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In a Garden in Milan

Adam Phillips: Augustine’s Confessions, 25 October 2018

Confessions: A New Translation 
by Augustine, translated by Peter Constantine.
Liveright, 329 pp., £22.99, February 2018, 978 0 87140 714 6
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... Paul) experienced; and that Confessions is, if anything, a series of conversion-like experiences (Robin Lane Fox called his recent book Augustine: Conversions and Confessions to suggest a sequence or an accumulation of experiences rather than a blinding revelation). And there is also a consensus among modern commentators ...

Madame, vous fatiguez les singes

E.S. Turner: The Tower Menagerie, 24 July 2003

The Tower Menagerie: Being the Amazing True Story of the Royal Collection of Wild and Ferocious Beasts 
by Daniel Hahn.
Simon and Schuster, 260 pp., £15.99, March 2003, 0 7432 2081 1
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... a class issue. Bull-baiting was the poor man’s sport and was being put down by those who upheld fox-hunting. Its defenders claimed that it was character forming, producing robust subjects in the pattern of John Bull. (If present-day fox-hunters defy a ban on their sport, will New Labour cite this precedent and send in the ...

I am a false alarm

Robert Irwin: Khalil Gibran, 3 September 1998

Kahlil Gibran: Man and Poet 
by Suheil Bushrui and Joe Jenkins.
One World, 372 pp., £18.99, August 1998, 1 85168 177 9
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Prophet: The Life and Times of Kahlil Gibran 
by Robin Waterfield.
Allen Lane, 366 pp., £20, August 1998, 0 7139 9209 3
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... and managed to be soupily soulful and vaguely prophetic in both languages. He also painted – Robin Waterfield’s biography is good on the recurring features of his art, including its ‘vague ectoplasmic figures, often female’ and the ‘veil of mist as a symbol for the dim access the normal human mind has to higher worlds’. Most of Gibran’s ...

That Tendre Age

Tom Johnson: Tudor Children, 15 June 2023

Tudor Children 
by Nicholas Orme.
Yale, 265 pp., £20, February, 978 0 300 26796 9
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... who came out of school ‘running like a heap of bees … whooping and hallooing as in hunting the fox’.But if children have remained much the same, the concept of childhood has changed dramatically. In 1960 Philippe Ariès published Centuries of Childhood, a book equally influential and infamous for its argument that childhood was an invention of early ...

Ruling the Roast

David A. Bell: A Nation of Beefeaters, 25 September 2003

Beef and Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation 
by Ben Rogers.
Chatto, 207 pp., £17.99, April 2003, 9780701169800
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... the shape of a gridiron (a successor society still exists, and has recently taken up the cause of fox-hunting). His analysis of Hogarth’s 1749 painting and engraving The Gate of Calais, which shows grotesque Frenchmen slavering over a huge joint of beef destined to feed English travellers, is particularly keen. The scene is painted from the perspective of a ...

Neo-Blairism

David Runciman: Blair’s conference speech, 21 October 2004

... be possible to make real progress (more progress than Blair has achieved, for all his big talk). Robin Cook’s careful, persistent unpicking of the government’s Iraq policy also offers a way out of the Manichean nightmare of the war on terror. Of course, a Labour government led by Brown, with Cook as foreign secretary, would offer the Tory Party a much ...

Wasp-Waisted Minoans

Miranda Carter: Mary Renault’s Heroes, 13 April 2023

‘The King Must Die’ and ‘The Bull from the Sea’ 
by Mary Renault.
Everyman, 632 pp., £16.99, October 2022, 978 1 84159 409 5
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... history obsessives, novelists (Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters, Madeline Miller), classicists (Robin Lane Fox, Bettany Hughes), historians (Tom Holland), who salute her muscular resurrections of the classical world, and gay men who see her as a pioneer in her writing about homosexual relationships. Along with hundreds of ...

Bravo l’artiste

John Lanchester: What is Murdoch after?, 5 February 2004

The Murdoch Archipelago 
by Bruce Page.
Simon and Schuster, 580 pp., £20, September 2003, 0 7432 3936 9
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Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Media Wizard 
by Neil Chenoweth.
Crown Business, 416 pp., $27.50, December 2002, 0 609 61038 4
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Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed up Big Media 
by Michael Wolff.
Flamingo, 381 pp., £18.99, January 2004, 0 00 717881 6
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... Golly, what a fearsome sanction.) If we think about it for a moment we remember that he owns the Fox network in America, and 20th Century Fox the film studio, and Fox News the toxic right-wing news channel, the Star satellite network in Asia, and the LA Dodgers baseball team, and part of ...

