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I’m all for it

R.W. Johnson, 30 March 2000

Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII 
by John Cornwall.
Viking, 430 pp., £20, September 1999, 0 670 87620 8
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... of religious life in France’. ‘Renewal of religious death’ would have been closer to the mark. Then, on 16 October 1943, came the round-up of Rome’s Jews – the oldest community in Europe. Even the German Ambassador, to his great credit, was horrified by the impending atrocity and put his neck on the block by explaining to Pacelli how best to use ...

Astride a White Horse

Declan Kiberd: Bridget Clearly, 6 January 2000

The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story 
by Angela Bourke.
Pimlico, 240 pp., £10, August 1999, 0 7126 6590 0
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... and tales among a public that was having all the usual trouble adjusting to an increasingly urban way of life. Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry had appeared in 1888; his Irish Fairy and Folk Tales in 1894. Jack Dunne came to visit the sick woman and said quite simply: ‘That is not Bridgie Boland.’ The being before him in the bed ...

Franklin D, listen to me

J. Hoberman: Popular (Front) Songs, 17 September 1998

Songs for Political Action: Folk Music, Topical Songs and the American Left, 1926-53 
edited by Ronald Cohen and Dave Samuelson.
Bear Family Records, DM 390, June 1996
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... Composers’ Collective – a New York-based Communist cell which included among its associates Mark Blitzstein, Earl Robinson and Aaron Copland. The Collective took its cue from the militant anthems of Bertolt Brecht and Hans Eisler, composing American versions of 12-tone protest songs: ‘The Strange Funeral at Braddock’ gives the full Modernist ...

Unmistakable

Michael Rogin, 20 August 1998

Celebrity Caricature in America 
by Wendy Wick Reaves.
Yale, 320 pp., £29.95, April 1998, 0 300 07463 8
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... bind audiences ever more closely to the famous people they seem to dwell among. Counteracting urban and immigrant alienation, Reaves writes, celebrity caricature created an ‘almost familial connection to prominent public figures’. Excited by modernity, speed and dissonant juxtaposition, celebrity caricature made the immigrant cosmopolitan metropolis ...

Gilded Drainpipes

E.S. Turner: London, 10 June 1999

The London Rich: The Creation of a Great City from 1666 to the Present 
by Peter Thorold.
Viking, 374 pp., £25, June 1999, 0 670 87480 9
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The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches: Style and Status in Victorian and Edwardian Architecture 
by Mordaunt Crook.
Murray, 354 pp., £25, May 1999, 0 7195 6040 3
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... the complications of which often throttled the aspirations of the most powerful and headstrong. Urban demographers can trace in its pages the movements, migrations and preferred areas of newcomers. Planters and nabobs, we learn, tended to find houses in Soho Square or to colonise Marylebone. Denmark Hill became ‘Little Germany’. Jews sought out the once ...

Old Testament Capers

Frank Kermode, 20 September 1984

The Only Problem 
by Muriel Spark.
Bodley Head, 189 pp., £7.95, September 1984, 0 370 30605 8
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... in the way people snoop, pilfer, spy and pry, but of late she has taken up kidnap, blackmail and urban terrorism as if these were the same things on a larger scale. This is a pity in a way, because it makes for complicated plots, and the best of the books are not over-plotted: but it reflects the temperament of a writer who has said she mistrusts indignant ...

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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... intolerable wrestle with words and feelings, a contest which it barely contrives to win. It is a mark of the Victorian novel’s maturity that at this historical period the form becomes ‘reflexive’ and analyses the nature of the feelings which it has always been able to articulate, and to generate in its readers. Hardy conceives the masterworks of ...

Faces of the People

Richard Altick, 19 August 1982

Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes 
by Graeme Tytler.
Princeton, 436 pp., £19.10, March 1982, 0 691 06491 1
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A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th-century Paris 
by Judith Wechsler.
Thames and Hudson, 208 pp., £18.50, June 1982, 0 500 01268 7
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... and written language, the traditional mode of communication and of adjustment to the conditions of urban living. Half of the people were illiterate in any case. It was the caricaturists’ achievement that they gave faces to the faceless crowd, a non-verbal means by which the people were oriented and given a sense of individual and class identity, for into the ...

