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Against Passion

James Meek: Passionate Politics, 30 November 2017

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics 
by Mark Lilla.
Harper, 160 pp., £19, August 2017, 978 0 06 269743 1
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The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction 
by Mark Lilla.
NYRB, 166 pp., £9.99, September 2016, 978 1 59017 902 4
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... Ukip and the Scottish National Party have shown that movement politics is capable of entering city hall peacefully and passionately.There is a further problem, which Lilla sidesteps: the awkward issue of identity politics in the age of globalisation. If you frame ‘identity politics’ as a self-indulgent distraction from the vital business of creating a ...

I have no books to consult

Stephen Sedley: Lord Mansfield, 22 January 2015

Lord Mansfield: Justice in the Age of Reason 
by Norman Poser.
McGill-Queen’s, 532 pp., £24.99, September 2013, 978 0 7735 4183 2
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... was a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he ...

He don’t mean any harm

John Bayley, 28 June 1990

A.A. Milne: His Life 
by Ann Thwaite.
Faber, 554 pp., £17.50, June 1990, 0 571 13888 8
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... the Pekinese flower face for which the cloche hat was designed (see Shepard’s illustration to ‘James James Morrison Morrison’), and they were very much in love. And so, to outward appearances, they remained. Did Kenneth Grahame, who also supported a fairly enigmatic marriage, write The Wind in the Willows for his little boy as a result? Milne turned ...

Unsex me here

John Bayley, 20 May 1982

Shakespeare’s Division of Experience 
by Marilyn French.
Cape, 376 pp., £12.50, March 1982, 0 224 02013 7
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... of cases. George Eliot can do nothing with a Dorothea Brooke married to the man she loves. Henry James has to fix up Isabel and leave her in the most exalted stasis of all: being a perfect lady in her misfortune. What it comes to is that male authors present a woman as a ‘case’. In the Classics she is a tableau, like patience on a monument; in the ...

Sticktoitiveness

John Sutherland, 8 June 1995

Empire of Words: The Reign of the ‘OED’ 
by John Willinsky.
Princeton, 258 pp., £19.95, November 1994, 0 691 03719 1
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... utopian Philological Society, based at the University of London, the amazing sticktoitiveness of James Murray, editor and mastermind of the project from 1879 to his death in 1915, and the (initially) nervous patron, OUP, who inherited the project 22 year after its launch. Willinsky tells much the same story as that given by Elisabeth Murray (Caught in the ...

A Row of Shaws

Terry Eagleton: That Bastard Shaw, 21 June 2018

Judging Shaw 
by Fintan O’Toole.
Royal Irish Academy, 381 pp., £28, October 2017, 978 1 908997 15 9
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... of a heavy industry in academia. Ireland is a small nation – ‘an afterthought of Europe’, as James Joyce put it – and marginality is much in vogue at the moment. Yet it is also home to a magnificent body of literature, much of it written with wonderful convenience in the world’s premier language, and so easily accessible from Tokyo to Bogotá. Being ...

Missionary Work

Christopher Turner: Henry Wellcome, 13 May 2010

An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World 
by Frances Larson.
Oxford, 343 pp., £18.99, September 2009, 978 0 19 955446 1
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... Wellcome felt free to start collecting on a grander scale. In his 1994 biography, Robert Rhodes James dismissed Wellcome as a ‘magpie collector’ who tried to rationalise the contents of his hoard after the fact, and concentrated instead on his subject’s social and business interests and his patronage of scientific research. Frances Larson, in ...

Morality in the Oxygen

E.S. Turner: Tobogganing, 14 December 2000

How the English Made the Alps 
by Jim Ring.
Murray, 287 pp., £19.99, September 2000, 0 7195 5689 9
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Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps 
by Fergus Fleming.
Granta, 398 pp., £20, November 2000, 1 86207 379 1
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... in all directions. Back in London, Smith mounted a rousing Alpine show which packed the Egyptian Hall for several seasons, firing the imaginations of future Cook’s tourists, who would eventually be rail-borne to the Alps for two weeks’ holiday at nine pounds per head. Albert Smith was not quite the sort of recruit sought by the high-minded Alpine ...

Why the richest woman in Britain changed her will 26 times

Mark Kishlansky: The Duchess of Marlborough, 14 November 2002

The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough 
by Ophelia Field.
Hodder, 575 pp., £20, June 2002, 9780340768075
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... the household of Mary of Modena, the 15-year-old second wife of the Duke of York (the future James II). She was later transferred to entertain his younger daughter, the emotionally, intellectually and physically challenged Princess Anne. This was hardly a plum position: Anne was third in line to the throne with the likelihood that ...

Did he leap?

Mendez: ‘Harlem Shuffle’, 16 December 2021

Harlem Shuffle 
by Colson Whitehead.
Fleet, 320 pp., £16.99, September 2021, 978 0 7088 9944 1
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... the first Black player to have been signed by a Major League team, was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. Motown, the record label founded by Berry Gordy in Detroit in 1959, quickly became synonymous with joyful pop songs influenced in equal measure by rock ’n’ roll and gospel, showing that Black youth culture wasn’t confined to race-related ...

Miracle on Fleet Street

Martin Hickman: Operation Elveden, 7 January 2016

... officials to be arrested were Richard Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy ...

A Hard Dog to Keep on the Porch

Christopher Hitchens, 6 June 1996

... Oxford 1968-9. In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the factional newspaper, or distributing the latest leaflet, or procuring another drink ...

A Million Shades of Red

Adam Mars-Jones: Growing Up Gay, 8 September 2022

Young Mungo 
by Douglas Stuart.
Picador, 391 pp., £16.99, April, 978 1 5290 6876 4
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... January Before’. In January, Protestant Mungo becomes involved with a young Catholic called James. In May, he is entrusted by his mother to the care of a couple of men she met at Alcoholics Anonymous, who undertake to show him the wild beauty of Scotland, and to teach him to fish. If this novel was your only source of information you would assume that ...

Washed and Spiced

Peter Bradshaw, 19 October 1995

The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture 
by Jonathan Sawday.
Routledge, 327 pp., £35, May 1995, 0 415 04444 8
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... incited by the felon’s dependants. The corpse was subsequently taken to the Barber Surgeons’ Hall in London for a public dissection followed by a sumptuous feast. This sequence of events indicates that – apart from everything else – a dissection at this time had a cathartic function as a ‘crisis’ through which the public onlookers were guided ...

Scenes in the Sack

Michael Wood, 11 March 1993

Memories of the Ford Administration 
by John Updike.
Hamish Hamilton, 371 pp., £15.99, March 1993, 0 241 13386 6
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... wives and a student or two (and one student’s mother), and trying to write a book on James Buchanan, the 15th President of the United States, a Pennsylvanian who sought at (almost) all costs to keep the South in the Union. But then Alf was doing these things before and (presumably) after the Ford years too; what happened only in the Ford ...

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