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Under the Arrow Storm

Tom Shippey: The Battle of Crécy, 8 September 2022

Crécy: Battle of Five Kings 
by Michael Livingston.
Osprey, 303 pp., £20, June, 978 1 4728 4705 8
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... Which is just what happened, so we’ve always been told, to the French at Crécy.In his new book, Michael Livingston argues that we have got nearly everything about Crécy wrong. The standard story has been told many times by historians and by novelists, including by Bernard Cornwell twenty years ago in Harlequin. (Cornwell has written a generous foreword to ...

Brexitism

Alan Finlayson, 18 May 2017

... at least, was the theory. When, a decade ago, Conservative politicians and ‘gurus’ such as Michael Gove and Steve Hilton heralded the ‘post-bureaucratic age’, what they were claiming (in common with the Silicon Valley techno-utopians who inspired them) was that the institutions and academic disciplines of the age of mass democracy had become ...

At the Café Central

Andrew Forge, 22 March 1990

First Diasporist Manifesto 
by R.B. Kitaj.
Thames and Hudson, 128 pp., £7.95, May 1989, 0 500 27543 2
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Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles, 1957-1987 
by John Ashbery, edited by David Bergman.
Carcanet, 417 pp., £25, February 1990, 9780856358074
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... the densities of the Human Clay, these antinomies and others besides, he brings together under the banner of his Jewishness: Diasporist Art. The personages in his paintings are always representative, mythic, however local their context, however strong their resemblance to people or pictures known. He has cited Daumier’s Ratapoil as an exemplar for the ...

On David King

Susannah Clapp, 21 June 2018

... like a demonic snowflake, made by King from black painted wood. Soviet artefacts: a silk banner, a crimson alarm clock, hammer-and-sickle badges. A fleet of scarlet filing cabinets holding photographs, documents and journals. And modern objects which nodded to the Reds: a scarlet drawing board, a scarlet rubbish bin, a scarlet Sellotape dispenser. In ...

Prinney, Boney, Boot

Roy Porter, 20 March 1986

The English Satirical Print 1600-1832 
edited by Michael Duffy.
Chadwyck-Healey, February 1986
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... within the rich cultures and subcultures of agitation in and out of doors. In the light of this, Michael Duffy, as general editor of this series, has rightly decided that a substantial explanatory introduction was needed for each volume and he has assembled a first-rate team of historians to address such problems. Several have interpreted their brief as ...

Chemical Soup

James Meek: Embalming Lenin’s body, 18 March 1999

Lenin's Embalmers 
by Ilya Zbarsky and Samuel Hutchinson.
Harvill, 215 pp., £12.99, October 1998, 1 86046 515 3
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... krasny, also meaning ‘red’. The Red Army was the Fine Army and the Army of the Red Banner, symbolising blood sacrifice, embarked on a metaphysical struggle widi the forces of evil. It was typical of the Soviet attitude to intellectual activity to use science to achieve the unscientific end of turning an ordinary human corpse into an object of ...

Who’d want to be English?

Tom Shippey, 4 January 2024

Triumph and Illusion: The Hundred Years War V 
by Jonathan Sumption.
Faber, 977 pp., £35, August, 978 0 571 27457 4
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... was thirteen, she heard a voice from God, which she eventually identified as that of the archangel Michael. The voice told her that ‘her mission was to lead the dauphin to Reims to be crowned,’ according to royal tradition. Before that, it was her duty to break the English siege of Orléans. By the time she gained access to the dauphin he must have been ...

Particularly Anodyne

Richard Norton-Taylor: One bomb in London, 15 July 2021

The Intelligence War against the IRA 
by Thomas Leahy.
Cambridge, 356 pp., £18.99, March 2020, 978 1 108 72040 3
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... Almost three decades of violence followed, with the loss of more than 3500 lives. Operation Banner, the longest continuous deployment by the British army, did not secure peace any more than its counterinsurgency campaigns before and since. Far from it. Intelligence played a part, as Thomas Leahy convincingly sets out, but a far from decisive one. The ...

