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Dining with Ivan the Terrible

Malcolm Gaskill: Seeking London’s Fortune, 8 February 2018

London’s Triumph: Merchant Adventurers and the Tudor City 
by Stephen Alford.
Allen Lane, 316 pp., £20, April 2017, 978 0 241 00358 9
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... forced loan on the Merchant Adventurers Company. By its terms, his fellow merchants would make the king solvent using the profits from their business in Antwerp. They complained, but in the end, they were according to Gresham ‘the great gainers’ from the arrangement. It was a masterstroke of financial wizardry. Gresham had the right credentials for this ...

Rough Trade

Steven Shapin: Robert Hooke, 6 March 2003

The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Strange and Inventive Life of Robert Hooke 1635-1703 
by Stephen Inwood.
Macmillan, 497 pp., £18.99, September 2002, 0 333 78286 0
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... world. Recognising that he could have IP with world-changing possibilities, Hooke went to see the King and asked him for a patent – that’s how you could secure your rights to IP in Restoration England, though it was more customary to work through Crown officials. Hooke gave the King an early version of his watch and ...

At the British Museum

Peter Campbell: John White’s New World, 5 April 2007

... for the delay). Raleigh’s attempts at colonisation followed hard on other ambitious voyages. Martin Frobisher thought he had found gold in the course of his 1576 search for the Northwest Passage. In 1578 he retraced his steps and brought home 1350 tons of ore from which ‘neither gold, silver nor any other metal could be drawn’. It was thrown away or ...

Pay me for it

Helen Deutsch: Summoning Dr Johnson, 9 February 2012

Samuel Johnson: A Life 
by David Nokes.
Faber, 415 pp., £9.99, August 2010, 978 0 571 22636 8
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Selected Writings 
by Samuel Johnson, edited by Peter Martin.
Harvard, 503 pp., £16.95, May 2011, 978 0 674 06034 0
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The Brothers Boswell: A Novel 
by Philip Baruth.
Corvus, 336 pp., £7.99, January 2011, 978 1 84887 446 6
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The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. 
by John Hawkins, edited by O.M. Brack.
Georgia, 554 pp., £53.50, August 2010, 978 0 8203 2995 6
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... the prompting of the popular press and an anonymous letter to Lord Bute led to a pension from the king in 1762. Too poor to complete his Oxford degree though more learned than his tutor, Johnson, like Richard Savage, his friend and the subject of his first biography, ‘having no profession, became by necessity an author’. Johnson begins his Life of ...

They were less depressed in the Middle Ages

John Bossy: Suicide, 11 November 1999

Marx on Suicide 
edited by Eric Plaut and Kevin Anderson, translated by Gabrielle Edgcomb.
Northwestern, 152 pp., £11.20, May 1999, 0 8101 1632 4
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Suicide in the Middle Ages, Vol I: The Violent Against Themselves 
by Alexander Murray.
Oxford, 510 pp., £30, January 1999, 0 19 820539 2
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A History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture 
by Georges Minois, translated by Lydia Cochrane.
Johns Hopkins, 420 pp., £30, December 1998, 0 8018 5919 0
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... a ditch as having fallen off a log. In either case the suicide’s property will be saved from the King. We can, Murray says, sometimes catch suicide ‘in the act of running away’. The juicier stories come from France, like that of Philippe Testard, a mad merchant who kept giving his money away and once, at the elevation of the Host in the Mass, lifted up ...

The Great NBA Disaster

John Sutherland, 19 October 1995

... Amis seemed shrewdly chosen to forestall the ‘Lord Archer wins the lottery’, ‘lucky Stephen King’, or ‘not more cash for Martin’ reactions. Conservative values and Good English (virtues that Sir Kingsley and the Times share) would be the prime beneficiaries of the shattered book agreement. Inside, the op-ed page ...

Mingling Freely at the Mermaid

Blair Worden: 17th-century poets and politics, 6 November 2003

The Crisis of 1614 and the Addled Parliament: Literary and Historical Perspectives 
edited by Stephen Clucas and Rosalind Davies.
Ashgate, 213 pp., £45, November 2003, 0 7546 0681 3
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The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair 1603-60 
by Alastair Bellany.
Cambridge, 312 pp., £45, January 2002, 0 521 78289 9
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... politicians mingled freely at the Mitre and Mermaid clubs and at the taverns associated with them. Martin Butler has demonstrated the prominence of playgoing in the shaping and sustaining of the political outlook of the Caroline gentry. Beneath that social level, as one would never guess from the standard social histories of the period, huge audiences watched ...

Possible Enemies

M.A. Screech, 16 June 1983

Collected Works of Erasmus. Vol. V: The Correspondence of Erasmus 
edited by Peter Bietenholz, translated by R.A.B Mynors.
Toronto, 462 pp., £68.25, December 1979, 0 8020 5429 3
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Collected Works of Erasmus. Vol. XXXI: Adages Ii 1 to Iv 100 
edited by R.A.B. Mynors, translated by Margaret Mann Phillips.
Toronto, 420 pp., £51.80, December 1982, 0 8020 2373 8
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Le Disciple de Pantagruel 
edited by Guy Demerson and Christiane Lauvergnat-Gagnière.
Nizet, 98 pp.
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... up into rival groups. Lefèvre d’Etaples’s Biblical studies won him the support of the French King’s sister, Margaret, and ought to have made him a natural ally of Erasmus. He was soon at Erasmus’s throat. I ‘treat Christ with contumely’, Erasmus exploded. He picked over Lefèvre’s worst insults in a letter addressed to Guillaume Budé (who had ...

