoverished forms. Madison ...

Return of Oedipus

Stephen Bann, 4 March 1982

Dissemination 
by Jacques Derrida.
Athlone, 366 pp., £25, December 1981, 0 485 30005 2
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... carry to an extreme the balance between citation and commentary which is the distinguishing mark of the learned article or critical review. Nevertheless the balance has not yet been tipped irretrievably towards citation, as in Glas (1974). Nor has the spatio-temporal unity of the book been sacrificed to the deceptively casual journal or ...

I even misspell intellectual

Rupert Thomson: Caroline Gordon v. Flannery O’Connor, 2 April 2020

The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon 
edited by Christine Flanagan.
Georgia, 272 pp., £31.95, October 2018, 978 0 8203 5408 8
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... it wrong most of the time.’ O’Connor’s best-known characters – Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, Francis Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away – are embodiments of that predicament or struggle. They wander in a wilderness of the spirit. They are in a constant and desperate search for grace. Here is Tarwater, towards the end of the novel:He remained ...

Anarchist Typesetters

Adam Mars-Jones: Hernan Diaz, 20 October 2022

Trust 
by Hernan Diaz.
Riverhead, 405 pp., £16.99, August, 978 1 5290 7449 9
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... be expected, at a period in American literary history when Sinclair Lewis had already made his mark. It would have been a shrewder move to present Bonds only in extracts, as Ida reads them to understand what Bevel wants from her (this is where the story proper gets going anyway), rather than starting the book with an uncontextualised slab of prose that ...

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