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Our Way of Proceeding

Diarmaid MacCulloch: Jesuit Methods, 22 February 2024

The Jesuits: A History 
by Markus Friedrich, translated by John Noël Dillon.
Princeton, 854 pp., £22, October 2023, 978 0 691 22620 0
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... courtier, eager to win honour and wealth not available in the Basque country by service in the king of Spain’s entourage. Once Loyola’s plans for the Society of Jesus took shape, they were made possible by his courtier’s sense of how to charm and persuade the powerful to look favourably on his vision: not least his skill in influencing noble ladies ...

Wobbly, I am

John Kerrigan: Famous Seamus, 25 April 2024

The Letters of Seamus Heaney 
edited by Christopher Reid.
Faber, 820 pp., £40, October 2023, 978 0 571 34108 5
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... or should they make us notice the artistry of the many pages scribbled in airports? In a review of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters, Heaney’s Field Day colleague Tom Paulin argued that ‘a poetics does operate when we read a letter,’ but that ‘the gifted correspondent has to appear negligent of effect.’ What successful letters show is ‘a rejection of ...

Mr and Mr and Mrs and Mrs

James Davidson: Why would a guy want to marry a guy?, 2 June 2005

The Friend 
by Alan Bray.
Chicago, 380 pp., £28, September 2003, 0 226 07180 4
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... at it like rabbits the night after they exchanged vows? The Dukes of Burgundy and of Orléans? King Malcolm and Earl Tostig? Probably not, but who knows? At the other end of the timescale, Anne Lister certainly did do it with the woman she exchanged rings with, as previously with her intended from whom she caught a venereal disease: gotcha! Returning to ...

Everybody’s Joan

Marina Warner, 6 December 2012

... in clogs and woollen skirt’ who took up arms and walked out fearlessly to confront her king and restore him to his throne. One of the many verses goes: Fiers enfants de la Lorraine Des montagnes à la plaine, Sur nous, plane ombre sereine, Jeanne d’Arc, vierge souveraine! Marjorie Annan Bryce in a Suffragette procession to mark George V’s ...

Pull off my head

Patricia Lockwood: What a Bear Wants, 12 August 2021

Bear 
by Marian Engel.
Daunt, 176 pp., £9.99, April 2021, 978 1 911547 94 5
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... of civilisation every morning to keep it shiny, or cooking Beef Wellington every night for a pig king who would be just as happy eating apple cores. Equitable division of household labour has always had to contend with the fact that no husband on this earth was ever raised by Mary Passmore, hears her voice in his mind when he enters the grocery store or ...

Unsluggardised

Charles Nicholl: ‘The Shakespeare Circle’, 19 May 2016

The Shakespeare Circle: An Alternative Biography 
edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells.
Cambridge, 358 pp., £18.99, October 2015, 978 1 107 69909 0
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... a still happier outcome must have been apparent (‘she rounds apace’), for their daughter Elizabeth was born in February 1608, less than nine months after the wedding. Hall was from a Bedfordshire family of good standing and had studied at Cambridge. Over the years he built up an extensive practice in the Midlands (though he was not a member of the ...

All the girls said so

August Kleinzahler: John Berryman, 2 July 2015

The Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 427 pp., £11.99, October 2014, 978 0 374 53455 4
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77 Dream Songs 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 84 pp., £10, October 2014, 978 0 374 53452 3
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Berryman’s Sonnets 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 127 pp., £10, October 2014, 978 0 374 53454 7
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The Heart Is Strange 
by John Berryman.
Farrar, Straus, 179 pp., £17.50, October 2014, 978 0 374 22108 9
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Poets in their Youth 
by Eileen Simpson.
Farrar, Straus, 274 pp., £11.50, October 2014, 978 0 374 23559 8
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... poets: Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop and Theodore Roethke. The last two were more peripheral, both less overtly confessional, especially Bishop, and not so much on the scene, New York or Ivy League (though Bishop turned up briefly, and memorably, at Harvard). Their work has stood up ...

Against Passion

James Meek: Passionate Politics, 30 November 2017

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics 
by Mark Lilla.
Harper, 160 pp., £19, August 2017, 978 0 06 269743 1
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The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction 
by Mark Lilla.
NYRB, 166 pp., £9.99, September 2016, 978 1 59017 902 4
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... down – and the queasy attitude of those white ‘moderates’ in the 1960s whom Martin Luther King lamented in his famous letter from jail in Birmingham, Alabama were ‘more devoted to “order” than to justice’.‘The thing is,’ Smith told Curve magazine earlier this year,everyone has an identity – historically, culturally, politically and ...