Not Altogether Lost

James Hamilton-Paterson: The Tasaday, 19 June 2003

Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday 
by Robin Hemley.
Farrar, Straus, 352 pp., $25, May 2003, 0 374 17716 3
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... offshoot of Cotabato Manobo, a language unrelated to T’boli, the tongue of the surrounding area. Robin Hemley’s book is a brave and wholly convincing attempt to find the truth concerning the ‘anthropological fraud of the century’. These days, and certainly in the Philippines, the received opinion is that the Tasaday were unquestionably a hoax ...

Disconnected Realities

Mary Hawthorne: In the Munro mould, 17 February 2005

Runaway 
by Alice Munro.
Chatto, 325 pp., £15.99, February 2005, 0 7011 7750 0
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... of town; for a time, before his business failed and he became a night watchman, her father was a fox and mink farmer. The climate was dramatic: winters were bitterly cold, and summers fiercely hot and pestilent. Munro was a pretty and precocious child who did recitations on the radio when she was three or four years old. A few years later, at school, she ...

Sweden’s Turn for the Worse

Alan Brownjohn, 10 October 1991

... seat, said or did nothing at all on his own account – no leading questions in the style of Sir Robin, no Paxmanite raised eyebrows. His job, performed perfectly, was to instruct (no, not invite) speakers to answer each other; and monitor to the second the share of time they were taking. ‘Answer that in 28 seconds, Bengt Westerberg,’ he coolly told the ...

Homage to Tyndale

J.B. Trapp, 17 December 1992

Tyndale’s New Testament 
edited by David Daniell.
Yale, 429 pp., £18.95, September 1989, 0 300 04419 4
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Tyndale’s Old Testament, being the Pentateuch of 1530, Joshua to II Chronicles of 1537 and Jonah 
edited by David Daniell.
Yale, 643 pp., £25, October 1992, 0 300 05211 1
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... men from reading Scripture was ‘not for the love of your souls, which they care for as the fox doth for the geese ... insomuch as they permit and suffer you to read Robin Hood, and Bevis of Hampton, Hercules, Hector and Troilus ... ribaldry, as filthy as heart can think.’ The positions of Tyndale and More were, it ...

Regrets

Michael Wood, 17 December 1992

The Art of Cinema 
by Jean Cocteau, André Bernard and Claude Gauteur, translated by Robin Buss.
Marion Boyars, 224 pp., £19.95, May 1992, 0 7145 2947 8
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Jean Renoir: A Life in Pictures 
by Célia Bertin, translated by Mireille Muellner and Leonard Muellner.
Johns Hopkins, 403 pp., £20.50, August 1991, 0 8018 4184 4
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Jean Renoir: Projections of Paradise 
by Ronald Bergan.
Bloomsbury, 378 pp., £25, October 1992, 0 7475 0837 2
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Malle on Malle 
edited by Philip French.
Faber, 236 pp., £14.99, January 1993, 0 571 16237 1
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Republic of Images: A History of French Film-Making 
by Alan Williams.
Harvard, 458 pp., £39.95, April 1992, 0 674 76267 3
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... quotes a telling remark, made during Renoir’s early years at what he called Fifteenth-Century Fox: ‘I am afraid of having lost all enthusiasm for my profession, or rather, it’s that the métier of cinema has become too old, too organised, too immobile ...’ Darryl Zanuck, then head of Fox, reciprocated by ...

Poor Man’s Crime

Ian Gilmour, 5 December 1991

The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the 18th Century 
by Peter Linebaugh.
Allen Lane, 484 pp., £25, September 1991, 0 7139 9045 7
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... him well, even waiving his right to the usual apprenticeship fee. Sheppard therefore was no more a Robin Hood robbing the rich to give to the poor than he was a city Hampden fighting tyranny and oppression. In that respect, he was fairly typical of most criminals. Linebaugh mentions a number of conspicuous targets of crime: the Dukes of Ormond and ...

Oops

Ian Stewart, 4 November 1993

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier 
by Bruce Sterling.
Viking, 328 pp., £16.99, January 1993, 0 670 84900 6
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The New Hacker’s Dictionary 
edited by Eric Raymond.
MIT, 516 pp., £11.75, October 1992, 0 262 68079 3
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Approaching Zero: Data Crime and the Computer Underworld 
by Bryan Clough and Paul Mungo.
Faber, 256 pp., £4.99, March 1993, 0 571 16813 2
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... end so that they can be understood. Hackers mostly see themselves as the electronic equivalent of Robin Hood. To the telcos – telephone companies – they are rats lurking in the cyberspatial wainscoting. The Secret Service didn’t take much serious notice of them – until Martin Luther King Day. The Hacker Crackdown concentrates on the AT–T crash, what ...

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