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The Shinka

Michael Rose, 21 June 1984

... season to restore the throne to him. Turn and turn about, it is the throne that moves and not the king. Five minutes I remained at the foot of the coffin, until I understood how unequivocal was the stillness and the silence. And I the only person in the room. I moved round to the side and touched his hand: toneless clean chilled meat. Another minute gazing on ...

A Diagram of Power in the Arab World

Michael Gilsenan, 2 October 1997

Master and Disciple: The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism 
by Abdellah Hammoudi.
Chicago, 195 pp., £30.50, September 1997, 0 226 31527 4
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... invest emotionally in claims by their rulers to powers of blessing, or baraka (Morocco’s King Hassan); to the prestige of holy or sharifian descent from the Prophet Muhammad’s family (Jordan’s King Hussein and King Hassan); to the guardianship of Islam (the Saudi royal ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Gospel According to Saint Matthew’, 21 March 2013

The Gospel According to Saint Matthew 
directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
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... no stable, no animals. ‘Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,/ Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews?’ In Pasolini we see more faces: all looking as Italian as Charlton Heston, say, playing Moses, looks ...

Second Last Leader

Ian Gilmour, 7 June 1984

Another Heart and Other Pulses: The Alternative to the Thatcher Society 
by Michael Foot.
Collins, 220 pp., £8.95, June 1984, 0 00 217256 9
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... electorally it died in 1980 or even earlier. There will be similar controversy over the role of Michael Foot: did he lead it to its death or did he just accompany it? Was he one of the physicians who killed it, or was he merely the undertaker? The most remarkable feature of Labour’s history is not its short life, but its striking lack of success during ...

The great times they could have had

Paul Foot, 15 September 1988

Wallis: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor 
by Charles Higham.
Sidgwick, 419 pp., £17.95, June 1988, 0 283 99627 7
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The Secret File of the Duke of Windsor 
by Michael Bloch.
Bantam, 326 pp., £14.95, August 1988, 9780593016671
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... there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s lover. Both were sympathetic to, and possibly active agents for, Mussolini and Hitler at a time when the British Government was about to declare war on Italy and Germany. Mr ...

Glimpsed in the Glare

Michael Neill: Shakespeare in 1606, 17 December 2015

1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear 
by James Shapiro.
Faber, 423 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 0 571 23578 0
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... a half yards of red livery cloth issued to Shakespeare as a token of his new status as one of the King’s Majesty’s Servants might be as significant as the company’s move to a new playhouse; and for Shapiro it was almost as important to understand the structural underpinnings of that theatre as to explore the material foundations of Shakespeare’s ...

Where the hell?

Michael Wood, 6 October 1994

The Crossing 
by Cormac McCarthy.
Picador, 426 pp., £14.99, August 1994, 9780330334624
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... it does very little for a man’s appearance’); eerier still to see a distorted after-image of King Lear set loose in a Western desert, ‘like some scurrilous king stripped of his vesture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die’. In another cultural register, Western fans will recognise a scene or ...

Butcher Boy

Michael Kulikowski: Mithridates, 22 April 2010

The Poison KingThe Life and Legend of Mithridates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy 
by Adrienne Mayor.
Princeton, 448 pp., £20.95, November 2009, 978 0 691 12683 8
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... has disappeared. So it was with one of Rome’s most flamboyant enemies, Mithridates VI Eupator, King of Pontus. He had cheated death for decades, at the hands of family, of ostensible friends, of many a declared enemy. Time and again he had checkmated Rome’s most formidable generals, or at least those who were not too busy checkmating one another in their ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: From ‘Alien’ to ‘Covenant’, 15 June 2017

Alien: Covenant 
directed by Ridley Scott.
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... seems to have got the message upside down. In the poem the writing on a ruined monument to the ‘King of Kings’ says ‘Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ The poem then concludes: Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.David sees the dead human population around ...

