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Turncoats and Opportunists

Alexandra Walsham: Francis Walsingham, 5 July 2012

The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I 
by John Cooper.
Faber, 400 pp., £9.99, July 2012, 978 0 571 21827 1
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... and close relationships with senior figures in the Elizabethan regime, such as William Cecil and Robert Dudley. His activities abroad were instrumental in his appointment as principal secretary to the queen in 1573, which marked the beginning of nearly two decades of virtually uninterrupted activity at the heart of government. Cooper’s portrait necessarily ...

Upside Down, Inside Out

Colin Kidd: The 1975 Referendum, 25 October 2018

Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain 
by Robert Saunders.
Cambridge, 509 pp., £24.99, March 2018, 978 1 108 42535 3
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... being ‘a European, not an insular’ phenomenon. Gerald Ellison, the bishop of London, and David Edwards, chaplain to the speaker of the House of Commons, denounced as a kind of heresy the obsession with sovereignty found, for example, in the High Tory ecclesiology of Enoch Powell. Outside Ulster, ultra-Protestantism made limited headway, except in the ...

It’s the Oil

Jim Holt: Iraq’s Lucrative Mess, 18 October 2007

... Green Zone. As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably ...
... a sense of false security by the nature of the notably anodyne Preface contributed by Dr David Edwards, the present Provost of Southwark, to the 1983-85 Crockford, the first to appear under the new dispensation. How it was that they failed to spot any danger signals when Dr Bennett’s manuscript came in remains, however, a mystery. For Dr Bennett’s ...

Frisking the Bishops

Ferdinand Mount: Poor Henry, 21 September 2023

Henry III: Reform, Rebellion, Civil War, Settlement 1258-72 
by David Carpenter.
Yale, 711 pp., £30, May, 978 0 300 24805 0
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Henry III: The Rise to Power and Personal Rule 1207-58 
by David Carpenter.
Yale, 763 pp., £30, October 2021, 978 0 300 25919 3
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... by Matthew Paris, the monk of St Albans. Any biographer is spoiled for choice among the sources: Robert of Gloucester, Roger of Wendover, Thomas Wykes of Osney, Alderman fitzThedmar of London – all of them salty and unrestrained in their comments, whether on the uselessness of Henry as a war leader or the brutality of Simon de Montfort’s massacre of the ...

Drab Divans

Miranda Seymour: Julian Maclaren-Ross, 24 July 2003

Fear & Loathing in Fitzrovia: The Bizarre Life of Writer, Actor, Soho Dandy, Julian Maclaren-Ross 
by Paul Willetts.
Dewi Lewis, 403 pp., £14.99, March 2003, 1 899235 69 8
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... lifelong penchant for disguise. We are told that he was obsessed with certain books by Robert Louis Stevenson, but no convincing explanations are offered. Why was he so eager to adapt The Suicide Club, Stevenson’s strange tale of a group of men who agree to act as each other’s executioners? Willetts doesn’t tell us. Edward Hyde, a sinister ...

Hooray Hen-Wees

John Christensen: Pinochet’s Millions, 6 October 2005

Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System 
by Raymond Baker.
Wiley, 438 pp., £16.99, September 2005, 0 471 64488 9
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... for a surprisingly long time, but when scandal finally came in 1996 – a currency trader called Robert Young, working in cahoots with Cantrade Bank, a Jersey subsidiary of the Swiss banking giant UBS, defrauded investors of $26 million – the Wall Street Journal concluded that Jersey was an offshore hazard ‘living off lax regulation and political ...

Browning and Modernism

Donald Davie, 10 October 1991

The Poems of Browning. Vol. I: 1826-1840 
edited by John Woolford and Daniel Karlin.
Longman, 797 pp., £60, April 1991, 0 582 48100 7
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The Poems of Browning. Vol. II: 1841-1846 
edited by John Woolford and Daniel Karlin .
Longman, 581 pp., £50, April 1991, 9780582063990
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... paratactic. In a later phase of the Modernist endeavour this would be recognised, so that Michael Edwards (Of Making Many Books, 1990) can say of Charles Tomlinson – in my view, quite rightly: ‘Tomlinson’s syntax is what makes his poems, linguistically, what they are ... in the poetry of our century, Tomlinson enacts the revenge of ...

