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Appreciating Paisley

Charles Townshend, 22 January 1987

God save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism 
by Steve Bruce.
Oxford, 308 pp., £15, November 1986, 0 19 827487 4
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Children of Wrath: Political Violence in Northern Ireland 
by Michael MacDonald.
Polity, 194 pp., £19.50, September 1986, 0 7456 0219 3
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... by the absurd photograph on Bruce’s dust-wrapper – rather than of preachers like Henry Cooke and ‘Roaring’ Hugh Hanna, men outside the establishment, is symptomatic of the distortion. In fact, liberals would certainly be happier with Paisley if he were a politician bent on power and thus forced to battle, and compromise, for mainstream ...

The Braver Thing

Christopher Ricks, 1 November 1984

T.S. Eliot 
by Peter Ackroyd.
Hamish Hamilton, 400 pp., £12.50, September 1984, 0 241 11349 0
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Recollections Mainly of Artists and Writers 
by Geoffrey Grigson.
Chatto, 195 pp., £12.50, September 1984, 0 7011 2791 0
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... gayer than his reputation, actually singing “Frankie and Johnny”.’ Frankie and Johnny, or Tom and Viv? He was her man, but he done her wrong? The marketers of Ackroyd’s book have done both him and Eliot wrong in sensationalising it. The new Vanity Fair, which unlike the old one is not a magazine for which a T.S. Eliot would write, announced its ...

Doubling the Oliphant

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, 7 September 1995

Mrs Oliphant: ‘A Fiction to Herself’ 
by Elisabeth Jay.
Oxford, 355 pp., £25, February 1995, 0 19 812875 4
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... implement’. In an obituary note written after she finally succumbed to colon cancer in 1897, Henry James paid characteristically equivocal tribute to this most prolific of women writers: ‘from no individual perhaps had the great contemporary flood received a more copious treatment.’ His obituary hovered between contempt for helpless female fecundity ...

Head in an Iron Safe

David Trotter: Dickens’s Tricks, 17 December 2020

The Artful Dickens: Tricks and Ploys of the Great Novelist 
by John Mullan.
Bloomsbury, 428 pp., £16.99, October 2020, 978 1 4088 6681 8
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... full of as ifs.’ There are apparently 266 in Great Expectations alone. Where George Eliot and Henry James used analogy to guide interpretation of what a character might be thinking or feeling, in Dickens it is always a performance on the author’s part, a conjuring of unlikely associations (he was a gifted amateur magician). Mullan, however, rightly ...

Gentlemen and ladies came to see the poet’s cottage

Tom Paulin: Clare’s anti-pastoral, 19 February 2004

John Clare: A Biography 
by Jonathan Bate.
Picador, 650 pp., £25, October 2003, 0 330 37106 1
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‘I Am’: The Selected Poetry of John Clare 
edited by Jonathan Bate.
Farrar, Straus, 318 pp., $17, November 2003, 0 374 52869 1
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John Clare, Politics and Poetry 
by Alan Vardy.
Palgrave, 221 pp., £45, October 2003, 0 333 96617 1
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John Clare Vol. V: Poems of the Middle Period 1822-37 
edited by Eric Robinson, David Powell and P.M.S. Dawson.
Oxford, 822 pp., £105, January 2003, 0 19 812386 8
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... business partner James Hessey gave a dinner for him, at which Clare met and became friends with Henry Cary, whose translation of Dante he draws on in ‘To the Snipe’. A week after returning to Helpston, he married Patty Turner, who was pregnant. An announcement of the wedding was placed in the London Magazine, and Hessey sent Clare a Cremona violin. When ...

Oh, you clever people!

Tom Crewe: The Unrelenting Bensons, 20 April 2017

A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain 
by Simon Goldhill.
Chicago, 337 pp., £24.50, October 2016, 978 0 226 39378 0
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... were rarely positive, and were often savage. The high watermark for criticism was set early by Henry James, a friend of the family, who was sent the handwritten first draft of Fred’s Dodo. His response is a small masterpiece of positive restraint: I am such a fanatic myself on the subject of form, style, the evidence of intention and meditation, of ...

Bush’s Choice

Tom Farer, 12 October 1989

... antagonism to Bush’s deliberate pace and prose. Like those establishment figures, epitomised by Henry Kissinger, who are the self-conscious heirs of the Anglo-European conservative tradition in foreign policy, with its emphasis on balance and order, liberal commentators were moved by a sensation of danger impending from a massive convulsion within the ...

