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Royal Panic Attack

Colin Kidd: James VI and I, 16 June 2011

King James VI and I and His English Parliaments 
by Conrad Russell, edited by Richard Cust and Andrew Thrush.
Oxford, 195 pp., £55, February 2011, 978 0 19 820506 7
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... Exclusion Crisis of 1679, the attempt to exclude Charles II’s Roman Catholic heir presumptive, James, Duke of York, from the throne. In the political dramas of the 1680s the Russell dynasty produced two of the iconic figures of English Whig mythology: the Whig martyr William, Lord Russell, and one of the Immortal Seven who in 1688 invited William of Orange ...

What’s a majority for?

James Butler, 18 July 2024

... Starmer’s victory has looked certain for months, but his personal approval ratings have never risen above lukewarm; they are unlikely to improve in office. In this election, it was enough to be the other guy.The holding pattern is over: Starmer now has the opportunity to ‘roll up his sleeves’, as he has so often said he wants to do, and get to ...

Foodists

John Bayley, 25 February 1993

A History of Food 
by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, translated by Anthea Bell.
Blackwell, 801 pp., £25, December 1992, 0 631 17741 8
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... of the King Edward potato, adding perfunctorily that it was not ‘an eating potato’. Henry James would have seen the point. In 1870 he wrote to his elder brother William from Malvern, England, where the hotel fed him mostly on mutton and potatoes, to say how much he missed ‘unlimited tomatoes & beans & peas & squash & turnips & carrots & corn – I ...

Scruples

James Wood, 20 June 1996

The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 213 pp., £15.99, September 1995, 0 571 17562 7
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The Spirit Level 
by Seamus Heaney.
Faber, 71 pp., £14.99, May 1996, 0 571 17760 3
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... The Haw Lantern (1987) inaugurated a poetry suddenly hospitable to discussions of the soul – ‘Risen and free and spooling out of nowhere’, as one poem has it – and the visionary. Heaney seemed to have taken a pew in George Herbert’s glassy church. In ‘Fosterling’, in his next book, Seeing Things, Heaney writes wonderingly about himself as ‘Me ...

Savage Rush

David Trotter: The Tube, 21 October 2010

Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf 
by David Welsh.
Liverpool, 306 pp., £70, May 2010, 978 1 84631 223 6
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... in a London gallery, there’s more to it than a shared interest in contemporary art, as Henry James explains with just a faint smack of the lips. ‘It wasn’t, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well, and when Kate afterwards imaged to herself the sharp deep fact she saw it, in the oddest ...

Azure Puddles

John Bayley, 21 May 1987

Compton Mackenzie: A Life 
by Andro Linklater.
Chatto, 384 pp., £14.95, May 1987, 0 7011 2583 7
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... in throughout Mackenzie’s writing career, many from unexpectedly distinguished sources. Henry James may well have been influenced by Mackenzie’s good looks. He had been so swept away by Rupert Brooke’s appearance that it had been quite a relief to be told he was not a very good poet. But about Mackenzie he was rhapsodic, considering him by far the ...

One Per Cent

Jonathan Steinberg: The House of Rothschild, 28 October 1999

The World’s Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild 
by Niall Ferguson.
Weidenfeld, 1309 pp., £30, October 1998, 0 297 81539 3
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... Nathan Mayer’s only competitor for the title of richest man in Europe was his youngest brother, James, founder of the Paris branch. Last year was the bicentenary of the arrival of Nathan Mayer Rothschild in England and Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, chairman of N.M. Rothschild and Sons, proposed a history of the House to Ferguson as a fitting way to commemorate ...

At the Barbican

Martha Barratt: Carolee Schneemann, 17 November 2022

... appears in the film Fuses (1964-67), edited from months of footage of Schneemann and her partner, James Tenney, having sex at home. In some sections, she employed the shot-reverse-shot sequencing of Hollywood cinema: we see the couple on the bed, then the cat staring towards the camera, then the couple again. We begin to wonder if we are the cat. Could ...

