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Into the Future

David Trotter: The Novel, 22 March 2007

The Novel: Vol. I: History, Geography and Culture 
edited by Franco Moretti.
Princeton, 916 pp., £65, June 2006, 0 691 04947 5
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The Novel: Vol. II: Forms and Themes 
edited by Franco Moretti.
Princeton, 950 pp., £65, June 2006, 0 691 04948 3
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... a migration to other continents, and exponential growth globally. The second volume opens with Thomas Pavel’s thoughtful and informative ‘historical morphology’ of the novel, from Heliodorus to Kafka, which describes a ‘confluence’ of different sub-genres (chivalric romance, elegy, pastoral, picaresque, novella) in 18th-century Britain (and to a ...

Reduced to Ashes and Rubbage

Jessie Childs: Civil War Traumas, 3 January 2019

Battle-Scarred: Mortality, Medical Care and Military Welfare in the British Civil Wars 
edited by David Appleby and Andrew Hopper.
Manchester, 247 pp., £80, July 2018, 978 1 5261 2480 7
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... into observations, experiments and improvements that helped save lives on the front line. Thomas Johnson, a royalist apothecary and botanist who died at the siege of Basing House in Hampshire, had been a great ‘herborizer’ before the war. He went on plant-hunting expeditions throughout England and Wales, and in 1633 edited John Gerard’s famous ...

Blood All Over the Grass

Ewan Gibbs: On the Miners’ Strike, 2 November 2023

Backbone of the Nation: Mining Communities and the Great Strike of 1984-85 
by Robert Gildea.
Yale, 469 pp., £25, August, 978 0 300 26658 0
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... order’. Gildea’s title gives us one of his own keywords: ‘backbone’. The Scottish miner Thomas Watson, when interviewed by Gildea, recalled his father often saying that ‘the miners are the backbone of the nation.’ Coal was central to the industrial economy, powering homes, factories, land and sea transport, steel production and electricity ...

You Have Never Written Better

Benjamin Markovits: Byron’s Editor, 20 March 2008

The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron 
edited by Andrew Nicholson.
Liverpool, 576 pp., £25, June 2007, 978 1 84631 069 0
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... next ten years firefighting the publication of pirated editions. (The poem mocks, among others, Thomas Moore, who became his friend, and the critic Francis Jeffrey, who became his champion.) He came back to London with two manuscripts in his luggage: Hints from Horace, a gentler sequel to English Bards, in which he leavens the satire with some literary ...

Wire him up to a toaster

Seamus Perry: Ordinary Carey, 7 January 2021

A Little History of Poetry 
by John Carey.
Yale, 303 pp., £14.99, March 2020, 978 0 300 23222 6
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... Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his account of R.S. Thomas as ‘primarily a religious poet, tormented by a sense of God’s absence, and berating his parishioners for using refrigerators, washing machines, and other modern evils’, or of air-headedness in his remark that Mrs Yeats’s ability to hear spirit ...

Whack-a-Mole

Rivka Galchen: Anti-Vax Sentiments, 27 January 2022

Stuck: How Vaccine Rumours Start – and Why They Don’t Go Away 
by Heidi Larson.
Oxford, 157 pp., £18.99, September 2020, 978 0 19 007724 2
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Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement 
by Jonathan Berman.
MIT, 277 pp., £25, September 2020, 978 0 262 53932 6
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... children’.In 2010, the disgraced (but still popular on the paid-lecture circuit) anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield visited the Somali community in Minnesota to expound his claims that the MMR vaccine causes autism in children. In the following years, vaccination rates in this group fell from more than 90 per cent to around 50 per cent. Researchers found that ...

Toshie Trashed

Gavin Stamp: The Glasgow School of Art Fire, 19 June 2014

... pioneer of modernism culminated in the publication in 1952 of a biography by the English architect Thomas Howarth, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Modern Movement. But to interpret his work in this light required a certain manipulation of the evidence. Shand, and others, deplored the feminine, decorative influence of Margaret’s ‘rather thin Aubrey ...

Cool Brains

Nicholas Guyatt: Demythologising the antebellum South, 2 June 2005

Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South 
by Michael O’Brien.
North Carolina, 1354 pp., £64.95, March 2004, 0 8078 2800 9
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... The Founding Fathers of the United States were mainly Southerners: between them, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison can take credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, winning the Revolutionary War, and preserving America’s independence through its turbulent early decades ...

