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Who was he?

Charles Nicholl: Joe the Ripper, 7 February 2008

The Fox and the Flies: The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath 
by Charles van Onselen.
Cape, 672 pp., £20, April 2007, 978 0 224 07929 7
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... Jewish suspects were John Pizer, a shoemaker known as ‘Leather Apron’; Severin Klosowski alias George Chapman; Michael Ostrog, described by a police investigator as ‘a mad Russian doctor and convict, and unquestionably a homicidal maniac’; and Joseph Isaacs. A few brief sightings of the Ripper, of varying reliability, concur in certain aspects: a man ...

The Big Con

Pankaj Mishra, 4 May 2023

... by Nazism and culpable in Gandhi’s 1948 assassination.† The defamation campaign against George Soros and the conspiracy-fuelled crackdown on India’s leading think tank, the Centre for Policy Research, are only the latest in a series of measures – bribing opposition politicians to defect; unleashing mobs to attack opponents on the streets and on ...

Hooted from the Stage

Susan Eilenberg: Living with Keats, 25 January 2024

Keats: A Brief Life in Nine Poems and One Epitaph 
by Lucasta Miller.
Vintage, 357 pp., £12.99, April 2023, 978 1 5291 1090 6
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Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse 
by Anahid Nersessian.
Verso, 136 pp., £12.99, November 2022, 978 1 80429 034 7
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... he was for complicated reasons penniless and in practical terms homeless. His surviving brother, George, who would die of intestinal tuberculosis two decades later, was in America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been ...

Darwin among the Gentry

Adrian Desmond, 23 May 1985

The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. Vol. I: 1821-1836 
edited by Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith.
Cambridge, 702 pp., £30, March 1985, 0 521 25587 2
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The Survival of Charles Darwin: A Biography of a Man and an Idea 
by Ronald Clark.
Weidenfeld, 449 pp., £14.95, April 1985, 0 297 78377 7
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... dirty smokey London’. He took tea with the Lyells (good science guaranteed no entrée here: George Busk was excluded on account of his wife’s rank). With characteristic diffidence Darwin saw himself as ‘only a sort of Jackall, a lions provider’: but lions like Sedgwick and Lyell were roaring approval at the Cambridge Philosophical and gentlemanly ...

How was it for you?

David Blackbourn, 30 October 1997

Man Without a Face: The Memoirs of a Spymaster 
by Markus Wolf and Anne McElvoy.
Cape, 367 pp., £17.99, June 1997, 0 224 04498 2
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The File: A Personal History 
by Timothy Garton Ash.
HarperCollins, 227 pp., £12.99, July 1997, 0 00 255823 8
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... where he worked for the German-language radio service and first met future GDR leaders like Walter Ulbricht. After 1945, a job at the Soviet-controlled Berlin Radio was followed by a posting to Moscow as a member of the new East German diplomatic corps, until he was ordered back to East Berlin to work in the fledgling intelligence service. He became its ...

Tankishness

Peter Wollen: Tank by Patrick Wright, 16 November 2000

Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine 
by Patrick Wright.
Faber, 499 pp., £25, October 2000, 0 571 19259 9
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... on the SS Lapland. When they arrived they were tested on a field rented by one of the Committee, Walter Gordon Wilson, a specialist in gearboxes and a brilliant mechanical engineer. Swinton had the initial vision: Wilson made it into reality. In June 1915 Swinton, still unaware of the existence of the Landships Committee, wrote a lengthy memorandum entitled ...

Family Stories

Patrice Higonnet, 4 August 1994

The Past in French History 
by Robert Gildea.
Yale, 416 pp., £30, February 1994, 0 300 05799 7
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La Gauche survivra-t-elle aux socialistes? 
by Jean-Marie Colombani.
Flammarion, 213 pp., frs 105, March 1994, 2 08 066953 2
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... One would like to know more also about the para-political myths of rural and urban life (George Sand and Flaubert) or the Walter Benjamin myth of Paris as the capital of the 19th century. Gildea ends his account on a happy note: French political myths of both Left and Right are, he thinks, alive and ...

