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obligatorynoteofhope.com

Adam Mars-Jones: Jenny Offill, 2 July 2020

Weather 
by Jenny Offill.
Granta, 207 pp., £12.99, February, 978 1 78378 476 9
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... think of herself as a ‘joiner’, starts to attend. Later, she and her troubled brother, Henry, consult Margot informally in her capacity as a therapist. This makes a sort of sense, since the role Lizzie herself plays with others tends to be that of amateur shrink. Her husband wishes she was a professional: then they’d be rich. At the meditation ...

Dogface

Ian Hamilton, 28 September 1989

Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War 
by Paul Fussell.
Oxford, 330 pp., £15, September 1989, 0 19 503797 9
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War like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the Forties 
by Andrew Sinclair.
Hamish Hamilton, 312 pp., £17.95, October 1989, 0 241 12531 6
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... the front-liners who actually lived through or died in that ‘abyss of blood and darkness’ (Henry James). In one of his most telling sequences, Fussell reported on a visit to the Somme. Finding it, in the early Seventies, ‘a peaceful but sullen place, un-forgetting and unforgiving’, he tried to conjure some picture of what it might have been ...

Boil the cook

Stephen Sedley: Treasonable Acts, 18 July 2024

The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History 
by Allen D. Boyer and Mark Nicholls.
Routledge, 340 pp., £135, February, 978 0 367 50993 4
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... gets credit for proscribing as treason any plot against the life of a feudal superior, and Henry VII for backdating his reign to the day before the Battle of Bosworth, making a traitor of anyone who fought for Richard III. There followed, in 1495, his Treason Act, which recognised that it was ‘ayenst all lawes reason and gode conscience’ to ...

Resurrecting the Tudors

John Pemble: James Anthony Froude, 23 May 2013

James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet 
by Ciaran Brady.
Oxford, 500 pp., £45, May 2013, 978 0 19 966803 8
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... fanaticism of the 16th century: the most sordid and shameful era in the national saga. Reviewing Henry Hallam’s 1827 Constitutional History of England, a two-volume work covering the period 1485-1760, Macaulay savaged the English Reformation: In Germany, in France, in Switzerland and in Scotland … worldliness was the tool of zeal. Here zeal was the tool ...

Wilderness of Tigers

Michael Neill: Shakespeare’s Latin, 19 March 2015

Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity 
by Colin Burrow.
Oxford, 281 pp., £16.99, September 2013, 978 0 19 968479 3
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... to have been mediated through Latin and English translations, he knew Plutarch well through Sir Thomas North’s version of the Parallel Lives, and is likely to have kept up with the publication of Chapman’s Homer. Successive chapters of Burrow’s book explore Shakespeare’s engagement with Ovid, Virgil, Plautus and Terence, Seneca and Plutarch, as well ...

Nelly gets her due

John Sutherland, 8 November 1990

The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 317 pp., £16.99, October 1990, 0 670 82787 8
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The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant 
edited by Elisabeth Jay.
Oxford, 184 pp., £16.95, October 1990, 0 19 818615 0
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... not his mistress. It is only by chance that any incriminating letters survive: Dickens’s son Henry and Ellen Ternan’s son Geoffrey Robinson destroyed all such correspondence. Dickens himself burned any personal letters that he could come by. He also destroyed his diaries at the end of every year. One diary – that for 1867 – was lost or, more ...

On Teesside

Joanna Biggs, 21 October 2010

... led a Quaker consortium in buying up the land and began to look for investors. He approached Henry Bolckow, a Mecklenburg-born corn tycoon and his English iron-maker business partner, John Vaughan, who opened ironworks on the Tees in 1841. But the firm of Bolckow and Vaughan didn’t come into its own until 1850, when Bolckow rather opportunely found ...

What’s the big idea?