Dream Leaps

Tessa Hadley: Alice Munro, 25 January 2007

The View from Castle Rock 
by Alice Munro.
Chatto, 349 pp., £15.99, November 2006, 0 7011 7989 9
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... the church is a powerful agent for change: Munro spends some pages on the life of the Reverend Thomas Boston, minister in the valley at the time James Laidlaw left it, writer of an autobiography and a book called Human Nature in Its Four-fold State. She suggests that the Laidlaw generations, with their determination to leave written records of their ...

I, Lowborn Cur

Colin Burrow: Literary Names, 22 November 2012

Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature 
by Alastair Fowler.
Oxford, 283 pp., £19.99, September 2012, 978 0 19 959222 7
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... he reveals his name, and even this arch literary empiricist curiously insists that his first name, Thomas (rather than his surname), is the real sign that he is a person of no nonsense: ‘You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all ...

‘My God was bigger than his’

Colin Kidd: The Republicans, 4 November 2004

The Right Nation: Why America Is Different 
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.
Allen Lane, 450 pp., £14.99, August 2004, 0 7139 9738 9
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Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet 
by James Mann.
Penguin, 448 pp., $16, September 2004, 0 14 303489 8
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Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image 
by David Greenberg.
Norton, 496 pp., £9.99, November 2004, 0 393 32616 0
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America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism 
by Anatol Lieven.
HarperCollins, 274 pp., £18.99, October 2004, 0 00 716456 4
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... ideological lineage going back to the Republican Party of the 1790s, a radical organisation led by Thomas Jefferson. The first party system gave way around 1830 to the battles of the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats. The emergence of today’s Republican Party during the 1850s as an open adversary of Southern ‘Slave Power’ and the advent of the Civil War ...

Shuffling off

John Sutherland, 18 April 1985

Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction 
by Garrett Stewart.
Harvard, 403 pp., £19.80, December 1984, 0 674 19428 4
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Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction 
by Barbara Hardy.
Owen, 215 pp., £12.50, January 1985, 9780720606119
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Language and Class in Victorian England 
by K.C. Phillipps.
Basil Blackwell in association with Deutsch, 190 pp., £19.50, November 1984, 0 631 13689 4
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... respectful attention to death and resurrection in the novelist’s work. Coincidentally, in 1982, Andrew Sanders’s Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist was published. Dickens was the subject of Garrett Stewart’s previous book, and is the main author discussed in Death Sentences. But his line is different from Sanders’s, who locates the Dickensian ...

Into the Gulf

Rosemary Hill, 17 December 1992

A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846 
by Alethea Hayter.
Robin Clark, 224 pp., £6.95, June 1992, 0 86072 146 9
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Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art 1700-1850 
edited by John Barrell.
Oxford, 301 pp., £35, June 1992, 9780198173922
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London: World City 1800-1840 
edited by Celina Fox.
Yale, 624 pp., £45, September 1992, 0 300 05284 7
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... which makes it useless as a work of reference. There is no overt theoretical line, and although Andrew Wilton returns fire from his footnotes on behalf of the ‘conventional’ art historians against the Barrellists, the book is in fact another, more coherent demonstration of the history of art as the history of more than art alone. Wilton’s essay on ...

Into Council Care

John Bayley, 6 July 1995

Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel 
by Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle.
Macmillan, 208 pp., £35, December 1994, 0 333 60760 0
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... keeping both convention and character at bay, leaving these threatening things to those who, like Thomas and Anna Quayne, Portia’s stepbrother and sister, have succumbed in the coldly defeated world of being themselves. To be young is to have none of the story – the stigmata – by which the adults are inexorably ‘placed’. For his elders, the amoral ...

On His Trapeze

Michael Wood: Roland Barthes, 17 November 2016

Barthes: A Biography 
by Tiphaine Samoyault, translated by Andrew Brown.
Polity, 586 pp., £25, December 2016, 978 1 5095 0565 4
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... an effect: that of what Barthes calls ‘festivity’. Two years after Barthes’s death, Chantal Thomas wrote very well of ‘the persistence of a theoretical desire progressively liberated from a concern with seriousness or consequence’. Does that sound frivolous? The concept of theoretical desire suggests a project that might be urgent, as well as ...

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