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Why did he not speak out?

Richard J. Evans: The Pope at War, 19 October 2023

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini and Hitler 
by David I. Kertzer.
Oxford, 621 pp., £25, November 2022, 978 0 19 289073 3
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... incurred a good deal of criticism. Particularly vocal was the British envoy to the Holy See, Francis d’Arcy Godolphin Osborne. Despite sharing some of the antisemitic prejudices of the British aristocracy, Osborne, a Protestant, was outraged by the Germans’ treatment of Jews. Appointed to his role in 1936, he became closely involved – under the ...

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 ...

Big Fish

Frank Kermode, 9 September 1993

Tell Them I’m on my Way 
by Arnold Goodman.
Chapmans, 464 pp., £20, August 1993, 1 85592 636 9
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Not an Englishman: Conversations with Lord Goodman 
by David Selbourne.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 237 pp., £17.99, August 1993, 1 85619 365 9
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... the account of it is inaccurate in almost every detail (old men forget), he warned me that Cecil King, because I declined to do something he asked of me, would make sure I’d never find another job in London. In fact, as I rightly supposed, Mr King, if ever he had any such intention, which is very doubtful, simply had not ...

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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... perhaps of ten thousand knew what right any man had to command him, or what necessity there was of King or Commonwealth.’ By the beginning of the war, Hobbes had done the analysis he thought necessary: he had rejected what he called the ‘Aristotelity’ he was taught at Oxford, he had embraced something like the Euclidean method for the human sciences, he ...

Foreigners

Denis Donoghue, 21 June 1984

Selected Essays 
by John Bayley.
Cambridge, 217 pp., £19.50, March 1984, 0 521 25828 6
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Collected Poems: 1941-1983 
by Michael Hamburger.
Carcanet, 383 pp., £12.95, March 1984, 9780856354977
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Poems: 1953-1983 
by Anthony Thwaite.
Secker, 201 pp., £8.95, April 1984, 0 436 52151 2
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... realia of the working day We care about, only because we know How poor the realm is, how mad our king. Getting from regalia to realia sharpens the otherwise too civic progress of speech, and allows the passage to settle upon the ballad-desolation of the mad king. Hamburger’s best poems are not immediacies: his common ...

Where am I?

Greg Dening, 31 October 1996

Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas 
by Neil Rennie.
Oxford, 330 pp., £35, November 1995, 0 19 811975 5
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... dimensions to Balboa’s claim five years later. Being a Portuguese in the service of a Spanish king, Magellan had the meridian of hemispheres running through his soul: the Tordesillas line, which divided the world between Spain and Portugal in the West, would divide it again in the East. But Magellan’s idea of a South Sea, which he (probably) called the ...

Maybe he made it up

Terry Eagleton: Faking It, 6 June 2002

The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature 
by Nick Groom.
Picador, 351 pp., £20, April 2002, 9780330374323
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... rather like the laws of physics. The mystery of the Universe’s origins is not so much how, pace King Lear, something could have come of nothing, since a random fluctuation in a quantum field might have popped an inflatable particle into fleeting existence, but rather where the quantum field itself might have come from. Or is to raise such a question merely ...

Further, Father, Further!

David A. Bell: ‘The Wanton Jesuit’, 17 November 2016

The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint: A Tale of Sex, Religion and Politics in 18th-Century France 
by Mita Choudhury.
Penn State, 234 pp., £43.95, December 2015, 978 0 271 07081 0
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... The archbishop of Paris fretted to the prime minister that it could lead to the beheading of the king, ‘as is done in England’. Until the 1750s, the quarrel excited considerably more attention in France than the writings of a few daring philosophes. By the time of the Girard-Cadière affair, the quarrel had become extremely unequal. The pope, the ...

