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Snakes and Leeches

Rosemary Hill: The Great Stink, 4 January 2018

One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Yale, 352 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 300 22726 0
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... accuracy or, as it seemed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, literalism; he complained to William Bell Scott that most of the Academy pictures that year were ‘done in prose’. But this was what the general art-viewing public of the mid-Victorian years liked, a picture with a story they could follow and explain to one another. Not that it had to be a nice ...

Oh, the curse!

David Runciman: A home run, 19 February 2004

Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball 
by Stephen Jay Gould.
Cape, 342 pp., £16.99, January 2004, 0 224 05042 7
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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game 
by Michael Lewis.
Norton, 288 pp., $24.95, June 2003, 0 393 05765 8
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... be hugely valuable. Just how valuable it has proved to one team in particular is the subject of Michael Lewis’s fascinating Moneyball. Lewis’s book tells the recent history of the Oakland Athletics, one of the worst supported and least affluent teams in major league baseball. Most of the time, the order in which teams finish the regular season ...

What I heard about Iraq in 2005

Eliot Weinberger: Iraq, 5 January 2006

... American network television for two months. During those two months, ABC news had 121 stories on Michael Jackson and 42 stories on Natalee Holloway, a high-school student who disappeared from a bar while on holiday in Aruba. CBS news had 235 stories about Michael Jackson and 70 about Natalee Holloway. I heard that in the ...

Why the Tories Lost

Ross McKibbin, 3 July 1997

... for openness since his heart was seemingly not in it. The Government’s behaviour towards the Scott Report was the best but not the only example of this. At the centre of the Thatcher-Major Conservative Party’s ideology lay a profound ambiguity of purpose which in retrospect will probably seem its most interesting feature. One powerful impulse behind ...

Self-Made Women

John Sutherland, 11 July 1991

The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present 
edited by Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy and Patricia Clements.
Batsford, 1231 pp., £35, August 1990, 0 7134 5848 8
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The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel 
by Richard Altick.
Ohio State, 854 pp., $45, March 1991, 0 8142 0518 6
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... was forced out of the ministry for trading and promptly went bankrupt. As Ruth First and Ann Scott tell us in their 1980 biography of Schreiner, this catastrophe ‘scattered the children and marked the end of the family home’. It seems, on the face of it, as noteworthy as the maternal spanking. The Companion is similarly silent about Olive’s ...

Fundamental Brainwork

Jerome McGann, 30 March 2000

Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Collected Writings 
edited by Jan Marsh.
Dent, 531 pp., £25, November 1999, 0 460 87875 1
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Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Painter and Poet 
by Jan Marsh.
Weidenfeld, 592 pp., £25, November 1999, 0 297 81703 5
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... as well as a popular audience created and nourished by many cultural entrepreneurs. As with Walter Scott and so many others, that success and influence would eventually count against Rossetti. Anglo-American Modernists took much from the Aesthetic Movement that they did not always acknowledge, but Rossetti’s pre-eminent status almost demanded that his work ...

New-Model History

Valerie Pearl, 7 February 1980

The City and the Court 1603-1643 
by Robert Ashton.
Cambridge, 247 pp., £10.50, September 1980, 0 521 22419 5
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... but which have been familiar to historians since the days of S.R. Gardiner and W.R. Scott. While the incidents do not themselves amount to ‘irrefutable proof’, the author tells us, they do suggest that such incessant attacks ‘alienated’ the city fathers and caused them to enter into an alliance with the Parliamentary leaders. Since the ...
Northern Antiquity: The Post-Medieval Reception of Edda and Saga 
edited by Andrew Wawn.
Hisarlik, 342 pp., £35, October 1994, 1 874312 18 4
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Heritage and Prophecy: Grundtvig and the English-Speaking World 
edited by A.M. Allchin.
Canterbury, 330 pp., £25, January 1994, 9781853110856
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... Thesaurus of the Northern languages, but again did not pick up popularity till after Walter Scott. ‘Valkyries’ were introduced to English by Gray in 1768, closely followed by Percy’s translation of the Swiss professor Paul-Henri Mallet’s Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens Scandinaves. But ...

No Clapping

Rosemary Hill: The Bloomsbury Memoir Club, 17 July 2014

The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club 
by S.P. Rosenbaum, edited by James Haule.
Palgrave, 203 pp., £20, January 2014, 978 1 137 36035 9
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... details of outer and inner life. Boswell was Strachey’s heroic alter ego, whom he admired, as Michael Holroyd wrote, ‘for all the qualities they did not share’ and also as an ur-Bloomsbury épateur of literary and social convention. It would be difficult, Strachey thought, to find ‘a more shattering refutation of the lessons of cheap morality than ...

Defanged

Eric Foner: Deifying King, 5 October 2023

King: The Life of Martin Luther King 
by Jonathan Eig.
Simon & Schuster, 669 pp., £25, May, 978 1 4711 8100 9
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... on his wife, who was aware of at least some of the affairs. Eig devotes more attention to Coretta Scott King than previous biographers, emphasising that she was an anti-racist radical in her own right. It tells us something about life in the Jim Crow South that although she was the daughter of a successful Black businessman she grew up in a home in rural ...

Do Anything, Say Anything

James Meek: On the New TV, 4 January 2024

Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television 
by Peter Biskind.
Allen Lane, 383 pp., £25, November, 978 0 241 44390 3
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... Bushnell, Sex and the City’s creator and its second lead writer were gay men, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, prompting one of the Girls cast, Jemima Kirke, to say of Dunham’s series: ‘It’s not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended ...

Watch this man

Pankaj Mishra: Niall Ferguson’s Burden, 3 November 2011

Civilisation: The West and the Rest 
by Niall Ferguson.
Allen Lane, 402 pp., £25, March 2011, 978 1 84614 273 4
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... Buchanan is nervous about other upstarts rising out of nowhere to challenge the master race. Scott Fitzgerald based Goddard, at least partly, on Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, the author of the bestseller The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920). Stoddard’s fame was a sign of his times, of the overheated racial climate of the early ...

‘The Meeting of the Waters’

John Barrell, 27 July 2017

... of the Greta and the Tees on the Rokeby estate in Teesdale, thought to have been named by Walter Scott after the song of that title by the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore. This was then the only place I knew of so named. Next came a beautiful lake at Killarney which turned out to be called the Meeting of the Waters; again, it’s believed, at ...

Where are we now?

LRB Contributors: Responses to the Referendum, 14 July 2016

... David Runciman, Neal Ascherson, James Butler, T.J. Clark, Jonathan Coe, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Daniel Finn, Dawn Foster, Jeremy Harding, Colin Kidd, Ross McKibbin, Philippe Marlière, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Jan-Werner Müller, Susan Pedersen, J.G.A. Pocock, Nick Richardson, Nicholas Spice, Wolfgang Streeck, Daniel TrillingDavid RuncimanSo who​ is to blame? Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude ...

Browning and Modernism

Donald Davie, 10 October 1991

The Poems of Browning. Vol. I: 1826-1840 
edited by John Woolford and Daniel Karlin.
Longman, 797 pp., £60, April 1991, 0 582 48100 7
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The Poems of Browning. Vol. II: 1841-1846 
edited by John Woolford and Daniel Karlin .
Longman, 581 pp., £50, April 1991, 9780582063990
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... in Notes and Queries for 1952, that the source for Browning’s ‘Cavalier Tunes’ was in Walter Scott’s Woodstock. And this raises the possibility – very unlikely, I think – that Pound drew directly on Scott without needing Browning as intermediary. However, Pound was a very bookish poet, as Browning was also. In ...

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