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At the David Parr House

Eleanor Birne: There are two histories here, 7 November 2019

... of stained glass above the front door lets in some light, but it’s quickly absorbed by the brown-painted wood on the walls. Step into the drawing room, however, and you’re suddenly, implausibly surrounded by decoration and colour. Pale green stalks, leaves, tulip buds and flowers are intertwined on the walls and there’s a narrow frieze just below ...

This Guilty Land

Eric Foner: Every Possible Lincoln, 17 December 2020

Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times 
by David S. Reynolds.
Penguin, 1066 pp., £33.69, September, 978 1 59420 604 7
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The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln and the Struggle for American Freedom 
by H.W. Brands.
Doubleday, 445 pp., £24, October, 978 0 385 54400 9
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... and the Emancipator, H.W. Brands has written a dual biography of Lincoln and the abolitionist John Brown, who in 1859 led a band of 22 men to seize the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in the hope of sparking a slave insurrection. The divergent paths chosen by Brown and Lincoln illuminate a problem as old as ...

Sunflower

Peter Burke, 20 March 1986

Velazquez: Painter and Courtier 
by Jonathan Brown.
Yale, 322 pp., £35, March 1986, 0 300 03466 0
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El Greco and his Patrons: Three Major Projects 
by Richard Mann.
Cambridge, 164 pp., £35, February 1986, 0 521 30392 3
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... was virtually restricted, or abandoned, to a handful of Central European Marxist émigrés such as Frederick Antal, Arnold Hauser and Francis Klingender. Yet it takes time for a new style of art history to spread from the centre to the periphery. It is only in the last few years, thanks to scholars such as Jonathan Brown and ...

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Arthur Conan Doyle and the Mary Celeste, 17 February 2005

... the ship to Gibraltar, where they hoped to claim salvage. Instead, they were met with suspicion: Frederick Solly Flood, the British attorney general for the colony, led an inquiry into possible foul play. The sailors were eventually acquitted, but rewarded with only a disappointing fraction of the value of the ship and its cargo. There’s plenty of foul ...

Southern Discomfort

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, 8 June 1995

The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism 
by Eugene Genovese.
Harvard, 138 pp., £17.95, October 1994, 0 674 82527 6
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... was fashioned by Cassius Clay and James Birney of Kentucky, the brilliant fugitive slave leaders Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, Mark Twain, Mississippi journalist Hodding Carter and Martin Luther King Jr, to name just a few from the last two centuries. These figures are not to be found in The Southern Tradition, but Southern they were. Even if racism ...

I want to be the baby

Kasia Boddy: Barthelme’s High Jinks, 18 August 2022

Collected Stories 
by Donald Barthelme, edited by Charles McGrath.
Library of America, 1004 pp., £40, July 2021, 978 1 59853 684 3
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... of frying pans, wine bottles, ‘a woven straw wastebasket’, ‘two ashtrays, ceramic, one dark brown and one dark brown with an orange blur at the lip’, ‘a Yugoslavian carved flute’, can-openers, corkscrews and some ‘thoughtfully planned job descriptions’. The impetus to all this is not just satirical; it is a ...

Go to Immirica

Dinah Birch: Hate Mail, 21 September 2023

Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters 
by Emily Cockayne.
Oxford, 299 pp., £20, September, 978 0 19 879505 6
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... suggests that the philandering earl may not, in fact, have been William’s father: perhaps it was Frederick, a dashing naval officer and a favoured nephew of the countess. Despite her determined efforts, unanswered questions remain. More important than the precise truth was that such secrets had currency, and anonymous letters could endanger the reputation of ...

The Hero Brush

Edmund Gordon: Colum McCann, 12 September 2013

TransAtlantic 
by Colum McCann.
Bloomsbury, 298 pp., £18.99, May 2013, 978 1 4088 2937 0
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... beginning with the first non-stop transatlantic flight, made in 1919 by John Alcock and Arthur Brown. McCann reconstructs the perils of the journey, the freak weather and mechanical trouble, as well as the ‘genius and magic’ needed to see them through. The chapter is high on technical detail and period slang (plenty of Great Scotts and Tally-hos) but ...

