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Forbidden to Grow up

Gabriele Annan: Ahdaf Soueif, 15 July 1999

The Map of Love 
by Ahdaf Soueif.
Bloomsbury, 529 pp., £18.99, June 1999, 0 7475 4367 4
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... romance. Anna’s anti-imperialism has to be gently expressed, but her first father-in-law, Sir Charles Winterbourne, has no inhibitions. She recounts his ‘tirade against the Empire – or rather, the spirit of Empire, for he is angered equally by the doings of Kitchener in South Africa, the King of the Belgians in the ...

Short Cuts

Jonathan Parry: Harry Goes Rogue, 6 February 2020

... provided a titillating soap opera centuries before the term was invented. Through the media, Charles and Di, the Queen Mum and Fergie, Wills and Harry have become familiar household presences. But though their personal foibles and imperfections have a fascination, we prefer most of the time an idealised rather than a mundane representation of daily ...

At the Queen’s Gallery

Brigid von Preussen: ‘Dressing the Georgians’, 29 June 2023

... rather than bloodstains. Fashions change, but monarchical regalia tends towards ossification: Charles III and Camilla left their coronation this year swathed in robes of ermine-trimmed purple, just as George III and his queen consort, Charlotte, did in 1761. Underneath her robes, Charlotte wore something more singular: her stomacher – the triangular ...

Picture in Little

Charles Nicholl: Hilliard’s Trajectory, 19 December 2019

Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist 
by Elizabeth Goldring.
Yale, 337 pp., £40, February 2019, 978 0 300 24142 6
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... in 1603, Hilliard remained famous and busy, but he was never quite at home in the Jacobean age. King James renewed his patent as the royal limner, and sat for him, but his Danish consort, Queen Anne, a more proactive patron, favoured Oliver; her passion for masques brought a new line of fantastically costumed court ladies into his repertoire. Oliver died in ...

Phattbookia Stupenda

Nicholas Spice, 18 April 1985

Illywhacker 
by Peter Carey.
Faber, 600 pp., £9.95, April 1985, 0 571 13207 3
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... bliss, Phoebe runs off with Horace the epileptic poet, abandoning Herbert with their two children, Charles and Sonia. Book Two moves forward to 1931. For seven years, Herbert has been bumming about Victoria, living with his kids in the back of a 1924 Dodge tourer, ‘writing bad cheques ... running raffles in pubs, buying stolen petrol, ransacking local tips ...

Base People in a Little Island

Clare Jackson: James I and Jahangir, 5 October 2023

Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire 
by Nandini Das.
Bloomsbury, 440 pp., £30, March, 978 1 5266 1564 0
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... tiers, and Roe remarked how ‘this sitting out hath so much affinity with a theatre … the king in his gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on.’ Two months earlier, Roe described a durbar held in Burhanpur by Jahangir’s son, Parvez, as being akin to ‘a great stage’, with Parvez seated like the ‘mock ...

Back to Runnymede

Ferdinand Mount: Magna Carta, 23 April 2015

Magna Carta 
by David Carpenter.
Penguin, 594 pp., £10.99, January 2015, 978 0 241 95337 2
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Magna Carta Uncovered 
by Anthony Arlidge and Igor Judge.
Hart, 222 pp., £25, October 2014, 978 1 84946 556 4
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Magna Carta 
by J.C. Holt.
Cambridge, 488 pp., £21.99, May 2015, 978 1 107 47157 3
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Magna Carta: The Foundation of Freedom 1215-2015 
by Nicholas Vincent.
Third Millennium, 192 pp., £44.95, January 2015, 978 1 908990 28 0
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Magna Carta: The Making and Legacy of the Great Charter 
by Dan Jones.
Head of Zeus, 192 pp., £14.99, December 2014, 978 1 78185 885 1
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... protested that this was the sort of arbitrary behaviour for which Cromwell had lambasted the late king, and demanded that the unjust tax be repaid to him. Cromwell first tried to browbeat Cony into submission, then threw him in prison. Cony’s lawyer, the eminent Sir John Maynard, demanded that he be set free, and the judges in the case were minded to ...