Time of the Red-Man

Mark Ford: James Fenimore Cooper, 25 September 2008

James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years 
by Wayne Franklin.
Yale, 708 pp., £25, July 2008, 978 0 300 10805 7
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... the more Cooper earned the more rapaciously he was hounded by such associates as the lawyer Robert Sedgwick, a one-time friend who extracted exorbitant amounts of interest on his loans, and the unsavoury duo of Thomas Bridgen and William Holt Averell, who ended up acquiring, by various devious stratagems, much of the land and property that had made up ...

Keith Middlemas on the history of Ireland

Keith Middlemas, 22 January 1981

Ireland: Land of Troubles 
by Paul Johnson.
Eyre Methuen, 224 pp., £6.95, October 1980, 0 413 47650 2
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Acts of Union 
by Anthony Bailey.
Faber, 221 pp., £4.95, September 1980, 0 571 11648 5
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Neighbours 
by Conor Cruise O’Brien.
Faber, 96 pp., £2.95, November 1980, 0 571 11645 0
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Ireland: A History 
by Robert Kee.
Weidenfeld, 256 pp., £9.95, December 1980, 0 297 77855 2
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... Painstaking work since the 1950s by a broad range of scholars such as R.B. McDowell, Owen Dudley Edwards, F.S.L. Lyons and Patrick O’Farrell has profoundly altered our understanding: not only have ancient myths been invalidated, but the structure of a genuinely Irish history now exists, free from the Anglo-centric emphasis still common twenty years ...

High Anxiety

Julian Barnes: Fantin-Latour, 11 April 2013

Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in 19th-Century French Painting 
by Bridget Alsdorf.
Princeton, 333 pp., £30.95, November 2012, 978 0 691 15367 4
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... us, reaches out an arm and points to Truth. As he put it in a letter to his English dealer Edwin Edwards, ‘I am the only one who will see her.’ Fantin was thus laying himself open even more to the charge of vanity; worse, the presence of a naked woman surrounded by clothed men was to revive the hysteria set off at the Salon two years earlier by Manet’s ...

Grit in the Oyster-Shell

Colin Burrow: Pepys, 14 November 2002

Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self 
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 499 pp., £20, October 2002, 0 670 88568 1
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... that Mr Lewes hath another daughter sick – and lastly, that both my servants W. Hewers and Tom Edwards, have lost their fathers, both in St Sepulcher’s Parish, of the plague, this week doth put me into great apprehensions of melancholy and with good reason. ‘Great apprehensions of melancholy’: you can only applaud that point in the sentence – he ...

Erasures

Colm Tóibín: The Great Irish Famine, 30 July 1998

... and, as Taoiseach, he decided to make public money available for this. The project was taken on by Robert Dudley Edwards from University College Dublin, who promised that a book, one thousand pages long, made up of essays by various experts, would be in print by 1946. The Government released a grant of £1500. Over the next ...

You have to take it

Joanne O’Leary: Elizabeth Hardwick’s Style, 17 November 2022

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick 
by Cathy Curtis.
Norton, 400 pp., £25, January, 978 1 324 00552 0
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The Uncollected Essays 
by Elizabeth Hardwick, edited by Alex Andriesse.
NYRB, 304 pp., £15.99, May, 978 1 68137 623 3
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... voluptuous rebirth.’ There aren’t many skeletons left in Hardwick’s closet. Since 1973, when Robert Lowell published The Dolphin, a series of sonnets based on Hardwick’s letters to him during the breakdown of their marriage, the story of her life has been bound up with, and contorted by, his overbearing presence. Cathy Curtis, author of the first ...

Vendlerising

John Kerrigan, 2 April 1987

The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry 
edited by Helen Vendler.
Faber, 440 pp., £9.95, November 1986, 0 571 13945 0
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Selected Poems 
by John Ashbery.
Carcanet, 348 pp., £16.95, April 1986, 0 85635 666 2
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The Poetry Book Society Anthology 1986/87 
edited by Jonathan Barker.
Hutchinson, 94 pp., £4.95, November 1986, 0 09 165961 2
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Two Horse Wagon Going By 
by Christopher Middleton.
Carcanet, 143 pp., £5.95, October 1986, 0 85635 661 1
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... Slack work from the Notebook years is no substitute for ‘The Quaker Graveyard’ and ‘Mr Edwards and the Spider’. To omit early Lowell constitutes censorship, not choice. Several kinds of density lie outside Vendler’s range, including that tortuous grappling with impacted matter which tends not to write itself in light. Her taste for grotesquerie ...

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