Prizefighters

Mark Mazower: The UN, 22 March 2007

The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American Power 
by James Traub.
Bloomsbury, 442 pp., £20, November 2006, 0 7475 8087 1
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The Parliament of Man: The United Nations and the Quest for World Government 
by Paul Kennedy.
Allen Lane, 361 pp., £25, July 2006, 0 7139 9375 8
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... the UN has acquired an unprecedented global prominence. Kofi Annan’s career, as described by James Traub in The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American Power, illustrates the possibilities and the pitfalls of this new world role. Having risen through the ranks to become under-secretary general for ...

What is the rational response?

Malcolm Bull: Climate Change Ethics, 24 May 2012

A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change 
by Stephen Gardiner.
Oxford, 512 pp., £22.50, July 2011, 978 0 19 537944 0
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... climate change on this one are as follows. Is it getting warmer? Yes, surface temperatures have risen by 0.8°C from pre-industrial levels. Are humans causing it? Almost certainly. The gases produced by industrialisation and agriculture are known to have an insulating effect, and their concentration in the earth’s atmosphere has increased in line with ...

Hew their bones in sunder

Eamon Duffy: Lancelot Andrewes, 3 August 2006

Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures 
edited by Peter McCullough.
Oxford, 491 pp., £90, November 2005, 0 19 818774 2
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... from Andrewes’s sermon on the role of the Magi in the Nativity story, preached at the court of James I at Christmas 1622, was to be incorporated virtually word for word into the opening lines of the 1927 poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’: ‘A cold coming they had of it, at this time of the yeare; just the worst time of the yeare . . . the waies ...

Will to Literature

David Trotter: Modernism plc, 13 May 1999

Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture 
by Lawrence Rainey.
Yale, 227 pp., £16.95, January 1999, 0 300 07050 0
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Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study 
by Tim Armstrong.
Cambridge, 309 pp., £14.95, March 1998, 0 521 59997 0
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Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative 
by Harold Segel.
Johns Hopkins, 282 pp., £30, September 1998, 0 8018 5821 6
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Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production 
by Douglas Mao.
Princeton, 308 pp., £32.50, November 1998, 0 691 05926 8
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... was all set, in its competent and agreeable fashion, to carry on as before. According to Henry James, in 1899, the novel had become a universally valid form, ‘the book par excellence’; according to Ford Madox Ford, in 1930, it was still indispensable, ‘the only source to which you can turn to ascertain how your fellows spend their entire ...

Ambifacts

Gary Taylor, 7 January 1993

Shakespeare: The Later Years 
by Russell Fraser.
Columbia, 380 pp., $35, April 1992, 0 231 06766 6
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Shakespeare: His Life, Work and Era 
by Dennis Kay.
Sidgwick, 368 pp., £20, May 1992, 0 283 99878 4
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William Shakespeare: The Anatomy of an Enigma 
by Peter Razzell.
Caliban, 188 pp., May 1992, 1 85066 010 7
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Politics, Plague and Shakespeare’s Theatre: The Stuart Years 
by Leeds Barroll.
Cornell, 249 pp., £20.80, January 1992, 0 8014 2479 8
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Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus 
by Margreta de Grazia.
Oxford, 244 pp., £30, February 1991, 0 19 811778 7
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... account of the court’s attitude to popular drama. It has become orthodox to assert that James I tied the theatre much more closely to the state than had Elizabeth I, increasing its prestige while decreasing its independence. Barroll demolishes this hypothesis, systematically and irresistibly. James’s own ...

See the Sights!

Gillian Darley: Rediscovering Essex, 1 November 2007

The Buildings of England: Essex 
by James Bettley and Nikolaus Pevsner.
Yale, 939 pp., £29.95, May 2007, 978 0 300 11614 4
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... pocket-slim volumes of the Buildings of England, take years to complete each hefty replacement. James Bettley, responsible for the new Essex volume, did not even have to bother with Ilford, Romford, Leyton and Walthamstow. With the setting up of the GLC and the new administrative boundaries of 1965, Essex, as the blurb to the Shell Guide quaintly puts ...

Short Cuts

Rory Scothorne: Edinburgh’s Festivalisation, 4 January 2024

... two world-conquering banks in 2008 left the city leaders scrambling for external support. The St James development – which includes the Golden Jobby – has been passed between American and Dutch pension funds. A polluted brownfield site in the north of the city, currently being turned into houses and shops, is part-owned by Canada’s Public Sector ...

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