A Tiny Sun

Tom Stevenson: Getting the Bomb, 24 February 2022

The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War 
by Fred Kaplan.
Simon and Schuster, 384 pp., £15, April 2021, 978 1 9821 0729 1
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The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution: Power Politics in the Atomic Age 
by Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press.
Cornell, 180 pp., £23.99, June 2020, 978 1 5017 4929 2
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... in Germany, Taiwan and South Korea.There were other ways of waging ‘limited war’. In 1957, Henry Kissinger argued for smaller, tactical nuclear weapons. Kaufmann and others pulled his argument apart by showing how easily the use of small nuclear weapons on the battlefield would escalate to full thermonuclear exchange. But this wasn’t enough to stop ...

‘This in no wise omit’

Tom Bingham: Habeas Corpus, 7 October 2010

Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire 
by Paul Halliday.
Harvard, 502 pp., £29.95, March 2010, 978 0 674 04901 7
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... they supervised imprisonment orders made anywhere, by anyone, for any reason.’ Chief Justice Sir Henry Montagu, writing in 1619, described habeas corpus as a ‘writ of the prerogative by which the king demands account for his subject who is restrained of his liberty’. It was a remedy developed, primarily, in the court of King’s (and ...

Diary

Tom Paulin: Trimble’s virtues, 7 October 2004

... into the mountain to pray, Himself, Alone.’ The title also reminded me of a revealing moment in Henry McDonald’s earlier biography (a mere 340 pages, published in 2000), when a friend describes bumping into Trimble in the law courts in Belfast on the day his divorce from his first wife was granted: ‘I remember being surprised to see him on his own. He ...

At the White House’s Whim

Tom Bingham: The Power of Pardon, 26 March 2009

... were also granted by authorities other than the Crown, a practice ended by statute in 1536, when Henry VIII obtained sole and exclusive authority ‘to pardon or remit any treasons, murders, manslaughters or any kinds of felonies’. By the time of the American Revolution, four features of the royal prerogative of pardon deserve mention. First, the reigning ...

Christian v. Cannibal

Michael Rogin: Norman Mailer and American history, 1 April 1999

The American Century 
by Harold Evans.
Cape, 710 pp., £40, November 1998, 0 224 05217 9
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The Time of Our Time 
by Norman Mailer.
Little, Brown, 1286 pp., £25, September 1998, 0 316 64571 0
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... in the emerging Cold War as against Japan in the World War Two endgame. He accuses Time editor Henry Luce, the man who coined the expression ‘the American century’, of proceeding in the manner of a Fascist in his role as leader of the post-World War Two pro-Nationalist China lobby. Although he sides with the United States in the Cold War, Evans comes ...

The Virtue of Incest

Marina Warner, 7 October 1993

Elizabeth’s Glass 
by Marc Shell.
Nebraska, 365 pp., £30.95, July 1993, 0 8032 4216 6
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... Maydeston.’ He thus contributes to the oratory of Protestant dissent which Ted Hughes and Tom Paulin have both evoked as a lost – or at least neglected – strand of the national tradition. Bale blazoned his desiderata as much as he reviled the objects of his contempt. The Princess Elizabeth embodied all he hoped for. In his Conclusion, she ...

White Peril

E.S. Turner: H. Rider Haggard, 20 September 2001

Diary of an African Journey (1914) 
by H. Rider Haggard.
Hurst, 345 pp., £20, August 2001, 1 85065 468 9
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... She composed his own epitaph, which was carved in black marble. It read: Here lie the Ashes of Henry Rider Haggard Knight Bachelor Knight of the British Empire Who with a Humble Heart Strove to Serve his Country Nothing there about his ripping yarns, the first of which had been hyped, in 1885, as ‘The Most Amazing Story Ever Written’. The ...

Killing Stripes

Christopher Turner: Suits, 1 June 2017

Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress 
by Anne Hollander.
Bloomsbury, reissue, 158 pp., £19.99, August 2016, 978 1 4742 5065 8
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The Suit: Form, Function and Style 
by Christopher Breward.
Reaktion, 240 pp., £18, May 2016, 978 1 78023 523 3
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... I went​ to Henry Poole & Co, the oldest tailor on Savile Row, for a fitting. Suits start at £5500, and I couldn’t afford to have one made, but the firm had agreed to teach me the principles of bespoke tailoring by measuring me for an invisible one, so I could at least engage in the fantasy: the emperor’s new clothes ...

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