Wordsworth and the Well-Hidden Corpse

Marilyn Butler, 6 August 1992

The Lyrical Ballads: Longman Annotated Texts 
edited by Michael Mason.
Longman, 419 pp., £29.99, April 1992, 0 582 03302 0
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Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Literary Possession 
by Susan Eilenberg.
Oxford, 278 pp., £30, May 1992, 0 19 506856 4
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The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries 
by Nicholas Roe.
Macmillan, 186 pp., £35, April 1992, 0 333 52314 8
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... Preface, anyone seriously studying it (or for that matter the 1800 edition) will miss footnotes to mark where material was added in 1802. Two new critical books illustrate the range and diversity of present historical work on Wordsworth and Coleridge. Susan Eilenberg goes into the deep relationship between the collaborating authors that Mason puts ...

A Very Bad Man

Michael Kulikowski: Julius Caesar, Génocidaire, 18 June 2020

The War for Gaul: A New Translation 
by Julius Caesar, translated by James J. O’Donnell.
Princeton, 324 pp., £22, September 2019, 978 0 691 17492 1
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... of duty overseas. When property restrictions on entry into military service were relaxed, the urban proletariat and the newly landless joined the legions and learned to save their loyalty not for the Roman state but for the commanders on whom their salary and discharge bonus depended. It had all culminated in civil war and murderous proscriptions when the ...

Swank and Swagger

Ferdinand Mount: Deals with the Pasha, 26 May 2022

Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East 
by Jonathan Parry.
Princeton, 453 pp., £35, April, 978 0 691 18189 9
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... by Ernest Gellner in Plough, Sword and Book: ‘all these features seem highly congruent with an urban bourgeois lifestyle and with commercialism’; Islam was in fact ‘closer in many ways to the ideals and requirements of modernity than those of any other world religion’. Parry does not mention Urquhart’s particular enthusiasm for the Turkish ...

The State with the Prettiest Name

Michael Hofmann: ‘Florida’, 24 May 2018

Florida 
by Lauren Groff.
Heinemann, 275 pp., £14.99, June 2018, 978 1 78515 188 0
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... for us to live here, surely He would have given us webbed feet. Or gills. Or cold blood. The urban legend has alligators tenanting swimming pools. Possums, armadillos and raccoons – respectively, stupid, armoured or clever creatures – out and about. Bacchus will know his own. The oft-noted absence of seasons, though a kind of unbearable monsoonish ...

Spitting, Sneezing, Smearing

Marjorie Garber: Messy Business, 10 August 2000

Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in 19th-Century Art and Fiction 
by David Trotter.
Oxford, 340 pp., £35, February 2000, 0 19 818503 0
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... important matter to him’; Mrs Gaskell placed ‘rag-and-bone warehouses’ next to those other urban emporia of recycling, pawn-brokers’ shops; and almost sixty years before Yeats, James Russell Lowell had already seen that literature itself was the random stuff of visceral alchemy: ‘The somewhat greasy heap of the literary rag-and-bone picker is ...

‘Equality exists in Valhalla’

Richard J. Evans: German Histories, 4 December 2014

Germany: Memories of a Nation 
by Neil MacGregor.
Allen Lane, 598 pp., £30, November 2014, 978 0 241 00833 1
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Germany: Memories of a Nation 
British Museum, until 25 January 2015Show More
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... of the Bible translated into German by Martin Luther. All of this testifies to a flourishing urban cultural life in the late medieval and early modern period. The Holy Roman Empire and its elaborate judicial, administrative and electoral institutions held things together only in a limited sense, as a display of the many different coins issued by ...

Hairy Fairies

Rosemary Hill: Angela Carter, 10 May 2012

A Card from Angela Carter 
by Susannah Clapp.
Bloomsbury, 106 pp., £10, February 2012, 978 1 4088 2690 4
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... It was in the Granada interiors that Carter first encountered romantic fantasy set amid modern urban street life, just as it would be in her own work. Like the neo-medieval mansion where the kidnapped Fevvers is taken, on whose front the ‘raw brick showed through the ivy’, Carter’s best effects could be summed up as South Circular Gothic. The ...

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