A Potent Joy

E.S. Turner, 4 July 1985

Hitler’s Rockets: The Story of the V-2s 
by Norman Longmate.
Hutchinson, 423 pp., £13.95, May 1985, 0 09 158820 0
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... the launching-sites had been destroyed or over-run and the two evil geniuses of the V-2, General Walter Dornberger and Werner von Braun, were relaxing at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, cosseted and well-fed by the Americans, who lost no time in rushing them to the United States to further the science of rocketry. (If V-weapons had rained on New York and the British ...

Old Western Man

J.I.M. Stewart, 18 September 1980

C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences 
edited by James Como.
Collins, 299 pp., £6.95, August 1980, 9780002162753
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... a rowing boat among battleships’; or that taking up some obscure and unfortunate critic of Sir Walter Scott is ‘like reading a review by a jackal of a book written by a lion’; or that an error into which he fell in the course of his recovering the faith of a Christian was the persuasion that he could no more ‘meet’ God than Hamlet could meet ...

Weeding in the Nude

Ange Mlinko: Edna St Vincent Millay, 26 May 2022

Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St Vincent Millay 
edited by Daniel Mark Epstein.
Yale, 390 pp., £28, March, 978 0 300 24568 4
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... to one another – Browning, Tennyson, Dickens – as others embroidered, or they’d take Sir Walter Scott on ‘tramps’ through the mountains. For entertainment, there were church socials, dance halls, Firemen’s Balls, the Glee Club, community players: ‘I am going to play Susie in “Triss”, and we had a rehearsal tonight … I have the stage all ...

Taking sides

Karl Miller, 17 April 1980

W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet 
by Charles Osborne.
Eyre Methuen, 336 pp., £7.95, March 1980, 0 413 39670 3
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... National Endowment for the Arts): the other appointments announced on the same day were those of Walter Gropius to the committee on architecture and Basil Rathbone to the drama committee.’ The next page proceeds in the same vein: ‘At the end of the year, Auden was one of four new members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters: announcing ...

Offered to the Gods

Frank Kermode: Sacrifice, 5 June 2008

Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera 
by Derek Hughes.
Cambridge, 313 pp., £45, October 2007, 978 0 521 86733 7
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... and discounted. The mere thought of Frazer prompts unavoidable and dismissive allusions to George Eliot’s Casaubon and his ‘Key to All Mythologies’, a ‘beguiling and age-old obsession’ that obviously must be resisted. When Frazer, dealt with at the outset, turns up again in his proper historical situation (along with Nietzsche, Marcel ...

Is it always my fault?

Denis Donoghue: T.S. Eliot, 25 January 2007

T.S. Eliot 
by Craig Raine.
Oxford, 202 pp., £12.99, January 2007, 978 0 19 530993 5
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... with many names, different names for a familiar compound ghost.’ One of those names might be Walter Pater. In his essay on Coleridge, Pater referred to ‘that inexhaustible discontent, languor and homesickness . . . the chords of which ring all through our modern literature’. Eliot quoted those words in his essay on ‘Arnold and Pater’, only to ...

But this is fateful!

Theo Tait: Jonathan Lethem, 16 March 2017

The Blot: A Novel 
by Jonathan Lethem.
Cape, 289 pp., £16.99, February 2017, 978 0 224 10148 6
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The Blot 
by Jonathan Lethem and Laurence Rickels.
Anti-Oedipus, 88 pp., £6.99, September 2016, 978 0 9905733 7 1
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... in your hometown’. Stolarsky had idolised Bruno at school – he still calls him Flashman, after George MacDonald Fraser’s dashing anti-hero – and he and Tira seem immensely tickled to have run into him. Bruno suspects that they are swingers, and both hint repeatedly that there might be room in their open relationship for him. In his hour of need, they ...

Down the Telescope

Nicholas Penny: The Art of Imitation, 24 January 2019

Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War 
by Elizabeth Prettejohn.
Yale, 286 pp., £45, June 2017, 978 0 300 22275 3
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... we may wonder whether many people recognised it at the time. Prettejohn comes to it by way of Walter Pater’s essay on Giorgione of the same period, in which Legros is mentioned. Pater has never had a more careful and sympathetic reader or one better able to demonstrate how subtle and radical his ideas of influence and cultural inheritance were. Noting ...

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