Whip with Six Strings

Lucy Wooding: Anne Boleyn’s Allure, 8 February 2024

Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and the Marriage That Shook Europe 
by John Guy and Julia Fox.
Bloomsbury, 581 pp., £30, September 2023, 978 1 5266 3152 7
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... there. Katherine of Aragon ‘watched with delight’ as her husband was joined by her nephew Charles V in the tournament yard; at around the same time, Anne met the eldest son of the earl of Northumberland, and ‘the couple fell deeply in love.’ There is no reliable evidence for any of this. When Anne was crowned in the summer of 1533, she was six ...

Short Cuts

Jeremy Harding: David Jones’s War, 19 March 2015

... like ‘broom-stick horrors’, cutting every which way through Mametz Wood, the poem evokes King Pellam’s treacherous brother Sir Garlon in Book Two of Le Morte D’Arthur, who ‘rideth alwy invisible’, killing with impunity. Centrifugal storms of metal become a horror in the wood, ready to ‘clout you suddenly, come on you softly, search to the ...

Tory History

Alan Ryan, 23 January 1986

English Society 1688-1832 
by J.C.D. Clark.
Cambridge, 439 pp., £30, November 1985, 0 521 30922 0
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Virtue, Commerce and History 
by J.G.A. Pocock.
Cambridge, 321 pp., £25, November 1985, 0 521 25701 8
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... proposition that the Stuart kings were a bad lot, given to homosexuality (James I), extravagance (Charles I), excessive wenching (Charles II) and a systematic attempt to debauch our ancient liberties and betray us into the hands of the Pope and Louis XIV (Charles II and James II). The ...

My Old, Sweet, Darling Mob

Iain Sinclair: Michael Moorcock, 30 November 2000

King of the City 
by Michael Moorcock.
Scribner, 421 pp., £9.99, May 2000, 0 684 86140 2
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Mother London 
by Michael Moorcock.
Scribner, 496 pp., £6.99, May 2000, 0 684 86141 0
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... like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ...

In-Betweeners

Malcolm Gaskill: Americans in 16th-Century Europe, 18 May 2023

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe 
by Caroline Dodds Pennock.
Weidenfeld, 302 pp., £22, January, 978 1 4746 1690 4
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... body and soul – given velvet tunics and compulsorily baptised – and granted an audience with Charles V. Exactly who they were and what they were doing is unclear, but they were astute interlocutors and the king, soon to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor, considered good relations a means to an end. ...

Not a Prophet

Alexander Bevilacqua: Black Jewish Messiah?, 18 July 2024

Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah: The 16th-Century Journey of David Reubeni through Africa, the Middle East and Europe 
by Alan Verskin.
Stanford, 189 pp., £23.99, January 2023, 978 1 5036 3443 5
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... by the use of newly developed firearms; Rome was sacked by the troops of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, in 1527.Many of the Jews who lived around the Mediterranean were on the move, and not by choice. Those who hadn’t converted to Christianity were expelled from the domains of the Spanish crown in 1492, and from the kingdom of Portugal in 1497. The ...

A Regular Grey

Jonathan Parry, 3 December 2020

Statesman of Europe: a Life of Sir Edward Grey 
by T.G. Otte.
Allen Lane, 858 pp., £35, November, 978 0 241 41336 4
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... East Africa in 1911: excited for the kill, he galloped too near his prey, missed and was mauled. Charles, having lost an arm and won an MC in the First World War, was felled by an angry buffalo in Tanganyika in 1928. Grey’s remaining brother, Alexander, a vicar in Trinidad, died aged 44, probably from the after-effects of a childhood cricket ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Madness: The Movie, 9 February 1995

... The first draft of The Madness of King George (then called The Madness of George III) was prefaced with this note: The Windsor Castle in which much of the action takes place is the castle before it was reconstructed in the 1820s. The 18th century wasn’t all elegance and there should be a marked contrast between the state rooms, in which the King’s life was largely spent, and the back parts of the building, those tiny rooms and attics, cubicles almost, where, because the court was so crowded, most of the courtiers had to lodge ...

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