Brush for Hire

Eamon Duffy: Protestant painting, 19 August 2004

The Reformation of the Image 
by Joseph Leo Koerner.
Reaktion, 494 pp., £29.95, April 2004, 1 86189 172 5
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... in the very notion of a Reformation image. The movement of religious protest inaugurated by Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517 quickly targeted the veneration of images as a damnable superstition, the idolatrous confusion of gross matter with an invisible God who was pure and eternal spirit. The 15th century had seen a great flowering of the visual ...

Love with Time Let in

Barbara Everett: ‘The Winter’s Tale’, 8 January 2004

... as detached narrative, in Court prose) but to the revival of Hermione and her coming-home to the King’s embrace.Myth-making or myth-finding has its own seasonal designs on the play. It leans, that is to say, too heavily on time as a circumstance outside the self. Early in Cymbeline, Posthumus, exiled in Rome, is asked what he will do to help himself, and ...

State of the Art

John Lanchester, 1 June 1989

Manchester United: The Betrayal of a Legend 
by Michael Crick and David Smith.
Pelham, 246 pp., £14.95, May 1989, 0 7207 1783 3
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Football in its Place: An Environmental Psychology of Football Grounds 
by David Canter, Miriam Comber and David Uzzell.
Routledge, 173 pp., £10.95, May 1989, 0 415 01240 6
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... manager is stated rather than evoked, so that at times the portrait of Saint Matt the philosopher-king grows dark with excessive bright. There is no glimpse of the man wondered at by Eamon Dunphy: The great thing about Busby was that you would go in to see him full of demands. And he would give you nothing at all. He might even take a tenner off your ...

Chinaberry Pie

D.A.N. Jones, 1 March 1984

Modern Baptists 
by James Wilcox.
Secker, 239 pp., £7.95, January 1984, 9780436570988
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Speranza 
by Sven Delblanc, translated by Paul Britten Austin.
Secker, 153 pp., £7.95, February 1984, 9780436126802
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High Spirits 
by Robertson Davies.
Penguin, 198 pp., £2.50, January 1984, 0 14 006505 9
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Hanabeke 
by Dudley St John Magnus.
Angus and Robertson, 133 pp., £6.95, January 1984, 0 207 14565 2
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Train to Hell 
by Alexei Sayle.
Methuen, 152 pp., £7.95, February 1984, 0 413 52460 4
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The English Way of Doing Things 
by William Donaldson.
Weidenfeld, 229 pp., £7.95, January 1984, 0 297 78345 9
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... they make rather an unfair sort of comedy team. Not Hope-Crosby, nor Abbott-Costello, more like Martin-Lewis. As his initials suggest, F.X. is the son of a Roman Catholic mother and he is (by Tula Springs standards) almost as slick and Italianate as Dean Martin – ‘Hey, brothers, pour the wine!’ – while Bobby ...

Cinders

Ian Hamilton, 21 October 1982

Women Working: Prostitution Now 
by Eileen McLeod.
Croom Helm, 177 pp., £6.95, August 1982, 0 7099 1717 1
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An English Madam: The Life and Work of Cynthia Payne 
by Paul Bailey.
Cape, 166 pp., £7.50, October 1982, 0 224 02037 4
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All the Girls 
by Martin O’Brien.
Macmillan, 268 pp., £7.95, October 1982, 0 333 31099 3
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... cut corners. I’m surprised that no one’s thought of it before. Norman Fowler, please note. Martin O’Brien is exactly the sort of Jack-my-lad who would have been barred from Cynthia Payne’s premises. In All the Girls he sets off round the world (or parts of the world) with unlimited funds and a grimly limited mission: he will sample whatever ...

Cheering us up

Ian Jack, 15 September 1988

In for a Penny: The Unauthorised Biography of Jeffrey Archer 
by Jonathan Mantle.
Hamish Hamilton, 264 pp., £11.95, July 1988, 0 241 12478 6
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... assessing the colour problem of the South, but hints at his opinion of the situation by regarding Martin Luther King and the late President Kennedy as his two idols. Whilst in his final year, Archer led a small demonstration against the final quashing of the death sentence appeal made by Carl [sic] Chessman. It was a move ...

Posties

Richard Rorty, 3 September 1987

Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen 
by Jürgen Habermas.
Suhrkamp, 302 pp., £54, February 1985, 3 518 57702 6
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... superficial dreamers – people like Edward Bellamy, Henry George, H.G. Wells, Michael Harrington, Martin Luther King. These are the people who dangle carrots before democratic societies by suggesting concrete ways in which things might get better – become more democratic, fairer, more open, more egalitarian, more ...

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