Good Activist, Bad Activist

Adam Mars-Jones: ACT UP grows up, 29 July 2021

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-93 
by Sarah Schulman.
Farrar, Straus, 736 pp., £30.99, June, 978 0 374 18513 8
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... homily, a quasi-secular point in the mass. But it didn’t work out that way. A protester called Michael Petrelis stood up on a pew and started shouting. Another activist, Tom Keane, received the host, then impulsively crushed it and dropped it on the floor. Schulman was in the cathedral that day, although she doesn’t use her experience as a lens through ...

When Ireland Became Divided

Garret FitzGerald: The Free State’s Fight for Recognition, 21 January 1999

Documents on Irish Foreign Policy. Vol. I: 1919-22 
edited by Ronan Fanning.
Royal Irish Academy and Department of Foreign Affairs, 548 pp., £30, October 1998, 1 874045 63 1
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... impose conscription on Ireland, led to a radicalisation of Nationalist opinion. Rallying under the banner of the Sinn Féin party – founded earlier in the century by the non-violent Nationalist Arthur Griffith but from 1917 led by the senior survivor of 1916, Eamon de Valera – this new radical movement won 73 of the 105 Irish seats at Westminster in the ...

Appreciating Paisley

Charles Townshend, 22 January 1987

God save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism 
by Steve Bruce.
Oxford, 308 pp., £15, November 1986, 0 19 827487 4
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Children of Wrath: Political Violence in Northern Ireland 
by Michael MacDonald.
Polity, 194 pp., £19.50, September 1986, 0 7456 0219 3
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... policy, rural or urban in outlook, and so on. What, in particular, does its ‘democratic’ banner mean? Bruce records without explanation the dropping of ‘Protestant’ from the party’s title; he admits that Calvinism sits uneasily with liberal democracy; but his analogy with Leninist ‘democratic centralism’ does not seem entirely apt. There ...

Cracker Culture

Ian Jackman, 7 September 2000

Irish America 
by Reginald Byron.
Oxford, 317 pp., £40, November 1999, 0 19 823355 8
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Remembering Ahanagran: Storytelling in a Family’s Past 
by Richard White.
Cork, 282 pp., IR£14.99, October 1999, 1 85918 232 1
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From the Sin-é Café to the Black Hills: Notes on the New Irish 
by Eamon Wall.
Wisconsin, 139 pp., $16.95, February 2000, 0 299 16724 0
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The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America 
edited by Michael Glazier.
Notre Dame, 988 pp., £58.50, August 1999, 0 268 02755 2
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... which runs the event, won’t let the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organisation march under its own banner. Hillary Clinton, who’s running for Pat Moynihan’s old seat, marched this year in an alternative parade in Queens as well as in the official version. Politicians often try too hard to get the Irish vote. In No News at Throat Lake,* his account of a ...

That Corrupting Country

Thomas Keymer: Orientalist Jones, 9 May 2013

Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer and Linguist, 1746-94 
by Michael Franklin.
Oxford, 396 pp., £35, September 2011, 978 0 19 953200 1
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... to meritocratic independence – indeed, it was often alleged, to outright republicanism. As Michael Franklin suggests in his excellent biography, Jones must have relished upending the patron-client hierarchy when he got Althorp elected to Samuel Johnson’s Turk’s Head Club, where Jones had mingled with Burke and Gibbon before even Boswell was ...

Pop Eye

Hal Foster: Handmade Readymades, 22 August 2002

Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art 
by Michael Lobel.
Yale, 196 pp., £35, March 2002, 0 300 08762 4
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... company, were not happy about this turn of events. In 1949 Life had showcased Pollock under the banner: ‘Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?’ In 1964 the same magazine profiled Lichtenstein under the heading: ‘Is He the Worst Artist in the US?’The charge of banality was first to do with content. To the delight of some, to the ...

Long live the codex

John Sutherland: The future of books, 5 July 2001

Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future 
by Jason Epstein.
Norton, 188 pp., £16.95, March 2001, 0 393 04984 1
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... Clancy fired the agent who had represented him for 15 years and hired a ‘business manager’, Michael Ovitz, who, he hoped, would market his technothrillers more lucratively in Hollywood. Most of what has happened to the book business since 1960 is, according to Epstein, retrograde. ‘Trade publishing’, by which he means the careful making of good ...

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