Jonathan Parry: The Origins of Our Decline, 30 November 2017

The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914 
by Simon Heffer.
Random House, 912 pp., £30, September 2017, 978 1 84794 742 0
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... a monocle and an orchid but behaved badly to the future Beatrice Webb. The Liberal prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman ate so much that he ballooned to twenty stone.The ruling class was free to behave in this appalling way, Heffer asserts, because of ‘the decline of the spiritual’, though he doesn’t have much to say about it. The middle classes were ...

The Great National Circus

Eric Foner: Punch-Ups in the Senate, 22 November 2018

The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War 
by Joanne Freeman.
Farrar, Straus, 450 pp., £20.99, September 2018, 978 0 374 15477 6
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... by contrast, was inhabited by giants, notably the ‘great triumvirate’ of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as well as eloquent spokesmen on both sides of the slavery question, such as Stephen Douglas and William Seward. John Quincy Adams didn’t consider it beneath him to serve in the House after his term as president. Such men offer a ...

In-Betweeners

Malcolm Gaskill: Americans in 16th-Century Europe, 18 May 2023

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe 
by Caroline Dodds Pennock.
Weidenfeld, 302 pp., £22, January, 978 1 4746 1690 4
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... of the savage kings of the Countrey of Brasill’, probably a Tupinambá from Bahia, visited Henry VIII at Whitehall. He had facial piercings, his lower lip was set with a jewel, and everything about him, it was said, was ‘very strange to the beholders’. Once he had seen what he wanted of this curious place, his hosts put him back on a ship ...

Brand New Day

Niela Orr: ‘The Wiz’ and the Prez, 18 March 2021

... In​ ‘The Wizard of Oz: A Parable on Populism’ (1964), Henry Littlefield, a high-school teacher, interpreted L. Frank Baum’s novel as an extended metaphor for American politics in the 1890s. He argued that Baum, who in 1888 moved to the territory that became South Dakota, sympathised with the plight of the region’s farmers and was influenced by the views of a man he sang with in a barbershop quartet, who later became a senator for the Populist Party ...

A Tentative Idea for a Lamp

Tim Radford: Thomas Edison, 18 March 1999

Edison: A Life of Invention 
by Paul Israel.
Wiley, 552 pp., £19.50, November 1998, 0 471 52942 7
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... Thomas Edison invented himself, and then he invented the legend. He did the first in the usual, recognisably Victorian way, from scratch, with terrific self-confidence, huge energy, astute focus and ferocious determination. He did the second by exploiting a singular gift for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite ...

Up the Levellers

Paul Foot, 8 December 1994

The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645-53 
by Ian Gentles.
Blackwell, 590 pp., £14.99, January 1994, 0 631 19347 2
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... poorest he that is in England has a life to live as the greatest he.’ This assertion by Colonel Thomas Rainborowe in November 1647 seems almost a cliché, as much part of the democratic history of England as the Magna Carta or the Tolpuddle Martyrs or Paine’s Rights of Man. Yet for two and a half centuries after Rainborowe said his piece, no one knew ...

Pastiche

Norman Stone, 21 July 1983

The Invention of Tradition 
edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger.
Cambridge, 320 pp., £17.50, March 1983, 0 521 24645 8
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... then, were well-launched on the road south. How much one sympathises with the subsequent effort of Thomas Chalmers and the Disruption to adhere to a concept of Scottishness that respected honest content, not bogus form. But events in Scotland could almost serve as a parable for what was to come elsewhere. As Eric Hobsbawm well appreciates, new nations and ...

Pioneers

Christopher Reid, 3 September 1981

Some Americans: A Personal Record 
by Charles Tomlinson.
California, 134 pp., £6.50, June 1981, 0 520 04037 6
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... revealed that there were other ways of writing verse than those prescribed either by the Dylan Thomas school of apocalyptic word-chimers, or by the Movement, in whose manifestos he detected – rightly, I think – a fatal ‘whiff of little Englandism’. So, after beginning unsteadily, with early poems that had not quite assimilated the influences of ...

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