American Breakdown

David Bromwich, 2 August 2018

... has gone on to normalise the extreme aberration in a way that recalls the passive compliance of King Victor Emmanuel III in 1922 and Field Marshal Hindenburg in 1933. Yet it is the ‘resistance’ warriors in the popular culture who have gone furthest to take political confrontation to a perilous edge. Robert De Niro led a cheer of ‘Fuck Trump’ at the ...

Speak for yourself, matey

Adam Mars-Jones: The Uses of Camp, 22 November 2012

How to Be Gay 
by David Halperin.
Harvard, 549 pp., £25.95, August 2012, 978 0 674 06679 3
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... in Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (first produced in 1962, filmed with Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in 1966), referring to a line spoken by Bette Davis in King Vidor’s 1949 film Beyond the Forest, and one man’s sexual desire for another? How is it that an Australian readership in 2000 can ...

Act One, Scene One

David Bromwich: Don’t Resist, Oppose, 16 February 2017

... the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.’ The Democrats, however, have for a generation been hesitant to act as accusers in any merely political context. They may routinely charge Republicans with sexism or racism, but constitutional illegalities they regard as tedious ...

The Angry Men

Jean McNicol: Harriet Harman, 14 December 2017

A Woman’s Work 
by Harriet Harman.
Allen Lane, 405 pp., £20, February 2017, 978 0 241 27494 1
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The Women Who Shaped Politics 
by Sophy Ridge.
Coronet, 295 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 4736 3876 1
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... her three sisters were born into an upper-middle-class London family: her father (whose sister, Elizabeth, became Lady Longford; Antonia Fraser is Harman’s cousin) was a doctor and her mother had qualified as a barrister, though she gave up work when she had children. Their four daughters were to be educated but marriageable; not too submissive or too ...

Canetti and Power

John Bayley, 17 December 1981

Auto da Fé 
by Elias Canetti, translated by C.V. Wedgwood.
Cape, 464 pp., £7.95, January 1982, 0 224 00568 5
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The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Continuum, 268 pp., $12.95, June 1979, 0 8164 9103 8
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The Human Province 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Continuum, 281 pp., $12.95, June 1978, 0 8164 9335 9
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Crowds and Power 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Carol Stewart.
Penguin, 575 pp., £2.95, October 1978, 0 14 003616 4
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Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Christopher Middleton.
Marion Boyars, 121 pp., £5.95, October 1976, 0 7145 1136 6
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The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit 
by Elias Canetti, translated by J.A. Underwood.
Marion Boyars, 103 pp., £5.50, January 1978, 0 7145 2579 0
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The Conscience of Words 
by Elias Canetti, translated by Joachim Neugroschel.
Continuum, 246 pp., $12.95, May 1979, 0 8164 9334 0
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... of us have to live by. Not Canetti’s great masters, however. Shakespeare may not have wept over King Lear, may indeed have written the play in a passion of relish, but he suffered: the play is a correlative of his total capacity to suffer. That is perhaps self-evident and tautologous. In a climate of pseudo-scientific structuralism, a bloodlessly ...

Ruthless and Truthless

Ferdinand Mount: Rotten Government, 6 May 2021

The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism 
by Peter Oborne.
Simon and Schuster, 192 pp., £12.99, February 2021, 978 1 3985 0100 3
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Political Advice: Past, Present and Future 
edited by Colin Kidd and Jacqueline Rose.
I.B. Tauris, 240 pp., £21.99, February 2021, 978 1 83860 120 1
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... is, the tactful wiles the adviser uses to hang on to his job or his head. In More’s History of King Richard the Third, the preacher Dr Ralph Shaa, discussing Richard’s ‘ghostly purpose’ to prove that the sons of Edward IV were bastards, declares that ‘ye matter should be touched a slope craftily.’ Esther Eidinow describes the way Pericles and ...

Neutered Valentines

David Bromwich: James Agee, 7 September 2006

‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, ‘A Death in the Family’, Shorter Fiction 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 818 pp., $35, October 2005, 1 931082 81 2
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Film Writing and Selected Journalism 
by James Agee.
Library of America, 748 pp., $40, October 2005, 1 931082 82 0
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Brooklyn Is 
by James Agee.
Fordham, 64 pp., $16.95, October 2005, 0 8232 2492 9
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... crops up in the dedicatory verses, comparing the mission of Agee and Evans to that of Edgar in King Lear: ‘Edgar, weeping for pity, to the shelf of that sick bluff,/Bring your blind father, and describe a little.’ But they are not much like Edgar, not on the scene to show and expound suffering to the sufferers; and one of Agee’s truest points will be ...

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