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Too Much for One Man

Thomas Penn: Kaiser Karl V, 23 January 2020

Emperor: A New Life of Charles
by Geoffrey Parker.
Yale, 760 pp., £25, May 2019, 978 0 300 19652 8
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... In late​ 1555 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and head of the house of Habsburg, returned to the Low Countries, where he was born: there, he began the long, slow process by which he abdicated in favour of his son Philip and brother Ferdinand. It was abundantly clear why such a transfer of power was necessary. It was a cold winter and Charles, white-haired, with shrunken gums exposing blackened teeth, his joints so crippled by gout that he was unable to sign documents with his bandaged hands, was exhausted, infirm and, in his mid-fifties, prematurely aged ...

The market taketh away

Paul Foot, 3 July 1997

Number One Millbank: The Financial Downfall of the Church of England 
by Terry Lovell.
HarperCollins, 263 pp., £15.99, June 1997, 0 00 627866 3
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... This organisation very soon started to show signs of the malaise it was set up to cure. One man, Charles Knight Murray, assumed great power over the Church estates, but forgot to tell the Commissioners that he was a director of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway and an eager speculator in railway shares. To pay for his prodigious share purchases, he ...

The Ballad of Andy and Rebekah

Martin Hickman: The Phone Hackers, 17 July 2014

... focused on thirty individual cases, including those involving three cabinet ministers, Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Prescott. Edis told the court that while their papers were busy hacking to find evidence of other people’s affairs – in January 2003 the Sun ran a story calling Andy Gilchrist, then leading the Fire Brigade Union in a series of strikes ...

Leonardo’s Shortcomings

Charles Hope, 18 March 1982

Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man 
by Martin Kemp.
Dent, 384 pp., £14.95, August 1981, 0 460 04354 4
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... as artist and as scientist, must have remained to a great degree hidden. In his remarkable book Martin Kemp has succeeded in revealing Leonardo’s genius with unprecedented clarity, so that we can now see him in a way that was never possible ...

Four Thousand, Tops

Michael Wood: Headlong by Michael Frayn, 14 October 1999

Headlong 
by Michael Frayn.
Faber, 395 pp., £16.99, August 1999, 0 571 20051 6
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... vision or speculation which takes over the whole modest world of the central character. He is Martin Clay, a philosophy lecturer on sabbatical, diligently avoiding work on the book he is supposed to be writing on nominalism, and he is convinced that his disorderly neighbour in the country has, but doesn’t know he has, a lost Bruegel among the mountains ...

Crowing

Michael Rogin, 5 September 1996

Imagineering Atlanta 
by Charles Rutheiser.
Verso, 324 pp., £44.95, July 1996, 1 85984 800 1
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... insecurity about the actual history and character of the US. The Olympic acquisition inspired Charles Rutheiser’s brilliant account of the city. An anthropologist teaching in Atlanta, he writes in the tradition of urban studies established by Mike Davis’s pathbreaking City of Quartz. But there is more ethnographic texture in Davis’s Los ...

Frank knew best

Martin Pawley, 7 April 1994

Frank Lloyd Wright. The Lost Years, 1910-1922: A Study of Influences 
by Anthony Alofsin.
Chicago, 456 pp., £43.95, March 1994, 0 226 01366 9
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... that in certain quarters lasted until the Blitz. Fifty years later it was revived by Prince Charles in his 1987 ‘Luftwaffe’ speech at Mansion House. Frank Lloyd Wright was a 19th-century man, with an uncomplicated belief in progress. He was born before Imperial Germany existed, at a time when the Emperor Napoleon III was securely on the throne of ...

Fourth from the top

Martin Kemp, 1 December 1983

Collected Essays: Vols I and II 
by Frances Yates.
Routledge, 279 pp., £12.50, May 1982, 0 7100 0952 6
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... science, with the associated techniques of naturalistic representation in the visual arts. As Charles Schmitt’s recent Aristotle and the Renaissance underlines, the predominantly Aristotelean tradition of university philosophy and science was not, as commonly assumed, a static, monolithic barrier to scientific change. A case can be made for insisting ...

Joan Didion’s Style

Martin Amis, 7 February 1980

The White Album 
by Joan Didion.
Weidenfeld, 223 pp., £5.95, October 1980, 0 297 77702 5
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... paranoia was fulfilled.’ Miss Didion reached her own breaking-point almost exactly a year before Charles Manson reached his. Alerted by an attack of nausea and vertigo (and such an attack ‘does not now seem to [her] an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968’), Miss Didion enrolled as a private outpatient of the psychiatric clinic at St John’s ...

Velvet Gentleman

Nick Richardson: Erik Satie, 4 June 2015

A Mammal’s Notebook: The Writings of Erik Satie 
edited by Ornella Volta, translated by Antony Melville.
Atlas, 224 pp., £17.50, June 2014, 978 1 900565 66 0
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... had been introduced to by a friend. Each piece has a picture at the top drawn by the illustrator Charles Martin in the style of a fashion shoot. The words and music stand in for captions. ‘Le Golf’, for example, tells a story about a cocky colonel’s comeuppance on the links:The colonel is wearing shocking green ‘Scotch Tweed’.He will be ...

The way out of a room is not through the door

Christian Lorentzen: Charles Manson, 7 November 2013

Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson 
by Jeff Guinn.
Simon and Schuster, 495 pp., £20, August 2013, 978 0 85720 893 4
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... of a local dry cleaner. They moved to Cincinnati. She named the baby after her dead father, Charles. She was 16. And she was still a bit wild. She kept going out most nights, and after three years William divorced her for ‘gross neglect of duty’. She filed a bastardy suit against Scott, and won $5 a month in child support. She got $25 on her day in ...

At the British Library

Peter Campbell: Mapping London, 25 January 2007

... in about 1688 that shows some new building, but nothing on anything like the scale of what, had Charles I survived or Charles II been in funds, would have lorded it over a long Thames frontage. Fires in 1691 and 1698 finally put an end to Whitehall Palace. Court offices were relocated in the undamaged tennis ...

Better off in a Stocking

Jamie Martin: The Financial Crisis of 1914, 22 May 2014

Saving the City: The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 
by Richard Roberts.
Oxford, 320 pp., £20, November 2013, 978 0 19 964654 8
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... Roberts, is that it doesn’t correspond neatly to standard typologies. On the well-known model of Charles Kindleberger (building on the work of Hyman Minsky and Irving Fisher), a crisis occurs after an exogenous shock to an economic system gives rise to an unsustainable bubble of speculative activity, which, when it bursts, precipitates a mad race for ...

Finest People

Penelope Fitzgerald, 3 December 1992

Letters from Margaret: Correspondence between Bernard Shaw and Margaret Wheeler 1944-50 
edited by Rebecca Swift.
Chatto, 279 pp., £13.99, November 1992, 0 7011 4783 0
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... six shillings each. She never asked to meet him. She wanted only to listen and to be listened to. Charles Wheeler was still overseas, and Shaw saw himself, or pretended to, as a senile version of the ‘Sunday husband’ he had been, in the 1890s. to May Morris. In 1945, however, Charles came home, and although the problem ...

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