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Bastard Foreigners

Michael Dobson: Shakespeare v. the English, 2 July 2020

Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness 
by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton.
Cambridge, 245 pp., £75, October 2019, 978 1 108 49373 4
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... Both are defeated over the course of the play, and its happy ending celebrates Cymbeline’s wise decision that Britain should remain part of the Roman Empire.Shakespeare doesn’t go out of his way to make the English national character sound very appealing either. The gravedigger in Hamlet suggests that if the distracted Danish prince doesn’t recover ...

Ich dien

Michael Neill: Shakespeare and the Servants, 22 October 2009

Shakespeare, Love and Service 
by David Schalkwyk.
Cambridge, 317 pp., £50, June 2008, 978 0 521 88639 0
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... wonderment and awe that precipates his final submission. (‘How fine my master is! … I’ll be wise hereafter/And seek for grace.’) The result, Schalkwyk suggests, is that ‘the player has it both ways,’ so that the play can trade ‘on the continuing significance of costume as political reality’ even as the action exposes its theatrical ...

Much to be endured

D.J. Enright, 27 June 1991

Samuel Johnson in the Medical World: The Doctor and the Patient 
by John Wiltshire.
Cambridge, 293 pp., £30, March 1991, 0 521 38326 9
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... one, & blister another, & be very useful, tho’ I believe disagreeable to all’. ‘Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind’ describes the best clinical care that most people could hope for, particularly at a time when traditional lore, empirical practice and scientific theory co-existed and intermingled. Wiltshire rightly devotes close attention to the poem ...

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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... Projects Committee, which had nominal powers to dispense tiny sums to popular forms of art. Michael Astor and I spent much time examining claims on these funds, mostly on behalf of projects the Chairman knew a priori to be rubbish. He was never to be found, as we were, along with Coldstream and Hugh Willatt, the Secretary-General, penetrating the ...

Diary

Jenny Diski: On Meeting the Creatives, 22 February 1996

... macro world of the individual in daily life. But it’s so attractive to feel in the know brain-wise. Questioned about his theories, Guntern explains to me that, yes, it is true that brain research is in a very uncertain infancy, but we must use whatever tools we can in order to intervene in the disastrous conduct of modern life and to save companies which ...

Reading the Bible

John Barton, 5 May 1988

The Literary Guide to the Bible 
edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode.
Collins, 678 pp., £20, December 1987, 0 00 217439 1
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... control of the conventions he uses than St Paul, and the single essay on the Pauline Epistles, by Michael Goulder, does full justice to the Apostle’s originality, and his ability to outsmart his opponents by mobilising the rhetorical devices of his day. With the Gospels, the interplay of individual literary skill and the dictates of literary convention are ...

Romantic Ireland

Denis Donoghue, 4 February 1982

The Collected Stories of Sean O’Faolain: Vols I and II 
Constable, 445 pp., £8.50, October 1980, 0 00 946330 5Show More
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... as if his first experiences were definitive and could only be lost if pestered by later matters. Michael MacLaverty, a gifted and largely forgotten writer, nearly broke my heart with a beautiful book, Lost Fields, one of the first books that I recall caring for. But again, he stayed where he started: perhaps the experience of childhood and boyhood was too ...

Diary

Clive James, 20 May 1982

... space it buys While everyone who’s got a job forgets Roy Jenkins once was roughly twice as wise A Chancellor as is Sir Geoffrey Howe – A fact she’d rather like suppressed just now. The Peace of Bishop Stortford and Howe’s Budget – In each case the effect might not be meant, But if it’s by the outcome that you judge it You must ascribe it ...

The Fred Step

Anna Swan: Frederick Ashton, 19 February 1998

Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton 
by Julie Kavanagh.
Faber, 675 pp., £12.99, October 1997, 0 571 19062 6
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... but Ashton’s young male lovers. Among the most influential of these dancer-lovers was Michael Somes, who, with Alexander Grant and Brian Shaw, remained loyal throughout hit career. Somes was a charismatic leading man, and partner to Fonteyn. There were inevitable jealousies within the company when Somes – at 17 – was given leading roles, but ...