Geraniums and the River

Nicholas Penny, 20 March 1986

The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers 
by T.J. Clark.
Thames and Hudson, 338 pp., £18, April 1985, 0 500 23417 5
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Cellini 
by John Pope-Hennessy.
Macmillan, 324 pp., £85, October 1985, 0 333 40485 8
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Alessandro Algardi 
by Jennifer Montagu.
Yale in association with the J. Paul Getty Trust, 487 pp., £65, May 1985, 0 300 03173 4
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... commentary on such sensational masterpieces as Cellini’s gold and enamel salt cellar made for Francis the First or his bronze Perseus with the decapitated Medusa (spurting stiff curls of blood) which has always stood in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. His book is sumptuously produced and (for the most part) superbly illustrated. But the publishers have ...

The Fog of History

Fredric Jameson: On Olga Tokarczuk, 24 March 2022

The Books of Jacob 
by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft.
Fitzcarraldo, 892 pp., £20, November 2021, 978 1 910695 59 3
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... the Messianic countdown itself: the time of waiting for the end time, or for Apocalypse, ‘a king on a white horse, riding into Jerusalem wearing gold armour, perhaps with an army, too, with warriors who would seize power alongside him and bring about the final order of the world’. Unless ‘the coming Messiah is a suffering, aching Messiah, trodden ...

Tolerant Repression

Blair Worden, 10 May 1990

Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal 
by Tom Mayer.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £32.50, April 1989, 0 521 36104 4
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Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII 
by Alistair Fox.
Blackwell, 317 pp., £35, September 1989, 0 631 13566 9
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The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Portraits at the Court of Henry VIII 
by Retha Warnicke.
Cambridge, 326 pp., £14.95, November 1989, 0 521 37000 0
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English Travellers Abroad 1604-1667 
by John Stoye.
Yale, 448 pp., £12.95, January 1990, 0 300 04180 2
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... were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.’ To the 17th-century republicans Edmund Ludlow and Algernon Sidney, Henry would be ‘that monster of mankind’, ‘one of the most violent princes we ever had’. To Bolingbroke in the 18th century, Henry’s would appear the most ‘severe’ of ...

Diary

Patricia Lockwood: When I Met the Pope, 30 November 2023

... ever seen. I text my friends a picture of it, to give them an idea of the infant’s proportions. King Baby, I call him, and steal looks at him throughout the flight; reassured, protected, in the presence of a monument.At the airport, I text my Lady’s Companion, my friend Hope. ‘Were you joking when you invited me to come with you to Rome?’ she wrote to ...

Seeing double

Patrick Hughes, 7 May 1987

The Arcimboldo Effect 
by Pontus Hulten.
Thames and Hudson, 402 pp., £32, May 1987, 0 500 27471 1
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... and a visual double meaning, where like objects are compared. In Winter, which is Arcimboldo’s King Lear, the decrepitude and decay we are seeing more of in the mirror on fine bright days is compared with the decrepitude and decay in a tree, another living body with a skin, and sinews, and growths, and sagging muscles. It is a most moving study of slow ...

English Protestantism

J.B. Trapp, 4 September 1980

Studies in the Reformation: Luther to Hooker 
by W.D.J. Cargill Thompson.
Athlone, 259 pp., £18, July 1980, 9780485111873
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... of the ecclesiastical courts. Since he urged that these courts be brought under the control of the King in Parliament, More had to tread warily. The great question of the English Reformation, the royal claim to be supreme head of the Church in England, was at issue. He knew what might be in store for him in this world, and he feared what might be his lot in ...

Washed and Spiced

Peter Bradshaw, 19 October 1995

The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture 
by Jonathan Sawday.
Routledge, 327 pp., £35, May 1995, 0 415 04444 8
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... 1957 exegesis of the monarch’s ‘two bodies’ and the political theology of the king’s person as an incarnation of the state. Recently, however, voices have been raised in dissent against the swollen ‘body’ industry, notably by Terry Eagleton, for whom the endless discussion of the body remains a tiresome and dubiously fruitful ...

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