I told him I was ready to die

Suzanne Scafe, 16 February 1989

Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House 
by Elizabeth Keckley.
Oxford, 371 pp., £15.50, July 1988, 0 19 505259 5
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The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke 
by Brenda Stevenson.
Oxford, 609 pp., £22.50, July 1988, 0 19 505238 2
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The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Secole in Many Lands 
by Mary Secole.
Oxford, 371 pp., £15.50, July 1988, 0 19 505249 8
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... its behalf, there is scant reference to the lives of black people in Washington. An encounter with Frederick Douglass is noted as an example of Lincoln’s generosity: the President allowed him into the White House after his Inauguration despite an order banning all ‘people of colour’. The feelings, thoughts and responses of Charlotte Forten Grimke are ...

Imperial Project

Richard Drayton, 19 September 1996

Kew: The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens 
by Ray Desmond.
Harvill/Royal Botanical Gardens, 466 pp., £25, November 1995, 1 86046 076 3
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... Merlin and Elizabeth I suggested the culmination of Arthurian prophecy in the Hanoverian monarchy. Frederick Louis, Caroline’s unpopular son, and his wife Augusta attempted to rival this display, planning a Mount of Parnassus, a House of Confucius and a Physic Garden. But Frederick died in 1751, and the realisation of ...

Amigos

Christopher Ricks, 2 August 1984

The Faber Book of Parodies 
edited by Simon Brett.
Faber, 383 pp., £8.95, May 1984, 0 571 13125 5
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Lilibet: An Account in Verse of the Early Years of the Queen until the Time of her Accession 
by Her Majesty.
Blond and Briggs, 95 pp., £6.95, May 1984, 0 85634 157 6
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... Another soul saved from dilettantism, if I may put it thus. Leavis never put it thus. Some of Frederick Crews’s book The Pooh Perplex is parody, but this isn’t: it is a lampoon which supposes itself, not to be imitating Leavis’s style or form, but to be exposing his essential nature – and translating it into something recognisable to ...

Wormwood

Walter Patterson, 29 October 1987

Sarcophagus 
by Vladimir Gubaryev, translated by Michael Glenny.
Penguin, 81 pp., £3.50, April 1987, 0 14 048214 8
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The Star Chernobyl 
by Julia Voznesenskaya.
Quartet, 181 pp., £10.95, August 1987, 0 7043 2631 0
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Chernobyl: A Novel 
by Frederick Pohl.
Bantam, 355 pp., £4.95, September 1987, 0 553 05210 1
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Mayday at Chernobyl 
by Henry Hamman and Stuart Parrott.
Hodder, 278 pp., £2.95, April 1987, 0 450 40858 2
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State of the World 1987: A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress toward a Sustainable Society 
by Lester Brown.
Norton, 268 pp., £14.95, April 1987, 0 393 02399 0
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... a long darkness. Chernobyl: A Novel is the first Western book-length fiction about the accident. Frederick Pohl, an elder statesman of Science Fiction, chanced to be in the Soviet Union, on his fifth visit, just after the explosion. The result was a narrative re-creation of the events of the days from 25 April to 23 May 1986, from the view-point of a select ...

Flowers in His Trousers

Christopher Benfey: Central Park’s Architect, 6 October 2016

Frederick Law Olmsted: Writings on Landscape, Culture and Society 
edited by Charles E. Beveridge.
Library of America, 802 pp., £30, November 2015, 978 1 59853 452 8
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... During​ the 1870s, the decade he turned fifty, Frederick Law Olmsted, the creative mastermind of New York’s Central Park, looked back on his career as a landscape architect, the compound profession he had virtually invented from elements of gardening, agriculture, architecture, landscape painting and civil engineering ...

A Leg-Up for Oliver North

Richard Rorty, 20 October 1994

Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America’s Future 
by Richard Bernstein.
Knopf, 367 pp., $25, September 1994, 0 679 41156 9
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... get white middle-class males to behave better to the people they enjoy shoving around: black and brown people, women, poor people, recent immigrants, homosexuals. It hoped to encourage these groups to take pride in themselves, rather than accepting the derogatory descriptions which the white males had invented. By now, however, it has turned into an attempt ...

Shave for them

Christian Lorentzen: ‘The Submission’, 22 September 2011

The Submission 
by Amy Waldman.
Heinemann, 299 pp., £12.99, September 2011, 978 0 434 01932 8
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... Ross Perot called Lin an ‘egg roll’. She was compelled to defend her design before Congress. A Frederick Hart statue of three soldiers was erected next to her memorial to appease the literal-minded. ‘It’s like Maya Lin all over again. But worse,’ a character in The Submission is made to say, without much subtlety, after the winner of the blind ...

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