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Holy Relics

Alan Milward, 3 April 1986

Selling Hitler: The story of the Hitler Diaries 
by Robert Harris.
Faber, 402 pp., £10.95, February 1986, 0 571 13557 9
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... the villages of Western Europe and the United States gradually becomes that of retail outlets for urban raiders in search of ‘antiques’, it is understandable that Nazi ‘antiques’ should become up-market commodities. Few other objects make so wide a variety of emotional appeals. They are associated with strange, dramatic events, with great personal ...

Reagan and Rosaleen

John Horgan, 21 June 1984

Prince of Spies: Henri Le Caron 
by J.A. Cole.
Faber, 221 pp., £8.95, April 1984, 0 571 13233 2
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... the major cities. Even as late as the 1960s, Irish county associations flourished in the American urban environment: Boston, New York and San Francisco had separate groupings of this kind for emigrants from each of Ireland’s 32 counties. This formidable presence was backed up both by the Ancient Order of Hibernians (which was a largely church-linked ...

The Fire This Time

John Sutherland, 28 May 1992

... 81 seconds of their beating of King had been videotaped by a resident in a nearby apartment, George Holliday. What Holliday did with the tape was momentous. He did not hand it over to the Police. Had he done so, there would have been an internal tribunal, and most likely some stern disciplinary action. There might also have been judicial control over the ...

Motherly Protuberances

Blake Morrison: Simon Okotie, 9 September 2021

After Absalon 
by Simon Okotie.
Salt, 159 pp., £9.99, January 2020, 978 1 78463 166 6
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... germane to their investigation and must be exhaustively scrutinised before being ruled out. George Eliot talked about the human need to filter, lest madness ensue: ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the ...

Lights On and Away We Go

Keith Thomas: Happy Thoughts, 20 May 2021

The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 
by Ritchie Robertson.
Allen Lane, 984 pp., £40, November 2020, 978 0 241 00482 1
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... and gentry every year’. In December 1797, a belief in divine control of human events led George III to order a general thanksgiving for recent British naval victories. One preacher who took part thanked God for whipping up a gale at a key moment, thereby thwarting a Dutch landing of ten thousand men on the coast of Scotland. No doubt he convinced his ...

Find the birch sticks

R.W. Johnson: A spy’s diary, 1 September 2005

The Guy Liddell Diaries. Vol. I: 1939-42 
edited by Nigel West.
Frank Cass, 329 pp., £25, February 2005, 0 415 35213 4
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... bankruptcy of the old establishment is difficult to exaggerate. In May 1941, Liddell records Lloyd George’s manoeuvres for a separate peace with Germany – all fatally undermined by his determination that this should also secure his re-entry to the cabinet on his terms. One notes with despair the presence in Lloyd ...

Killing Stones

Keith Thomas: Holy Places, 19 May 2011

The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland 
by Alexandra Walsham.
Oxford, 637 pp., £35, February 2011, 978 0 19 924355 6
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... their own sacred topography. The driving force was the cult of martyrs and the building of urban churches to contain their relics. It set in motion a long process by which Catholic Christianity would construct a new geography of the sacred. By the later Middle Ages, the European landscape was dotted with thousands of churches, chapels and ...

Toshie Trashed

Gavin Stamp: The Glasgow School of Art Fire, 19 June 2014

... famous son is puzzling. Despite the rise in Mackintosh’s reputation, Glasgow contrived to plan urban motorways which threatened both his Martyrs’ and Scotland Street Schools. In 1950, the Corporation had been encouraged to buy the lease of the Ingram Street Tea Rooms with its varied set of interiors designed for Kate Cranston which, had it ...

Don’t look at trees

Greg Grandin: Da Cunha’s Amazon, 9 October 2014

Scramble for the Amazon and the ‘Lost Paradise’ of Euclides da Cunha 
by Susanna Hecht.
Chicago, 612 pp., £31.50, April 2013, 978 0 226 32281 0
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... unfavourably to the Mississippi Valley, which had allowed a harmonious civil society to take root. George Kennan, who did visit South America, used what he imagined to be the natural violence of the Amazon basin as a metaphor for the dismal history of Spanish and Portuguese America, especially its disastrous racial intermixing: ‘The handicaps to ...

I lived in funeral

Robert Crawford: Les Murray, 7 February 2013

New Selected Poems 
by Les Murray.
Carcanet, 310 pp., £14.95, April 2012, 978 1 84777 167 4
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... Murray types his poems with a crooked finger, broken in a childhood struggle with his cousin George. As Murray’s depressed mother suffered successive miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy, she grew increasingly stern towards her only son, who was sent to live in a boarding house at Taree, New South Wales, where he went to secondary school. He was there ...

Disappearing Acts

Terry Eagleton: Aquinas, 5 December 2013

Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait 
by Denys Turner.
Yale, 300 pp., £18.99, May 2013, 978 0 300 18855 4
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... they live in community, but unlike them they pursue their mission out on the streets. Friars are urban types, while monks are mostly rural. Their original aim was to liberate theology from the cloisters and colleges so it could become what this book calls ‘a multi-tasking practice in the streets’. Dominicans in particular combine preaching and ...

One Stock and Nation

Christopher Kelly: Roman Britain, 11 February 2010

The Recovery of Roman Britain 1586-1906: A Colony so Fertile 
by Richard Hingley.
Oxford, 389 pp., £83, June 2008, 978 0 19 923702 9
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... with the construction of fortifications and military highways in the Highlands begun under George Wade in the 1720s and 1730s. On Roy’s detailed maps, the past and present were visibly united in one imperial enterprise. The close connection between conquest and civility suggested by the (Roman and Hanoverian) subjugation of Scotland was not always ...

Rules of Battle

Glen Bowersock: The Byzantine Army, 11 February 2010

The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire 
by Edward Luttwak.
Harvard, 498 pp., £25.95, November 2009, 978 0 674 03519 5
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... of fortified zones or limites, called ‘interior’ (more remote) and ‘exterior’ (nearer to urban settlements). Luttwak, I’m convinced, was entirely correct in thinking that all this could not have happened by accident or in response to crises in different places at different times. In The Limits of Empire (1990), the most important work on Roman ...

Dying to Make a Point

Shadi Bartsch: Death and the Ancients, 15 November 2007

Death in Ancient Rome 
by Catharine Edwards.
Yale, 287 pp., £25, June 2007, 978 0 300 11208 5
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The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint 
by Emily Wilson.
Profile, 247 pp., £15.99, August 2007, 978 1 86197 762 5
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... example, Joseph Addison would write a drama in praise of Cato; why this drama would be admired by George Washington and imitated by Eustace Budgell; and why the latter’s 1737 suicide note would read: ‘What Cato did, and Addison approv’d,/Cannot be wrong.’ These deaths were meant to resonate. While the immediate reality of the final moments is beyond ...

Having one’s Kant and eating it

Terry Eagleton: Northrop Frye, 19 April 2001

Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks 1982-90: Volume One 
edited by Robert Denham.
Toronto, 418 pp., £45, September 2000, 0 8020 4751 3
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Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks 1982-90: Volume Two 
edited by Robert Denham.
Toronto, 531 pp., £45, September 2000, 0 8020 4752 1
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... cosmic of questions. From Matthew Arnold’s portentous idiom of sweetness and light to George Steiner’s reverent talk of artefacts as real presences, art is a domain of displaced transcendence. It is the one remaining intimation of immortality for those who mourn the spiritual barbarisms of modernity, but are modern enough themselves to feel ...

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