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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... answer would include the English victory at Neville’s Cross the same year, which ended with King David II of Scotland a prisoner in the Tower, to be joined ten years later, after Poitiers, by King John II of France. Some might argue – and professional historians no doubt prefer multi-factored answers – that the ...

Finished Off by Chagrin

Michael Ledger-Lomas: Monarchs and Emperors, 21 July 2022

The Last Emperor of Mexico: A Disaster in the New World 
by Edward Shawcross.
Faber, 336 pp., £20, January, 978 0 571 36057 4
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King Leopold’s Ghostwriter: The Creation of Persons and States in the 19th Century 
by Andrew Fitzmaurice.
Princeton, 592 pp., £35, February, 978 0 691 14869 4
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The Kaiser and the Colonies: Monarchy in the Age of Empire 
by Matthew Fitzpatrick.
Oxford, 416 pp., £90, February, 978 0 19 289703 9
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... Piedmontese. Maximilian was so depressed he dreamed of becoming Belgian, like his father-in-law, King Leopold. A Saxe-Coburg princeling whose first wife had died in childbirth before she could inherit the British throne, Leopold had been installed as king of the new Belgian state created by the 1830 revolutions. Having ...

And That Rug!

Michael Dobson: Images of Shakespeare, 6 November 2003

Shakespeare’s Face: The Story behind the Newly Discovered Portrait 
by Stephanie Nolen.
Piatkus, 365 pp., £18.99, March 2003, 0 7499 2391 1
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Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions 
by Stephen Orgel.
Palgrave, 172 pp., £25, August 2003, 1 4039 1177 0
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Shakespeare in Art 
by Jane Martineau et al.
Merrell, 256 pp., £29.95, September 2003, 1 85894 229 2
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In Search of Shakespeare 
by Michael Wood.
BBC, 352 pp., £20, May 2003, 9780563534778
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... in a more aristocratic and accomplished manner, complete with emblematic fruit, by John Michael Wright’s c.1668 painting of James Cecil, fourth Earl of Salisbury and his sister Lady Catherine, now at Hatfield. Unhelpfully, there is no indication on the canvas as to the pear-bearing girl’s identity, and no date either. However, a modern brass ...

Washed White

Michael Rogin, 10 June 1993

The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America 
by Sacvan Bercovitch.
Routledge, 424 pp., £40, November 1992, 9780415900140
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Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America 
by Garry Wills.
Simon and Schuster, 315 pp., £17.99, April 1993, 0 671 76956 1
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... view, whereas Wills finds within the United States – from Washington to Lincoln to Martin Luther King – a place to stand against recent orthodoxies from Kennedy to Reagan and Bush. Impatient with easy liberal scapegoating of religious faith, Wills rescues a politics of religious commitment from the clutches of right-to-life fanaticism and a sacralised US ...

I just worked it out from the novel

Michael Wood, 24 April 1997

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me 
by Javier Marías, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
Harvill, 313 pp., £8.99, October 1996, 1 86046 199 9
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The Club Dumas 
by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, translated by Sonia Soto.
Harcourt Brace, 368 pp., $23, February 1997, 0 15 100182 0
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... politicians, brand-names and underwear we connect with a quite different kind of writer. The King of Spain (identified only by various nicknames, Solus, the One and Only, Only You, the Lone Ranger and so on), appears in Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, and Mrs Thatcher (recognisable from her lipstick, her manicure and the fact that she is called ...

Kings and Kinglets

Michael Kulikowski: Cassiodorus, 12 August 2021

The Selected Letters of Cassiodorus: A Sixth-Century Sourcebook 
translated and edited by M. Shane Bjornlie.
California, 328 pp., £25, September 2020, 978 0 520 29734 0
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... with the message that Italy had no need of an emperor and that he, Odoacer, would rule as king on Zeno’s behalf. Zeno had troubles of his own and was in no position to argue even if he wanted to. Constantinople’s shrugging benediction began more than a decade of peace and stability such as hadn’t been seen for a generation in the lands Odoacer ...

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