Black Electricities

John Sutherland, 30 October 1997

The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. Vol. XXV: January-December 1850 
edited by Clyde de L. Ryals and K.J. Fielding.
Duke, 364 pp., £52, September 1997, 0 8223 1986 1
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Reminiscences 
by Thomas Carlyle, edited by K.J. Fielding and Ian Campbell.
Oxford, 481 pp., £7.99, September 1997, 0 19 281748 5
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... the Law of the World, for you and for all men; to be servants, the more foolish of us to the more wise. The difficulty with Carlyle’s racism is that it cannot be smoothed away as being merely to do with the Zeitgeist. ‘Servantship’ and ‘Hierarchy’ – the eternal subordination of the brawny masses to the brainy minority – are fundamental to his ...

After Hartlepool

James Butler, 3 June 2021

... to some strategic nationalisation. As well as sounding eerily like Labour, there are shades of Michael Heseltine, a reminder that Johnson once described his own politics as ‘a Brexity Hezza’. And we shouldn’t imagine that Houchen lifts phrases only from the Labour right. In a recent piece for the website Conservative Home, he envisions the ...

Lucky Kim

Christopher Hitchens, 23 February 1995

The Philby Files. The Secret Life of the Master Spy: KGB Archives Revealed 
by Genrikh Borovik, edited by Phillip Knightley.
Little, Brown, 382 pp., £18.99, September 1994, 0 316 91015 5
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The Fifth Man 
by Roland Perry.
Sidgwick, 486 pp., £16.99, October 1994, 0 283 06216 9
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Treason in the Blood: H. St John Philby, Kim Philby and the Spy Case of the Century 
by Anthony Cave Brown.
Hale, 640 pp., £25, January 1995, 9780709055822
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My Five Cambridge Friends 
by Yuri Modin.
Headline, 328 pp., £17.99, October 1994, 0 7472 1280 5
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Looking for Mr Nobody: The Secret Life of Goronwy Rees 
by Jenny Rees.
Weidenfeld, 291 pp., £18.99, October 1994, 0 297 81430 3
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... history. On the only occasion that I knowingly met a Cambridge spy, I broached the same question. Michael Straight, a distinguished East Coast American liberal and publisher (he had run the New Republic during the queasy years of McCarthy, and if exposed during that period could have helped discredit a cause larger than himself in much the same way as the ...

Mad Doings in Trade

Anatole Kaletsky, 21 June 1984

The World’s Money: International Banking from Bretton Woods to the Brink of Insolvency 
by Michael Moffitt.
Joseph, 284 pp., £9.95, February 1984, 0 7181 2414 6
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International Debt and the Stability of the World Economy 
by William Cline.
MIT, 134 pp., £5.10, September 1983, 0 262 53048 1
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Managing Global Debt 
by Richard Dale and Richard Mattione.
Brookings, 50 pp., October 1983, 0 8157 1717 2
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... looking for juicy yarns. This is why a racy, readable, gossipy book like The World’s Money by Michael Moffitt (himself an adviser to Shearson American Express, a subsidiary of one of the big lenders) is worth a whole stack of official reports, particularly to policy-makers, who have to deal constantly with markets but often have no idea of what they ...

‘I’m coming, my Tetsie!’

Freya Johnston: Samuel Johnson’s Shoes, 9 May 2019

Samuel Johnson 
edited by David Womersley.
Oxford, 1344 pp., £95, May 2018, 978 0 19 960951 2
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... born in the 17th century, probably did not mean she thought Johnson ‘reasonable; judicious; wise’ (this definition of sensible is censured as an example of ‘low conversation’ in his Dictionary of the English Language). The thing most likely to have struck her was how easily and strongly his feelings were affected. ‘It was a love-match on both ...

Casuistries of Peace and War

Perry Anderson: The assumptions the Bush Administration and its critics share, 6 March 2003

... doctrine of Just and Unjust Wars, as set out by a distinguished philosopher of the American Left, Michael Walzer, in a work glowingly evoked by the still more eminent liberal philosopher John Rawls, in his aptly entitled The Law of Peoples. Indeed in attacking Iraq, we will be doing no more than completing the vital preventive strike against the Osirak ...

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